Turning points and dead-ends

by Uditha Devapriya

After more than a year of holding back, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya has finally showed the government the proverbial finger. This is the biggest mass rally a political party has held in a long time. That it evokes memories of the February 2015 rally in Nugegoda only underlies its significance. At a time of deep political and social crisis, such movements can only bring to the streets a sweeping tide of discontent. Sceptical comments by Colombo’s upper classes and left-liberal blocs aside, that tide can’t be stopped or held back.

It is hence up to the SJB, with other Opposition parties, to seize the momentum. Whether or not it will do this depends on how far it can revisit and challenge old ideas, adapt to the new normal, and engage with groups hit hardest by the pandemic.

In characteristic élan and aplomb, Dayan Jayatilleka calls the SJB’s rally “the turning point”, presumably of the government’s disastrous post-2019 downward spiral. The timing couldn’t have been more symbolic. This week marks not just the SLPP regime’s second anniversary, but Mahinda Rajapaksa’s 76th birthday as well as the seventh anniversary of Maithripala Sirisena’s walk-out from his second government. These do not bode well for an administration that came to power on a sweeping mandate and, at least on paper, still enjoys a two-thirds majority in parliament. It remains to be seen which way the wind will blow in the event of a local government election, but the writing is already on the wall: there’s dissent and despair smudged all over. Obviously, the government can’t be complacent forever.

What is significant is that it is the social groups and classes which the Rajapaksas counted among their strongest supporters who have turned the other way. The fertiliser imbroglio is a deeply divisive issue, and in the absence of scientific evidence it is difficult to comment on whether shifting from chemical varieties (inorganics) was a good idea. While environmentalists call it the most progressive decision the SLPP has ever made, agricultural experts are clearly opposed. We are yet to see debates between activists and agriculturalists (though the latter have had their say), but we are seeing protests by farmers, almost everywhere. Indeed, none less than Wimal Weerawansa, hardly the sort of politico you’d expect to make an incendiary statement about the government, has come out against its fertiliser policy, urging it to reconsider its decision.

It is against such a backdrop that Dayan Jayatilleka has cautioned the SJB against adopting a resistance strategy that places emphasis on urban elements over peasant interests. This is something no political analyst here has advocated, and it says a lot about liberal critics of the regime that while they fault the Opposition for not doing enough, they are quiet about what the SJB, or for that matter the JVP, must do. Dr Dayan, on the other hand, has more or less outlined tactics and strategies based on winning back electorates which a) the SLPP and the SLFP used to court, but have alienated and b) the UNP, the SJB’s parent party, alienated for a quarter-century. In other words, his argument is two-fold: get such groups on the SJB’s side, and ensure the SJB reworks its ideas and escapes its UNP past.

By all accounts, Dr Dayan’s strategy is well thought-out, even productive. No one has seriously considered the peasantry until now. This is because while the urban middle-class has figured in party manifestos, the subaltern classes – what Partha Chatterjee once called the “dangerous classes” – have remained, at best, a set of fringe groups whose relevance to mainstream political outfits crops up only during elections. The upper and middle classes, on the other hand, are more sensitive interests, whose choices determine not just the course but also the destiny of political parties and organisations. This is the same middle-class that the SLPP tapped into, and won in the hundreds of thousands, two years ago.

In the face of deteriorating economic conditions, an increasingly proletarianised middle-class is now defecting from the SLPP government. At the same time, the pauperization of the peasantry has brought farmers into the streets. While the regime has in no small part given the impression of kowtowing to big business interests, be it blue-chip companies or rice mafias and intermediate traders, the dangerous classes have banded together. That the middle-class, itself known for its hostility to radical action, has joined protesting academics, trade unions, and hungry farmers, certainly says much about the times we are in.

However, I personally believe that the radicalisation of the middle-class can go both ways. Traditionally, the UNP has always been the party of the well-to-do, the rich, the haves, the privileged, and the elite. Its programmes have appealed to Colombo’s bourgeoisie, which it lost to the Rajapaksas because of sheer incompetence. This is hardly a problem endemic to the UNP, but it is one endemic to the UNP of Ranil Wickremesinghe, and of those Third Way Centrists who, under yahapalanaya, attempted to sweeten its neoliberal heritage by shifting its ideological commitment from free market to “social market” economics.

The SJB is trying its best, through the intervention of the likes of bright, sharp, intelligent MPs like Imthiaz Bakeer Markar, to escape this past. Yet there is a section within the SJB that believes in the ideas of the past, as well as the ideology of the UNP. Radicalised though they may be, the middle-classes remain beholden to these ideas. That is what explains their confused responses to price controls: while decrying those controls, they went back on their opposition to State measures once the government chose to let go.

In other words, to recall a point I made a few weeks ago, these groups will remain radicalised and ripe for revolution only insofar as their aspirations are being threatened by the State. Recovery will kick in sooner than later, and in the event that it does, we will see sections of these milieus reverting to their old ideas: namely, the ideas of the UNP, the same ideas that have at least cosmetically been discarded by the SJB.

The dangers of being a captive of these interests should not be lost on any movement trying to dominate the resistance. To be fair, it’s not just the SJB that should be wary of such a prospect: given its past record of flirting with Colombo’s liberal intelligentsia, even the JVP has to be cautioned. Dayan Jayatilleka’s strictures against the liberal intelligentsia, that it should discard its perspectives and attitudes, may go unheeded by the intelligentsia itself, but it should not go unnoticed or unheeded by oppositional parties that think they can milk political mileage by being fellow travellers of Colombo’s civil society circuits.

I am not aware of any other analyst who has raised these points. That is why Dr Dayan’s interventions, even if one does not agree with them, are useful guides for the Opposition. More specifically, that is why his cautioning against relying on urban elements over peasant groups must be listened to, heeded to, and adhered to.

In my view, then, there are three challenges the SJB must meet if it is to seize the mood of the moment and carry forward the momentum of last week’s rally. Firstly, it has to extricate itself out of the UNP. The SJB may have officially renounced its links to the grand old party by contesting separately, but when you see its MPs not just regurgitating the ideas of that party but conjecturing whether Ranil Wickremesinghe will strengthen its hands, you tend to wonder whose ideology it is promoting: its own, or its ex-parent party’s.

Secondly, the SJB has to resolve all internal differences. Most of these differences are to do with what it must do with the UNP, but some are more personal: I am of course referring to Champika Ranawaka’s decision to organise his own troupe, the 43 Senankaya. One can very validly ask whether these troupes are part and parcel of the SJB or whether they are “a band apart.” Mr Ranawaka appeals to a suburban Sinhala middle-class, and it is likely that he can pose a formidable challenge to Sajith Premadasa’s electoral prospects.

The issue, then, is whether he will contest on his own or whether he will be with and work for the SJB. That he chose to participate at last week’s rally does show that, far from trying to sabotage the party as some of his critics claim, he is being part of it. This is, at least from Mr Premadasa’s standpoint, to be welcomed. After all, if the experience of the 1980s shows anything, it’s that a divided Opposition will always be an ineffective one.

Thirdly, and critically, it must decide whose interests it wants to privilege from within the multi-class resistance bloc it has been bequeathed courtesy of the government’s policies. The SJB, for all intents and purposes, is still seen as an offshoot of the UNP, even if in 2020 supporters voted for it and departed from the UNP en masse. How soon it can escape being demarcated as part of the “same old” will depend on how fast it can aim at and target class interests and formations which are suffering the most under the pandemic.

In my opinion, it is the SJB’s inability to focus on these class elements that has kept and is keeping it back from dominating the discussion. By failing to focus on its priorities and not heeding the call of the hour, the SJB runs the risk of ramming into a dead-end. It must hence turn away and search inward, strategising no less than a way out of the past.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com