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Featured Article: The JVP and 'Pol Potism'

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Friday, 27 January 2006
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Front Note by Sachi Sri Kantha

One of the cardinal rules in either business or combat [whether serious warfare or sports encounters - which are nothing but simulated warfare] is 'Know thy Adversary/Competition/Critic/Enemy.' One can add that it is even more important to 'Know thy Adversary, from the words of your trenchant critic.'

Dayan Jayatilleka is one of the leading anti-Tamil polemicist critics, though he couches his words in a deceptive charade to portray that he is only anti-LTTE, but not anti-Tamil.
In the spirit of 'Know thy enemy from the words of another of your adversaries,' I provide a verbatim reproduction of Chapter 9 entitled 'The JVP and Pol Potism' which appears in Dayan Jayatilleka's book, Sri Lanka, Travails of a Democracy, Unfinished War, Protracted Crisis (Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1995, pp.95-107).

JVP is the abbreviation for Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, founded by Rohana Wijeweera in the late 1960s. A voluble, racist predecessor of this JVP also had the same abbreviation, but stood for Jathika Vimukthi Peramuna, and was represented by a husband-wife team, K.M.P. Rajaratne and Kusuma Rajaratne – parliamentarians of the 1950s and 1960s.

Multiple reasons pushed me to re-read this chapter and transcribe it for a wider audience.

First, when the LTTE leader Pirabhaharan began his 2005 Heroes Day address with the sentence, "The Sinhala nation continues to be entrapped in the Mahavamsa mindset, in that mythical ideology," a few hisses were heard from Sinhala analysts, including Tisaranee Gunasekara, one of Dayan Jayatilleka's comrades-in-arms in the production of anti-LTTE polemics. In this chapter, ten years ago, Dayan Jayatilleka has discussed this same Mahavamsa mindset of the Buddhist clergy.

Pirabhakaran also made reference to "Sinhala-Buddhist racist forces [which] could not tolerate the emergence of a congenial environment of goodwill" and noted the JVP and Jathika Hela Urumaya as major representatives of these forces.

Second, in 1995 when this chapter was published, the JVP's parliamentary representation was in the single digits (one, to be exact). Now the JVP's parliamentary representation has increased to double digits (39); as such they have become more vocal and have attracted trans-border attention as well.

Whether they talk sense is another matter. This year also marks the 35th anniversary (on April 5th) of when the JVP made its splashy entry into the Sri Lankan political lexicon, and the words 'terrorism and terrorist' were introduced in the island.

Third, the cliché 'Pol Potism' is pedantically used by Narasimhan Ram of the House of Hindu publishers to smear the LTTE.

In my view, Ram - born to the Brahmin caste – consciously uses this 'Pol Potism' word as a pejorative euphemism for the caste marker on the LTTE leadership, since it has become politically incorrect to call a Tamil leader with a caste marker.

Thus, Ram and his coterie in the House of Hindu publishers deserve to be educated that Pol Potism (a hotch-potch of Communism blended with Aryan brown-skinned Buddhism) does exist in Sri Lanka, but its practitioners are born Buddhists dipped into half-baked Communism.

Fourth, Dayan Jayatilleka, the author of this chapter, is blessed with quite a few merits; (a) being the son of distinguished Sri Lankan journalist Mervyn de Silva, (b) being a wordsmith for Marxist/Communist polemics presented in flowery, sometimes stilted, English, (c) being a prolific analyst on Sri Lankan affairs, (d) fluenct in the Sinhala language, which allows him to read the JVP literature in its original, (e) being a terrorist himself - representing the underground group Vikalpa Kandayama (in the mid 1980s) - who was "indicted (in absentia) in the Colombo High Court as the first accused, on 14 counts, including conspiracy to overthrow the state through violence" as per the back-cover blurb of this 1995 book.

Check the foot-notes 12 and 13 at the end of the Chapter. This Vikalpa Kandayama group was in rivalry with the JVP for the lumpen proletariat among the Sinhalese. (f) being a beneficiary of the munificence of India's intelligence gumshoes, when he was 'on the run' from J.R. Jayewardene's rule of terrorist law.

I wouldn't also overlook a few noticeable defects of Jayatilleka; these include, (a) allegiance to unprincipled opportunism in political theater, though he self-anointed himself about his 1980s career move, as one of the 'rational revolutionaries' (b) delivering flashy, crystal ball predictions which turn out to be utterly wrong, and (c) a penchant for ignoring/twisting ugly facts which don't fit his Sinhala-Buddhist bias.

Fifth, occasionally Dayan Jayatilleka can be very candid in his comments and delivers the correct choice of amusing phrases. On the JVP's political ideology, he notes that "what you have in Sri Lanka is a malignant, midget Marxism – a dwarfed, distorted, debased, caricatured Marxism," which in fact equally applies to his past and present career as a card-carrying Marxist-Leninist commentator.

This will suffice for a front-note and I leave Dayan Jayatilleka to describe the JVP's deeds from 1971 to 1995. At first I thought about whether I should select and provide only excerpts to clip the verbiage of Jayatilleka, the unrepentant Marxist-Stalinist. Note that critic Regi Siriwardena, in one of his essays, said that "the last surviving admirer of Stalin in Sri Lanka is probably Mr. Dayan Jayatilleke" [Lanka Guardian, May 1, 1996, pp.7-9]. But I felt, I can do justice to both the JVP and to Dayan Jayatilleka, if I transcribe the entire text without any omission.

Thus, if Dayan Jayatilleka's pathological obsession with cliched phrases of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric repels the reader at first, I plead please stick to reading until the end. His view (towards the end) sheds some light on the JVP from a vantage angle, which no non-Sinhalese academic can deliver.

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