� The Sri Lankan Left’s Long Road to Power
Tuesday 26 November 2024, by Devaka Gunawardena and Ahilan Kadirgamar <https://www.alterinter.org/?The-Sri-Lankan-Left-s-Long-Road-to-Power> https://www.alterinter.org/?The-Sri-Lankan-Left-s-Long-Road-to-Power ... Decisive Victory It was in this tense atmosphere that the left-leaning NPP was able to win such a decisive majority, assuming office amidst great hopes and expectations. The NPP is primarily the vehicle of its chief constituent party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). As the leader of both the JVP and the NPP, Dissanayake has portrayed the latter as a third force. He counterposes it to the corruption of the political class and its favoured home in Sri Lanka’s two historic parties, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP), along with their contemporary offshoots, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) and the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB). That said, we should not forget that the JVP’s move to form the NPP in 2019 was in part intended to deflect attention from its own bloody history, including its first armed insurrection in 1971 and an even more brutal attempt in the late 1980s. At the same time, the NPP’s victory aligns with global trends, as ever-larger groups of voters swing between left- and right- populist alternatives to the political establishment from one election to the next. The NPP shares many of the ambivalent characteristics of left-wing formations in other countries in which neoliberalism has become politically dominant. Yet unlike the main left-wing parties in India, for example, which have governed in states such as Kerala and West Bengal for decades, the NPP is assuming power at a time when the political and economic order is already fraying. Nevertheless, despite the severity of the economic hardship and the ferocity of the 2022 revolt, it remains uncertain whether Sri Lanka’s new government will be willing to take steps toward an independent development path. That would require a break with neoliberalism. Since coming to power, the NPP has pledged to follow the terms of the previous government’s IMF Agreement. It even accepted an Agreement in Principle with external bondholders, which contains unprecedented legal revisions to allow a restructuring of Sri Lanka’s bonds largely to the benefit of commercial creditors. In this regard, it does not appear that the NPP is yet willing or able to resist the blackmail of global capital. Nevertheless, the NPP cannot be dismissed outright, particularly given the widespread anger with austerity that facilitated the coalition’s victory. The JVP in particular has played a key, albeit contradictory role in the multifaceted history of the Sri Lankan Left. The party, and by extension its electoral coalition, has tended to reflect broader contradictions in the polity. It straddles various class fractions and social groups. The NPP now stands at a critical juncture. Will it address the grievances of an increasingly immiserated middle class and the working people, who have borne the brunt of the current crisis, by pursuing self-sufficiency with a strong redistributive dimension? Or will it fall back on aspirational rhetoric that appeals to its newer backers in the professional and business communities, while sticking to the current economic trajectory? Critical engagement with the party’s history is necessary to explore if and how the NPP can be pushed to the left – a question that left-wing forces around the world must also ask themselves as they strive to build viable progressive coalitions amidst the unravelling of the world order. Maoism, Militancy, and Cross-Class Coalitions To analyse how the JVP came to be what it is today, we must situate it within the historical context of Sri Lanka’s Left. The country’s first official political party was the socialist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), formed in 1935 before independence from Britain in 1948. The LSSP’s founding leaders were influenced by figures such as British economist and later Labour Party leader Harold Laski during their studies abroad. Yet the LSSP was not only Sri Lanka’s first party, but also the first Marxist party with an explicitly Trotskyist orientation. As political scientist Calvin Woodward put it, in Sri Lanka, Trotskyists (ironically) represented the orthodoxy, while the Stalinists were the renegades. The Communist Party (CP), which emerged as an offshoot of the LSSP, eventually gravitated toward an alliance with its former party, despite their ideological differences. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie found its political home in two mainstream parties, the UNP and its breakaway, the SLFP. The “Old Left”, represented by the LSSP and the CP, grappled with the strategic dilemma of retaining political independence versus participating in coalitions with the left-leaning but nevertheless bourgeois SLFP. The latter won the elections of 1956, ushering Sri Lanka onto a path of state-led development and import substitution policies in conjunction with a nationalist mobilization focused on the Sinhala Buddhist majority. By the 1960s, however, a split formed in the CP. It led to the formation of the Communist Party – Peking Wing led by Nagalingam Shanmugathasan. Soon thereafter, Rohana Wijeweera emerged as the leader of a youth faction that went on to found the JVP. Unlike the Old Left, the JVP and the broader “New Left” took a very different approach to the question of armed struggle. The JVP drew from a contradictory mix of ideologies, but was chiefly influenced by Maoism. While the Old Left “preached war and practiced peace”, to paraphrase its eminent theorist Hector Abhayavardhana, the JVP took the question of revolution seriously, even attempting an insurrection against the state in 1971. The JVP’s break with the Old Left was not only based on a strategic disagreement, however. Rather, it crystallized around tensions specific to Sri Lankan society, especially in the rural South. The JVP embodied different social, linguistic, and generational cleavages within the Sri Lankan polity. Namely, it drew support from youth who primarily spoke Sinhala and tended to come from rural areas, as opposed to the leadership of the Old Left, which had an Anglophone character and cosmopolitan outlook. Meanwhile, the Old Left joined the United Front government (1970–1977) led by the SLFP, in which the LSSP remained a junior partner until 1975. The Old Left rationalized the government’s brutal response to the JVP insurrection, during which roughly 10,000 people were killed. Dissidents within the Old Left such as Edmund Samarakkody, however, understood the JVP’s popular appeal. Although its ideology was contradictory, it had emerged as a response to the unresolved problems of underemployed youth in both rural and urban areas. Many in the younger generation had been unable to realize their aspirations even under the social-democratic regime of the post-1956 period. In this sense, the party’s base was among underemployed youth who sought employment in the state, but it also appealed to constituencies such as smallholder farmers, who felt that their needs were not being met by left-leaning governments focused more on their urban trade unionist supporters. 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