By Vishwamithra –

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”  ~ Antonio Gramsci

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his Cabinet of Ministers seem to have settled in. They were literally greeted by severe stormy weather and the first test of their governance and management capabilities are being tested at this very moment. Paper credentials and theoretical magnificence will be tested to the hilt. Selection of the ideal bureaucracy and other addendum staff should respond to these crises which any government, green, blue or red, would be facing with a robust energy and a planned preparedness. What was achieved on the electioneering plateau must be repeated, even with more vigor and commitment. Can they do that?

The people would not wait for tomorrow for help to arrive. Their deadline was yesterday. They must be met, without condition. Cynics would wait for a  more diabolical end. They must be set aside, annihilated and destroyed, in a metaphorical and figurative sense. I am more than sure that the current government has within their quarters the know-how and skills and the dedication that are required in a crisis situation. Do not allow the critics to equate the current National People’s Power to be desecrated by unwanted and sinful past of the negative side of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). The NPP leadership must confront such potential criticism with positive and constructive energy and enthusiasm. They shall do it, that is the collective wish and hope of the public.

The people have already started figuring out what their scorecards for the NPP government would look like. It is primarily absurd to evaluate the performance of a government after it being in power for less that one and half months. But for armchair critics, that in itself is more than a hobby. For such lotus-eaters, which they are, there is nothing else to do. Their indulgence in egocentric trips is quite regular and thirst-quenching. Whether it’s in Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world, those whose elementary livelihood is faultfinding with others has become very ordinary; not outside the box; the box in which they have been lodging in for the last seven to eight decades.

It is not fair to prejudge politicians, unless their individual past accounts lend themselves as respective mirrors of what they could be after assuming power. No politician is in politics just for the service of man. Whether it’s Rohana Wijeweera or JR Jayewardene, Premadasa, Bandaranaike or AKD, they were and are all in politics in pursuit of power. The challenge for all historians and political scientists to decipher is what they accomplished in that chosen profession of theirs. What is also before historians and social scientists to analyze and tell the reader is whether the accomplishments or failures of each politician was a product of a personal feat or a collective result of sociopolitical forces.

It is in that profound context one has to go deep into the persona and aptitudes of Rohana Wijeweera, the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the National People’s Power (NPP) respectively. Wijeweera was a student of Marxist theory. He may have widely read about the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. He may have studied the nuanced aspects of social revolution and Marxist thought as Antonio Gramsci wrote in his extensive studies and writings. However, what Wijeweera attempted in his Five Classes in the late sixties, a movement that culminated in the 1971 Insurrection fell way below the expectations, much to the dismay of his followers who hardly had any intellectual or theoretical exposure to the profound teachings of Marx, Engels and Gramsci.

Wijeweera experimented with a ‘quasi Maoism’ theory and action based on an imaginary painting of social contradictions and launched a ‘revolution’, the demand or necessity for which was sparsely present at the time in Ceylon. The necessary objective and subjective conditions for a sociopolitical revolution were not present in the country and the larger majority of the masses were not ready for an overthrow of a government that was legitimately elected via the polling booth. Wijeweera not only failed to read the electorate correctly, his failure in training and driving the motivated few fell far short of requirements.

A motivated few, however strong and forceful that motivation could propel them to action, alone cannot topple a government. Barely armed and inadequately cognizant of the conditions that suit the ultimate conditions for an armed struggle, is not the path for real change, nor was it of any real value in the context of social transformation. Moreover, it was only Rohana Wijeweera that we heard and read about at the time. No second or third tier members of the movement were exposed to the country. Driven to the edge by distrust bordering on paranoia, Wijeweera had no confidence in his disciples. Explaining away the shortcomings in a ‘doctorate thesis-like’ letter written by Lionel Bopage was material for later writers to write about; but what Bopage did not realize at the time when he was in the Peradeniya Campus as an engineering student experimenting on rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) is timely enlightenment of the realities of social change.

What followed the release of Wijeweera from prison and his entry into mainstream politics did not create much enthusiasm amongst mainstream media at the time. Wijeweera contesting the Presidential Elections in 1982 and receiving less that three hundred thousand (300,000 or 4.1% of the total votes) votes too was  no surprise. The JVP and its movement was limited to the base level activists. A political party cannot win an election in a democracy by surrounding itself exclusively with its base followers. The average voter looks at all other shades and shapes of each political party and their respective leaders.

Yet even in 2019, AKD under the NPP ticket received less than 4% of the total vote. Then, how come that a party catapulted from 3% -4% to more than 40% in less than five years. Many things happened: the total collapse of the economy; abject corruption at all levels of the government; from the politician downwards to the KKS (Karyala Karya Sahayake), office peon and driver. Aragalaya-22 lent sufficient impetus to an awakening of a nation to new realities and newer possibilities. More than anyone else in the political arena, AKD saw the probability of a new beginning.

When the entire status quo was being judged and evaluated most harshly by the electorate, National People’s Power (NPP) stood alone, tall and steady. Would Wijeweera have taken the same path as AKD did in 2024. We don’t know, yet we can surmise that given Wijeweera’s stubborn rigidity, he may have adopted a doctrinaire approach. AKD instead showed his political maturity by adopting a middle of the road path. He new that the people had already got used to a free market economy; reverting to outdated socialist way of administering a state-owned-enterprise-based centrally planned and centrally controlled economy is not the answer. At the same time, AKD had to walk a very tight rope in that the hardcore JVP element in his NPP needs to be balanced against a reality based market-oriented economy; that’s the answer, not only for the current economic crisis; that was the only way to pacify a very powerful private sector whose influence on the voting public, especially the middleclass in the country was critical. That is the pragmatic way of doing things.        

We have a government led by a President whose political beginnings can be traced to the 2^nd JVP Revolution in ’87-’89 era and an NPP government whose navigators are complete novices in governance and being called such at every corner possible. Prices of essential household items have not moved an inch downwards. On the contrary, they are still on the way up. Weather gods have not been kind; patience of the public seems to be running thin. AKD and his government must realize that the people cannot substitute ‘eradication of corruption’ for the missing meals on the table on a daily basis. Whatever AKD and his Cabinet choose to do, they simply cannot tell lies to the people. That is a no-no. Telling the unpalatable truth about the real situation of the country’s coffers might harm them in the very short run. Yet, unconditional transparency might be the only way forward and it will help them.

NPP’s time is now, tomorrow and the day after. Yesterday is gone; They have the talent; they have the skills and above all they certainly have the will. Mountains can be moved with that will. It’s time they did that.

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com