Sri Lanka: a new chapter in the revolution

‘Marxist-leaning president wins Sri Lanka’s elections’: this is how the result of the country’s presidential elections on the weekend have been reported in the international press. The headlines are incorrect, but the facts are sensational enough.

For the first time, a party outside the duopoly that has dominated Sri Lanka since independence in 1948 has taken the presidency. All of the old politics, parties and dynasties, all of the old crooks and leeches who have sucked Sri Lanka dry for 76 years, were on the ballot paper and the masses rejected them roundly.

The old ruling cliques, with all the advantages of their wealth and power, were utterly humiliated. Back in 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa took 51 percent of the vote. On the weekend, his nephew Namal Rajapaksa took a humiliating 2.5 percent!

The outgoing president Ranil Wickremesinghe, to whom the whole electoral machine of the Rajapaksas had defected, who had all the advantages of being the incumbent, of being the liberal darling of the ruling class, and of being able to sell his ‘success’ in negotiating an IMF bailout, did little better. He got just 17 percent.

Anything associated with the establishment, with the old elites, with the handful of families that have dominated the island for decades and who have brought it to ruin, was rejected.

In their place, we’ve seen the most remarkable political transformations. A generation ago, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, ‘People’s Liberation Front’) called itself a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ party. Its members were killed, imprisoned and exiled after leading not one but two failed ‘youth insurrections’ against the state. On the weekend it rose from 3.6 percent to 42 percent, clinching the presidency for its candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD).

It must be stated from the start that, today, the JVP bears little relation to the party it once was. It continues to bear the hammer and sickle as the party logo, but that’s a distant echo of its once ‘revolutionary’ past.

A rally of the JVP from May Day 2016. The party may still use the hammer and sickle, but this is a distant echo from its past / Image: unknown

Its leader, the new president, has been shaking hands with ambassadors, bankers and businessmen for months. He has reassured the blood-sucking creditors and the IMF that the country will ‘move forward in partnership’ with them under his presidency – a ‘partnership’ that bears resemblance with that of the mule and its driver, or perhaps the lion and the gazelle.

But despite this, in the days running up to the election, the old ruling clique raised a red-baiting hue and cry about this ‘extreme’ party with its ‘violent’ past. In so doing, they only helped enhance the anti-establishment credentials of the party in the eyes of the masses, who want nothing more than to uproot and destroy the whole establishment.

A complete upheaval in consciousness

If you want an example of how narrow, how utterly circumscribed so-called ‘democracy’ is under capitalism, just take a look at Sri Lanka. Five years ago, the masses were asked to put a tick next to one of a limited list of names in order to decide who will rule over them.

They did so immediately following an atrocious wave of ISIS terror attacks. The result, predictably, led to a landslide for Gotabaya Rajapaksas, with his clan’s nationalist campaign, soaked in Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism and ‘national security’ hysteria. He won 51 percent of the vote.

In 2019, Gota Rajapaksa (pictured, left) received 51 percent of the vote. On the weekend, his nephew Namal Rajapaksa received 2.5 percent of the vote, a humiliating defeat for the clan / Image: Government of India

Since that election in 2019 – which gave a mere partial snapshot of a temporary mood, distorted through a limited system of dynastic parties – the country has been through a pandemic, national bankruptcy, a revolution, and the flight of the very same president!

On the weekend, the Rajapaksas stood again. This time they put up the young princeling and Gotabaya’s nephew, Namal Rajapaksa. He took a mere 2.5 percent – a complete and well-deserved humiliation for this clan.

Look at the electoral map of the weekend’s election: it was precisely those areas that voted most heavily for the Rajapaksas at the last elections that voted overwhelmingly for a so-called ‘ex-Marxist’ now!

There is a lesson there. In 2019, the superficial, pessimistic empirics despairingly sighed about Sri Lanka’s hopelessly calcified, reactionary and racist electorate. With the election of the Rajapaksas, they confidently predicted that Sri Lanka was entering a prolonged period of reaction, even ‘fascism’.

The same species of superficial analysts have written off the Trump-voting workers of the United States, Le Pen-voting workers in France, and Modi-voting workers in India as irredeemable reactionaries.

And yet, in Sri Lanka, the same electorate who lifted the Rajapaksa clan to power have hurled them down in such a fashion that it is hard to envisage a road to recovery. The lesson, if the empirics are capable of learning anything at all, is that these snapshots only give a few hints at the really complex processes at play in the minds of millions of men and women, and that mighty events, at a certain stage, will inevitably turn consciousness completely on its head.

Why AKD won and where he didn’t

Bourgeois elections offer a partial snapshot of what stage consciousness is passing through. Digging deeper, these results paint a complex picture. AKD’s victory was a remarkable one, but he has received an endorsement that is far from unanimous.

The electoral map shows quite clearly along which lines the electorate is divided. In the North and East, with its Tamil and Muslim majorities, and in the plantation regions of the Central highlands where Indian Tamils are a significant force, it wasn’t AKD but the SJB’s Sajith Premadasa who topped the polls. In Colombo too, where a third of the population come from the Sinhala majority, a third are Tamils and a third Muslims, Dissanayake also trailed behind Premadasa.

A breakdown of the election map shows that, whilst the JVP/NPP won a majority, in the North, East and Centre of the country, the right-wing bourgeois opposition party, the SJB, took the anti-government vote / Image: Furfur

Majorities among the Sinhala masses voted for the JVP’s Dissanayake. This was, as we have explained elsewhere, a negative vote, a vote against the old parties and dynasties. But the JVP is an old party with a long history, and a rather chequered one to say the least when it comes to the minority groups in Sri Lanka.

Indeed, the JVP supported Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brutal campaign of atrocities against the Tamils after the latter was elected president in 2005. The same negative vote against the ‘Ranil Rajapaksa’ regime was thus in no way expressed among minority groups with a vote for the JVP. Instead, they largely voted for the only other tool that could express a mood of similar rejection of the governing parties, namely, the right-wing opposition party, the SJB, although without any great enthusiasm for its buffoon of a leader, Sajith Premadasa.

Dissanayake, the JVP, and the party’s electoral alliance the National People’s Power (NPP), have done much to distance themselves from the JVP’s past – or rather, the insurrectionary ‘communist’ part of the party’s past! They’ve made clear that they are a ‘respectable’, centre-ground party now. But there has been no repudiation or apology for the party’s long history of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism.

There was no hint of a class appeal to the masses, to unite the working masses across the ethnic divide, whose common suffering has taken on agonising proportions in the past two years. This was thus a key limiting factor in restraining the potential for the NPP/JVP’s success, which is already restrained by its dubious past.

Dissanayake has reassured those who really call the shots – the capitalists – that his programme will be a responsible one, of respecting the deals done with the IMF, of perhaps amending this or that of the harshest aspects of the debt restructuring programme, but otherwise ensuring that the creditors get their pound of flesh. 

The whole thrust of the party’s programme has been one of ‘fighting corruption’ and ‘good governance’. By cutting out the graft and corruption that is endemic to politics in a country like Sri Lanka, AKD assured the masses that his government would be able to refund education, healthcare, and certain social programmes, to take the edge off austerity, whilst restoring the public finances and economic stability.

This is sheer nonsense. The crisis into which Sri Lanka has been plunged is a consequence of the overarching crisis of world capitalism. There will only be an economic recovery once austerity and attacks against the working class reduce labour costs to such miserable levels that international capital can be guaranteed handsome profits.

Dissanayake’s programme, by directing the fury of the masses against ‘corruption’ instead of capitalism, is music to the ears of the IMF and the big creditors. But the latter nonetheless fear that the masses, drawing confidence from the blow they’ve dealt against the old ruling clique, will have expectations that go far beyond the NPP’s empty programme.

That’s the problem when your programme is a void: the masses can fill it with whatever content they imagine.

Prospects

What can we expect going forward? Firstly, the JVP/NPP will face a struggle to consolidate its power after this victory. AKD has dissolved parliament and called new elections. This is a popular move. The old Rajapaksa-dominated parliament is absurdly out of keeping with the real feeling in the country.

But the NPP faces multiple hurdles. Dissanayake’s victory was not as convincing as he might have hoped. For all the above mentioned reasons, he is, in fact, the first Sri Lankan president since 1978 who has been elected while failing to gain more than 50 percent of first-preference votes.

This presents a dilemma. Unless the NPP can get a majority of MPs in the upcoming parliamentary elections, which it is far from guaranteed, a crisis immediately beckons. If it emerges as the biggest party but remains short of a majority it will either be utterly unable to govern – a government of crisis from day one – or it will be forced to enter a coalition.

But with whom would it enter coalition? Presumably one or other of the very same rotten, dynastic parties whose corruption it has promised to root out. Its anti-corruption programme will fall into smithereens.

The old ruling elite is now closing ranks to contest the upcoming elections and protect their common interests. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP is presently in discussion with Sajith Premadasa’s SJB to contest the election jointly.

They will be pulling out all the stops. So will AKD and the JVP/NPP. They face the disadvantage that they lack a party machine based on extensive clientelism. We can expect a few tokenistic moves on the part of AKD to boost the party’s chances, like the recent recall of all luxury ministerial cars, so symbolic of the opulence of the governing elite.

But the real trouble for the JVP/NPP would begin if they actually win these elections and get their majority. This victory has emboldened the masses after two hard years. They will be putting pressure on the new government to deliver something beyond symbolic measures like the arrest of the most corrupt former regime figures.

They have no intention of going after the wealth of the foreign capitalists and the domestic elite that have really drained the nation. There will be enormous pressure, meanwhile, to return to the IMF to renegotiate the debt restructuring in order to remove the most onerous austerity conditions.

The party has maintained an ambivalent stance on this question. They must surely know that, whilst this is what the masses desperately desire, they can hope for no better terms from the IMF.

Even if the IMF could afford to do so, for political reasons, they cannot grant any further concessions after the agreement reached with the outgoing government of Ranil Wickremesinghe. To do so would send a potent message to the oppressed masses in dozens of countries facing bankruptcy around the world that revolution pays off.

The results of this election are a product of the revolution in 2022. The ruling class has tried to use the mailed fist. Now it must use the velvet glove to deceive the masses / Image: Batapola Antenna

To anyone who holds sincere illusions that AKD and the JVP/NPP could successfully renegotiate a deal, we point to the example of Greece.

There, the Greek masses elected the left government of Syriza on a far less unambiguous programme than AKD of renegotiating bailout conditions with the IMF. After the negotiations, in which Syriza dared to mobilise the masses, they imposed far harsher terms to punish the Greek masses for their defiance, and Syriza capitulated. On the back of that betrayal, the traditional party of Greek capital, the New Democracy, was able to claw its way back to power.

Sri Lanka’s government will enjoy no greater success in appealing to the ‘goodwill’ of the imperialist institutions and blood-sucking creditors.

The election of AKD is a fruit of the Sri Lankan revolution of 2022. Under the Rajapaksas and Ranil Wickremesinghe, the ruling class has attempted to rule through brute repression. Now, through the JVP/NPP, they will be forced to switch tack, and to rule through sweet promises and illusions. In his inaugural speech as president, AKD said the following: “There is one dream our people see every new day the sun rises. That is, ‘tomorrow will be better than today!’”

Yes, these are very picturesque words, and they indeed express the very modest hope of the Sri Lankan people. But your party’s programme cannot guarantee such a thing. The capitalist system, that you defend, promises only an ever darker tomorrow.

The Sri Lankan working class will have to pass through this new school of promises and sweet words, from which its vanguard will draw more advanced conclusions. Not only the old cliques, but the whole system must be uprooted.

Only the repudiation of the debt and the expropriation of the local oligarchy and foreign capital can offer a way out of the nightmare into which the people have been plunged. Such a path, which a revolutionary party of the advanced workers and youth alone would be able to take, would light the way for the socialist revolution across the Subcontinent, which at present is a seething cauldron of revolutionary anger.