The recently concluded presidential elections have shocked Sri Lanka’s established, corrupt, family-centered political parties. The result, favouring the The Janatha Vimukthi Peramun (JVP – ’People’s Liberation Front’), which led the National People’s Power (NPP) electoral front, not only surprised the liberal elite of Colombo but also sent political tremors through South Asian geopolitics, particularly in India, where its favoured candidate, Sajith Premadasa of the SJB, suffered a blow.
Excluding a section of the revolutionary left, Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s (AKD) win has been portrayed as a “Marxist victory” across the political spectrum. Various international and domestic media outlets have labelled AKD a “Marxist-leaning president.” Right-wing, liberal, and bourgeois media painted the win as a “Red scare,” while reformists and “social democrats” across South Asia and beyond celebrated it as a triumph for the working class.
However, both claims are far from the truth. AKD adopts the facade of Marxist rhetoric in optics and propaganda to win over the masses by tapping into their anger against the corrupt political elite. But his ideological politics are far from Marxist in both praxis and theory.
The JVP-led NPP political position is more accurately described as left-populist rather than Marxist. Any willingness to accept AKD as a Marxist and to attach euphoric revolutionary value to this win would ultimately undermine Marxist politics at both the perceptual and practical levels. Furthermore, it would serve to discredit Marxism in electoral politics and potentially contribute to the resurgence of sidelined, corrupt right-wing parties.
As allies of the working class and the masses, we must not only expose the Marxist facade of the JVP-led NPP but also caution the public about the impending disillusionment AKD is likely to bring through his new variant of neoliberal status quo policies.
To begin with, the JVP is not a party grounded in a workers’ ideology but rather in a petty bourgeois ideology. It brings together workers and trade unions under various sections of the petty bourgeoisie, both urban and rural.
While the JVP is indeed a cadre-based party with loyal, committed members driven by an ethic of self-sacrifice, these cadres are often motivated by sentiment—sometimes related to socialism—but have not undergone significant political education on what constitutes socialism, Marxism, or a far-sighted socialist perspective and strategy. Their cadres are ideologically weak, inept, and lacking in political education rooted in Marxist methods and struggle. Since their ideological worldview is shaped by petty bourgeois Sinhala nationalism, the party oscillates between adventurism and electoral reformism.
Tamil National Question
AKD’s JVP is fundamentally a Sinhala chauvinist party, characterised by a majoritarian, exclusivist stance on the national question of Tamils. The JVP dismisses the Tamil national question, including their “right to self-determination, which includes the right to secession,” as a conspiracy orchestrated by Indian and Western imperialism to recolonize Sri Lanka. While Tamils were suffering atrocities at the hands of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF), the JVP continued its nuanced Sinhala chauvinistic approach, labelling northern Tamils as agents of Indian colonisation. Prominent leaders like Vijaya Kumaratunga and others who attempted to negotiate on Tamil political issues were labelled traitors and were assassinated by JVP hit squads. By misrepresenting the national question as a tool for recolonization, the JVP advocates for a unitary state model along Sinhala chauvinistic lines, aligning with the political positions of the main political parties, the SLFP, UNP, SLPP, LSSP, and the communist party. They went as far as going to court to divide north and east in September 2006.
Furthermore, the JVP has shown an unwillingness to make political concessions regarding the devolution of power (i.e., the 13th Amendment). During the civil war, the JVP advocated for a military solution rather than a political one. The war led to the loss of more than 10 percent of the Tamil population in the north, and the JVP sided with the Rajapaksa family, who orchestrated the massacre. During the 2005 presidential elections, the JVP even aligned with and formed a political front to support the murderous, corrupt Mahinda Rajapaksa’s SLPP, thereby destroying the hopes of a peace agreement with the Tamils and pursuing a military victory instead.
Moreover, leading up to the recent elections, in its meetings with ex-servicemen, the JVP took credit for building ideological support for the military offensive. Although its manifesto talks about investigating war crimes and bringing the culprits to justice, the party continues to court ex-servicemen accused of war crimes.
We should also ask what conditions led a supposedly left-wing organisation to acquire a Sinhala chauvinistic character.
To begin with, the emergence of the dominant petty-bourgeois character within the left is the result of various historical processes rooted in colonialism, the balance of class power, as well as the ideological limitations of the left. The colonial nature of the plantation economy, with its system of unequal exchanges, hindered the development of a domestic bourgeois political movement. The domestic bourgeoisie, characterised by backward, commercial, and mercantile activities such as plantation management, arrack production, revenue collection, and granite mining, failed to lead any movement against colonialism. Instead, it fully collaborated with the colonial powers without contest.
The weakness of the bourgeois class, combined with the dominance of Buddhist nationalism in the south, among other factors, contributed to a shift in a section of the petty bourgeoisie, peasants, and some rural poor and workers toward the Buddhist nationalist left.
However, since its inception, various leftist groups and trade unions have taken up the cause of the working class, particularly the plantation workers of Tamil and Malayali ethnic backgrounds. They fought for decent working and living conditions, as well as for political rights, such as citizenship and permanent residency. They tirelessly worked to unite workers from various ethnic backgrounds.
The right-wing response was to accuse the left and trade unions of being unpatriotic, irreligious, and disloyal to the interests of Sinhalese workers. Left parties were referred to as “kochchiya” parties, a derogatory term used for Indian-origin Malayali and plantation workers.
Despite attacks from the right-wing and right-wing trade unions, the left held firm in its support for immigrant workers and focused on uniting workers across ethnic lines. Although it succeeded in building cross-ethnic solidarity through radical participation in general strikes, the situation began to change in the 1950s with the rise of the SLFP. The SLFP’s Sinhala-only stance and its nationalisation agenda even led parts of the left to sympathise with it in electoral contests.
The leadership of the left, with some exceptions, capitulated to Sinhala nationalism from the late 1950s onward, ostensibly to maintain a support base in the south. This capitulation was largely driven by a desire to secure electoral success and maintain parliamentary positions.
For example, in 1960, at the Communist Party’s 6th Party Congress, leaders criticised the politics of immigrant workers as “culturalistic” and “cosmopolitan.” In 1966, the Communist Party and SLPP organized a protest against the UNP government for introducing the official use of the Tamil language in Tamil provinces. Furthermore, when drafting the new republican constitution in 1972, Colin R. de Silva of the LSSP, as the Minister of Constitutional Affairs, dealt a blow to secularism by giving Buddhism a foremost place in the constitution. Prior to this period, during the emergence of LSSP as a strong left force in the country, Colvin played a different role. He famously asked the parliament “Do you want two nations and one language, or two languages and one nation?”. But By the 1960s, LSSP and the Communist Party had institutionalised Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism. At that time, the LSSP had mass support and formed a coalition with the capitalist SLFP to maintain its electoral position. As part of this process, they began to change their stance on various issues. As a result, their broader working-class and minority support began to erode.
In this context of established Sinhala chauvinism within the left, the JVP emerged as a populist force representing the petty bourgeoisie. It began to gain prominence in the 1980s, as the masses and workers abandoned the LSSP and communist party due to their support for IMF-driven free-market economic policies, such as freezing public recruitment and privatising sectors like telecom. There was a growing perception that the left had become subservient to local and international capital. Disillusioned with the LSSP and communist party, workers and trade unions began to turn to the JVP, which positioned itself as an alternative to these parties. The JVP on the other hand sided with the chauvinist propaganda to deport all hill country population back to India.
A Few Significant Points on Their Economic Agenda
On the economic front, Anura accepts the prescriptions of the IMF to address the crisis. As history and cross-country experience show, the IMF’s macroeconomic policies, such as the devaluation of local currency, changes in interest rates, fiscal deficit policies, and the privatisation of industries such as telecom, health, and education, along with export-driven growth reliant on foreign capital, are prescriptions for more austerity, poverty, and disaster for historically hard-won working-class gains. Anura’s public statements and manifesto advocate for the privatisation of specific industries, except for those deemed strategically important, and for the creation of regulatory bodies to manage the economy more efficiently. Additionally, he emphasises the need for experts to lead and run economic departments, which is a euphemism for depoliticizing key areas of economic management and distancing them from the direct political participation of workers and their unions.
In the lead-up to the election, the NPP faced criticism from various quarters due to its history of violent adventurism. Furthermore, liberal opposition parties engaged in scare-mongering about the potential economic decline under an NPP-led government. To counter this and ease the concerns of the business community, the NPP organised several conferences to gain the confidence of “business people,” during which top business leaders declared the irrelevance of Lenin and Marx’s ideas on the NPP platform. The NPP promised to root out crony capitalism and eliminate political corruption. Due to the limitations of Sri Lanka’s small local market, they pledged to establish trade embassies in Africa and other parts of the world to capture global markets. In this way, the NPP attempts to bring antagonistic classes into its fold.
To conclude, liberals, right-wingers, and social democrats—whether intentionally or unknowingly—identify the AKD-led JVP as Marxist without offering any substantive political content to support their claims. For instance, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) celebrated Anura’s win.
Regardless of their political wisdom, most seem to want AKD to fail, in order to discredit Marxism as a viable alternative to capitalism. Some even circulated a picture of AKD with Sitaram Yechury, a key CPI(M) leader who recently passed away, as if a revolutionary change had occurred in Sri Lanka. By doing so, they not only mislead their members and supporters but also work against the advancement of working-class interests in India and Sri Lanka. These pseudo-Marxists must also be exposed to rebuild a genuine working-class struggle in South Asia and beyond.
