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| Sunday, 22 August 2004 |
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JVP and LTTE : Two faces of nationalism Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
So the political pundits and the wiseacre columnists have hummed and hawed, probed and fingered, analysed and assessed what they have gleefully proclaimed to be cracks, splits and schisms in the edifice of the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA). The grist to their mills was, of course, provided by the withdrawal of President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga from the post of UPFA President, Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake succeeding her and the President's displeasure at some of the remarks made recently about the peace negotiations by the leadership of the JVP. But it is a moot point whether this was really analysis or wishful thinking. Were all those estimable gentlemen engaging in genuine political commentary or were they seeking to substitute their fantasies and fond wishes for the reality? This was nowhere more evident than in the bout of shadow-boxing they sought to stage between Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse and Minister Anura Bandaranaike, seemingly for the position of UPFA President. According to their book, both had thrown their hats into the ring no sooner than the President had withdrawn, and unable to choose between her Prime Minister and her brother, the President had nominated the loyal Ratnasiri Wickremanayake to the post as a stop-gap. Of such airy stuff is political fiction wrought. The point is that not a single of these political pundits anticipated the resignation of the President from the leadership of the UPFA as a means of resolving the difference of opinion which had sprung up with the JVP on the LTTE's demand that it was on the basis of the Internal Self-Governing Authority (ISGA) that any future negotiations between itself and the Government should commence. It has been the UPFA's position that any such discussion should be linked to a final resolution of the National Question while the JVP has appeared to rule any discussion of the ISGA itself out of court. But obviously this conflict of opinions was not a tenable position and by withdrawing from the leadership of the Alliance, President Kumaratunga has placed herself above the partisan fray and is in a position to bring to bear a broader vision on the pressing issues of the day as befitting the Head of State. It is also in keeping with President Kumaratunga's whole outlook on the National Question for unlike many Sinhala politicians, she has never been guilty of taking up chauvinistic positions for political advantage. She has consistently advocated the just rights of the Tamil people and has offered them the most far-reaching constitutional settlement in recent memory. In spite of provocations by the LTTE, she has refused to take up militaristic or jingoistic positions although naturally as Head of State she has had to lead a military campaign against the LTTE's terrorist acts. But by this most recent action, even as her Government gets ready for talks with the LTTE, she has sought to separate her two roles as political leader of a single party or alliance and the President of the entire nation. Separate administration But the President can by no means be unmindful of the fact that there are sections which are opposed to the very idea of the ISGA being taken up for discussion fearing that this will be a tacit acceptance of the admissibility of a separate administration for the Tamil areas. Foremost among these are the JVP, the Deshahithaishee Jathika Vyaparaya and the Jathika Hela Urumaya which, although operating from different poles, converge in a common agreement on the issue. There will also be sections within other political parties and most notably the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the chief Alliance partner, who will share these views. For in our preoccupation with the negotiations, it would be unwise to lose sight of the historical realities. Sections of the Sinhala opinion who are implacably opposed to the ISGA are as much part of the post-Independence reality as Tamil nationalism, of which the LTTE is the most vocal expression. Federalism, devolution of power and views for and against those concepts and demands have been at the heart of the contemporary political debate. Political parties after all are only the embodiments and expressions of ideas and feelings which for good or ill, animate large masses of people in any society. As we have repeatedly said in this column, the failure of the Sri Lankan elite to build the State round itself following political independence saw the separate identities of the Sinhala and Tamil people manifesting themselves in the form of opposing linguistic nationalisms. It is true that the call for a Federal system of government for the Tamil areas preceded the Sinhala Only Bill, but in time to come, the demand for a Federal set-up exacerbated by the feeling of hostility engendered in the Tamil people by this legislation was to snowball into a call for a separate Tamil state, mixing both language and the call for self-rule into a potent and explosive mix. If the demand for the displacement of English by Sinhala was the war cry of the mono-lingual petit bourgeoisie among the Sinhalese, it would be largely true to say that both the Sinhala and Tamil upper classes remained unaffected by this new development since they had a common bond in their knowledge of English. Thus it was the Sinhala and Tamil middle and lower middle classes who found themselves on the opposing sides of the communal barricades in the 1950s and 1960s when the Federal Party waged its civil disobedience campaign and the Sinhalese responded by tarring Tamil names on sign boards. During this period the SLFP and the Federal Party were the authentic representatives of Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms respectively. Logical successors Against this backdrop, it might strike some with a sense of shock that the JVP and the LTTE, which now find themselves on the opposing sides of the barricades, are the logical successors to the SLFP and the Federal Party. The LTTE took the demand for a separate Tamil state put forward by the TULF (of which the FP was the main constituent) to its violent conclusion while the JVP is the successor to those petite bourgeoisie social layers within the SLFP who had advanced themselves as a result of the displacement of English and gained a place in the sun. But by the 1970s when the JVP was emerging, this place in the sun was shrinking and the disenchantment and hostility that this generated among the newly-educated youth who found their advance blocked by a contracting economy found expression in the crusade against the so-called Indian expansionism which formed one of the 1971 JVP's five lectures. Although marked by significant differences characterising the Sinhala and Tamil societies, the JVP and the LTTE are the mirror images of youth movements of a radical and militant kind organising themselves against the established political parties both of the Right and the Left to be found in many countries the world over. To begin with, they are predominantly drawn from among the youth and have consciously set themselves up as movements of youth opposed to what they see as the effete politics of their elders. This means that their base is almost exclusively among the youth and they more or less reject the working class which orthodox Marxism has seen as the vanguard of the socialist revolution. They are also movements which have sprung out of the disillusionment of young people alienated and marginalised from the established order on account of unemployment, exclusion from the education system and other such sources of discrimination. While the JVP sprang from the anger of Sinhala-educated rural youth denied employment after a university or secondary education, the Tamil movement had its origins in the exclusion Tamil youth suffered from in the 1970s on account of being denied a university education as a result of the system of standardisation governing university admissions. Higher castes Another common factor between the two was their resentment of the domination of politics by the higher castes. Most of the active cadres, particularly of the 1971 Insurrection, were drawn from the lowest castes of the hierarchy, most of them even unheard of and unspoken in the polite upper class circles. Likewise, the LTTE was a challenge to the Vellala domination of Jaffna politics. While the fisher caste which thus challenged the upper caste and class Tamils had been long entrenched and had even obtained some respectability in the politics of the South, the JVP's revolt was against the domination by a few select castes of Sinhala politics. For example, when Cabinets were formed, it was considered mandatory to accommodate members of the Goigama, Karawa, Salagama and Durawa castes, but there were several other lesser castes which were outside this select group and the JVP cadres were drawn predominantly from those castes particularly in the South and the Kegalle district which were among its 1970 strongholds. The other common factor was, of course, their choice of violence as the method of effecting social change. It was the JVP which first introduced violence in the form of armed insurrection as the chosen method of social transformation, but the LTTE was to outstrip it in due course, using individual acts of violence, guerilla warfare and conventional military methods as and when those were appropriate in their long drawn-out campaign against the Sri Lankan State. Militancy and nationalism have therefore been the two dominant characteristics of the JVP and the LTTE. The difference of course is that the JVP's nationalism is that of the Sinhala majority and because of this, it is no different from that of any right-wing political party in spite of the JVP's radical rhetoric. Today however, both the JVP and the LTTE are faced with a historic divide. While the JVP has become a partner of the Government at the Centre, the LTTE is asking for self administration at the periphery. Can the JVP deny the LTTE in the outer reaches what it has obtained at least in part at the heart of the State? |
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