BY DR DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
“…The Sri Lankan government must keep up the pace on reform. Building trust by demilitarizing the North…We owe it to victims and survivors across Sri Lanka to ensure that those responsible are held to account…That’s why we, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have made clear that the report must be published and discussed by September 2015 and we will stick to that. In six months time the spotlight will be back on Sri Lanka.” – David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK, Daily Mirror, Op-Ed, March 10, 2015
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It is hardly that I was unaware of or unconcerned about the many faults, flaws and follies of the Rajapaksa regime (having been an institutional victim of some of those errors). It is that, as I had written repeatedly, that was not and is not my main arena of concern or my main criteria, deriving from my primary political values. I am not primarily concerned with matter of political culture, political behavior and issues of governance.
@RajapaksaNamal: At the “134 Amadam Sisila Bana” programme at the Carlton House on Poya-March 5, 2015
My focus is the State. This has been a decades-long focus. I distinctly recall the first tutorial set for us ‘freshers’ by our guru Prof K.H. Jayasinghe when we entered Peradeniya university in 1976: “What is Political Science?” My tutorial which earned an A Plus from him was entitled – and the title prefigured my conclusion which I had argued out in the tutorial—that “Political Science was the Science of the State and Revolution”. (The tutorial’s title had obvious echoes from Lenin and the text quoted Gramsci). That has remained my perspective, though I would add “and Counter-Revolution” to the definition and title.
It is crucial to grasp the distinction between State and Government. I am concerned about the State, not so much about Government, still less governance, which I why, for instance, I didn’t really give a darn as to whether or not President Premadasa ran a “one–man show” as was widely alleged, most crucially in the impeachment motion against him.
The distinctions I observe are analogous to the one made so famously by Carl Schmitt, between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. He conceptualized the latter as defined by the “friend/enemy” distinction, and paid a tribute to Lenin for introducing this new political perspective—which, interestingly, he also traced to tough-minded Catholic political thinkers. In the 1970s, French intellectuals drew a similar distinction between “la politique” (government, everyday politics, politicians) and “le politique” (‘the political’ especially as concerns State power). It is the latter that is my main domain of concern and has been so for decades. I cannot be accused of not using criteria from another domain or genre, any more than I can be accused of not seriously appreciating Country music (which I cordially detest) when I have long stated that I am a blues, jazz, rock and soul fan.
So that’s why I support/ed Mahinda Rajapaksa, Ranasinghe Premadasa (rather than the impeachment and the DUNF or CBK), Mao (despite the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution), Stalin (despite the Gulags), the Communist tradition rather than the Trotskyist, and am a (non-practicing) Catholic rather than a Protestant. I am sure the continuum of values and criteria are rather plain.
My current political perspective certainly has elements and emphases that are new, because there is a new ‘conjuncture’ and as Lenin said the main thing is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. However, it would be erroneous to locate everything or even most of it in Mahinda Rajapaksa and the elections- recent or forthcoming. It would also be wrong to locate it in a recent conversion to Sinhala nationalism, as some critics do. The shortest, most helpful explanation I can give is to quote from the essay I was invited to submit to ‘History and Politics: Millennial Perspectives- Essays in Honour of Kingsley de Silva’ published in 1999.
In it I wrote inter alia, as follows:
“…The struggle against the hegemonic project of the sole superpower: The US hopes to maintain and protect the historical moment of unipolar hegemony. This is manifested in its aggressive, interventionist and militaristic policy of downgrading the sovereignty of independent states. The policy of serial state cleansing is meant at changing the norms of the global state system, deconstructing the global political superstructure and redrawing the world map. The aim is quite simply world domination. In response the strategy should be one of a global anti-hegemonic alliance based on the defense of national independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. This alliance would include countries, nations and peoples. It would also take many concrete forms ranging from the Belarus President’s idea of an anti-NATO bloc to a worldwide movement of solidarity with Russia in the event of a communist or communist-nationalist victory at the elections.
…This requires the construction of the broadest possible anti-comprador united fronts bringing together all possible classes and strata including the middle and perhaps even the big manufacturing bourgeoisie) in a bloc against the neo-liberal model…Two corresponding united fronts then mirror parallel strategies: an anti-hegemonic front and an anti-comprador front. Common to both is the recognition of the main enemy and the primary aspect of the primary contradiction– Imperialism. It is on the whetstone of anti-imperialism, which organically includes the struggle against its national local allies that Marxism can continue to be sharpened…” (Dayan Jayatilleka, ‘Marxism and the Millennium’, History and Politics: Millennial Perspectives- Essays in Honour of Kingsley de Silva, 1999).
Certainly Mahinda Rajapaksa was hardly in the picture when I wrote this. Furthermore, I was nowhere near Geneva and the successful diplomatic united front of May 2009 in the defense of Sri Lanka’s sovereignty in the battle against ‘human rights imperialism’. All my stances over the past fifteen years at least, including on Sinhala nationalism, should be seen within the perspective laid out here.
I know on which side of the barricades Western imperialism is and in the final analysis, Mahinda Rajapaksa was and is. Mahinda was on the side of national sovereignty.
Tamil nationalism—I should say expansionist ‘Tamil Zionism’– was always on the side of imperialism and sought its support against Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. Those within the Tamil movement who were anti-imperialist were violently eliminated by the Tamil ultranationalists or converted to their cause.
I know the strategy and tactics of imperialism and its regional allies and partners, in the moves for ‘regime change’ from Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973, to Libya in 2012 and Venezuela today. It failed in Syria thanks to Putin’s Russia.
I know that Mahinda Rajapaksa was in part, externally de-stabilized, with the stakes involving the competition with China and Eurasia (China and Russia). I know the geopolitical significance of the map of the election results and the odds against the voter percentage in certain Northern areas not merely exceeding the percentage of participation at the Northern Provincial Council election, but leaping exponentially by 70% or even 90% between 2010 and 2015!
I know which states in the world system have proved our consistent friends and allies. I know how slogans and the ideology of human rights and governance have been used for decades to de-stabilize patriotic regimes throughout the Third World, and since the 1990s, through the so-called Colour Revolutions, in Europe itself, in an effort to encircle Russia.
I know that the game, the great struggle is not yet over. The Mahinda Movement is a force for resistance. Whatever its backward features and currents may be, Sinhala nationalism is a force and factor of resistance and the defense of sovereignty, and is therefore objectively progressive. This is why Stalin said in the 1920s that “the Emir of Afghanistan is more progressive than the British Labour Party”—a line that Samir Amin often quoted in recent decades.
I know that neoliberalism, Tamil nationalism, the pro-imperialist comprador elite (Ranil’s UNP), and the semi-feudal residues (CBK) are in a single power-bloc. I know which side of the global struggle this new power-bloc is located. It stands against national sovereignty, with imperialism, for hegemonic interference and interventionism.
Mahinda Rajapaksa made the defense of territorial integrity, national sovereignty and national unity possible by reunifying the territorial boundaries of the State—a historic task and challenge that JRJ, Premadasa, Wijetunga, CBK and Ranil all failed in. In a recent speech at the Kingsbury Hotel, General Sarath Fonseka listed the main military defeats, some with quadruple digit casualties, imposed on the Sri Lankan armed forces by Prabhakaran and the Tigers. All the defeats he listed (1996, 1999, 2000) one except the first (1991) were during the tenure of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, that self-righteous, smug and pompous lady who acerbically denounces her vastly more successful successor!
Mahinda gave us back not only peace, but our country; our State. Those in Sri Lanka who oppose Mahinda Rajapaksa were and are objectively on the side of imperialism and against sovereignty. Those who were at Nugegoda on February 18, 2015 were objectively for national sovereignty and against imperialist de-stabilization of a patriotic regime. As a Gramscian I know which is, or approximates, or is potentially, the ‘national-popular bloc’, the bloc of the ‘people-nation’, and which is not; which is the opposing cosmopolitan bloc. I know which side of the barricades I am on. I also know the duty and the project of the engaged intellectual.
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