While endorsing LIONEL’s emphasis on a pluralist path to some sort of modus vivendi in Sri Lanka, I remain pessimistic about the prospects given the present chauvinist policies of the government and its allies, with a sharpening ‘nativist’ edge reminiscent of the ‘1956 ideology’.
Here, let me follow this tangential line by taking up the interesting extension of comradeship by MUTHU. Having chatted with Lionel recently I was made aware of a recent slice of history that was not known to me: namely the JVP’s active propaganda work among Tamils in Tamil regions in the period 1978-83, work in which Lionel Bopage was a leading hand.
This was undoubtedly genuine effort to build a radical socialist alliance across the developing ethnic divide. I gather, though, that it did not produce the anticipated results: in the sense that the support in these Tamil areas for Wijeweera’s presidential candidature at the 1982 (?) elections was minimal. So that Wijeweera subsequently took his JVP organisation in increasingly chauvinist directions ‘a direction that Bopage opposed so that he left the party.
These bare facts suggest s that by 1976/77 the die was cast ‘the younger Tamil generations were too alienated to grasp the hands across the divide extended by revolutionary Sinhala youth even though, like Muthu, they showed up to talk. This is an issue on which I desire more info relating to those times.
That said, I still believe that the JVP Mach I, the JVP of the 1965-71 era, did have a staunch nativist current of thinking, spiced further with some measure of neo-mercantilist self-sufficiency economics, in its bag of ’solutions.’ It is for this reason that on one occasion I briefly described the JVP of that era as the children of the Old Left and the children of 1956.
Bopage’s departure was ones tep in the transformation of the JVP into an increasingly chauvinist force of a virulent sort, that is, it marked the dilution of the social justice programmes of a trans-ethnic kind in favour of the populist and nativist rhetoric of the type associated with 1956.
Mahinda Chinthanaya has since stolen the clothes of this JVP, donned the hat of Jathika Chinthanaya and pre-empted both the JHU and the Sihala Urumaya. This is populism par excellence namely all things to all (Sinhala) men and women. But it is also dangerously inward-looking, ostrich-head-in-the-sand.
Maybe I should become indigenous too and say kukulage-oluva-in the sand!