By Vishvanath
The NPP government has made elaborate preparations to put on a show of strength tomorrow, with only a few days to go before the local government (LG) elections. It will hold its May Day rally at Galle Face, the cradle of Aragalaya (2022), which paved the way for the JVP-led NPP’s rise to power. Why it is doing so is understandable. It is all out to win the upcoming local government (LG) elections, and therefore has to drum up as much popular support as possible. Speculation is rife in political circles that voter apathy has set in, and there will be a relatively low voter turnout in the mini polls to be held on 06 May. This means that there will not be a wave of popular support as such for any political party, and it is a worrisome proposition for the NPP, which has to maintain its electoral performance at the same level or better. Any decline in its vote base will be seen as a sign that it is becoming a lame duck. So, the JVP/NPP is all out to gain a turbo boost for its LG election campaign from tomorrow’s May Day rally.
The ruling party can always hold massive rallies as it has the wherewithal to do so. Even Opposition parties have held mammoth political events at Galle Face, and they include the SLFP, the UNP, the SJB and the JVP itself. However, there is no guarantee that big crowds at political rallies translate into votes in crucial elections. There have been numerous instances where governments held huge May Day rallies but lost subsequent elections, President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidential election campaign (2014) being a case in point; his rallies attracted massive crowds, but he still lost to Maithripala Sirisena in January 2015.
Visible enthusiasm of the public does not necessarily reflect popular support, much less electoral success, for a political party, especially the one in power. However, since the NPP has been on a winning streak, it is apparently confident that a massive show of strength will improve its chances of victory on May 06.
Tomorrow’s May Day rally is likely to deepen dialectical tensions in the JVP-led ruling alliance, which the JVP off-shoot, the Frontline Socialist Party, has called a patchwork of ideological differences. The NPP is a mixed bag of hardline Marxists like Tilvin Silva and liberals like Harini Amarasuriya. These two factions have competing interests and agendas. It is the NPP’s liberal outlook that appealed to the public in the last two elections, but it owes its organizational strength to the JVP.
The NPP’s Marxist core, which controls the incumbent government, for all practical purposes, is reportedly feeling undermined and doing its best to retain its hold on the ruling alliance and power. Tilvin has chosen to play a very dominant role in the NPP, to prevent the alienation of the JVP’s diehard Marxist cadres. Time was when the JVP used its May Day rallies to reaffirm its commitment to Marxist ideals, and would display massive cutouts of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Che with its leaders donning red. But now it prefers to promote the policies of the liberal faction of NPP instead of the JVP’s Marxist ideology, which cannot help attract votes. Some JVP leaders including President Anura Kumara Dissanayake are now seen in different colors at JVP functions, which used to be all red. Differences between the Marxist and liberal factions in the NPP are likely to come to a head with the passage of time. The government leaders are using the NPP’s anti-corruption drive and other such campaigns based on broader social, political and economic issues that transcend the ideological differences among its members to hold the ruling alliance together.
The JVP emerged in the mid-1960s, claiming to be an alternative to the traditional left parties, which, it said, were not Marxist and revolutionary enough. The Communist Party (CP) had suffered a split by that time, and the mainstream socialist parties had become conformist owing to coalition politics. It backed the SLFP-led United Front (UF) in the 1970 general election, but did not support the Marxist parties in that coalition—the CP and the LSSP. In 1971, it took up arms against the UF government. Thereafter, it gravitated towards the capitalist UNP, which came to power in 1977. It staged its second uprising in the late 1980s, when it strayed from its socialist ideals and espoused nationalism, to all intents and purposes, and subsequently joined the SLFP-led UPFA coalition in 2004, and secured 39 seats in the parliament. It took 20 years for the JVP to capture state power as the main constituent of the NPP.
Ironically, the JVP has done what it condemned the CP and the LSPP for doing in the mid-1960s; it itself has opted for an alliance with liberals, and coalition politics has had a mellowing effect on its revolutionary ideology. The traditional Marxist parties have become mere appendages of the SLFP or its off-shoot, the SLPP. Some factions of those socialist outfits have even joined forces with the UNP, which the JVP, too, has made common cause with and even backed, without forging a formal alliance.
The JVP has deviated from its Marxist path on several occasions for expediency during the past six decades or so, but it retained its revolutionary ideology and remained averse to neo-liberal economic policies, resisting divestiture programs and advocating a statist approach to economic management. Its commitment to Marxist ideals remained unchanged even after forming the NPP, but it has begun to undergo change again since its ascent to power by marketing a policy program, which is a far cry from its original Revolutionary Policy Declaration, which rejected capitalism, lock, stock and barrel.
The JVP finds itself at a political crossroads. Will circumstances compel it to move further away from the Marxist path and run the risk of alienating its cadres, and end up being bracketed with the traditional leftists? Will its revolutionary core consolidate its power in the ruling alliance at the expense of the liberal faction, which is the government’s public face? Tomorrow’s NPP May Day rally will indicate which way the JVP is heading.
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