By Uditha Devapriya –

Uditha Devapriya

In many electoral democracies, there seems to be a tendency to critique the left rather than the liberal centre or the right during elections. This has been so for two main reasons. First, the left – in whatever form – is associated, rightly or wrongly, with socialist or communist forms of governance, which are seen as passé and out of step with the times. Second, while many left-wing parties are open and transparent about their policies, many others opt for secrecy, either because they are averse to making their internal processes available for public consumption or because they feel that they are at the receiving end of attacks from other parties, especially those on the centre and right.

That it took time for this critique of the NPP or JVP – namely, that it lacks a commitment to democratic principles and is not transparent enough – to come out into the open should come as a surprise. Yet there is hardly anything new about it. The more coherent of the NPP’s – for sake of clarity I will call it NPP-JVP from here on – critics have always hailed from the liberal-centrist and centre-right crowd. Their argument has been that the NPP-JVP’s position on minorities, on checks and balances, indeed on the underlying tenets of what is framed as liberal democracy – has been problematic at best and contentious at worst. On those grounds, they point out that while it presents itself as an alternative, voters need to be aware of its positions on these issues before selecting them.

The NPP-JVP should, obviously, be critiqued. I have my own criticisms of the party, above all else its inability to resolve a fundamental disjuncture between what the NPP is saying and what the Old Guard of the JVP is saying. However, to assume that this is relevant only to the NPP-JVP would be disingenuous. The SJB, too, has been making statements that seem wildly divergent, or contradictory, particularly on issues like debt restructuring. As for the SLPP – the pro-Ranil Wickremesinghe faction, which has morphed into what can only be called an electoral abomination, the Podujana Nidahas Eksath Peramuna (PNEP) – the less said about its stance on economic reforms and its election gimmicks, the better.

The NPP-JVP has also seen itself as above everyone else, in the sense that it projects a deep-seated aversion to coalition politics. As I have argued in my column last week, that begs the question as to what it will do in the event it wins presidential elections. With prominent MPs taking to the stage and gloating about the many breakaway rebel MPs from the SLPP whom they turned away on account of their lack of political pedigree, one wonders whether they will stick to this narrative after election season, or whether they will, like so many other left-wing parties the world over, forge alliances with those same “despicables.”

This, however, is as far as my critique of the NPP-JVP will go. They are not unresolvable flaws, and they are hardly specific to the party or alliance. Indeed, if anything, the NPP-JVP’s parliamentary presence has compelled it to moderate its stances – as the debates, among its supporters, over hitherto sensitive questions such as the minorities issue or the Executive Presidency show – to a far greater extent than, say, its main rival on the left, the Alliance for People’s Struggle (APS). I am still not sure who will win the upcoming election, but I am sure that it will be won by the party that puts together the broadest possible alliance and moves to the centre. Whether the NPP-JVP can do this is a matter of debate.

It is laughable, if not ridiculous, however, to censure the NPP and JVP based on its fidelity, assumed or real, to communist and “totalitarian” forms of governance. It is also intriguing that this hazy critique of the party is coming from the liberal or left-liberal camp, a crowd which prides itself on its tolerant and pluralist character. Of course, the counterargument to this is that the NPP-JVP’s political structure is anything but tolerant and pluralist. But to assume that the party adheres to specific form of politics would be to engage in the same kind of straw-manning, and redbaiting, that the right is.

There is, for instance, the argument that the NPP-JVP has entrenched “leftwing” forms of political control, including democratic centralism. Democratic centralism is associated with the Communist parties of China, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union. It is associated with social democratic parties, including the African National Congress (ANC), as well. In brief, it prioritises party decisions over individual choices and subordinates (almost) everything to the diktats of the party. From that flows other forms of control, including the nomenklatura, through which appointments are subjected to party approval.

These tenets or principles are held up as being inferior to Western liberal democracy. There is no doubt that qualitative differences do exist between the two. There is also no doubt that the kind of political principles attributed to the NPP-JVP – rightly or wrongly – raise serious questions about transparency and governance itself. However, when we see these tenets – for instance, nomenklatura – for what they are – forms of political patronage in which party supporters, and allies, are favoured over rivals – one wonders what exactly is the thin blue line separating the one from the other. Patronage networks, the most extreme of which would be political systems where oligarchic interests like lobbies dominate – are associated not just with the former Soviet Union, but also Western democracies.

As the recent war in Gaza clearly shows, Western political parties that pride themselves on their pluralist character have revealed their selectivity well. These are not mere flaws; they have been so firmly ingrained and institutionalised in the system that they are hard to take out. A good example would be the US Democratic Party’s position on the Israel-Gaza War; on the one hand, it is either apportioning equal blame to the Israeli government and Hamas when most casualties have been from Gaza, or defending the Israeli State; and on the other, it has tacitly decided to shut out Palestinian voices. This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course: there are enough and more studies (for instance, by Stephen Walt) which reveal how strong and pervasive these lobbies are in influencing policy.

Viewed that way, the liberal-centrist and centre-right critique of the NPP-JVP does not hold for three reasons. The first is that, despite qualitative differences between the West and the rest, openness and accountability have become more the norm than exception even among liberal outfits, even in the West. One cannot, of course, compare the Communist Party of China with the US Democrats or Republicans, or for that matter the UK Conservatives. Yet if transparency is the buzzword here, the NPP-JVP’s approach to issues like political patronage do not differ much from its rivals. The record of other parties, including the SLPP and UNP, has been more or less the same: when in power, they have institutionalised some form of patronage, in terms of, for instance, hiring supporters into government service, that hardly diverge from “communist governance” à la NPP-JVP.

The second reason is that assuming people want an alternative to the establishment and then cautioning against voting for parties that supposedly depart from Western forms of democracy reeks of the kind of condescension which is no different to the redbaiting of the establishment itself. More than anything, it reveals the limits of liberalism as it is practised today: a point that Rajiva Wijesinha has noted clearly in the last chapter of Representing Sri Lanka (Godage, 2023). Since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been, not just in Sri Lanka but also the rest of the Global South, a perceptible shift from the type of enlightened liberalism associated with the Democratic Party in the US under Kennedy, to a wholesale embrace of economic liberalism, even at the cost of social welfare. The class interests that dominate and pervade centrist and centre-right parties have endorsed this shift as well.

The third reason is that fears of the NPP-JVP rising to power and installing a Communist dictatorship of the Marxist-Leninist model are unwarranted because the NPP-JVP has become, as I have noted earlier, more moderate in its policies and positions. This can clearly be seen when comparing the NPP-JVP’s programme with, say, the APS’s. The NPP-JVP is, certainly, somewhat opaque in its dealings with external players. But its evolving position on the IMF, and its visit to India, show that it is not above playing the game of compromise. One sees a broader tendency to shift to the centre among other leftwing parties as well, even those in the West. The Sri Lankan experience, with regard not just to the NPP-JVP but also the Old Left – the LSSP and the CPSL – has been no different.

What we need is a more thoughtful critique of the NPP-JVP, not least because, as a party still struggling to create a mass base, it needs course-corrections of the sort that other left parties, even in Sri Lanka, have historically undergone. However, the tendency among liberal centrist camps today is to assume the JVP’s policy positions and lambast it accordingly. A more thoughtful critique of the NPP-JVP came from Dayan Jayatilleka earlier this week. In his essay, he expresses his support for Sajith Premadasa over Anura Kumara Dissanayake. That just goes to show that it is not only possible, but also imperative, to make political choices without pandering to the kind of hysteria which permeates most Colombo-centric critiques of the NPP-JVP. Sri Lanka is not Colombo; nor, indeed, should it be so.

*Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.