{"id":84942,"date":"2024-10-20T20:58:51","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T00:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=84942"},"modified":"2024-10-20T21:57:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-21T01:57:41","slug":"84942","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=84942","title":{"rendered":"The JVP\u2019s commendable evolution on matters economic has not been paralleled in the ethnic problem arena. The NPP was remarkably reticent on the subject in its presidential manifesto. Behind a non-racist fa\u00e7ade, the JVP is as regressive about the Tamil question today, as it was in the past."},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy<\/p>\n

Tisaranee Gunasekara<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe future is cloth waiting to be cut.\u201d Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The point had been made often enough. Without a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, there wouldn\u2019t have been an Anura Kumara Dissanayake presidency. For the NPP\/JVP to go from 3 percent to 42 percent in four plus years, the system had to be broken from within by the very leaders entrusted with its care by a majority of voters. Gotabaya Rajapaksa achieved that feat in ways inconceivable even by his most stringent critics (who in their sane minds could have imagined the fertiliser fiasco?).<\/p>\n

But President Dissanayake\u2019s victory has two other fathers: Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa. President Dissanayake won because the competition was so uninspiring. It was more a case of Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe losing rather than President Dissanayake winning. While the NPP\u2019s rise was meteoric, President Dissanayake failed to gain 50 percent mark of the vote. He is Sri Lanka\u2019s first minority president.<\/p>\n

As the IHP polling revealed continuously, all major presidential candidates had negative net favourability ratings; they were more unpopular than popular. The election was a contest to pick the least unpopular leader. Thus the winner\u2019s inability to clear the 50 percent line.<\/p>\n

This situation hasn\u2019t changed qualitatively in the run up to parliamentary election. According to the latest IHP poll, President Dissanayake\u2019s net favourability rating is still negative, which means more people regard him unfavourably than favourably. He and Harini Amarasuriya are at minus 10, the least unpopular of leaders. Sajith Premadasa at minus 31, Ranil Wickremesinghe even lower, lag behind not just President Dissanayake and Ms. Amarasuriya, but also the now retired Ali Sabry.<\/p>\n

The NPP\/JVP is likely to clock a bigger win at the parliamentary election even so, because the oppositional space is clogged by Mr. Wickremesinghe and Mr. Premadasa, with the Rajapaksas hanging on to the seams. The same actors representing the same unattractive futures. Compared to these prospects, a Harini Amarasuriya premiership would seem alluring to most Sri Lankans (she is an excellent choice, in any case, for the job).<\/p>\n

President Dissanayake has avoided any obvious missteps in his first month. He is treading cautiously, especially in the economic arena, opting not even to tweak Ranil Wickremesinghe\u2019s deal with a group of ISB holders, despite some unfavourable \u2013 and precedent-making \u2013 clauses such as giving bondholders the option of changing the law underpinning them from New York to England or Delaware; New York is about to pass a bill giving debtor nations greater bargaining power. He is no Gotabaya, at least economics.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In Sri Lanka, it is normal for the party that wins the presidency to win the parliament as well. In 2010, after Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidential election, the opposition unity fractured. The UNP contested on its own and the JVP contested in an alliance with the defeated presidential candidate, Sarath Fonseka. In the presidential election, Mr. Fonseka had polled 4.2 million. At the parliamentary election, the main oppositional party, the UNP, polled only 2.4 million. Even after the votes for the Tamil and Muslim parties and the JVP\/Fonseka headed DNA were factored in, this amounted to an erosion on a massive scale \u2013 1.2 million votes.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Sajith Premadasa polled 5.6 million votes. Yet his newly formed SJB polled a mere 2.8 million at the 2020 parliamentary election. Once the votes given to Tamil and Muslim parties and the UNP were factored in, this amounted to a bigger erosion, over 2 million votes.<\/p>\n

Even the Rajapaksas could not buck this general trend in 2015. The UNP won the general election despite the much vaunted Mahinda Sulanga.<\/p>\n

So the NPP\/JVP winning on November 14 would be the norm. The only question is about the extent of that victory: would it be limited to a simple majority or something bigger, close to a two thirds?<\/p>\n

A simple majority would be necessary to run an effective government. But a near two thirds victory would be a tragedy. Every time a Sri Lankan party won so big, disaster ensued in 1956, 1970, 1977, 2010 and 2020. Too much power not just corrupts but also stupefies. A future NPP\/JVP government might be able to avoid the (financial) corruption trap. But if burdened with a huge majority the government will not be able to evade a blunting of senses, of growing blindness and deafness to public distress, of an addling of wits.<\/p>\n

Already, future ministers are shrugging off price hikes in such staples as rice, calling them normal. They might be but the dismissive attitude hints that the rot of indifference to public pain might have begun to set in already. In the absence of a strong, principled, and effective opposition, the rot will grow faster, to the detriment of all Sri Lankans, including compass enthusiasts.<\/p>\n

Feudal ethos and tyrannical practice<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be fully functional, a bourgeois democratic system needs bourgeois democratic parties. Unfortunately, most Sri Lankan parties are feudalist in ethos and tyrannical in practice.<\/p>\n

We have a history of leaders treating their parties as private or familial property. The Rajapaksas are the most egregious example but they didn\u2019t start the habit, merely took it to a new low. Senanayakes and Bandaranaikes preceded the Rajapaksas, both families treating dynastic succession as the norm.<\/p>\n

When he became the leader of the UNP, J.R. Jayewardene made a clean break with that feudalist ethos. He delinked the UNP from familial politics and opened it to new blood, providing the space for the creation of a line of brilliant second level leaders. In 1977, he allowed the candidates for the upcoming parliamentary election to choose a steering committee to manage the campaign (in a secret vote). The man who topped that internal poll was made the deputy leader, Ranasinghe Premadasa.<\/p>\n

Had Mr. Jayewardene won a simple majority in 1977, history might have turned out differently and better. But he won a five sixth majority. It didn\u2019t take long for hubris to set in, making a man of undeniable intellect commit a bunch of avoidable mistakes and unnecessary crimes. And having obtained undated letters of resignation from all parliamentarians, Mr. Jayewardene ran the party like a dictator. Unlike the Bandaranaikes and Senanayakes, he didn\u2019t crown his offspring. Instead, he turned himself into an uncrowned king.<\/p>\n

Ranil Wickremesinghe opted for a dictatorial leadership style from day one. He gave himself the title The Leader, changed the party constitution to make it literally impossible to effect leadership changes, marginalised potential challengers and promoted untalented loyalists. He slowly abandoned the J.R.\/Premadasa UNP\u2019s anti-feudal ethos, turning the UNP into a party where preferment was given to spouses, siblings and offspring of politicians.<\/p>\n

As president, Mr. Wickremesinghe prevented the economy\u2019s freefall and achieved a turn around. The NPP government\u2019s decision to go the same route, at least for now, is a tacit admission of the success President Wickremesinghe achieved under extremely difficult circumstances. <\/p>\n

Yet, his me-or-deluge attitude to the UNP continued and continues. As president, instead of allowing a new young leadership to rebuild the party, he kept control of the UNP via discredited and deeply unpopular yes men. After his humiliating defeat, he clings to the party leadership.<\/p>\n

Sajith Premadasa in this department is a veritable Wickremesinghe clone. He has suffered three national defeats, losing the presidency twice and the parliament once. Yet, like Mr. Wickremesinghe, he seems determined to cling to the SJB leadership even at the cost of running the party to the ground. He is also allowing his family into politics. Consequently, the SJB too has become a party unsuited to a bourgeois democratic system, feudal in ethos, dictatorial in style.<\/p>\n

Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidency because the JVP understood its own un-electability and created a more electable cocoon as cover, the NPP. Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe are incapable of even such minimal evolution. Like the woolly mammoths who couldn\u2019t adapt to climate changes and were hunted extensively, their inability to adapt to the new political climate created by the NPP\/JVP victory would drive their own parties to extinction. With no opposition to keep it on its toes, the government would succumb to hubris sooner rather than later.
\nThe rest would be history. All too familiar history.<\/p>\n

Somethings new, one thing old <\/strong><\/p>\n

What if J.R. Jayewardene did not commit the deadly mistake of banning the JVP on totally fabricated charges?<\/p>\n

The JVP entered the democratic mainstream in 1977. From then till about 1983, the JVP was non-racist, trying to reach out to Tamils along the lines of class solidarity. It also treated the SLFP as its main enemy, and dreamt of becoming the main opposition (thus the famous lecture series: The Journey\u2019s end for the SLFP). The JVP leadership maintained contact with some government leaders (especially Prime Minister Premadasa). <\/p>\n

When the opposition launched the general strike of July 1980, the JVP criticised the move and stayed out of it (the strike failed and the government sacked 60,000 striking workers). At a personal level, Mr. Wijeweera got married and started raising a family. These were hardly the actions of a party or a leader harbouring insurgent intentions.
\nMr. Wijeweera\u2019s abysmal performance in the 1982 election created a crisis in the JVP. The party\u2019s reversion to a more Sinhala-oriented line was arguably a reaction to the shock of defeat. Yet going the armed revolution path was never on the JVP\u2019s agenda even then. <\/p>\n

Had President Jayewardene not extended the life of the existing parliament (in which his UNP had a five sixth majority), the JVP would have contested the next general election (scheduled for 1983), won a few seats and settled down into standard parliamentary existence of reform and compromise.<\/p>\n

Not only did President Jayewardene postpone parliamentary polls. He also banned the JVP. It was that criminal error which led to the second JVP insurgency (the insurgency\u2019s racist, brutally intolerant nature was the JVP\u2019s choice alone).<\/p>\n

Perhaps President Dissanayake is where Mr. Wijeweera would have been had parliamentary election not been postponed and the JVP not been banned. Unfortunately, the JVP\u2019s commendable evolution on matters economic has not been paralleled in the ethnic problem arena. The NPP was remarkably reticent on the subject in its tome-like presidential manifesto. Listening to the JVP general secretary Tilvin Silva indicates the reason. Behind a non-racist fa\u00e7ade, the JVP is as regressive about the Tamil question today, as it was in the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter 1970, our major political parties became provincialized gradually,\u201d Mr. Silva said in a recent TV interview when asked about the NPP\u2019s unimpressive electoral performance in the North and the East. \u201cThis allowed new forces to come into being in the North, the East, and the plantations\u2026 Tamil parties in the North, Muslim parties in the East, plantation parties in the plantations\u2026 So these parties decided on how to vote. For example, the people of the North did not vote freely. They voted according to what the TNA decided.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not a word about how the supposedly national parties alienated Tamils via discriminatory policies and violence actions, nothing about the disenfranchisement of Upcountry Tamils, Sinhala Only, the race riot of 1958, the standardisation of university admissions in 1971 or the brutal attack on the Tamil Language Conference in Jaffna in 1974. <\/p>\n

Nothing of that history exists in the JVP\u2019s universe, according to Mr. Silva. He admits to the existence of a language problem. The rest is reduced to water, markets, schools and education.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most telling is how he explains the land issue. \u201cDuring the war some left their lands. Then they couldn\u2019t return. Those who stayed back grabbed the land. Now when the owner goes back someone else is in occupation. So there\u2019s a fight. So the government must intervene, set up land kachcheris and solve the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not a word about the continued military occupation 15 years after the war ended, the military\u2019s ongoing attempts to grab more land or the road closures which hamper ordinary life. So like the Rajapaksas.<\/p>\n

Mr. Silva accuses the Tamil leaders of talking about the 13th Amendment and devolution to protect their own interests. \u201cBut people on the ground don\u2019t want 13; they don\u2019t want devolution of power\u2026\u201d Even if that argument is granted, what about the thousands of acres occupied by the military?
\n According to the JVP\u2019s reading, do the Tamil people want their land back from the military, or not?
\n Do they want their roads opened or not?
\nDo they want justice for their dead or not? <\/p>\n

If the JVP cannot understand those basic demands and yearnings, if the best solution it can offer is administrative decentralisation (under a de facto military occupation), the NPP won\u2019t make much headway in creating a Sri Lankan nation. If Sri Lanka\u2019s road ahead lies between a Sinhala government and a feudalist autocratic (and ineffective opposition), the next five years are unlikely to be all that different from the last 76.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:Groundviews<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Tisaranee Gunasekara \u201cThe future is cloth waiting to be cut.\u201d Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes) The point had been made often enough. Without a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, there wouldn\u2019t have been an Anura Kumara Dissanayake presidency. For the NPP\/JVP to go from 3 percent to 42 percent in four plus years, the system …<\/p>\n

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