The Opposition’s lack

By Uditha Devapriya

The problem with the government is that it parades itself as the only option the country has. The problem with the Opposition is that it hasn’t presented any viable alternative to the government. It’s a two-way street, and anyone who criticises this regime for its excesses without touching on the woeful lack of creativity and imagination in the Opposition is misreading the current moment. The SJB and the JVP-NPP has potential, as has various other anti-Ranil Wickremesinghe outfits. But what is their political programme, what are their policies, where are their manifestos, who are their intellectual ballasts?

I admit I have exaggerated for effect. The Opposition does have alternatives. The SJB, for instance, has Ranasinghe Premadasa’s paradigm, while the JVP-NPP has at least now begun to take industrialisation seriously. But these parties tend to undermine themselves with one internal contradiction after another. The SJB, for instance, has yet to fully incorporate the Ranasinghe Premadasa paradigm into its programme. Instead, it is young economists and thinkers, like Bram Nicholas, who are talking about Premadasa’s policies. The JVP-NPP is a little bit better, in that it constantly highlights the need to industrialise the economy. Yet it too sways both ways, pandering at times to the Colombo yuppie-techie crowd and another to its social democratic base. None of this is helping these parties.

The government, meanwhile, has successfully co opted sections of Colombo’s civil society and made people think that the policies it is enacting are the only policies, and reforms, worth enforcing. Welfare and pensions cuts are to Sri Lanka’s economy what Band-Aid is to a gunshot wound, but for Colombo’s neo-liberal crowd, there seems to be no alternative to them.

To be fair, that crowd has been railing against the government’s gross selectivity in enforcing such reforms, as well as the government’s tendency to shield itself, and its ranks, from the worst effects of those reforms. But there is at present a rift, an unbridgeable one, between the anger of the people and the response of the intellectual elite. This has helped the government enforce its rule through these reforms, and in doing so, as Dayan Jayatilleka pointed out weeks ago, fall into “that category of damnable social sin.”

The only way to respond to a hegemonic elite is by mobilising a counter hegemonic elite. But where are the counter hegemonic elites? Not in the mainstream Opposition: not the SJB, not the JVP-NPP. In one stroke the Communist Party rallied some of the youngest and brightest heterodox thinkers around one comprehensive document, Idiri Magen Idiriyata. Does the SJB has its version of Idiri Magen Idiriyata? Does the JVP-NPP? I have yet to see one from either party. The manifestos it has published thus far amount to a series of empty promises, hot air, and platitudes to orthodox neo-liberal thinking.

What is sad about this is that there is no dearth of heterodox thinkers. The Communist Party, more so than the rest of the Left, have been able to tap into them because they have always been able to mobilise progressive thinkers and technocrats. Dr S. A. Wickramasinghe’s critique of the Gal Oya project, dismissed so flippantly back then, for instance, seems eerily prescient and accurate now. The Left talked about, and considerably dwelt on, electrification and nuclear energy long before other political groups did. It is talking about transport, energy, the need for a more robust public sector today. If the SJB and the JVP-NPP is behind the Left today, it is not because it doesn’t have these thinkers to dip into.

Of course, I can understand the SJB’s dilemma. It is caught between a rock and a hard place. The parliamentary Opposition is composed of many Rajapaksist cohorts. The SJB does not want to be seen bedding with them, so it has chosen to go its own way, as its recent voting record over crucial issues like Central Bank independence and IMF reforms should tell us. It also owes much of its existence, paradoxically, to Ranil Wickremesinghe: several of its key MPs, after all, regularly churn out and affirm the President’s economic policies. This explains the SJB’s critique of the JVP-NPP, that the latter it mindlessly parrots anti-neoliberal diatribes without presenting an alternative. While largely true, the critique undermines the potential for legitimate criticism of the reforms we are undergoing at present.

I can also understand the JVP-NPP’s dilemma. In fact, there is not one but two dilemmas, or contradictions, in it. On the one hand, it is trying to present itself as more progressive on issues like minority rights, but it has been unable to do so because much of its top brass are cut from an older ideological cloth. Thus, while Harini Amarasuriya underscores the need for devolution vis-à-vis the 13th Amendment, the JVP-NPP’s old cohort contend that there is no need for such reforms, echoing the party’s hardline stance on them. On the other hand, it wants to be seen as opposing the neo-liberal setup which has been reinforced by the current regime, but it cannot do this because the new faces it has chosen to represent the party are incapable of mounting a proper attack against that setup.

To understand these contradictions is, of course, not to concede to them. If the Opposition here is serious about upping its game, it must do what countless successful Oppositions elsewhere have done: tap into the seething mass of anger, mobilise one counter hegemonic elite after another, and present a viable alternative which not only undermines the status quo but also can stand soundly and concretely on its own, anywhere. I have yet to see such a programme from any of Sri Lanka’s ubiquitous Oppositional outfits. This is largely because all of them, barring one or two from the Left, have been permeated by the kind of orthodox thinking that dictates the government’s policies. To oppose the government, the Opposition must hence first confront itself. But is it ready to?

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.