A JUNTA MAY BE TRIGGERED BY THE JVP

by Dr. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

The Army calendar for 2022 carries a photograph of Gen Shavendra Silva with a quote from him underneath it in block letters. It reads: “THE SRI LANKA ARMY IS CAPABLE OF DEVELOPING AND MAINTAINING A PROSPEROUS AND SUSTAINABLE NATION.”

In a democracy the task of “developing and maintaining a prosperous and sustainable nation” is not the task of the Army. This is also true of systems that are not liberal democracies. In China and Russia, the Army would dare not assert that it is “capable of developing and maintaining a prosperous and sustainable nation”. That is the task respectively of the Communist Party of China and the elected President of Russia and his government. In all these systems the task of the army is DEFENDING AND PROTECTING the nation.

It is only in a military dictatorship that the army would lay claim that it “is capable of developing and maintaining a prosperous and sustainable nation”. Sri Lanka has been a democracy since 1931 and never in the history of the Sri Lankan Army has its ever made this claim, because as an institution it was steeped in the democratic ethos.

Does this claim, appearing now, indicate a bid to step into the role played in all political systems except military juntas, by civilian authorities?

Is it a signal that in 2022 we shall be in transition from democracy to something else?

Meanwhile the Army Diary 2022 has many quotes from the Army Chief, General Shavendra Silva, interspersed with quotes from Charles Dickens, Martin Luther King etc.

‘One Country, 1 Corps’

Is it One Country, 1 Corps? On Dec 29, the evening newscast showed Army chief, Gen. Shavendra Silva addressing the newly established elite reserve strike force, the 1 Corps, headquartered in Kilinochchi. He told them that the Army has been tasked by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to drive the ‘green agriculture’ project, educating the peasantry on it.

Why should the Army Commander address 1 Corps, of all the units of the Sri Lankan army, on this, of all subjects—or include this subject in his address to 1 Corps?

Unless one were to assume that the Sri Lankan army’s equivalent of America’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is going to be bogged down in teaching and implementing organic cultivation, then this is an indication of what’s going to happen next year, with the most reliable, freshly-minted formation of the Sri Lankan military, headed by a hard-bitten former Special Forces commander of wartime vintage, being deployed in the rural theater, facing down the restive peasantry.

If you feel that Ven Galagodaatte Gnanasara’s statement to the Sunday Virakesari of Dec 26 2021 that state power and authority should be handed over to the military for an interim period so that the economic crisis can be managed, is merely the well-known monk shooting his mouth off, then please don’t waste your time reading this article.

Similarly, if you feel that the President’s ‘gala’ in-gathering of 1,090 senior military men, serving and retired was simply a typically sociable, benign gesture of a year-end party, then please don’t waste your time reading this.

But on any or all of these counts, you get a queasy feeling, then you’d better read this.

United Fronts

Contemporary world history shows that the only successful formula for resistance to dictatorship whether of the military sort or a frankly fascist sort has been the united front, and this has been pioneered and sustained by the Left.

Furthermore, the Left has been most successful when it has been part of a united front, whether as the leader or the most dynamic element and driving force. This is not a “united front from below” with the rank and file of other parties, but precisely a “united front from above” at the political leadership level.

This is also precisely that which has been ruled out by the JVP, the leadership of which either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the theory of the united front was adopted by the Comintern (Communist International) a century back, in 1921, when it was steered by Lenin and the undivided Bolshevik leadership.

The JVP’s icily rude response to Dayasiri Jayasekara’s gushing and untimely endorsement of the idea of an SLFP-JVP rapprochement was an illustration of the JVP’s abiding sectarianism.

The JVP’s ‘principled’ aversion to those mainstream parties who have held office in earlier administrations would have had more credibility had it entered a united front with the leaders of the Frontline Socialist Party and thus created a United Left, which would not merely have added to, but multiplied the strength of the movements in which they are the driving forces.

The smart JVP personality Dr Nalinda Jayatissa said in a recent TV interview that Wimal Weerawansa and Kumar Gunaratnam were welcome as members of the Jathika Jana Balavegaya (JJB) provided they agreed and adhered to the JJB’s conditions. This was especially revealing in the case of Kumar Gunaratnam, the leader of the FSP.

Between the JVP’s failed first insurrection and its failed second insurrection, the JVP’s founder-leader Rohana Wijeweera established a structure which had a visible penumbra and a recessed core. The penumbra was called the “seenuwe pakshaya”, the party of the Bell, which was the JVP’s electoral symbol. That was the ‘open’ structure of the party. The recessed core was called the “noothana Bolshevik pakshaya”, the “modern Bolshevik party”, and was the real vanguard.

Kumar Gunaratnam’s elder brother Ranjithan (apprehended and executed in custody) belonged to the latter as did Kumar Gunaratnam himself. Having survived the repression and being released from detention, Kumar Gunaratnam rebuilt the foundations of the party we see today, starting 1994.

So, Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa who was not member of the inner core of the party during the hard times, or perhaps even of the party itself, was offering a conditional entry to Kumar Gunaratnam, to the front organization of fellow-travelers of the JVP, the JJB – which is not even the equivalent of the ‘party of the Bell’– and not to the JVP itself.

One cannot entirely and exclusively blame Dr Jayatissa, though. Years ago, Anura Kumara Dissanayake said on TV that the JVP never had a member named Kumar Gunaratnam. What Dr Jayatissa revealed is that the JVP’s sectarian arrogance abides and runs-through the leadership (with the probable exception of the long-standing leader of the JVP’s proletarian front, KD Lal Kantha).

Throughout its history the JVP had strategic options which it rejected. In 1971, when the Police cracked down as home-made hand-bombs accidentally exploded at Peradeniya, the JVP need not have hurled itself into armed action. It had a great deal of political capital accumulated by its role in the campaign against the UNP government in the 1970 General Election. It could have explained that the weapons had been stockpiled to protect against an Indonesian type coup from the UNP’s Right. It could have entered a bloc with the leftwing of the Communist Party. Instead it chose frontal confrontation.

The result was a strengthening of the authoritarian tendency of the United Front Coalition which ruled under Emergency, extended its term of office, dissolved local authorities and excessively used the Essential services regulations.

That was the first time around. The second time around was in 1979. The JVP had briefly entered a 5-party bloc with the LSSP, CPSL, NSSP and Bala Tampoe’s RMP. It broke the bloc between 1979 and 1980. If that bloc had lasted, the JVP would not have been so easily isolated and suppressed in the 1980s. If this seems a stretch, the reader must know that Uruguay’s urban guerrillas, the MLN-Tupamaros entered a multi-party united front in 1970-1971, named the Frente Amplio (which, significantly, means ‘Broad Front’). It remained in that front through the long night of repression (over a decade) and through recovery as a democratic formation. When the Tupamaros came to power it was with the Tabare Vasquez Presidency, as Frente Amplio.

When he was succeeded by the iconic Mujica, a historic leader of the Tupamaros, second in importance only to the founder, Raul Sendic, it was as the Frente Amplio candidate.

The JVP’s third chance was when President Premadasa released over 1,000 JVP prisoners, declared a unilateral ceasefire, offered to dissolve parliament, hold elections and invited the JVP to take three cabinet portfolios. He also invited them to an all-parties Roundtable conference, which even the LTTE’s short-lived political front, the PFLT, attended. The JVP scornfully refused – most conspicuously at a Nugegoda rally which lasted into the night–and returned to civil war. It was militarily crushed within the year.

Fatal Unreason

It is crucial to grasp the sheer irrationality of today’s JVP-NPP strategy. It is a political go-it-alone project with no other political parties of any mass significance involved. In that sense it is a stance of political self-isolation. This is the very opposite of the logic of a United Front, in which the main enemy is isolated by a broad political encirclement.

The JVP seems to have no idea what or who its main enemy is and what, who and from which direction the main threat comes. Any rational reading would clearly reveal that the most dangerously reactionary force is the main threat and enemy, and in Sri Lanka today, that is the threat to democracy from the bloc of those who actually consider Hitler as a legitimate role-model, i.e., the bloc of militarists and ultra-chauvinists congealed around the Gotabaya presidency and which include that specific presidency.

The JVP-NPP’s irrationality goes beyond this interpretation which is subject to debate. What is not subject to debate is the fact that the JVP’s present project is of getting from 3% of the vote and 3 seats in parliament, to the assumption of state power and the leadership of the country, in one go, through mass struggle, without an intervening period of transition which involves intermediate stages and political alliances. Anura Kumara Dissanayake once suggested in parliament that the opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa should ‘get his head examined” for indicating that he and his party the SJB were ready and able to assume the leadership of the country. If given the SJB’s current strength, that ambitious assertion warrants getting one’s head examined, how much more valid would that advice be for a leader who makes the same claim with 3% and 3 seats?

Of course, the current dynamics are that the JVP-NPP has grown rapidly, but it would requite exponential growth and a quantum leap to get from where they were in 2020 to where they aspire to be soon. Only Lenin and the Bolsheviks did anything like it, and Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci emphasized that the same thing was not possible in a very different social and political formations such as those which existed in Western Europe where the citizenry enjoyed political rights unlike in Tzarist Russia. Gramsci’s distinctive work could be said to have pivoted on that qualitative difference.

In 1970 or 1971, sometime before the insurrection, the JVP’s main rival, G.I.D “Castro” Dharmasekara wrote a pamphlet critical of the JVP, predicting that “on one moonless night, the JVP will lead the youth of this country to the executioner’s block”. Years later, addressing an audience at Peradeniya University, Dharmasekara (who had shifted from Castro to Mao) told us that there was only a single error his prophecy of pre- April 1971. “It was a full moon” he said with a sad half-smile, referring to the foredoomed JVP uprising of April 5th 1971.

The political sectarianism of the AKD-Tilvin Silva duumvirate may well march a third generation of Sri Lankan youth into the waiting guns of the State’s repressive apparatuses, with power being wielded for the first time by hardnosed military veterans of the Southern civil war. Remember Matale, anyone?