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| Sunday, 21 November 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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The audacity of Rohana Wijeweera Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
Five years ago in this newspaper this columnist wrote a three-part series on Rohana Wijeweera on the 10th anniversary of his barbaric killing. The foregoing sentence is not written in any sense of self-advertisement but only to set against the spate of belated obituaries which the founder of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna has inspired five years later. The very mass media which maintained a conspiracy of silence about him since his death, last week made him into almost a national idol. Programme producers, interviewers and writers were all part of this new conspiracy which dare one say would have brought a cynical smirk across the countenance of the JVP leader in whatever Red Valhalla to which he might have been assigned after his brutally unceremonious passing on that cruel November night. No political leader in Sri Lanka has engendered such sharp and conflicting views about his role in the country's life as Rohana Wijeweera when he was killed at the age of 49. Justly so since from his own perspective Wijeweera sought to upset the apple cart, the consensus which the post-Independence elite of Sri Lanka whether they were capitalist, liberal or Marxist had arrived at in order to maintain the status quo. To both the right as well as the orthodox left he was the devil incarnate but to his followers he was a demi-god. Wijeweera himself quite revelled in this role. With his beard, his beret and his fiery speeches he was very much part of the political landscape of the time playing all the available roles on Sri Lanka's impoverished political stage ranging from Devil's Advocate to Presidential Candidate. From the point of view of his detractors Wijeweera was an opportunist who split N. Sanmugathasan's Ceylon Communist Party and drew away its cadres to form his own private army with which he made a bid for state power in April 1971. From the view point of his admirers he was an idealist who mobilised the poor peasantry and particularly its marginalised younger sections who had been excluded from the established social system since Independence. Which version approximates more to reality ? Perhaps there is an element of opportunism in every political action and politics is an admixture of opportunism and idealism. But what can be safely said is that Wijeweera was the most audacious politician of his time in the sense that twice within a period of three decades he mounted two assaults on the Sri Lankan State safeguarded by the ramparts of the post-Independence consensus between the Left and the Right to pursue the Holy Grail only through the path of parliamentary elections. Wijeweera's appeal lay in the fact that he chose the rural poor as the base of his political programme. The LSSP and the CP going on orthodox Marxist lines had already begun mobilising the working class of the towns which prevented the JVP from undertaking any political activity with the urban proletariat. But it was the peasantry which had provided the engine of the successful Chinese revolution in another agrarian country and the peasantry in Sri Lanka had been historically a neglected lot. Most of them were without land of their own and were either ande cultivators working for absentee landlords or small land owners eking out a bare existence through subsistence agriculture. Either way they were captives of the middleman and the usurious money lender. It was to the younger generation springing from these backward and stagnant villages that Wijeweera addressed himself. They had entered the school and university systems with the intention of pulling themselves up from the quagmire of rural poverty and helplessness but found that by the late 1960's the Welfare State was no longer able to satisfy their aspirations of upward social mobility. Taking the Chinese model and choosing the peasantry as the engine of his revolution Wijeweera at least in his 1971 bid for state power chose a variant of the Cuban method as the instrument of that bid for power. Regis Debray, the theoretician of the Cuban Revolution has described Castro's method in terms of the 'foco theory. 'To quote Debray in his 'Revolution within the Revolution' the answer to the central question of how best to capture state power is 'by means of the more or less slow building up, through guerilla warfare carried out in suitably chosen rural zones, of a mobile strategic force, the nucleus of a people's army and of a future socialist state.' Wijeweera it would appear went one better and instead of a slow build up through guerilla warfare sought to immobilise the state apparatus through a lightning strike on the country's Police stations during a single night. Wijeweera also deviated from or rejected classical Marxist thinking in the sense that he did not believe in organising the broad masses for struggle against the oppressive state machinery. He had anyway no base in the urban working class or the plantation proletariat, the most exploited section of Sri Lankan society, indeed dismissing the latter as agents of Indian expansionism. He had also no great interest in building up a revolutionary party which Lenin had held to be the first essential of the successful revolution. He seemed to have thought that the Five Lectures were sufficient political education for his young and immature cadres while going with Debray he appeared also to hold that the party and the army could be one. But the JVP of 1971 armed with rifles and molotov cocktails was no match for the State, which though taken by surprise fought back ferociously and since there was no mass support for the insurgency it was foredoomed. What is more Wijeweera himself was not there to lead it and the decision to strike was taken by others. What was in 1971 both the party and the army was converted into an amorphous mass political party after 1977 when the JVP prisoners were released and the party began legitimate political activities. The high point of this was, of course Wijeweera contesting the Presidential Election of 1982 and while it is a moot point whether the JVP would not have returned to violence if it had not been proscribed in July 1983 this proscription certainly buttressed Wijeweera's fears that the Establishment would never really give a chance to anybody outside its ranks to assume power. This led to the post-1987 anti-systemic campaign of the JVP where adroitly exploiting the arrival of the Indian Peace Keeping Force and the widespread nationalist sentiments of large sections of the Sinhala people the JVP under Wijeweera began to terrorise both the state machinery and those sections of civil society opposed to its thinking and almost brought the State to its knees. What Wijeweera's debacle signifies is the limitations of pure youth politics. Eschewing the organised working class Wijeweera sought to build a party round the marginalised sections of the rural youth belonging to the peasantry. What is more he saw the capturing of state power as a purely militaristic manoeuvre whereas every Marxist has held that a successful revolution can take place only if conditions for it had matured within class society and that the masses had to be prepared for such a transformation. On the contrary Wijeweera seemed to believe that violence used for its own sake could be used as the midwife to effect the birth of a new social order which led to the spate of arbitrary violence of the 1987-89 years not only against the state and the JVP's other opponents but also former JVP leaders and members such as Nandana Marasinghe. Who then was Rohana Wijeweera ? It would be wrong to dismiss him as some sections of the Old Left still tend to do as an intellectual philistine outside the pale of their Brahminical Marxism. He certainly deviated from the categories of orthodox Marxism but he also cleverly exploited the Old Left's embracing of parliamentarism to make a violent bid for state power which after all is the ultimate goal of every Marxist or Left party. In this he tried to evolve innovative methods and used his tremendous oratorical powers to rouse the masses to a demagogic pitch. But he underestimated the durability and staying power of the state machinery and while it is too early for us to make any proper evaluation of him Wijeweera will certainly be remembered as the only politician who was bold enough or foolhardy enough to believe that the citadels of the upper class monopoly of political power could be breached by somebody outside the magic circle of elitist politics. SOURCES, JVP: A Private Army Based on the Marginalised - Hector Abhayavardhana - Selected Writings - Social Scientists' Association, 2001. Regis Debray - Marxism After Marx - David MacLellan - The Macmillan Press Ltd., - 1979. |
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