On the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
The JVP, one of the major opposition parties of Sri Lanka, has historically viewed India as an expansionist power seeking to colonise Sri Lanka. However, of late, the party is of the view that the reality of India as Sri Lanka’s closest neighbour and a ‘m
The story so far: n February 5, an unlikely visitor landed in Delhi from Sri Lanka on an official invitation. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, received a red carpet welcome, following which two top officials spent time with him in the capital. The main constituent of the NPP is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna ( JVP), and Mr. Dissanayake is its leader. The Indian outreach to the JVP has set off much speculation in Sri Lanka. The country is to go through a presidential election this year followed by parliamentary elections this year or the next. A survey conducted by the Health Policy Institute showed that 50% of respondents favoured Mr. Dissanayake as the next President. Since its inception, the party has had a bad history with India.
But Mr. Dissanayake’s meetings with National Security Adviser A. K. Doval and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar have created new optics in the runup to the election.
OWho are the JVP?
Over its five decadeexistence, the JVP, which calls itself Marxist, but has been mostly a Sinhala nationalist party, has viewed India as an expansionist power seeking to colonise Sri Lanka.
The JVP was formed in 1965. Its founder Rohana Wijeweera, who came from a family of modest means in coastal southern Sri Lanka, already had exposure to leftist ideologies through the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, before he went as a student to Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba International University, where he mingled with leftists from all over the world. On his return, he aligned himself with the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist), before breaking away to form the JVP, with the intention of creating a revolution to turn Sri Lanka into a socialist state. Its members were mostly the youth who were unable to find jobs in the Sri Lankan economy, comprising Britishera trading houses manned by Colombo’s Englishspeaking elites.
The cadres of JVP imbibed the party ideology from lectures known as the Five Classes — on the crisis of the capitalist system in Sri Lanka; history of Sri Lanka’s left movement; history of socialist revolutions; Indian expansionism; and the path of revolution in Sri Lanka. However, within no time, JVP found it more expedient to push class struggle to the backburner, and became a vehicle for majoritarian SinhalaBuddhist sentiments.
What happened in 1971?
In the 1970 election, the JVP campaigned for Sirima Bandaranaike’s leftist United Front coalition comprising of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party. But the JVP’s support for Sri
Lanka’s ‘bourgeois’ left was shortlived. In April 1971, it carried out an armed insurrection. The plan was to take over police stations first. The government, despite receiving prior intelligence, was caught unprepared. A state of Emergency was declared and Wijeweera was jailed. But the Sri Lankan triservices were a ceremonial force and the government had to appeal to foreign nations for help. The Indian Army, Navy and Air Force played a part in thwarting the rebellion. The insurrection was overcome after a few weeks and some 15,000 JVP cadres were arrested. The death toll was over a 1,000, including civilians, police personnel and Sri Lankan armed forces personnel.
In 1977, with the election of J. R. Jayewardene, who went on to politically dominate the country for a decade, the
Sri Lankan economy changed full tilt from the Bandarnaike era of socialist nationalisation, to liberalisation and the entry of free market forces. Jayewardene also released all JVP prisoners including Wijeweera, who went on to contest the 1982 presidential election, polling 4% of the vote. Some make the case that Jayewardene used the JVP to weaken the SLFP and the “old left”. Indeed, the JVP made SLFP’s Sinhala Buddhist plank its own from about the time of the 1983 antiTamil riots and the flaring up of the SinhalaTamil ethnic conflict.
What was the context for the JVP’s second insurrection?
Delhi’s growing involvement in the conflict led to antiIndia sentiment among the Sinhalese majority. In June 1987, the Indian Air Force carried out Operation Poomalai to airdrop food to the north of Sri Lanka, which was Tamildominated, at a time when Sri Lankan forces had laid siege to the province, believing that they had cornered the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The next month came the IndiaSri Lanka Accord under which Sri Lanka introduced an amendment in its Constitution to devolve political power to the Tamil north and east. However, the LTTE rejected the Accord, and the soldiers that India sent under the banner of the Indian Peace Keeping Force to disarm the LTTE, soon found themselves in a war against the group. JVP launched protests against the presence of Indian troops on Sri Lankan soil. Among the Sinhalese, the protests found widespread support. The Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when he was attacked by a sailor at a guard of honour at the airport after the signing of the Accord in Colombo. Even SLFP workers joined hands with the JVP on the ground. However, the JVP did not take on the Indian Army or even the Tamils, directing its violence on fellow Sinhalese in southern Sri Lanka. Government officials, police personnel, teachers, students of rival unions and political activists — with its lists of “traitors”, the JVP went after all of them. Lampost hangings, tyre pyres and bodies on roads were a common sight. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s husband, Vijaya Kumaratunga, a charismatic film starturnedpolitician, was shot dead. The government’s brutality in putting down the insurgency was no less. The bloodbath lasted until 1989. The number of people killed is cited as 60,000. Wijeweera was also among the dead.
What happened to the JVP after that?
In the 1990s, the JVP tried to put its past behind and entered the political mainstream under a new leadership. It won one seat in the parliamentary elections of 1994. It even contested elections for provincial councils, which it had opposed as an Indian imposition under the 13th Amendment.
In the 2001 parliamentary election, the JVP won 16 seats, indicating that it had gained the trust of sections of voters. Its high point came when it contested in coalition with the SLFPled People’s Alliance in 2004. The election was fought on an anticeasefire plank. The previous United National Party (UNP) government had entered into a Norwaybrokered truce with the LTTE in 2002, on terms that were seen as favouring the LTTE. In 2004, President Kumaratunga called for fresh elections, naming Mahinda Rajapaksa as the prime ministerial face of the People’s