Dayan Jayatilleka, Harsha de Silva, and the SJB

By Uditha Devapriya

“The Harsha [de Silva] blueprint harshly rebukes the policies of many post-Independence administrations. It lightly pats on the back the liberalisation of 1977 and 1988, dropping heavy hints that it just wasn’t good enough because it just didn’t go far enough. It praises policy reforms attempted in 2003 and 2016 – years in which Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe held office. There is no similar commendation of the major ideas and programs of Ranasinghe Premadasa.”

Dayan Jayatilleka, DailyFT, 18 August 2022

Dayan Jayatilleka’s critique of Harsha de Silva’s escape plan for the economy (“Harsha’s harsh blueprint and AKD as alternative”, DailyFT, 18 August 2022) does two things. First, it paints de Silva’s plan as a template straight out of Suharto’s Indonesia (and, quite naturally, Pinochet’s Chile), particularly in its application of hard, grinding austerity and economic liberalisation on all fronts. Secondly, it reflects Dr Jayatilleka’s disillusionment with the main Opposition, the Samagi Jana Balavegaya, of which de Silva, along with former UNP stalwarts like Eran Wickramaratne, is often portrayed as a chief economic policy advisor.

At the outset I admit I cannot agree with Dr Jayatilleka’s characterisation of the JVP as Left, simply because the JVP, through its parliamentary avatar the NPP, has been playing hard to get with Sri Lanka’s historically anti-socialist, anti-radical middle-classes. The fact that the latter have been more or less radicalised and have changed in their attitudes towards the JVP should not make us forget that, leading players of the aragalaya though they were, the (predominantly Sinhala) middle-classes tended to project a line that is deeply antipathetic to the JVP’s brand of socialism, as revealed in its policy papers and manifestos.

However, the main thrust of Dr Jayatilleka’s critique is something I can accord with only too well. The SJB had always dangled between a right wing and a social democratic base, but this shift could be resolved only in favour of a complete tilt to the right so long as the party retained elements from the UNP, and not just the UNP, but Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP. To state this is not to deny that the SJB attempted to portray itself as a more people-friendly version of the UNP: under Sajith Premadasa, it did come to terms with such a necessity, and, to be fair by Mr Premadasa, it did attempt to move towards the Left.

Two things prevented it from doing so. Firstly, the parliamentarians manning the SJB had been associated for so long with Ranil Wickremesinghe’s policies that they simply could not escape their past. To complicate matters further, their very constituencies, in and around Colombo’s affluent middle-class heartlands, could not stomach them shifting to a radical Left. Sri Lanka’s electoral constituencies are divided along ethnic and caste lines, but they are also deeply disfigured by class distinctions. To the extent that the SJB’s leading figures hailed from upper middle-class constituencies, there was no way even a rebel faction of the UNP was going to step out of the UNP’s economic and social line.

This explains the SJB’s rather ambivalent attitude to Ranil Wickremesinghe after August 2020. The SJB had rightly felt it had appropriated the UNP’s social base, and acted or rather tried to act accordingly. But Wickremesinghe’s return to parliament a year later revealed, so to speak, the wolves dressed as sheep. From tweets to press conferences, SJB MPs swayed between outright opposition (most prominently by Ashok Abeysinghe) to mild approbation of the man who had once led them and, in a way, moulded their political destinies. Those who welcomed his return to parliament, ever so slightly, were for obvious reasons going to be the first to leave when Wickremesinghe replaced Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

The second point is more complicated. From late last year, the SJB relied on opposition to the SLPP and to Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Yet, as it found out rather belatedly, people had grown past the “they are better than them” mentality that had defined national politics for so long. The May 9 debacle showed clearly that people were in no mood to look up to Premadasa as an alternative to the establishment. The attack on Rajitha Senaratne on July 9 proved more or less the same thing. Their valorisation of Sarath Fonseka, however, revealed that people were less bothered by ex-military personnel contesting for elections than Colombo’s liberals may assume. But this is exceptional: barring figures like Fonseka, people have grown tired of conventional politics, and they are tired of the main Opposition.

The SJB itself lacked a head, a heart, and a centre. Sajith Premadasa was its leader, but a leader who could not balance the different interests and ideological alignments in his own party. When the issue of food price controls came up late last year, for instance, we had MPs advocating welfarist measures and MPs advocating market reforms. When the rupee’s value dropped, we had MPs urging a more phased out devaluation and MPs urging more of the same. This, a party with less than half the number of MPs in the ruling coalition! Such disparities, differences, and disagreements tend to unnerve voters, especially when voters are being impoverished by an uncaring regime and when they are presented with what they assume to be more radical outfits, such as the JVP-NPP and FSP.

One can’t blame the SJB alone for this. Whatever one may say about the cultural makeup of Sri Lanka’s political map, mainstream parties will, at the end of the day, bank on the mood and the ideological preferences of the Sinhalese middle-classes. The peasantry matters too, but since at least 1977, when economic liberalisation “liberated” the petty bourgeoisie, the mainstream parties have been vying for the support and the affection of the middle-classes: it is this middle-class, after all, which voted for Mahinda Rajapaksa twice, then Sirisena, and then Gotabaya Rajapaksa, only to turn away from the latter. The Sinhala middle-classes are, in that sense, not a little inconsistent and incoherent in their choices, to such an extent that, at a time like this, no Opposition party can hold them or rein them in for long.

In his critique of Harsha de Silva’s economic blueprint, Dayan Jayatilleka points at the protean tendencies of the middle-class: he argues that the latter has not only become supportive of the IMF, but also of the JVP. Now, viewed from a certain perspective, there is no paradox between supporting the Left and supporting an IMF programme. But from a progressive Left perspective, there is. Yet the Sinhala middle-classes have made this rather astonishing leap, and are more or less okay with it. They want to have the cake, eat it, and probably share it too: they want a radical coalition calling the shots in the government, but they also want the IMF and other multilateral financial institutions to step in and impose their reforms. In that sense it is hardly surprising that the JVP has still not come out with a definitive statement on their attitude to the IMF, or even the government’s engagement with it.

In any case, there is no essential difference between the economic policies associated with Ranil Wickremesinghe and the policies unveiled by Harsha de Silva. One feels Dr Jayatilleka’s critique as being perhaps too harsh. But the truth of the matter is that no Left intellectual has seriously contested or contended with the blueprint, so far. Many of its proposals do alert us to the need for a serious restructuring of the economy. But as Dr Jayatilleka himself once put it, the underlying question is not whether we need to restructure or go to the IMF, but on whom the burden of such reforms should fall: the poor who are already suffering as they are, or the rich who haven’t paid their proverbial due to the State?

The way out for the country is a shift to the Left. One can discuss, debate, and disagree over how far to the Left we should go. I have personally always been a pragmatist where socialist reform is concerned: there is absolutely no point turning into a utopian autarky, but there is a need, an urgent one, for industrialisation, and for greater local production.

I do not know whether Harsha de Silva’s plan for recovery pays adequate attention to local production. I do know, however, that the kind of austerity-driven neoliberal policies that Dayan Jayatilleka ascribes to his plan does not, has not, and will not accord any place to the kind of progressive policies which Howard Nicholas conceived in the Premadasa years. Is it any wonder that, as Dr Jayatilleka notes well, the plan he so devastatingly critiques does not mention the Premadasa reforms, which were less pro-market than pro-people?

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