The perils of political identity

By Uditha Devapriya

The SJB and the JVP-NPP lead the latest IHP surveys, while the UNP and the SLPP lag behind. The SJB has the potential to beat the JVP-NPP but has not, and will not. The UNP is making a bid for a comeback, and while its leadership remain purposely ambivalent on the question of elections next year, they are focusing on electoral reform. They probably think they can pacify the electorate with the latter, but they are mistaken. Sri Lankans of all shades and creeds are calling for a change in leadership. Ranil Wickremesinghe might not be another Gotabaya Rajapaksa, but he comes from the same generational DNA.

Sajith and Anura Kumara, on the other hand, are younger. Going by their years they seem more relatable to the Sri Lankan population. Yet both candidates are beset with problems neither has been able to transcend. Both their parties have been caught by an urge to shift to a centrist space. This swing to the centre has pushed these parties to confront certain tensions and contradictions.

The most unpardonable sin any political party can make is to let such tensions define them, and worse, define their leaders. The UNP and SLPP, to be sure, have their share of these issues. But they have the luxury of having being governing parties. Opposition parties, by contrast, are more vulnerable, more prone to attack.

The SJB’s shift to the centre has largely been defined by its lineage from the UNP. On social and political issues it shares little with the latter party: in this sense it resembles the UNP of the faux reformist yahapalana era, a not altogether incorrect assumption given that many of the stalwarts of the SJB held ministerial posts in that administration. On economic issues, however, the SJB and UNP appear to be of one mind. The tension here has mostly been between the SJB’s articulation of a pro-market and pro-liberalisation economic agenda and its defence of progressive politics. The SJB has tried not to let the UNP’s mindset swamp its ideology here. But most SJB stalwarts trace their lineage to that mindset. To overcome such a crisis, the top brass needs to embrace alternative economic paradigms.

This is unlikely to happen, for two reasons. First, though the SJB broke away from the UNP, in the sense that it contested as a separate party, the rupture had to do with disagreements with the UNP’s leadership. When S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike broke away from the UNP he was careful not to brand the new party as an extension of the old.

Bandaranaike did have issues with the Senanayake and Jayewardene domination of the UNP, but this was not the only reason why he formed his own outfit. So far, that has not happened with the SJB. And I can understand why. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s political-economic agenda centred on the Sinhala Maha Sabha, predated the UNP, and was in many ways more progressive than the UNP. The SJB by contrast never had a pre-UNP ideology like that.

Nevertheless, though the SJB may not have a pre-UNP programme, it does have a pre-Ranil programme: the Ranasinghe Premadasa formula of equity with growth. This formula, tried and tested by none less than the father of the current SJB leader, delivered results for the Sri Lankan economy. The Premadasa government always made it a point, as the SJB, UNP, and SLPP do not seem to have done, to never distinguish between the economy and the people.

In Dayan Jayatilleka’s words, this enabled the government to square the circle, to achieve the unachievable, to break away from the past. In that sense the UNP under Premadasa did an S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike without defecting from the parent party. The SJB, by contrast, has not even tried thinking afresh, despite moving out of the UNP.

In its early years the SJB both castigated the then government’s economic policies and articulated a need for an alternative. This need resonated everywhere. Yet at the peak of the crisis and the protests last year, influential economic think-tanks were peddling orthodox narratives, calling for the government to liberalise, deregulate, and privatise.

The Left struck back at these calls, but the protest movement, as such, was more concerned with forcing the president to resign. When the aragalaya achieved this end, all the dissensions and disputes that had conveniently been submerged came out into the open. The Left lost its position among the protestors, and those peddling neoliberal narratives, and prescriptions, came up. It was at this point that the SJB began embracing these narratives.

The pushback against the neo-liberalisation of the country has so far not forced the SJB to alter its position on ongoing economic reforms. The think-tanks that peddled IMF narratives continue to peddle them, while they go on blaming trade unions and other organisations for trying to stall reforms. This has more or less fed into the government’s advocacy of stability at all costs.

The SJB has tried, with much difficulty, to play a balancing act here: on the one hand, for instance, it supports a domestic debt restructuring mechanism, and on the other, it has come out against the impact of DDR on the EPF. Unlike the Left – by which I include the CPSL and the JVP-NPP – though, it has not strayed from its adherence to IMF diktats, and has challenged Left parties to come up with a more viable alternative.

The latter demand, in fact, shows the fundamental weakness of the SJB. The SJB’s leadership already has an alternative development paradigm it can use and implement. Yet, for some reason, it has chosen not to use it. This is not to say that what worked in the Ranasinghe Premadasa administration will work now. But at a time of mass disaffection with mainstream politics and economic reforms, the Opposition must strive to break free of the past, and to implement something new. The SJB’s inability to do so shows that it has failed to break away from the UNP’s ideology. What we need today is a clash of ideas, not of personalities. By limiting its disputes with the UNP to its clashes with the UNP’s leadership, the SJB has failed to gain ground as a strong Oppositional outfit. This is a pity.

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