The SJB’s problem

By Uditha Devapriya

When people get tired of a system, they do not want a variation, they want an alternative. The SJB’s right-wing flank are happily promoting IMF narratives of austerity, while going all-out against the JVP-NPP on the basis of the latter’s Marxist policies. The JVP-NPP for its part has been defending those policies rather awkwardly: that is, defending them without really defending them. The upper echelons of Sri Lanka’s most popular Left formation have been more adamant about their stances, even on political issues: weeks after Harini Amarasuriya came out in support of the 13th Amendment, for instance, Sunil Handunhetti remarked that the latter amendment had no support from either the JVP or the NPP.

The middle-classes are as divided and fragmented as ever, particularly on economic issues and the question of what is to be done to resolve the crisis. A significant section has tilted to the JVP-NPP, though they are not aligned with the latter’s supposed Marxism. They may not be fervent or committed socialists, but they are clamouring for a change in the system. They do not expect the SJB, still less the UNP or SLPP, to deliver that change. As for the Freedom People’s Alliance, it has gone quiet over the last month, while its members have been and continue to be associated with the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration. These, plus the fact that the country’s main Opposition don’t appear to be agreed on any issue, be it taxation or the death penalty, have turned the middle-class to the only party which has promised to go out in search of alternatives and not variations on the status quo.

To be sure, the JVP-NPP’s Marxism may turn out to be a mirage. But in a country where policies have counted for little and populist rhetoric for everything, what party MPs and leaders do in public have a massive impact on voting patterns. On that basis, Anura Kumara Dissanayake has gained the sort of popularity that the SJB’s upper echelons, including the neoliberal haut monde (fashionable society), have not. Dissanayake’s recent skirmish with the police, which the anti-JVP-NPP media twisted and contorted – as Dayan Jayatilleka pointed out in this week’s DailyFT column, Dissanayake didn’t protect himself in a shop, he was escorted there by protesters worried about his safety – shows that in the great divide between the regime and the people, the people are willing to hedge their bets on the JVP-NPP.

Again, this is not a comment on, less an endorsement of, the JVP-NPP’s policies, economic or otherwise. The party imagines itself to be Left, and it is. But how far to the Left? “The JVP’s problem,” writes Dayan Jayatilleka, “is not that they are good Marxists but that they are bad Marxists.” Jayatilleka takes the party to task for not being able to band together with other Left formations and groups: he chastises the JVP for alienating the FSP, which to him is more radical, but also less sectarian. This may or may not be a fair critique. But the JVP’s problem, of being bad Marxists, is to me simpler to diagnose: the issue isn’t that they are promoting socialist policies, which are anathema to the SJB’s neoliberal flank, but that they haven’t clarified what these policies are and, even if they have done so, have failed to rationalise or explain them in concrete terms. The JVP-NPP, in other words, continues to commit the two most unforgivable sins that any political party, on the Left or the Right, can commit and be accused of: inconsistency and lack of coherence.

The JVP-NPP has a chance to fill a massive gap. When the SJB was formed back in 2020, this writer felt it would become the social democrat version of the UNP without becoming an appendage of the UNP. Since then two prominent SJB MPs have defected to the UNP and the President is making use of divisions within the party to promote tensions and control other MPs who owe their political careers to him. The recent COPF fiasco is a case in point. The government did not appoint a leader from another party, but instead chose an SJB MP whose brother is a staunch loyalist of Ranil Wickremesinghe. The problem, in other words, is not that Mayantha Dissanayake was taken to replace Harsha de Silva, but that Mayantha is Navin’s brother and that he accepted the government’s directive even as the SJB has vowed to distance itself from the government’s policies.

It would be wrong to view the SJB as an appendage of the UNP. But it would be wrong also to view it as a social democrat or a left-wing version of the UNP. The SJB has MPs who would not have been in politics without Ranil Wickremesinghe. It has MPs who have, on Twitter and elsewhere, proclaimed themselves as pro IMF, just days if not hours before the IMF releases statements praising the government’s much vilified tax reforms. It has MPs who do not want to join Mr Wickremesinghe politically, but whose proposed policies differ marginally and not substantively from his actual policies. Yes, the SJB has much potential for change, but the divisions between the leader and his MPs, which reflect a split between the populist and the neoliberal flanks in the party, are just too much for people to accept it as a viable, if not tangible, alternative to the current dispensation.

One can blame Wickremesinghe for sowing discord in the SJB. But as the main Opposition party, the SJB has the right if not the moral duty to immunise itself from the attacks, and worse the machinations, of the ruling party. And yet, instead of countering these tactics, the SJB has focused its energies on attacking the JVP-NPP, sometimes on the flimsiest, most ridiculous grounds, as the recent tussle over hand-me-down clothes between a Twitter bot and Vraie Cally Balthazaar, easily the JVP-NPP’s most youthful, candid, promising faces in Colombo, shows. The SJB’s co-option of artists, including actors, who have since the 1980s managed to set a low bar for pretty much everyone else, is another case in point: Damitha Abeyrathna, hailed as a heroine in the aragalaya, now steps on the SJB stage and praises the party leader while badmouthing the JVP-NPP through innuendo.

Damitha’s remarks are, however, exceptional, and thankfully so. Given the JVP-NPP’s rising popularity among the middle-classes and in particular the rural middle-classes, as well as sections of the peasantry and the working class, artists and academics are bound to come out in its support, even if they do not advocate what everyone assumes to be its economic positions. The IMF’s recent remarks clearly show that the world’s most powerful financial institution is not in fundamental disagreement with the regime’s tax and income policies, even if think-tanks like Verité have pointed out, correctly, that the IMF’s stance on economic reform cannot be used as an excuse to impose austerity on the people. In any case, Verité remains a glaring exception to the dismal rule: most Colombo-based think-tanks seem to have no issue with IMF reforms, and are in fact advocating more of the same. Against this backdrop, the JVP-NPP will eventually find out that the only way it can survive is by tapping into the tide of discontent that is fast turning against the regime and its allies.

The debates now raging over IMF reforms are completely different from six months ago. Back then the question was simple, and posed in Manichean terms: go to the IMF or suffer. Last year, however, the country was facing a dollar crisis. This year we are facing a rupee crisis. Even if we have the dollars – and, despite the quotas, the import restrictions, and other Central Bank imposed regulations, we do have enough with which to manage our fuel requirements and other essential imports – State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) do not have the rupees with which to settle their transactions. This is a problem of revenue, and for such problems the typical prescription is higher taxation. The issue is that no one likes taxes: not the middle-classes burdened by privations, and certainly not the lower classes who don’t have the luxuries that the middle-classes do. Against such a backdrop, if the government, in tandem with the elite, advocates more of the same, only parties critical of extreme austerity can survive. From the narrow perspective of political survival, hence, it is the JVP-NPP that will flourish. It can seize the moment, or it can forego it. It would be foolish to forego it. The reason is simple. People don’t want continuity. They want a rupture.

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