The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) rarely organically related to the people in the bad old days of the two insurrections. Rohana Wijeweera’s JVP relied on support from among the rural youth, both in 1971 and the waning years of the 80s.
But today’s National People’s Power (NPP, the JVP led coalition) is much different and this transformation was engineered from the time Somawansa Amarasinghe led the party. Amarasinghe used to be petrified that the people still thought of the JVP as the outfit led by violent insurgents who held five classes (“Panthi Paha”) for rural youth, who were recruited to the party ranks. He once told this writer that the JVP is so decisively past this era, that they would not even resort to violence as a last resort.
But yet sometimes it appeared you could take the JVP out of the galkatas (a rudimentary locally-made gun) but could not take the galkatas out of the JVP. Though the bad old days of gratuitous violence inflicted by the insurgents were past, there was still the campus related intimidation the Antharaya, or the JVP allied Inter University Students Federation (IUSF).
There is also the violence that gets associated with the JVP more due to reputation than anything else. All that has led to a certain anxiety factor when it comes to the JVP, and party heavyweights K.D. Lal Kantha and Nalin Hewage do not help when they make statements to the effect that some of those killings in the 70s and 90s were necessary, or words to that effect.
This brings us to the main poser this article intends to examine, which is whether the party and its larger cohort the NPP relates to the people organically? Is the party still functioning from a place where it continues to operate on a command principle of sorts, where there is a politburo which lays down the law and everybody is expected to follow?
POLICYMAKING
It is a more pertinent question than it ever was, as the JVP is now front and centre of the national political discourse, having anointed itself as the force that has finally arrived.
If the JVP organically relates to people it could be asked why the party rank and file behaves as if they have already won the election?
This may be a slightly larger manifestation of a visible weakness of the comrades. Lal Kantha himself is on record ruminating over this phenomenon.
The video must be somewhere on YouTube. He says that when they — the party leadership — goes for weddings and other functions of comrades’ children and so on they always get chided about being favoured to get more than 3 percent of the vote before the elections, despite the fact that things always go to back to square one, i.e. 3 percent, when the votes are finally counted.
This time it is guaranteed it is not going to end up that way. The NPP/JVP has broken that ceiling much before a single vote is cast. The JVP led coalition could secure a substantial share of the national vote, and it would be an amount that would give them some tangible clout in national policymaking.
But it is still no reason to behave as if they have already won, and that is where you would have to begin to wonder if the party relates organically to the hoi polloi, which of course they obviously refer to as the proletariat?
The question though is, do they consider the proletariat as hoi polloi, and look patronisingly down at the ‘rabble’? Organic politics is not a coinage, it has been studied by intellectuals and academics for a long time. Organic politics is when nothing is orchestrated, and when the people resist oppressive systems organically, and this phenomenon gets reflected in the work of political parties vis-à-vis the people.
But the JVP had a command structure, with the cadre being predominantly recruited from a certain specific segment of the rural population, i.e. the rural youth.
In the past, there was no overt attempt made to relate to the older demographic, the upper middle classes or simply put, the broader cross sections of society. That would have been fine if the latter categories took a shine to the JVP organically, of their own accord. The reality was almost exactly the opposite, meaning that other than the youth, almost every other segment of the population, barring of course the families of the hardcore JVP cadre, felt alienated from the movement.
All that is history now and the question is, have the boys become men and stopped treating the community at large as their patrimony, and their hunting-grounds for votes but not their constituency which they should relate to in the manner of brothers and sisters, not merely comrades?
As stated earlier, the difference in the current moment is that the JVP/NPP is in the enviable position of people having taken a shine to them. To that extent it is an organic expression of interest in their politics from ordinary people who are sick of the systemic alternatives which have brought the country to the brink, economically speaking, and curtailed their future prospects drastically.
But on a larger scale, is the party and the coalition of its allies organically connected to the broader electorate? The party leadership may think it is an absurd and even unfair question. How organically connected are the other parties to their constituencies, they may ask?
Alienated
Is not the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) Colombo and urban-centric, they may demand with some indignation? Is not the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) good in the rural Sinhala heartlands, but hopelessly alienated from the minorities?
But being a political party does not mean winning friends everywhere. Someone from a semi-rural milieu may feel he or she could one day approach the SLPP leadership through may be certain intermediaries and become part of their political outreach. Do people feel the same way about becoming part of the JVP?
They may feel there is a red-shirted inner-sanctum that is out there and rather unreachable. They may feel there are layers of structural architecture they have to negotiate, and barriers they have to breach.
That is because the JVP is a party of that sort. It is where the educated (read the converted) get onto a platform and preach, and the cadre gets preached at. There are no back-slappers and baby-kissers in that party, and they take it as a major attribute to be that way, because they are always very disdainful of the spectacle of conventional politics.
But sickening as this spectacle of baby-kissing copybook politics may be, it is also something that has organically evolved. The JVP on the other hand cannot be unapproachable and predictable.
The subtle distinction is that organic is not synonymous with organised. The Nazis were organised too, but far from organic, and this is certainly not to compare the JVP to the Nazis. It is just to say that organised monoliths become, eventually, about machine politics.
But the JVP sometimes has brilliant turns of strategy. Remember the time the party got some 30 seats in Parliament by tweaking and taking advantage of the quirks of the PR and preferential voting systems?
The JVP has visionaries but is most times lacking in short-term political savvy that the professional politicians of other political parties take to.
The new JVP or NPP on the other hand has to grow into organic politics.
The conundrum they face is that by doing so they may end up looking like all other political parties, when the idea obviously is to stand out. The Old Left could not do it too. Comrades Pieter (Keuneman), Colvin (De Silva), Dr. N.M. (Perera) and Leslie (Gunawardana) were comrades but were not part of the larger community in any organic sense.
The Old Left politically withered on the vine. It is a tragic story. Surely the JVP now at its new fangled best does not want to go down that road?
The JVP has enough swagger. Look at the way its leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake walks. What it needs is an infusion of folksiness without diluting its brand. But this was always easier said than done for the party. It is constrained by the same Red-Shirt regimentation which the Old Left faced. It will take some doing to come out of that straitjacket, no matter how promising the comrades may be looking at the present moment.
