The SJB’s trust deficit and the JVP-NPP’s strategy

By Uditha Devapriya

The aragalaya that lasted from February to somewhere in August showed two things: the people’s anger at the regime and the people’s rage against the system. The two are clean different. While a considerable section of the protesters wanted Gotabaya Rajapaksa out, a not inconsiderable second layer used these calls to campaign against the government: hence the interchangeable use of “regime change” and “system change.”

Given this, people should be forgiven for thinking the protests were confused, disjointed and unfocused, because they were exactly that. Laudable as their goals were, they soon deteriorated into a confused morass of rage, anger, and frustration.

The distinction between regime and State is one of the most profound in political science. Sri Lanka’s liberals and left-liberals, not to mention anarchists, tend to confuse and conflate the two. A State exists above, and beyond, a regime. A regime exists well below it, and is in fact subservient to it. If your call to displace a regime gets mixed up in calls to displace the State, then a regime, however unpopular, will find it very easy to make a comeback, on the pretext that protesters are seeking to overthrow an entire political system and with it the last vestiges of law and order. This is precisely what happened on July 13 and 14, when the FSP, followed by the JVP-NPP, asked people to walk into parliament. Their intention may or may not have been to overthrow the legislature, but people thought so.

This in turn activated the more liberal and conservative elements in the aragalaya. Almost immediately after the likes of Kumar Gunaratnam and Sunil Handunneti mobilised crowds at parliament, these groups sprang up on social media, urging people not to go and be hoodwinked by socialist parties. What these groups forgot, in their outcries, was that it had been these socialist elements – or those parading themselves as such – which had led and mobilised the protests since May. Prime among these groups, of course, was the FSP allied IUSF. The IUSF’s long march to Galle Face Green was cheered by a hitherto politically inert middle-class, in particular the youth. It is these same sections that are today castigating the IUSF and the FSP over allegations of ragging at universities.

In other words, the honeymoon is over, even if temporarily. The government has seen it fit to act against protesters and it sees the spate of arrests it has been unleashing since last month as a means of securing, if not the country, then at least Colombo. The same middle-class that hailed them as heroes are no longer bothered. This is natural, and it speaks more about the IUSF’s strategic error of relying on them than about the class preferences of these milieus. Related to this, I would say, is the IUSF’s, JVP-NPP’s, and of course FSP’s tendency to mix up State and regime, which has led these groups to commit two major blunders: to cast themselves as the only political choices in the country, and to alienate Opposition parties which can be made use of in a wider anti-government movement.

I think the November 2 protest showed these tendencies well. While the SJB, the de facto and de jure Opposition in the country, entered into an alliance of sorts with the FSP – and hence FSP allied groups – SJB MPs who entered the protests were not viewed favourably by many of the protesters themselves. Nuzly Hameem, who I believe is one of the more sincere protesters in that crowd, was blunt about Sajith Premadasa: “He simply ran away!” When an SJB official rose up to Premadasa’s defence – as he should – by arguing that Premadasa was afraid of the police attacking demonstrators, Hameem quickly countered: “Irony is such that Opposition leader run away leaving the protesters behind scared that oppression would take place where the main slogan of the protest is ‘Stop Oppression’.”

The protests caught much attention, here and abroad. The international media was much more sympathetic to their demands. The local media, by contrast, either ignored them or demonised them. One leading newspaper highlighted Premadasa’s desertion, in effect questioning his credibility. The protesters themselves, on social media, voiced their anger at Premadasa, more or less agreeing with the same media that marginalised their campaign. I think this shows the SJB’s trust deficit, a deficit compounded if not widened by Premadasa’s actions during the May 9 debacle, and his unwillingness – critiqued even by analysts like Dr Dayan Jayatilleka – to take on the premiership when it was offered to him.

At the same time, these developments have disenchanted sections of the Left opposition. What the FSP thought of Premadasa’s actions last Wednesday we may never know. But we know what the JVP-NPP thought. They refused to join the protests. Justifying his party’s line, MP Wasantha Samarasinghe contended that those taking part in them were more or less siding with the government. One of the demonstrators’ many calls was the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). MP Samarasinghe point-blank observed that such calls diverted attention from other issues, and that those taking up cudgels against the PTA were following the government’s agenda. By making this case for his party’s decision not to take part, Samarasinghe thus effectively distanced it from the FSP and the SJB.

I think I understand the JVP-NPP’s argument, whataboutist as it may be. At a time of a deepening economic and social crisis, the government is using the PTA to crack down on dissent. MP Samarasinghe and the JVP-NPP may be thinking that if the campaign against the government focuses solely, or mainly, on the PTA, it will embolden the government, or the State, to portray protesters as terrorists and fellow travellers. Over the last few weeks the government has instituted legal action against several aragalistas and this has enabled it to depict the latter as extremists. Samarasinghe’s argument is that by focusing on the PTA, instead of the gross incompetence that continues to wreak havoc on the economy, these protests will make it easier for the government to suppress dissent.

This is the more complex explanation. The simpler explanation, of course, is that the JVP-NPP does not want to take part in any campaign organised by not one, but two, of its bete noires. It does not like the FSP and it has so far resisted any attempt at forging an alliance with that outfit. It does not like Sajith Premadasa, if at all for his sin of being his father’s son. Lately it has badmouthed his party, calling it no better than the SLPP – invoking, of course, the late Mangala Samaraweera’s “two sides, same coin” argument. The JVP-NPP sees itself as the superior of these two formations and for that reason it does not wish to enter into any alliance with them. Though Premadasa himself has tried to invite them, and has made many overtures to this end during the last two years, he has failed.

In politics, it is perfectly possible to be correct and wrong at the same time. The JVP-NPP is correct in its characterisation of the SJB. Not because the SJB hasn’t tried, but because it hasn’t tried hard enough. Sajith Premadasa’s speech against the recent Budget showed that the SJB wants to be seen as following a different economic paradigm. Yet the blowback against the party by centre-right, right-wing, and neoliberal outfits and think-tanks based in Colombo has pushed the party’s stalwarts, like Harsha de Silva and Eran Wickramaratne, to make statements at odds with Premadasa’s speech: one of them has come out in support of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s policies. These elements are deeply conservative and neoliberal in their outlook. The JVP-NPP cannot be faulted for calling them out on this.

The JVP-NPP is wrong, in my view, in where it wants to go with this diagnosis. Any sensible political formation pitted against an overbearing regime must value what Mao characterised as the broadest possible alliance. In no revolution have revolutionary elements all come together with a consensus on every issue and problem. Latin America is seeing a resurgence of the Pink Tide precisely because the left and centre-left have chosen not to walk it alone. This has won these parties some censure from the dogmatist Left: the editors of the World Socialist Web Site, for instance, have poured scorn on the Workers’ Party in Brazil and its mobilisation of leftist forces by calling the latter elements “pseudo-left.” The WSWS calls the JVP-NPP “pseudo-left” too: a charge the party may not agree with.

But I digress here. My point is that the JVP-NPP cannot isolate itself from the mainstream Opposition. At the same time, it cannot allow itself to be co-opted by the mainstream. The Latin American Pink Tide analogy loses ground when you consider that elements within the SJB, or what I’d like to call the Ranilist faction, are much more to the right than the centre-left and liberal elements which sided with Lula da Silva’s party in Brazil. The WSWS may be wrong in terming these formations, and their supporters, “pseudo-left”, but this is a label that can be applied to the SJB’s recent attempts at shifting to the left. The recent protests, in that sense, showed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Left elements in the aragalaya. Unless they come up with an alliance with other parties, and unless those other parties free themselves from their neoliberal past, the only time we’ll see a vibrant protest movement here is when the country runs out of fuel, gas, and electricity.

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