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| Sunday, 10 April 2005 |
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Looking back on April 1971 Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake This article written on the 15th anniversary of the JVP-led insurrection of 1971 titled 'April 1971' fifteen years after a belated postscript which first appeared in the 'Sunday Island' of April 27, 1986 is ironically enough carried as a belated assessment of the same revolt 19 years later. In our collective obsession with terrorism and our frenzied worship of cricket a significant anniversary has been permitted to slip into limbo. Early this month was the fifteenth anniversary of the insurrection of April 1971 - that watershed which opens the contemporary period of post-independence politics. True we are concerned more with the violent conflict in the north today than with left-wing insurrections but yet things have never been quite the same after April 1971. It was almost like a long overdue adolescence which came upon the nation with a traumatic shock. In other senses too the April 1971 JVP-led insurrection presaged what is happening today. If today in the north and the east we are witnessing a movement of disillusioned Tamil youth who have taken to arms and draw inspiration from a hotch-potch of Marxist-oriented ideologies and pay homage to an assortment of left-wing heroes, April 1971 unfolded the same spectacle in the south. The fact that today's movement of northern youth is much better equipped than the knock-about troops of the JVP point to a greater degree of foreign support to the northern terrorist movement. The fact that the JVP was an organisation exclusively drawing upon Sinhalese youth of the south for support shows that even as early as 1971 communal identities had eaten deep even into a movement of radical youth. The Sinhalese youth who formed Comrade Wijeweera's ranks were disenchanted native sons who had been churned out by the degree factories and thrown on the dung heap of an unemployed existence. Their education was almost entirely in Sinhala and their horizons were bounded by basically middle-class expectations. But at the same time superficial though their aspirations might have been these youth were also the flower of their generation ready to sacrifice their lives which after all is the supreme sacrifice. This makes the JVP's 1971 adventure a graveyard of aborted hopes and muddled idealism. Though derided by the traditional left then in the United Front Government as an ultra-leftist adventure it also touched off a vein of deep feeling among several layers of the population for the 1971 dead. April 1971 was also a watershed for left-wing politics in Sri Lanka. Hitherto left-wing politics had been dominated by the old left leadership produced by the London School of Economics, the Sorbonne University and other temples of western scholarship a cosmopolitan generation of the middle-class intelligentsia kicking at the genteel conventions and taboos worshipped by their fathers. They were basically urban-oriented and although due to a quirk of history they managed to build up considerable bases along the western coastline, the Sabaragamuwa province, the Hewagam Korale and the deep south their attitude was basically oriented towards the towns and the urban working class which they saw as the motor of the impending social changes. The strength of this leadership was that they had a modernist outlook on life. They were responsible for agitations which led to the passage of several pieces of social welfare legislation. They made a considerable contribution to raising the political consciousness of the people. By eschewing communalist politics during the early years this leadership introduced at least a seminal internationalist consciousness into the working class the value of which we can feel in retrospect in the context of today's overweening communalism. But the weakness of this approach and attitude was that it distanced the left-wing leadership from the large bulk of the people. The bulk of Sri Lanka's people are of rural origin and bring their mental baggage from the village even into the towns. They are accustomed to a patriarchal attitude from their leaders and had become cushioned from the rigours of a hard life by the vast corpus of post-independence social welfare legislation to which the left itself had made such a contribution. In such a context there was little cultural contact or rapport between the left and these people. It was to repair this damage that the left aligned itself with the SLFP but in retrospect now it is revealed as the wrong move that it was. Exasperated by the traditional left's failure to relate to the people a school of thought has grown up which attributes this to the fact that the left did not try to relate itself to the culture of the larger masses of the people. This is true to some extent because the leaders of the old left were all reared in a liberal classical culture with more than a few cosmopolitan if not elitist undertones. They were strangers to the native ethos. But this argument does not take sufficient note of the fact that those who have professed to speak on behalf of the people's culture (at least on political platforms) have been guilty of chauvinistic excesses. The nationalist posture can easily deteriorate into an extremism which mocks the larger human concerns which should underline any true adherence to one's ethos. Pride in one's language, culture and identity has to be sustained without allowing it to be petrified in tribal loyalties or ancient grudges. The old left might look alienated and aloof because of their estrangement from the pulse beats of the people but yet they have also been oases of sanity in a country which has become fragmented into communal and religious groups warring with each other. The cultural upheaval of 1956 which restored their identity to the larger masses also enthroned an obscurantist and somewhat parochial outlook whose deleterious effects we can see today. It encouraged a harking back to the past without encouraging a confluence of the best currents of tradition and the progressive impulses of the present and the future. This kind of cultural inwardness was responsible for much of the distortions of contemporary times generating in turn a mirror image of the same among the Tamil people as well. The generation of April 1971 was therefore in many ways the product of the changes created by the upheaval of 1956. Their own brand of Marxism distilled into the 'Five Lectures' their rural middle-class origins and above all their mix of populism and their caricature of textbook socialism from which the old left self-consciously flinched all cut them away from the left movement. But for better or for worse this new kind of leftism was to profoundly influence the left since 1971. The splinter left groups today owe more to the JVP than to the old left. The JVP's own gravitation to communalist politics from the underground is the logical culmination of its middle-class origins and latter-day populism. The insurrection of April 1971 therefore brought out more the limitations than the potentialities of the left movement, both old and new. But underlining the ossified doctrinaire postures of the old left and the callow romanticism of the new left are important lessons for Sri Lanka. In retrospect and particularly in the light of the sharp communal divisions of today the most important lesson is thrown up in the form of a question. How does the left relate to the people at large without surrendering to the forces of populism and the agents of obscurantism who might be in the vanguard of the people? Was the old left correct to have kept aloof from such people without surrendering their ideological purity to them? And what is most important how does the left respond to the challenge of today which is nothing more than welding the aspirations of people (whatever their community might be) with their deeply-felt need for a distinctive identity of their own? Fifteen years after however, the ghosts of the 1971 dead will not be able to recognise the country as the same one they had known then. In the supermarket civilisation which has been created the gods of the open market economy reign and flourish. Idealism is on the retreat in the face of the relentless advances made by the forces of commerce. The bombs which you hear exploding are not the molotov cocktails of 1971 but the monster bombs being hurtled about in today's ethnic war. Those other sounds you hear are not a country weeping for those who are victims of violence and natural disaster but the applause of the populace for our conquering cricketing heroes. 1971 seems like a phantom country. |
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