By Dayan Jayatilleka –

The Left has the best chance of being elected to office in Sri Lanka since 1964 or 1947. That’s speculative. So let me put it more clearly. Never in my lifetime has the Left been closer to assuming governmental power by democratic means, i.e., leading the country. We have never been closer to having a leftwing leader and administration.

Society is dividing between those who think that’s a good thing and those who think it’s bad. As Mao said in his first political essay on the Peasant Movement in Hunan, opinion is divided between those who say “it’s fine” and those who say “it’s terrible”. Mao thought it was fine.

We had a similar division of opinion during the Aragalaya. Opinion remains divided about it. I was among those who said in print that “it’s fine”. Ranil thought it was fine and later that it was terrible. The Pohottuwa thought it was terrible all along.

This was a throwback to the division of opinion in Ceylon about the Hartal of August 1953, the popular uprising that left 8 dead of Police shooting and a Prime Minister who resigned. Progressive-minded people, like my father, at the time a reporter for Lake House just out of university, were in sympathy with and admiring of the Hartal. His father, my paternal grandfather, a staunch UNPer, thought it was terrible. Those who sympathized with the Hartal ’53 went on to applaud the crushing defeat of the UNP by SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956.

Why I Welcome AKD-JVP-NPP

Those who supported the Aragalaya would tend to support the Anura Kumara Dissanayake candidacy and the JVP-NPP, but with an interesting difference. A splinter supports Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sir John Kotelawala’s political descendent. True, those who endorsed the Hartal were also divided between the Marxist Left and the center-left SLFP, but no one supported Sir John Kotelawala, Ranil’s political ancestor.

I supported the Aragalaya as my published writing shows. I also welcome and support the rise of the Left in the form of the JVP-NPP led by Anura Dissanayake. I suggested Anura as a left presidential candidate in 2014. (Sri Lankan ex-radical calls for a JVP presidential candidate).

I did that then and do so now despite being prominently on the other side of Wijeweera’s JVP during the left-on-left mini-civil war of the 1980s. The issues which divided us then no longer exist or do not divide us anymore.

There’s another reason that I welcome and applaud the AKD-JVP-NPP option this year. My intellectual formation having been Marxist, I have always regarded myself as on the Left. When this article appears, the top international policy journal in Moscow, namely Russia in Global Affairs, would be featuring an essay by me on Lenin’s relevance today, marking his death centenary.

However, since 1984-5 when I wrote 4 cover stories in the Lanka Guardian supporting Vijaya Kumaratunga and his new party, I have been a leftist committed to Social Democracy and have preferred to support the closest available approximation to it, which chiefly meant progressive-populists (Vijaya, Premadasa, Mahinda) rather than Marxist-Leninists or the exclusively Left options.

While a Trotskyist periodical called the Spartacist critiqued me in the 1980s for “Latin Americanist petty-bourgeois guerrillaism”, a double-page spread in middle page of the broadsheet Kamkaru Mawatha, a widely-read Trotskyist newspaper belonging to a bigger, more durable faction, critiqued in 1984 my support for Vijaya Kumaratunga and predicted that I would ‘degenerate’ into a “social democrat”. It was prophetic. The rival Trotskyist publications were correct in their own ways, but there was no contradiction because that was the trajectory of the Latin American revolutionary left which culminated in a fusion of social democracy and left populism albeit of different ratios in each national setting.

Today, the candidacy and the party I thought would fill that ‘social democratic’ slot, Sajith Premadasa and the SJB, do not do so. Unlike as presidential candidate in November 2019 and through to mid-late 2022, Sajith is objectively functioning today as a mask for economic ‘Harsha Chinthanaya’ which is itself a mask for economic ‘Ranil Chinthanaya’. Harsha’s ‘Blueprint’ is Ranil Lite, while Sajith’s discourse is Harsha Lite or an artificial sweetener for the “bitter medicine” that Harsha delightedly prescribes.

Currently, and as long as the Harsha-Eran paradigm remains ideologically dominant, the SJB is not a progressive-centrist alternative but a recognizably center-right option. It is as if everything that President Premadasa fought against in the UNP and removed from it has been reinstated while much of what he stood for has been removed. Susil Sirivardhana, Simon Navagattegama and I had little problem in transitioning to him and supporting his project and him to the bitter end and beyond, but we wouldn’t have come within a hundred miles of the present SJB with its Economic Blueprint.

Dr. Harsha de Silva’s current claim to fame being his World Bank credentials (he says ‘advisor’ in Sinhala, but could mean ‘consultant’ or participant in World Bank projects—in Nepal and Bhutan) is amusing. If those credentials were so decisively valuable, then why did Ranil and his economic team including Dr Harsha de Silva totally ignore the advice given in Colombo in 2015 by no less than the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and Nobel Prize-winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz? And why isn’t he critical of it even in retrospect? Why doesn’t he embrace Stiglitz’ advice even today, but prefer Ricardo Hausmann instead?

In the absence of a progressive-centrist alternative, and with the populist-developmentalist or populist-centrist formation pivoting right, embracing neoliberal austerity, my foundational leftism provides the compass which points me to the main party of the Left which has built a political mass movement of a left-populist character.

This is NOT because I think AKD-JVP-NPP has victory in the bag. The Northern and Eastern Provinces and the Hill-Country (and to a lesser degree the minorities in the Western province) could swing the outcome at a Presidential election away from Anura Dissanayake.

My supportive stance is because I can identify much more with what Anura is saying and representing, than with any other contender. I think he offers the people real hope. Indeed, I am convinced that had Ranasinghe Premadasa heard AKD he would have wished to have a dialogue and draw him into a governing equation, while conversely, had he heard the SJB’s technocratic discourse and read its Economic Blueprint he would have distanced himself from that party as he did when he formed the Puravesi Peramuna in 1972-3, or he would have sacked them from any government and party he headed, as he did Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake.

My Criticisms: Left Gaps and Deficits

However, my support of the AKD-NPP-JVP formation is not uncritical. What I am critical about is completely unrelated to the 1980s. It is that they are not doing all they can or should – because this may be all they can—to win this historic victory.

I am critical, though supportive, not only of the JVP-NPP, but also of the Lankan Left in general. That’s because the ‘generic Left’ is not doing all it can to help secure this historic victory.

I note the following gaps and deficits, which if not bridged could cost AKD and the NPP-JVP either the presidential or parliamentary election or both. Bridging these gaps in time could secure victory.

* The cold war or unbridgeable distance between the JVP-NPP and the FSP-JAV.

* The lack of sufficient activity by the left intellectuals and academics of both the pro-NPP-JVP camp and the non-NPP-JVP camp.

* The lack of outreach of the non-JVP-NPP Left in the direction of the JVP-NPP.

* The lack of outreach of the JVP-NPP to other left and progressive elements.

Firstly, the gap between the JVP-NPP and the FSP-JAV. Let’s be frank. Anura Kumara is concerned that the FSP’s radicalism could scare off middle-class voters. There’s no point debating that. What must be recognized is that each party needs the other, and though the FSP is far smaller, the JVP has more to lose.

What the FSP could bring to the table is the power of public persuasion wielded so modestly by the JVP’s former educational Secretary and currently the FSP’s Educational Secretary, Pubudu Jayagoda. No one mounts a better economic critique than he does. Jayagoda is the country’s most successful public pedagogue and model of what Antonio Gramsci called an organic intellectual.

The JVP and FSP must be creative and flexible enough to work out an understanding whereby the FSP-JAV opens an autonomous, parallel ‘second front’, waging a politico-ideological ‘guerrilla war of resistance’ against the common neoliberal enemy. One possibility would be cooperation NOT between the JVP and FSP but between their respective social movements or political mass movements.

Secondly, the strange silence of the left academia and intelligentsia, both ‘pro’ and ‘non’ NPP-JVP. In pre-election 1970 the universities were ‘ideas factories’ for the oppositional United Front coalition. I know because my uncle (my father’s brother-in-law) Prof PEE Fernando, was in the forefront at Peradeniya. OK, so there’s no united front today, but there are academics sympathetic to the NPP as to the FSP-JAV.

For the NPP this is election year. For the FSP-JAV, which isn’t that into elections, there’s the biggest threat of a neoliberal shock therapy agenda in Sri Lanka’s history. However, there’s far more activity and a higher profile of the economic neoliberals who are waging an ideological offensive to ensure that whatever the electoral outcome, the neoliberal model and agenda are adhered to, than there is of the collective left intelligentsia—with the academia at its core.

The latter should be waging a battle the ideas, the battle for moral-ethical, intellectual-cultural and ideological hegemony, without which there can be no sustainable political victory.

Thirdly, the non-JVP Left parties have limited options, none of which they are activating. They can reach out to the JVP-NPP and arrive at some arrangement which entails a division of labour in what must be recognized as a decisive common battle. Or they can become part of a parallel ‘second front’ with the FSP-JAV-IUSF. Or they can form a solid front with the Dullas faction of the FPC, which in no way contradicts the earlier mentioned option of a second front. If they do none of these, they will be discredited by company of the social chauvinist dominated Uttara Lanka and wiped out electorally.

Fourthly, and finally is the JVP-NPP’s insistence that in a repetition of the ‘Walk of Shame’ in the Game of Thrones, penitents may enter the NPP as individuals, but parties or factions will not be accommodated in a bloc.

Why Risk Defeat?

In a tribute to Lenin on his death centenary, I could of course quote Lenin on the united front, from the proceedings of the 2nd and 3rd Congresses of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920 and 1921, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll stick to the hard historical facts of elections on this island.

* Except for the first two occasions, every time a party won, it was as a coalition. Those two exceptions were DS Senanayake in 1947 and Dudley Senanayake in 1952. DS immediately formed a multi-party, multiethnic coalition government. Dudley’s UNP didn’t, and he was overthrown in one year by the Hartal 1953, and the UNP swept away in 1956.

* Every government was formed after an election (barring 1952) was as a coalition.

* Every single time a government was defeated in the island’s historical victory, it was by an Opposition coalition.

* That includes the JR-led UNP landslide of 1977. The UNP had one powerful ally, a trade union plus political party, the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) led by the iconic Saumyamoorthy Thondaman.

That indicates something about the complex terrain of the Sri Lankan social formation and therefore, its politics.

The JVP aligned with bigger political parties in the past and suffered the FSP split as a result. The answer to questionable alliances under centrist capitalist leadership, is not to go it alone; it is to have broad alliances under Left leadership, by which I mean AKD’s and the NPP-JVP’s leadership.

The JVP-NPP is trying to go it alone, politically. Again, as in 1971 and 1988. Why does it want to run the risk of bucking the national odds, when it can easily form a political coalition of the left, progressive and democratic parties and organizations under its leadership and around –in support of– Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s presidential candidacy?