Is Anura Kumara Dissanayake a JVPer?

by Vishvanath

The title of this comment is a rhetorical question SJB MP Dayasiri Jayasekera asked during the ongoing budget debate in the parliament on Thursday (Feb. 20). It may sound a bit absurd because President Dissanayake Dissanayake is the leader of the JVP, as is public knowledge. The government MPs did not want to be drawn in on that question for obvious reasons, and Jayasekera himself answered it in the negative. 

MP Jayasekera said President Dissanayake had long ceased to be a JVPer, meaning that the latter had given up the JVP’s Marxist ideology for expediency. He said Dissanayake now espoused the ideology of the National People’s Power (NPP), of which the JVP is the main constituent.

Jayasekera said there were some other government members who pretended to represent the JVP, but they had abandoned its policies. He named some of them including Ministers Wasantha Samarasinghe and K. D. Lalkantha. They, too, now espoused the NPP policies, he claimed. That was how he sought to highlight the glaring differences between the economic policies adopted by the incumbent government and those of the JVP. He asked the JVP leaders not to take their cadres for a ride by claiming to champion the JVP’s cause, which they had abandoned.

The NPP has described itself as “a political movement made up of 21 different groups including political parties, youth groups, women’s groups, trade unions and other civil society organisations.” It was established in 2019 following a series of discussions on the need for a progressive political platform. 

The JVP headquarters effectively controls the NPP and its parliamentary group consisting of 159 members, and the leaders of the other NPP coalition partners hardly speak for the government. One may recall that when the NPP won a two-thirds majority in the parliament in last year’s general election unexpectedly, it was JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva who hurriedly summoned a press conference to thank the public and give an assurance that the NPP’s supermajority would never be misused. He has eclipsed NPP General Secretary Dr. Nihal Abeysinghe, who has chosen to play a subdued role in the ruling coalition. 

The non-JVP constituents in the NPP may be a minority, but they are a force to be reckoned with in politics at large. If not for them, the JVP would not have been able to woo the public and garner favour with millions of floating voters, who had previously backed Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the SLPP, to win elections. They are associated with NPP leaders such as Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, rather than the figures like Tilvin. They are known to hold liberal views.

The JVP’s economic policies have undergone changes over the years. The JVP no longer believes in a socialist Utopia. It even contested the 2004 general election, as a constituent of the SLFP-led United Freedom Alliance (UPFA), which had embraced the same open market economic policies as the UNP. It fielded about 55 candidates on the UPFA ticket, and won 41 seats including National List (NL) slots. However, it forwent two NL slots to help the SLFP overcome an internal dispute over the allocation of its NL posts. But it was only after its victory in last year’s presidential election that the JVP adopted ‘neoliberal’ economic policies of its own volition for the first time. 

President Dissanayake, while delivering his budget speech on Monday (Feb. 19) flayed his political rivals for having claimed that a JVP-led government would take over private ventures, leave the IMF programme and mess up the economy big time. He said his government had succeeded in disappointing those detractors by proving their doom and gloom forecasts wrong. Ironically, he was blaming his critics for having expected him to carry out the JVP’s economic policies and taking pride in the fact that he had not done so! His swipe at his political rivals was self-defeating. The JVP used to condemn the IMF, which, it claimed, was a neo-colonial agency helping perpetuate the grip of the West on the developing world, and advocated for socialist policies including nationalization. His jibe at the Opposition has unwittingly served to bolster Jayasekera’s claim that the government has abandoned the JVP policies. 

SJB MP Kabir Hashim, taking part in the budget debate on Thursday, pointed out a sea change in the JVP’s economic policies. He lashed out at the JVP for having driven foreign investors away in early 1980s by threatening to do away with the Free Trade Zones without compensating the foreign companies if it formed a government. That threat had scared many foreign investors away, and the country had lost a great deal of investment, Hashim said. 

Hashim’s claim was factually correct. The JVP, under its founder, Rohana Wijeweera’s leadership, declared in its ‘Revolutionary Policy Declaration’:

“A fully planned socialist economic structure shall be established, and the existing capitalist mixed economy shall be completely abolished … Foreign capital in every sphere shall be vested in the state without any payment of compensation … Free Trade Zones shall be abolished. The business undertakings and properties within such zones shall be vested without any payment of compensation. (The Structure of the Economy, Chapter, p 23.)

The JVP-led NPP’s manifesto, ‘A thriving nation: A beautiful life’, lays emphasis on foreign investment promotion. It says it will “stablish a single empowered institution by integrating existing state institutions including the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka to coordinate and promote investments … promote long-term foreign investments in public-private-people partnerships (PPPs) by prioritizing strategically important sectors.” (p. 59)

It can thus be seen that the NPP has had a mellowing effect on the JVP’s primary doctrine, which the JVP’s old guard represented by Tilvin and others, resolutely champion. What made the JVP different from other leftist parties was its central Marxist philosophy. Other socialist parties lost their identities a long ago due to their prolonged stay in coalitions led by the SLFP. The JVP’s main attraction to its cadres was its revolutionary ideology, and it will be interesting to see what their reaction will be to the dilution of their party’s core economic philosophy. MP Jayasekera’s aforesaid statement in the parliament was obviously meant for the consumption of the JVP’s rank and file, especially the party’s full-time cadre.

SJB MP and economist Dr. Harsha de Silva took a jibe at President Dissanayake last week for having adopted what the JVP had denounced as neo-liberal economic policies. He said the NPP had presented a budget that was similar in all respects to the ones President Ranil Wickremesinghe had formulated previously. 

MP Jayasekera, like other Opposition MPs, is obviously using a wedge strategy in a bid to pit the JVP against the NPP and cause a split in the ruling coalition. Whether they will succeed in achieving that end remains to be seen. However, there are differences, both political and economic, between the JVP and other parties and groups in the NPP, and the government will be lucky if it can prevent them from coming to a head. Coalition dynamics are difficult to manage.