Monday 17th March, 2025

Leader of the House and Minister Bimal Ratnayake, tabling the Batalanda Commission report in Parliament on Friday, mourned for the thousands of youth killed during the second JVP uprising in the late 1980s. Media reports have said that on listening to Ratnayake, Speaker Dr. Jagath Wickremaratne became choked with emotion and could hardly speak. It is only natural for anyone to be overwhelmed by such a moving narrative. Ratnayake’s speech reminded us of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Although this poetic elegy is about the horrors of World War I, it has relevance to other conflicts characterised by brutality and senselessness, especially the ones Sri Lanka has experienced. The first stanza of the poem comes to mind:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

The JVP drove tens of thousands of youth to suicide in an abortive bid to capture state power and implement its socialist agenda. It also sought to scuttle the Indo-Lanka Accord, the 13th Amendment, the Provincial Councils and defeat what it called Indian expansionism. The JVP claimed to be using violence as a means to an end, but in reality its savage terror became the means and the end both and eventually proved to be its undoing.

Today, the JVP is ensconced in power, having secured the coveted Executive Presidency and obtained a supermajority in Parliament. But its current agenda is antithetical to its much-avowed goal, which it led thousands of youth to lay down their lives for, in 1971 and during the 1987-89 period. What this glaring contradiction signifies is that the JVP has deep-sixed what those youth strove for. They died in vain. Were they taken for a ride?

The JVP, as the main constituent of the ruling NPP, has embraced the very economic policies it once condemned as neo-imperialist, accepted the 13th Amendment and devolution it went all out to sabotage albeit in vain, mended fences with India, which it likened to an octopus with tentacles spread all over Sri Lanka, opted for a honeymoon with the US, and above all, chose to follow the IMF dictates. It is also enjoying numerous benefits accruing from the Executive Presidency, which it would condemn as a source of evil.

It takes two to tango. The extrajudicial executions at issue must be condemned unreservedly, but they would not have taken place if the JVP had not taken up arms and incited the youth to violence. So, the blame for the savage killings in the late 1980s should be apportioned equally to the UNP and the JVP, which also killed countless dissenters and even traders who sold Indian goods including Bombay onions, which had to be renamed ‘Lanka loku lunu’ to save lives. Besides, it strove to sabotage elections and destroy the economy, seized thousands of firearms and committed many armed robberies in the name of its supposedly socialist cause.

The incumbent NPP government, especially the JVP, which is trying to make itself out to be a paragon of virtue and victim of the UNP’s violence, has done the right thing by tabling the Batalanda Commission report in Parliament. However, a discussion on a spree of counterterror which led to grave violations of human rights cannot be held in isolation of its cause––terror. Therefore, there is a pressing need to probe the JVP’s reign of terror and its heinous crimes as well. That will help make the narrative about the extrajudicial killings in the late 1980s complete. The Batalanda Commission report also sheds light on the JVP’s terrorism. This fact is sure to be highlighted when a parliamentary debate on the report gets underway. The JVP is opening a can or worms.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Frontline Socialist Party, an offshoot of the JVP, have taken moral high ground, calling upon the government to take action fast in keeping with the recommendations of the Batalanda Commission report. These holier-than-thou characters were also in the JVP when it perpetrated barbaric violence in the late 1980s. They cannot therefore be considered less culpable than the leaders of the UNP and the JVP, where the 1987-89 bloodbath is concerned.