From the Victoria Bridge in Sri Lanka, the French journalist René Dumont watched bodies flow down the Kelani River, together with hundreds of silent, unmoving people. “The police, who had killed them, let them float downstream in order to terrorise the population,” he recorded in Nouvel Observateur. Twelve thousand insurgents, at least, were killed, many in summary executions. “Some of them were decapitated, and others were riddled with bullets, their wrists bound behind their backs,” journalist Daniel Sterba wrote.
The insurgents, armed with just homemade weapons, fought hard for weeks, seizing the towns of Elpitiya and Deniyaya. Then, three Indian frigates, as well as ground troops from Pakistan, moved in to secure the Sri Lankan coast against supplies coming in from North Korea. The Soviet Union and China flew in artillery, while the United Kingdom supplied helicopters.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who became Sri Lanka’s president this week, was a three-year-old child when the hammer-and-sickle flag of his Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party flew over his hometown of Galewela in southern Sri Lanka. A student activist in the even more savage rebellion of 1987-1989, he has since apologised for “certain mistakes” the JVP made during the second, murderous insurgency.
The real question, though, isn’t about whether President Dissanayake will now seek to transform Sri Lanka into a violent dystopia. To build its constituency, the party from the outside had painted over its Marxist red with the colours of Sinhala ethnic nationalism. Tamils and Muslims were consigned to the margins of the JVP’s politics and cultural imagination.
For many in Sri Lanka, the rise of the JVP marks an opportunity to demolish a venal, discredited establishment. But, as Sri Lanka struggles to build a just, post-war federal order, the JVP could reopen festering war wounds.
A very English colony
From 1948, Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, secured independence—but of a peculiar kind. For all practical purposes, England handed over to a single, elite family. The plutocrat Don Stephen Senanayake, who derived his fortune from his inherited graphite mines, served as Prime Minister as well as Minister of Defence and Foreign Affairs. His son, Dudley Senanayake, was Minister of Agriculture, his nephew, John Kotelawala, Minister of Commerce, and cousin, Junius Jayawardene, Minister of Finance.
“The indigenous bourgeoisie simply basked in the sunshine of Edwardian imperialism,” the great historian Fred Halliday noted in a 1975 essay, “and complacently mimicked its masters. It did not produce a single political party before independence—surely a record even in the annals of the Commonwealth.”
Fittingly, from an aesthetic perspective, Prime Minister Senanayake was killed in a horse-riding accident in 1952 while participating in a faux-English equestrian championship.
The monk Anagarika Dharmapala—born Don David Hewavitharana to an affluent ethnic Sinhala trading family, and the Buddhist representative at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago alongside charismatic Hindu preacher Swami Vivekananda—was key to the making of the nation this elite was handed.
Although Dharmapala was a relatively marginal figure in his own time, historian Harshana Rambukwella notes, his work provided an ideological weapon to an Anglophile class keen to see themselves as protectors of Buddhism and Sinhala culture. Tamils and South Indian Muslims were cast as foreigners in this supposedly authentic Sinhala nation.
Following independence, Tamils and Sinhala politicians worked closely together in the two major Left-wing parties, the Communist Party and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, or LSSP. The LSSP leader Colin Da Silva, as political scientist Rajesh Venugopal records, argued against the one-language policy pushed by chauvinists, warning it could lead to “two torn little bleeding states.”
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The chauvinist tide
Electoral politics, though, pushed the Left to ally with the chauvinists. In the 1956 elections, Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party was elected to power. SLFP was then in an alliance with the Left, and emphasised a one-language state on a Sinhala-nationalist platform. Tamils were slowly pushed out of government service, even as tensions flared with soldiers deployed in the north on anti-smuggling duties, scholar Susan Hayward writes. The same Da Silva who had warned against the one-language policy became the cabinet minister in charge of framing the infamous 1972 constitution of Sri Lanka, which set the stage for Tamil secessionism.
The Left would be torn apart by the ethnic-nationalist tide it hoped to ride. Led by the iconic insurgent Rohan Wijeweera, the JVP split from a pro-China faction of the Communist Party to become an independent faction in 1966-1967 The party’s leadership came largely from small-town and peasant backgrounds, sharing little with the metropolitan intellectual milieu of the old Communist guard. The scholar Gananath Obeyesekere’s study of over 10,000 captured insurgents showed the bulk were the educated sons of just three caste-clusters, small farmers, their landless labourers, and artisans like jaggery-makers.
Even though the JVP’s insurrection of 1971 proved a disaster for the party, the impulses it represented did not die out. Terrified by the uprising, the SFLP-Left government turned increasingly authoritarian. The consequences were wide-ranging. Tamil leadership was taken over by militants, who drifted toward violence by the end of the 1970s. The Opposition United National Party, under the leadership of the patrician Junius Jayawardene, turned from a loose alliance of notables to a tough, street-fighting outfit.
Elected to power in 1977, historian Mick Moore argues, President Jayawardene created the conditions for civil war to erupt. The 1983 anti-Tamil communal violence enabled the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to emerge as the principal voice of the community. The even more consequential decision he made, though, was to amnesty the membership of the JVP, seeking to undercut the SFLP’s base among rural Sinhala youth.
According to Moore, the relationship between Jayawardene and the JVP rapidly soured after 1983, as the radicals realised his electoral machine offered them no real opportunity for democratic opposition. Even though it became Sri Lanka’s third-largest party in the presidential elections of 1982, it won just four per cent of the vote. After the India-Sri Lanka Accord was signed in 1987, and New Delhi deployed peacekeepers in the Tamil-dominated north, the JVP positioned itself as the protector of Sinhala sovereignty and pride.
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An unhealed wound
From its first strike on a Sri Lanka Army base in 1987, the JVP began a ferocious campaign of insurgent attacks and bombings that targeted military installations, police stations and political leaders. Forty thousand people are estimated to have been killed in the fighting. Like its first insurrection, the second JVP insurgency between 1987 and 1989 was eventually crushed—in part because the peace deal with India allowed Sri Lanka’s armed forces to focus on fighting the JVP, instead of also having to combat the LTTE.
The fighting claimed the life, among others, of Wijeweera, in a shootout many consider staged. The remnants of the party were allowed to rehabilitate themselves again, supporting the United People’s Freedom Alliance in the 2004 elections, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005. The JVP functioned as a key supporter of Rajapaksa’s victorious war against the LTTE, trenchantly mobilising against foreign pressure for a peace deal.
The JVP had learned two important lessons despite its failed revolutions. First, Moore notes, the JVP succeeded in becoming the predominant voice of Sinhala youth, displacing almost all other student organisations. The party’s mix of Marxist rhetoric with ethnic nationalism allowed it to appeal to a generation that had acquired high levels of formal education but had few prospects of regular, salaried employment.
As important, the JVP secured the support of significant elements of the Buddhist clergy, some of whom allowed it to use temples and monasteries as logistics bases for its military campaign. This was to prove a durable alliance. As Hayward observes, “Political monks have played a role in framing a political and economic contest religiously, drawing upon deep sentiments in the Sinhala public.”
Finally, the party found its opportunity in the protests that swept President Rajapaksa from power—a leader it ironically helped install. There is little prospect that a Sri Lanka bound by an International Monetary Fund reform programme can become the socialist utopia President Dissanayake has so long promised his young followers.
Lacking means to deliver an earthly paradise, the JVP could find itself compelled to resume its war on ethnic minorities again. In a Sri Lanka where the wounds of the Eelam Wars are far from healed, that path could again lead to perdition.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Succinctly articulated passage through decades of complex, history, Praveen.
Mr. Praveen Swami, please do not bring in the Muslims everywhere. Irrespective of the country, they are always at the margins – not because someone puts them there but because they themselves wish to be at the margins.
They do not assimilate and integrate – be it India or Sri Lanka or Europe or USA or Canada.
The story remains the same across the world.