JVP

JVP does not know fundamentals of Marxist politics.  They started with a bloody revolution  with which it  achieved only the fear of the people for its criminal excesses and the peoples’ hatred. May be there is no single family in the south of Sri Lanka which did not have a relative of theirs murdered by the JVP, or a severed head of the head of a family stuck on a stick and planted in front of the house. 

There were gruesome stories one of which  was that  the father was taken away by a JVP man  and  a message was sent to the family that he would come in the evening and gave a parcel of meat saying that he wanted it prepared for dinner. The mother prepared a meat curry and rice. She made the children eat and go to bed. The mother  waited for her husband, and as it was getting late she had her  dinner as well and went to sleep. The following morning when she opened the door her husband’s severed head stuck on a stick had been planted in front of the house.  The meat sent to the family through the  JVP messenger was her own husbands flesh.

The JVP has a cruel criminal history that the Sinhala people will not forget. It was worse for the Sinhala people, than it would have been for the Tamil people in the North under terrorism. People lived in fear. When the JVPers came in the night, people blew out the lamps.  They dare not open a door or a window, unless the JVP criminals surrounding the house asked them to pass their identity cards, money, gold or silver through the windows.

That is what the JVP had been and those are the indelible memories  left behind in the minds of the people. Now they have different rhetoric condemning Mahinda Rajapakse  and ever since the Yahapalanaya set their dirty paws in the political cake JVP did not stop their march to the office of the Commissioner for Bribery and Corruption with files accusing the Ministers  of the Mahinda Rajapakse government.   It is not the SLFP or the Mahinda Rajapakse Regime that was responsible for political crimes, but JVP and UNP as much as the JVP,for  UNP too has its criminal past. The killing and burning Sinhala youth on heaps of tyres, and torturing and killing youth in many torture camps such as in Batalanda, by Ranil Wickramasinghe under President R.Premadasa.

JVP knows that even though there are crowds at their meetings, the people  are reticent in giving them political power.  The tendency will never change as the people are distancing themselves from JVP politics. Marxists know that they cannot depend on Parliamentary elections to come to power therefore if a revolution of the proletariats is not possible they should make use of the popular political party to ride on it to gain political recognition. The JVP knows it by experience as it was when it contested as a partner of the UPFA coalition that it  won 39 parliamentary seats.  But since they left that coalition and contested on their own or with  other political parties they  failed to have a respectable number of seats. At the last General election with all the pretentious rhetoric they got only 6 parliamentary seats.

The present JVP political strategy was explained by Lalakantha  a  senior member of JVP at a television  programme in which he was interviewed.  He says JVP has no trust in any of the political parties. If the JVP is to support UNP it would indirectly benefit the former President Mahinda Rajapakse, and if the JVP were to support Mahinda Rajapakse it would be to the benefit of  the UNP. Therefore, the JVP is opposed to both  which would  enable them to prepare the ground for a third political force- which would of course be  the JVP.

We saw this strategy when JVP joined forces with the capitalist UNP, the ambitious JHU, racist TNA, and the outsider who remains on the fringe to take what they can without any effort- the SLMC. Here the effort of the JVP was to defeat the Presidential candidate Mahinda Rajapakse. Since  the defeat of Mahinda Rajapakse, there is  a UNP-SLFP government supported by the -TNA-JVP-JHU-SLMC lead by Maithripala Sirisena as the President.

After the Presidential elections JVP was taking all measures possible to bring Mahinda Rajapakse and his  family to courts accused of various malpractices to prove to the people  Mahinda Rajapakse was not a patriotic people friendly politician but a rogue  who was trying to accumulate wealth and allow his family members and friends to do so with various projects he initiated and carried out leaving behind a huge debt.

Wasantha Samarasinghe of the JVP is its voice against corruption, and we saw him in that role with many files accusing  Rajapakse’s and his collaborators in the previous government under his arm going to the  Office of the Commissioner for Bribery and Corruption making statements to media with great assurance that  JVP has enough material to lock up the Rajapakses in prison. They have still failed because Rajapakses did not make money and they did a job of work for the betterment of Sri Lanka. Their work is there to be seen, a witness to posterity.

Wasantha Samarasinghe and JVP accused Rajapakses as thieves and got others of the UNP,and JHU to do so, passed judgment, and hanged them before even the courts and judges found an iota of evidence to find them guilty of any thin that had been accused of,  and they are still looking for  ways and means to  prove the Rajapakses are thieves. All that is because the JVP and the whole of Yahapalanay know that Mahinda Rajapakse is popular and more they accuse him more he becomes popular.

JVP is spending sleepless nights thinking of ways to remove Rajapakses from the political scene so that the stage will be free for their pranks, and fool  the people to make them give their votes to form a JVP government. JVP knows that  UNP is in business because of the Tamils, the Muslims and the Catholics. But JVP is putting all their cards on Marxist theories to get a majority in Parliament.

In a Parliamentary democracy and in a country like Sri Lanka Marxist theories do not give desired results. The JVP’s only means to have a respectable number of  representatives in the parliament is to ride on a popular political party. That too should be that of Mahinda Rajapakse and the Joint Opposition. On its own or being in a  coalition with UNP, JVP will never get more than 6 seats, which is the maximum they could hope for, even if they manage to  “lock up” all Rajapakses

In a recent Derana TV programme where the subject of discussion was on “left wing politics” the participants were  Nimal Devasiri, Vasudeva Nanayakkara,Tissa Vitaharana, Lal Kantha of JVP and Pubudu Jagoda. There was lot of Marxist theories  discussed to define Imperialism in modern left wing politics,but unfortunately they were far away from the political context in which Sri Lanka finds itself today.

Vasudeva Nanayakkara and Tissa Vitharan pointed out to them that while they theorise left politics as it should apply to the  Sri Lankan situation, the sovereignty of  Sri Lanka is being usurped by the USA, even proposing its intervention in writing  a new Constitution to Sri Lanka, setting up a Naval base in Trincomalee, and acquiring six acres of prime land in Colombo to put up buildings by an American construction firm, probably to set up a military base to keep the Chinese built port city under constant survey.

The Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe is the most powerful man in Sri Lanka. The  President Maithripala Sirisena only makes speeches leading a quiet life in his President’s House in fear of Ranil Wickramasinghe to whom he is indebted for his position as thr President of Sri Lanka. 

President Maithripala Sirisena wanted Arjun Mahendran removed from the Central Bank and appointed a Governor of his choice. Maithripala Sirisena would have been happy as after all he had his own way despite  his Prime Minister. But Ranil Wickramasinghe appointed Arjun Mahendran as his adviser taking him every where he goes.

The USA has still not given a cent to Sri Lanka for development work, but spends lot of money to make Sri Lanka a strategic American base from which to keep China and Russia in check.  The President Maithripala Sirisena has even agreed to buy fighter planes, despite Sri Lanka’s  dwindling finances and debt (which Yahapalanaya says is the main reason for the proposed Value Added Tax) , apparently to satisfy the demands of America through its Ambassador.

But JVP continues to call Rajapakses thieves, and that  UNP is mismanaging the country and demands that they be given the country to rule. The people are already suffering under Yahapalanaya Government and see no light at the end of  the darkest tunnel into which Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickramasinghe have dragged the country.

The people of Sri Lanka in this predicament will never turn to JVP, but certainly to Mahinda Rajapakse and the Joint Opposition to find a safe way out.