By Dayan Jayatilleka –

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

The ongoing string of defeats of the governing NPP at the Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society (MPCS) elections in areas as diverse as Angunukolapelessa (Hambantota), Welvitya-Divithura (Galle), Homagama, Kelaniya and Beruwela, are unprecedentedly early signs of a trend which may take five years to come to fruition, but come to fruition they will.

What we are seeing is an accelerated replay of the trajectory of the center-left United Front government of 1970 which enjoyed a two-thirds majority.

Lessons of the 1970s

The 1970s prove that if the Left doesn’t provide a clear alternative early enough to a Center-Left government turned rightwards and economically hurting the people, the Right will succeed it. The Left has to seize the banner of anti-government struggle and lead it.

In 1970 a center-left United Front with a powerful left component was elected to office with a 2/3rds majority. In 2024 a left-populist movement driven by a Marxist party shifted to the center and won a 2/3rds majority. The 1970 Government deviated rightwards and the UNP crushed it at the 1977 General Election.

The 2024 one has done likewise, pivoting more sharply rightwards– the ISB sellout—and adopting in an ultimate irony, the program of Ranil, son of Esmond Wickremesinghe, whose Shenoy-Suharto-Chicago Boys model triggered Wijeweera’s arming of the JVP in the late-1960s.

Left critiques of the 1970 UF government were of several types:

* Critical support from within by those (Wickramabahu, Vasu, Janavegaya Maoists) fearful of a break with the UF base; ‘unity-and-struggle’ constructive criticism from without, by those who demurred at rupture. Voters bypassed all vacillators in halfway-houses, embracing the Opposition UNP as the only clear-cut alternative.

* Frontal critiques from Trotskyists and Maoists – Bala Tampoe, N. Sanmugathasan–who had opposed the LSSP and CPSL shifts, national and international, to the right in 1964. Tamil-led, these had limited national traction.

* Breakout to the Opposition (1972) by CPSL icons SA Wickremesinghe and Sarath Muttetuwegama, supported by the ATHTHA newspaper. Soviet pressure restored party unity, disastrously– the lesson being, never let anyone else’s foreign policy be your domestic policy. Mao, Ho and Fidel never did.

* Radical ‘New Left’ critiques from Wijeweera’s JVP and smaller organizations before and after the 1971 insurrection and its suppression. (I belonged to the post-1971 radical ‘New Left’.)

Imagine if:

(a) Wijeweera’s JVP had maintained its left critique of the UF Government without being provoked into adventurist armed violence.

(b) The SA Wickremesinghe-Sarath Muttetuwegama wing of the CPSL (so-called ‘hardliners’) remained in the Opposition and evolved into the equivalent of Kerala’s CPI-M.

(c) Vasudeva-Vickramabahu-Vama SamaSamaja had broken away in 1972-3.

Any of these political options—better still, a combination–may have achieved one of four outcomes:

* Repeated the 1953 Hartal uprising when mass economic hardship was acute from 1973 (e.g., the ban of rice transport) or taken the 1976-1977 nationwide students’ revolt-railway strike-General Strike to the next level.

* Competed with the UNP as Left alternative in 1977.

* Been the main Opposition in the 1977 Parliament.

* Formed a strong Left Opposition in the 1977 Parliament.

As a ‘thought experiment’, recall Rohana Wijeweera’s political and ideological line of the 1970s towards the UF government, MINUS the armed violence. That would have been the correct line then. That would be the correct line now.

Mimicking Menshevism

Invocations of Lenin in justifying AKD in the Lankan press remind me of LSSP ideologues during the UF government of 1970, justifying Dr NM Perera’s budgetary policies by referring to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP).

It also reminds me of Bala Tampoe’s pun: “a little Lenin is a dangerous thing”.

It must be recalled that Lenin didn’t overthrow the old establishment, the Tsar. Tsarism had already been overthrown by the time he made it on a sealed train (negotiated from the Germans) to the Finland station in 1917. Warmly welcomed by cheering crowds, he almost had to be rescued from them when he finished speaking because he frontally criticized and called for the replacement of the Provisional Government, the petty-bourgeois leftist administration which replaced centuries-old tsarism (much older and infinitely worse than “the post-Independence Establishment which ruled Sri Lanka for 76 years”).

Headed by Lenin’s old school principal’s son Kerensky, it consisted of Marxists and leftists – his former comrades and bitter rivals the Mensheviks led by Julius Martov, and the ‘S-Rs’ (the ‘Socialist-Revolutionaries’), a left party bigger than the Bolsheviks.

Lenin called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government born of the February Revolution which shattered Tsarism. He overthrew it in October 1917 because it didn’t and couldn’t disentangle itself from the alliances with and commitments to the Western powers which tsarism had enmeshed Russia in, continued its involvement in the world war between imperialist rivals, and would have brought economic catastrophe upon the Russian people.

In their sellout to the foreign and local bondholders, and their invitation to and deeper entanglement of Sri Lanka with rival Big Powers, AKD and the JVP-NPP are the direct descendants of the post-tsarist Menshevik and S-R Government, not of Lenin. A contemporary Lenin would call for their replacement.