Peter Main
The election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the candidate of the National People’s Power, NPP, electoral alliance, as the President of Sri Lanka marks a dramatic rupture in the island’s political history. It is the culmination of a crisis of government that began in 2022 with the “Aragalaya”, the uprising against the corrupt rule of Gotabaya Rajapakse.
The Aragalaya
The mass protests, that ended with the storming of the presidential palace and Rajapakse’s flight, began with demonstrations by relatively comfortably off residents as they were finally affected by the rapidly worsening economic situation. They were soon joined by thousands of others, who established a permanent encampment on Galle Face Green.
Entirely missing from the scene were any representatives of the main political parties which had ruled the island since the Brits left in 1948. And for good reason – the Aragalaya itself signalled their rejection by the great majority of citizens. True to form, the “established” political leaders met together to find a way of quelling the unrest, now spreading to the rest of the island, while defending their own privileges.
Their greatest asset in this was the absence of any political leadership among the enraged masses. Once the immediate demand, “Gotabaya Go!” had been met, the whole movement began to ebb. A rescue plan was quickly cobbled together. The veteran former prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had been unable to win a parliamentary seat for himself but gained one from his party’s national list, was appointed President by an assortment of his supposed political opponents, foremost among them the remaining Rajapakse clan.
JVP tactics
Although also absent from Galle Face Green, one party was not involved in this demonstration of the fraudulence of parliamentary democracy, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna People’s Liberation Front, JVP. Having been founded in the mid 1960s as an insurrectionary force, heavily influenced by the military and political strategies of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, it had already passed through several abrupt changes of policy.
These included two adventurist armed insurrections, a mobilisation to break the 1980 general strike, a murderous armed campaign against the Left in the 1990s, a turn to electoralism and entry into a coalition government, in which Dissanayake was a minister, and support for Mahinda Rajapakse’s barbarous war against the Tamils.
Now, with only three parliamentary seats and uninvited to the share out of government perks, it turned to grass roots electoralism, diluting its politics in the NPP and holding rallies to denounce the Wickremesinghe government across the island. It was a well-calculated move. Presenting itself as an “outsider”, opposed to all the established parties, the NPP appealed across the many divisions, ethnic, cultural and religious, that were normally encouraged by all of the parties, including the JVP.
At the same time, while campaigning against many of the measures required by Wickremesinghe’s deal with the IMF, Dissanayake assured the middle classes that he would only seek to modify some of the worst aspects of that deal. This would ensure that the next tranche of IMF “bail out” money would be forthcoming, if he were elected. It is a measure of the scale of the distrust of the past ruling dynasties that such an inherently contradictory political programme was enough to win him the presidency.
What next?
Faced with a hostile parliamentary majority, he has done the obvious thing and dissolved parliament. Elections will be held on November 14 and, given the disarray in the former ruling parties, he can reasonably expect big changes in the parliamentary arithmetic. Then a new chapter will begin.
This chapter will be dominated by Dissanayake’s attempt to implement the IMF package which, even if some cosmetic changes are negotiated, means continued assaults on the living standards of the majority. The JVP is not a workers’ party but it does have the leadership of several unions. Members of all unions, but those in particular, should demand their leaders coordinate actions to oppose every attempt to solve Sri Lanka’s on-going economic crisis at the expense of the working class, farmers and fisherfolk.
In the longer term, the priority for militants and the activists of the various small socialist groups should be developing tactics towards the building of a workers’ party, genuinely rooted in the working class. This is unlikely to come from individual recruitment to the existing groups, none of whose candidates was able to attract even 1% of the votes in the recent election.
Although the trade union movement is highly fragmented, it is surely the starting point for developing joint initiatives and campaigns to defend working class interests. Through such work the most committed activists can be won to the need for a new political party to fight for the interests of the working class and oppressed across the island. Within that, revolutionaries will campaign for a party committed to advancing those interests by the overthrow of the entire capitalist order and the formation of a state based on the workers’ own organisations.