by Vishvanath
The JVP celebrated its 60th anniversary on May 14 on a grand scale, with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake himself attending it as the Chief Guest. All speakers at that commemorative event boasted of the fact that JVP had captured state power and thanked the party’s rank and file for the achievement. But the question is whether the JVP has been able to retain its ideology over the years, and whether it can any longer call itself a Marxist party in the real sense of the term.
It is time to reflect on the ideological repositioning of the JVP over the past 60 years.
The outcome of the recently held local government (LG) elections is being viewed from different perspectives. It is subject to different interpretations. Various factors have been adduced to explain a decline in the JVP-led NPP’s vote share, compared to that in last year’s general election. The NPP polled a staggering 6.86 million votes (61.56%) in the last parliamentary polls, but it could secure only 4.5 million votes (43%) in last week’s LG elections.
It is being argued in some quarters that the outcomes of parliamentary elections and those of LGP polls cannot be compared. This argument is not without some merit, but the fact remains that the NPP government, which won as many as 159 seats in the 225-member Parliament, and made an all-out attempt to expand its vote base failed to achieve its goal. This must of serious concern to the ruling alliance. The SLPP polled 4.9 million votes (44.65%) and secured 231 LG councils and 3,369 members in 2018, just two years after its formation, while in the Opposition, with the then UNP-led Yahapalana government and President Maithripala Sirisena going all out to prevent its victory. The NPP won 265 councils and 3,926 seats in the recent LG polls despite its electoral victories late last year. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya themselves led the NPP’s LG polls campaign, and made an otherwise grassroots level voting event assume the same importance as a presidential/parliamentary election.
The focus of this comment is not on the drop in the JVP-led NPP’s vote share, which is seen as an electoral setback for the ruling coalition. Instead, it is on what can be described as the JVP’s ideological repositioning on the political spectrum due to the influence of the non-Marxist forces in the NPP coalition, and political and electoral consequences of that shift.
The JVP came into being in the mid-1960s as a revolutionary alternative to the traditional leftist parties, which had opted for coalition politics dominated by the SLFP. In 1965, JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera, declared that his movement believed in capturing state power only through an armed struggle; he denounced the other Marxists as reformists given to parliamentarianism, who had given up arms for political expediency. The JVP initially had support among the Sinhala-educated petty bourgeois youth facing economic hardships; it had a rural support base while the traditional left was confined to urban areas, and had support among the ethnic minorities. The JVP was very secretive about its operations, especially recruitment, which was preceded by a strict indoctrination process. It claimed to represent the proletariat, but its support base consisted mainly of unemployed youth, students, most of whom belong to the petty bourgeoisie and not the proletariat.
The JVP has experienced several ideological shifts, over the past six decades, and the first one came about in 1970, when the JVP threw its weight behind the SLFP-led United Front (UF) coalition, claiming that the CIA was planning to keep the then UNP government in power and therefore the UF should be elected with a supermajority to defeat that conspiracy. The JVP described the Dudley Senanayake government as a US puppet. However, it did not support the other Marxists in the UF for obvious reasons. The following year, it took up arms against the UF government, and after being crushed with its leaders being incarcerated, it gravitated towards the capitalist UNP, in the late 1970s, despite its anti-American and anti-imperialist rhetoric. The Batalanda Commission report has revealed that the JVP organizers in the periphery backed the UNP in the 1977 general election while their leaders were in prison.
The JVP fell out with the UNP, challenged the outcome of the heavily rigged referendum in 1983, when the J. R. Jayewardene government falsely accused it of being involved in the anti-Tamil riots and banned it. The JVP adopted nationalism in the late 1980s to gain political traction by launching an armed uprising against the Indo-Lanka Accord, which paved the way for the devolution of power and the creation of the provincial councils. Having suffered a military defeat and lost all its leaders, save one—Somawansa Amerasinghe—it sided with the SLFP again in the early 1994 and went on to coalesce with the SLFP and hold ministerial positions in the SLFP-led UPFA government, which came to power in 2004. It had 39 MPs in that government. It campaigned hard for Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2005 presidential race, and helped him win the presidency. It sided with the UNP-led Opposition parties in a bid to defeat President Rajapaksa in 2010, when it backed former war-winning Army Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka, albeit in vain. In 2015, it got closer to the UNP and campaigned hard to enable Maithripala Sirisena to defeat President Rajapaksa and win the presidency. Its honeymoon with the capitalist UNP lasted until 2019. In 2018, it went so far as to resort to legal action against President Sirisena’s move to sack the UNP government, which it propped up in the parliament. It was a case of a Marxist party ensuring the survival of a capitalist government.
The JVP formed the NPP in 2019 and that marked a turning point in its political journey. Its alliance with non-Marxists, who had helped Sirisena enlist enough popular support to win the presidency in 2015, enabled Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the SLPP to win the 2019 presidential election, the 2020 parliamentary polls respectively, helped the JVP shore up its electoral prospects, especially after the onset of the economic crisis and the resultant political upheavals, which came to be dubbed Aragalaya.
Interestingly, in the recent LG polls, the JVP did not succeed in delivering the rural votes to the NPP the way it was expected to do, and most local councils in the rural areas became hung, and some of them were bagged by the SJB and other Opposition parties and independent groups. Rideemaliyadda, one of the poorest areas in Sri Lanka, is a case in point. The JVP-led NPP could not secure an absolute majority in the Pradeshiya Sabha in that area; it polled 13,552 (48%) and won 9 seats while the Opposition parties obtained 9 seats— the SJB (6), the SLPP (2) and the UNP (1).
The non-JVP constituents of the NPP enabled the ruling coalition to win over the urban voters, especially the middle-class electors and perform extremely well in the urban and suburban areas. For example, it won the28-member Gampaha Municipal Council comfortably by obtaining 18,324 votes (60.54%) and 17 seats, with the SJB coming a poor second with only 4,411 votes and 4 seats.
In the 2024 general election, it was the non-JVP forces in the NPP that rallied the floating voters, especially those belonging to the middle class, won over the ethno-religions minorities and gained international legitimacy, helping the JVP-led new political movement achieve a meteoric rise in national politics and capture power. But this stellar achievement has come at a huge ideological cost for the JVP, which is likely to lose its appeal to its niche Marxist constituency it has cultivated for decades. The JVP has adopted the very economic policies it used to reject as capitalist. It has also chosen to work with the IMF and the US-led western bloc. There is no guarantee that the votes the non-JVP members of the NPP have helped amass will remain intact; the government’s vote base has already shown signs of shrinking. This may be the reason why the JVP celebrated its 60th anniversary on a grand scale; it apparently sought to rally its supporters, but it will not be able to retain its hold on power with the help of its traditional vote bank alone. There’s the rub.
