The opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) released its manifesto
for the August 17 general election in Sri Lanka late last month.
Entitled “The Accord of Conscience,” its overriding aim is to
demonstrate to the ruling elites that it is a reliable and viable
alternative to the two main bourgeois parties—the ruling United National
Party (UNP) and the opposition Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).
The
JVP, which was established in the 1960s advocating the “armed struggle”
by rural Sinhala youth, has long been integrated into the Colombo
political establishment, exchanging its guerrilla fatigues for
parliamentary seats. It is seeking to function as a political safety
valve for the widespread hostility among working people to the UNP and
the SLFP.
The JVP’s ability to do so, however, has been seriously
undermined by falling support and a series of debilitating splits since
it joined an SLFP-led coalition government in 2004 and assisted in
implementing pro-business policies. The number of JVP parliamentarians
plunged from 39 in 2004 to 4 in the 2010 general elections. In the
latest round of provincial council elections in 2013 and 2014, its
overall seat count in the central, north western, western and southern
provinces collapsed from 55 to 7.
Conscious of the JVP’s role in
diverting public alienation into safe parliamentary channels, the
Colombo media gave its manifesto launch on July 22 broad publicity. The
state-owned Independent Television Network (ITN) broadcast the entire
event live for the cost of just 54,600 rupees ($4,082)—substantially
less than the usual price of around 200,000 rupees.
The discount
was undoubtedly for services rendered to President Maithripala Sirisena
and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The JVP backed the election of
Sirisena in the presidential election in January—a carefully
orchestrated operation backed by the US to oust former President Mahinda
Rajapakse who Washington regarded as too close to Beijing. Sirisena
then appointed Wickremesinghe as prime minister to head a minority
UNP-led government.
In the current election campaign, the JVP is
posturing as an opponent of the UNP and the SLFP. In presenting the
manifesto to a special party conference, JVP leader Anura Kumara
Dissanayake criticised both the UNP and SLFP, declaring: “The successive
governments over last 67 years have done nothing to develop the
country.”
The JVP, however, has since its formation supported one
or other of the main bourgeois parties, most recently demonstrated by
its support for the installation of Sirisena and Wickremesinghe. Since
the January election, the JVP has been represented on the 13-member
National Executive Council (NEC), the country’s top advisory body that
includes the president and prime minister and has overseen the
implementation of government policy.
There is no doubt that the
JVP is backing the UNP in the election. While making muted criticisms of
Wickremesinghe in its campaign, JVP leaders direct their main fire
against the “corrupt, nepotistic and dictatorial” Rajapakse and vow to
prevent him from coming to power. Both the SLFP and the UNP are
capitalist parties that have a long record of attacks on the democratic
rights and social conditions of the working class.
The JVP was
founded on the ideology of Castroism, Maoism and Sinhala populism but
has all but abandoned its previous socialistic and anti-imperialist
rhetoric. Its election manifesto is pitched to big business. The JVP
promises to promote “public-private partnerships,” provide a five-year
tax holiday and other benefits for investors, and to industrialise
agriculture with an orientation to exports. Dissanayake blamed
successive governments for reducing Sri Lanka’s portion in the world
market to 0.45 percent and pledged to reverse the trend.
Under
conditions of global economic breakdown and falling commodity prices,
the JVP’s promises can only mean that it will implement and enforce the
demands of big business for lower wages and greater productivity—that
is, higher rates of exploitation. This is already evident in the tea
plantation sector where companies are insisting on higher workloads with
no wage rises in order to compete on the world market.
The JVP
manifesto calls for the country’s economy to be based on “new
socialism”—a phrase that it has adapted from the Stalinist Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), which justifies its transformation of China into a
gigantic cheap labour platform for global corporations as “socialism
with Chinese characteristics.” The JVP, which still maintains
party-to-party relations with the CCP, is offering to replicate the
brutal exploitation of Chinese workers in Sri Lanka.
The JVP
organised a special meeting for corporate leaders on July 27 in Colombo.
Dissanayake assured the audience that the JVP was “ready to join hands
with business community” and had organised the meeting to convince
businessmen not to regard the party with suspicion. “There is an opinion
that JVP is going to have an economic system which takes from the rich
to give to the poor,” he declared, but stressed that was wrong.
In presenting the JVP manifesto, Dissanayake offered another assurance
to the ruling elites—that the party would not take up arms again. “We
have done some actions that should not have been done by a party. We
regret these actions. We will not fight with arms. Our fight will be
between ideas,” he declared.
The JVP launched an adventurist
insurrection in 1971 that was brutally suppressed. Again in the late
1980s, its gunmen killed hundreds of political opponents and workers who
refused to support its chauvinist campaign against the Indo-Lanka
Accord. The Accord was an agreement between Colombo and New Delhi to
allow Indian “peace-keeping” troops into northern Sri Lanka to enforce a
ceasefire in the country’s civil war and disarm the separatist
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in return for the limited
devolution of powers on the provincial level.
The JVP’s empty
promises to voters are basically no different from the lies being told
by the UNP and the SLFP. It declares that it will ensure democracy by
declaring that it will abolish the country’s executive presidency that
has been used by successive presidents to underpin their autocratic
methods of rule.
The JVP has made the same pledge again and again
but has also repeatedly encouraged presidents to use their executive
powers. In 2003, the JVP campaigned for President Chandrika Kumaratunga
to dismiss the defence and home ministers in the UNP government, and, in
the following year, to sack the entire government on the grounds of
“national security.” The JVP then campaigned alongside the SLFP in the
2004 election and held three ministries when it formed government.
The JVP now denounces Rajapakse as “corrupt, nepotistic and
dictatorial” but in 2005, its leaders campaigned for his election as
president. Right up until the defeat of the LTTE in 2009, the JVP
defended Rajapakse and his executive powers, and was a cheerleader for
the military’s ruthless war that cost tens of thousands of civilian
lives.
The JVP’s claim that reducing the powers of the president
and boosting those of parliament will guarantee democracy is a fraud. In
Sri Lanka, as in other countries, parliament is simply the façade for
bourgeois rule and the ruthless use of the state apparatus to protect
private property and profits at the expense of the working class.
The
only new lie that the JVP has added to its propaganda is that it now
postures as a party that can heal the divisions produced by nearly 30
years of communal war. At the special party conference, JVP leader
Dissanayake accused governments, past and present, of “sowing racism to
establish their power.”
The comment is breathtaking in its
cynicism and hypocrisy. The JVP has been mired in Sinhala communalism
from its very inception, when it branded oppressed Tamil plantation
workers brought to Sri Lanka as indentured labour under British rule as
an “Indian cultural invasion” that was a threat to “the motherland.”
The
JVP always backed the communal war begun by the UNP in 1983 to the
hilt. Its opposition to the Indo-Lanka Accord in the late 1980s was not
because it was aimed against the working class, but because it “betrayed
the motherland” by allowing an “invasion” by Indian troops. Right up
until the LTTE’s defeat in 2009, the JVP demanded that working people
“sacrifice” for the war effort to “defend the motherland.” When
Rajapakse resumed the war in 2006, the JVP helped build bunkers for the
military, voted for the war budgets and denounced all those opposed to
the war as “traitors” and “terrorist supporters.”
The JVP leopard
has not changed its spots. Its appeal for “national unity” and phony
opposition to racism is aimed at winning support among Tamils in the
North and East where it is standing candidates. At the same time, it has
attacked the bourgeois Tamil National Alliance for calling for a
federal constitution, not from the standpoint that it divides working
people, but from the chauvinist position that it “divides the nation.”
The
JVP’s “anti-racist” posturing is also aimed at presenting a more
respectable image in ruling circles in Colombo and internationally. It
is de facto aligned with the UNP, which is backed by the US. Washington
supported the war against the LTTE until it was defeated, but is now
encouraging a political compromise between the island’s Sinhala and
Tamil elites and is seeking to marginalise Chinese influence in Sri
Lanka.
The JVP manifesto still contains “anti-imperialist” and
“anti-colonialist” phrases but it cultivates close relations with
Western diplomats. It backed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan,
supported Washington’s bogus “war on terror” and has had a series of
discussions at the US embassy in Colombo, including with senior
administration officials. In other words, the JVP has not only
transformed itself into a useful political tool for the Sri Lankan
ruling class but is also offering its services to imperialism. (By W. A. Sunil)
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