When Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected President of Sri Lanka in September, and his National People’s Power [NPP] alliance swept the general elections on November 14, most international news headlines stamped the winners as ‘Marxist’.

The tag was hardly positive or even neutral with its connotations of wild-eyed radicalism. The insinuation was that Sri Lanka’s ongoing programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would derail, and economic stability and recovery would be disrupted.

President Dissanayake, through his November 21 policy statement to the new Parliament, that he will take forward the IMF framework and the aligned debt treatment plans — finalised by his predecessor — tried to allay these fears.

President Dissanayake, through his November 21 policy statement to the new Parliament, that the IMF framework and the aligned debt treatment plans with bilateral and private creditors — finalised by his predecessor — will go ahead, tried to allay these fears.

So where does this ‘Marxist label’ on Sri Lanka’s new government come from? The NPP is an eclectic social coalition of some 21 groups, including political parties, youth and women’s organisations, trade unions and civil society networks. But one political party forms its political, if not ideological, core — the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front).

In fact, it was JVP leader Mr. Dissanayake who created the NPP in 2019 to widen the party’s appeal beyond its traditional cadre base and boost its chances at the polls. His political enterprise, which has now secured a massive victory, has turned a new page in post-colonial Sri Lanka, where politics has been dominated by just two parties and their offshoots, and the five elite families controlling them.

The JVP’s office in Battaramulla, a suburb about 10 km east of Colombo, is located close to parliament, although the party has rarely been close to power in the six decades of its existence. Three large black-and-white portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin adorn the white wall of the main meeting room. Party cadre, regardless of position or prominence, make and serve tea to their guests. Above the reception desk at the entrance is a photograph of the party’s founder and charismatic leader Rohana Wijeweera, an infallible icon for its cadre. His mane, cap, and beard suggest Che Guevara-inspired self-styling.

Wijeweera began what became the JVP in 1965, exactly three decades after Ceylon’s left movement birthed the country’s oldest party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), consequent to serial fractures within the Left. The LSSP split during the Second World War, leading to the formation of a pro-Moscow Communist Party. The cracks within the CP in the 1960s, triggered by the Sino-Soviet dispute, and internal tensions over the parliamentary road to socialism would, in turn, lead to the formation of the JVP, as a revolutionary party with Marxist-Leninist orientation.

‘Five classes’

Attracted to Maoism in his student days in the Soviet Union, Wijeweera joined the Communist Party (Peking wing – CP) of Sri Lanka in 1964, and became a youth leader. He challenged the party’s leadership, on their interpretation of class politics and revolution, and was subsequently expelled in 1965. His independent faction morphed into the JVP. Wijeweera and his comrades held political lessons for rural Sinhala youth, called the “Five Classes” that analysed Sri Lanka’s social and political order; Indian hegemony; the reformist left and coalition politics; and the parliamentary road to socialism. As part of preparation to achieving their objective of seizing state power, they trained in the use of shotguns and put together explosive devices.

The story of the JVP’s rise in the late 1960s and fall in the next two decades unravels in the backdrop of two major changes in Sri Lanka — President J.R. Jayewardene’s open economic reform in 1977 and the beginning of a full-blown civil war after the 1983, state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom that he falsely attributed to Left parties, including the JVP.

The JVP’s first insurrection in 1971 came out of frustration that the left-wing Sirimavo Bandaranaike-led government was not doing enough to meet the aspirations of educated but unemployed young people, and in changing the social, economic and political order inherited from the British. The discourse was anti-imperialist and socialist. The insurgents attacked dozens of police stations, to capture weapons and ammunition.

The second insurrection, from 1987 to 1989, roughly coincided with the party’s embrace of Sinhala-nationalism; its fierce opposition to Tamil self-determination; and to the signing of the India-brokered 1987 Accord aimed at ending the war, with boots-on-the-ground in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). To Tamils in the far north of the island, the JVP appeared as Sinhala chauvinist instead of progressive, although the party never directly engaged in anti-Tamil violence.

In both insurrections, where the JVP took up arms against the state, its representatives, supporters, and dissidents from the Left [in the second insurrection], the state’s counter-insurgency response was many times more lethal, resulting in the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of Sinhala youth. Wijeweera himself was executed while in state custody in 1989.

Somawansa Amarasinghe, the only politburo member to survive the repression of the 1980s, escaped to India and subsequently to Europe. After a few years of underground existence, the surviving cadre resurrected the party, even as the country was increasingly preoccupied with massive human rights violations in the south and the raging war in the north-east. The JVP tentatively contested in the 1994 general election through another party, winning one seat. Within the next few years, the JVP warmed up to the political mainstream, winning more seats in parliament between 2000 and 2004, and four Cabinet-level ministerial portfolios in 2004–05, in a short-lived coalition with the Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga government.

Two splits

The new course of the JVP is defined by two consequential splits, linked to the party’s proximity to Mahinda Rajapaksa who began dominating the political scene from the early 2000s. They were also fuelled by internal differences on the dilution of leftism for “patriotism” (Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism), versus emphasis on Wijeweera’s socialist ideology and the party distancing itself from Mr. Rajapaksa and his pro-war stance.

Since the breakdown of the 2001-03 ceasefire, the JVP unambiguously backed Mr. Rajapaksa’s hawkishness in delivering a political solution to the Tamil question, and the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with scant regard to Tamil lives. The JVP’s differences with Rajapaksa were more to do with their unease over ‘family-rule’ and his socio-economic policies rather than his militaristic response. However, its parliamentary group leader and reactionary politician Wimal Weerawansa disagreed, and broke away with a quarter of its legislators, forming the Jathika Nidahas Peramuna or National Freedom Front in 2008, that until recently firmly planted itself in the Rajapaksa camp. Four years later a Marxist faction within the residual JVP also split from it, criticising the party’s unconditional support to the Rajapaksa regime on the handling of the war, and its complete surrender to electoral politics. This group led by Kumar Gunaratnam formed the Frontline Socialist Party in 2012, the chief critic of the JVP today, from the left.

In 2014, Mr. Dissanayake was named leader of a party that had to stabilise itself, after shedding both its racist right-wing and its dissenting left-wing. The splits allowed the JVP to refashion itself, blurring its past profiles, and making a reputation for itself inside and outside parliament, as a bold critic of corruption and nepotism, and as an upholder of the rule of law and liberal democratic norms. The party, till date, is wary of clearly defining its position on the unresolved ethnic question. It also evades the language of class politics. In an interview to The Hindu in December 2023, Mr. Dissanayake said: “Labels have always given wrong perceptions. Left politics is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. Some people demonise this. That is why we say we are focussed more on working for the majority of our people, rather than on labels.”

Vijitha Herath receives a document from Sri Lanka’s President Anura Kumara Dissanayake after being sworn-in as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment, and Tourism during the swearing-in ceremony of the new Cabinet in Colombo on November 18, 2024. Photo: Sri Lanka President’s Media Division via AFP

On the morning of November 16, 2024, I was following the final tally of preferential votes secured by candidates in Sri Lanka’s recent general elections. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) alliance won a historic mandate of more than a two-thirds majority. Vijitha Herath, the NPP candidate in Colombo’s neighbouring Gampaha district, broke records by winning more than 7 lakh votes. He has been named Foreign Minister in the new government.

At the same time, a memory popped up on my social media. It was a short video clip of my interview with Mr. Herath six years ago. On November 16, 2018, Mr. Herath was among those injured when some people in the Rajapaksa camp violently attacked Members of Parliament who were challenging the sudden appointment of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister in place of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had been abruptly sacked by President Maithripala Sirisena. Sri Lanka was in the grip of a political impasse for some seven weeks until the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Sirisena’s move was illegal, and Mr. Wickremesinghe was reinstated.

In a fascinating coincidence, Mr. Herath, who in 2018 was a legislator with the opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), made headlines the same day six years later as part of a new political force that has decimated the island’s old political class, including the Rajapaksas, Mr. Sirisena, and Mr. Wickremesinghe.

It is as if decades happened in these six years in Sri Lanka. During this time, the island witnessed the deadly Easter Sunday serial blasts in April 2019, the election victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in November 2019, the pandemic from 2020, Mr. Gotabaya’s mighty fall in July 2022 in the wake of a crippling economic crisis and a citizens’ uprising, and now, the meteoric rise of Mr. Dissanayake and his political alliance. The near-erasure from Sri Lanka’s electoral map of the country’s traditional, once-powerful political parties and the political elite that controlled them signals a tectonic shift.

While polls are exciting news events for the media, reporters learn a lot more while covering what happens between elections. What seems a “tectonic” electoral shift is often the cumulative effect of many complex political changes on the ground, invariably tethered to how most people in a country are doing. As reporters, we have a distinct advantage. We don’t have to predict precise poll outcomes; all we need to do is listen to diverse voices to try and capture voter sentiment in our coverage.

Invariably, this sort of ground reporting allows us to glean some clear pointers to a likely poll outcome, even if not the extent of someone’s win. Both the defeat of Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2015 and the victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019 were not entirely surprising for many of us who report from Sri Lanka. That said, there are specific results that surprise us at times, either because our reading was biased or simply wrong. Either way, there is incentive to return to good, old-fashioned reporting.

In the case of the NPP’s victory in Sri Lanka’s recent election, the story, in a sense, began in 2018. With just six MPs in the 225-member House then, the JVP made compelling interventions in Parliament, besides moving the Supreme Court with others against Mr. Sirisena’s anti-democratic, unconstitutional move. The NPP was set up the following year as a counter to the political establishment, which was tainted by allegations of serious corruption and nepotism. Not long after, the country witnessed an unprecedented mass struggle in 2022, staggering in its magnitude and intensity. The headless citizens’ movement did what the political opposition couldn’t: eject the powerful Rajapaksas from office. Two years later, the NPP is in power now, with 159 out of the 225 members in the new Parliament convened on November 21.

meera.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in

Tilvin Silva, general secretary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front) of Sri Lanka, is seen at the party’s headquarters in Colombo on November 15, 2024, after the party-led alliance secured a landslide win in the island nation’s parliamentary elections.  
| Photo Credit: Meera Srinivasan

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna [JVP or People’s Liberation Front], which leads Sri Lanka’s ruling National People’s Power [NPP], could not have risen to power without widening its appeal and building a mass support base over the last few years, and the current political moment affords the party a chance to rewrite its history, general secretary Tilvin Silva said.

“When you want to obtain power, you need a mass support base,” he said on Friday (November 15, 2024), just as the NPP’s resounding win in the November 14 general elections became evident. Speaking to The Hindu at the party’s headquarters in Battaramulla near Colombo, Mr. Silva called the election win “a huge achievement”. “In particular, the victory in Jaffna and in the upcountry area, where we were able to defeat deeply entrenched traditional parties and political families. This gives us a real chance to build a united country,” he said, referring to the JVP’s historic win in the Tamil-majority northern district.

The party that once vehemently opposed Tamils’ political rights won three seats in Jaffna, outdoing traditional Tamil parties that were the community’s main voice in national politics. In Nuwara Eliya district, in the central hill country that is home to Sri Lanka’s famed tea estates and Malaiyaha Tamils who toil in them, the NPP won five seats and nearly 42% of the vote share.

Barely two months after President Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected President, the NPP fought Thursday’s (November 14, 2024) election knowing it would win. “Even those who were sceptical of us earlier began seeing that we were very committed to rebuilding the country, its political culture and economy,” Mr. Silva said.

Broadening the base

“We began appealing to more people just in the last one and a half months.” However, the NPP did not project a two-third majority, which is hard to obtain in Sri Lanka’s proportional representation system. On election day, Mr. Dissanayake said he expected “strong representation” in parliament, and that two-thirds would not be necessary.

Mr. Silva told local media on Friday (November 15, 2024): “We did not ask for a two-thirds majority. The public believed in us and gave us this power. Our responsibility is to carefully use this power and to safeguard their trust.”

Set up in 2019, the NPP is a broad social coalition rather than a conventional electoral alliance of different parties. It identifies as a “political movement”, comprising 21 diverse groups, including political parties, youth and women’s organisations, trade unions and civil society networks. The JVP remains its chief constituent, making up its political core. All the same, party general secretary Mr. Silva did not run in the elections, deciding to keep the party and government separate.

“The main problem in our country was the political culture. The foundation of the grave economic crisis we suffered was this very political culture,” he said, referring to political parties and groups “fighting bitterly” in the past for state resources, vehicles, “to enrich their own families”.

“If we want to defeat that culture, we felt it was important to keep that distinction between the party and the government.” On the relationship among the party’s influential politburo, the NPP, and the government, he said: “It’s not as if we’re different political groups taking different decisions. We work as one unit [on policy matters].”

Past vs. present

The JVP has seen considerable shifts in the last five decades. The party with Marxist-Leninist origins led two armed insurrections — in 1971 and in 1987-89. Its ideological emphasis changed from Marxism and redistributive justice in the 1970s to Sinhala chauvinism in the 1980s, when it resisted power-sharing with the Tamils.

However, Mr. Silva contended that the party’s history needed to be retold with context. “There is a wrong perception because our history was written by those who defeated us, the victors. Our path was not willingly chosen, it was forced upon us.” Alluding to the allegations of brutal violence facing the JVP, he added: “It was not [our] action, but a reaction from our end. If the [state’s] repression was armed, so was [our] response.”

In his view, the current political moment in Sri Lanka has opened up space to rewrite the story of not just the party, but also of the country, “without characterising some as terrorists who took up arms for no reason”. “But we want to tell this story not with words, but with our action. The present context gives a chance to do that.”

Queried on concerns among sections that the “Marxist party” might resist the Dissanayake government’s efforts to take forward the ongoing programme of the International Monetary Fund aimed at addressing Sri Lanka’s debt vulnerabilities, Mr. Silva pointed to “misconceptions” about Marxism. “It is not a set philosophy. Marxism is really about providing answers to people’s problems at a particular time and context. We are committed to doing that through development, eliminating rural poverty, rooting out political corruption, social justice and national unity that is important for our country. We want to build a clean and beautiful Sri Lanka.”

The political landscape in Sri Lanka is set to change as its citizens elect a new President on Saturday. Sri Lanka’s 17 million voters will choose from among 39 candidates in the country’s first election after the people’s uprising of 2022, which led to then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s ouster.

This year’s election is dominated by two major alliances, the SJB (Samagi Jana Balawegaya) and the NPP (National People’s Power), apart from various smaller parties and independent candidates.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe of the UNP (United National Party) is contesting as an independent. Wickremesinghe, popularly known as RW, is being supported by many rebel legislators of the SLPP (Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna) headed by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Also in the contest are opposition leader Sajith Premadasa from the SJB alliance; leftist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) – the presidential candidate of NPP – and Mahinda’s son, Namal Rajapaksa, as the SLPP candidate.

Poll surveys and experts suggest that Lankan voters are prioritising issues such as economy, education, health, law, and security. Matters of corruption and wrongdoing among politicians, which dominated the electoral narrative, have receded into the background after the 2022 unrest. Since most governments in the past didn’t solve the corruption issue, people feel it’s better to talk about development. They hope to elect a leader who can pull them out of dire poverty.

Gloomy past

In the last election, held after the Easter bombings on April 21, 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa of SLPP (Namal’s uncle) won a decisive victory and Sajith Premadasa came second. However, three years later, the world saw Sri Lankans oust President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, having endured a steady economic slide. The flawed economic and monetary policies of Gotabaya, along with the COVID-19 pandemic that dented tourism – a chunk of the economy – resulted in an unsustainable debt level. In April 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt and asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for assistance. The Russia-Ukraine war further aggravated the crisis with rising food, medicine and fuel prices resulting in mass protests never seen before in the country’s history.

The uprising was given the name of ‘Janatha Aragalaya‘ (a Sinhala term). Then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned and subsequently, his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa quit as President and fled. Ranil Wickremesinghe, a former minister, became Prime Minister. In July 2022, Ranil took over as president through a parliamentary vote with the support of the Rajapaksas’ party SLPP, which still has the majority in the legislature. Ranil Wickremesinghe adopted severe austerity measures, with support from the IMF.

New leaders

Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s inept governance and his decision to leave the country tarred the image of the Rajapaksa clan and the SLPP the most. Most SLPP MPs are supporting either Ranil or Sajith in this election. Namal Rajapaksa, they say, is just a symbolic candidate to keep the SLPP alive.

Sajith’s SJB has the support of the Tamil and Muslim minorities, who form 11% and 9% of the population.

Though Tamil parties have fielded a common candidate, the largest party ITAK (Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi) has extended its support to Sajith Premadasa. In 2019 also, Tamils had voted for Sajith but there was an unprecedented consolidation of Sinhala votes behind Gotabhaya Rajapaksa after the Easter bombings, which helped him win the election.

The political space created by Rajapaksas’ dismissal was filled by Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the JVP, who urged Sri Lankans to go for a broader change. Once in the margins, the party has emerged as a credible, major political force.

As far as Ranil Wickremesinghe is concerned, most members of his party UNP are now with Sajith, though he has support from some legislators of the SLPP like state Defence Minister Premitha Bandara Tennakoon. Ranil is banking on his handling of the economic crisis to fetch him votes.

“People want change this time. They don’t want to vote for the same party and old candidates. The new voters, especially on social media, are rooting for Anura Dissanayake. However, on the ground Sajith has a lot of support base, especially in the rural areas,” says Thushara Gooneratne, editor-in-chief, Mawrata News.

“Most people think of Sajith as pro-poor just like his father, former President R Premadasa.”

India’s Stake

In recent times, anti-India sentiment has surged in the neighbourhood, because of various reasons. Be it Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, politicians have been successful in diverting the people’s ire towards India.

For India, the sorry plight of the Tamil population in the north and east of Sri Lanka has been a concern for a long time. Successive Lankan governments have failed to implement the 13th Amendment signed as part of India-Sri Lanka agreement in 1987, which provided for devolution of powers to local governments in the north and the east. India, in fact, raised the Sri Lankan Tamil issue at the 51st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2022. With the new government, India would like to push for the restoration of provincial councils, which would give a measure of autonomy to Lankan Tamils.

India has stakes in a stable and peaceful Sri Lanka. It wants to restrict China’s growing interference in the country because of its geo-strategic location in the Indo-Pacific. The 99-year lease of Hambantota port to China in 2017, feeding the debt-trap narrative, has exacerbated India’s concerns.

Anura Dissanayake’s party has often been seen as close to China, India’s principal geopolitical rival. But for some time now, Dissanayake has enjoyed a different kind of authority within Sri Lankan politics, which has in turn earned him recognition as a rising political force even from India’s point of view. As a reflection of this, New Delhi invited Dissanayake in February to engage with him.

“Whoever wins this time will engage with India. Sajith is pro-India. But even Dissanayake, who was known to be anti-India before. India is important for Sri Lanka’s growth and stability,” says Thushara.

India needs all the goodwill it can command in order to navigate the increasing complexities in the neighbourhood, The escalating regional conflicts and a continuous shift in the global economic order. A friendly, stable neighbourhood is a good start.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, presidential candidate of Opposition political party National People’s Power. File
| Photo Credit: AP

The Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) on Monday (September 16, 2024) vowed to cancel the Adani Group’s wind power project in Sri Lanka if it gets elected in the presidential election scheduled for the weekend.

JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the presidential candidate from the broader front National People’s Power (NPP), told a political chat show here that they would annul the project.

Asked if the project posed a threat to the island nation’s energy sector sovereignty, Mr. Dissanayake said, “Yes. We will definitely cancel it as it threatens our energy sovereignty.” The JVP, which led a bloody anti-India rebellion in the island nation between 1987 and 1990 following India’s direct intervention in the Lankan civil war through the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord, is believed to be leading in the unofficial polls ahead of the September 21 election.

The JVP dubbed the Indo-Lanka Accord a betrayal of the nation and killed the then-ruling party members, supporters and other political activists who supported the pact signed between then-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and J.R. Jayewardena, the President of Sri Lanka at that time.

A crucial election in Sri Lanka | Explained

The Adani Group has faced fundamental rights litigation in Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court after it got approval for the proposed construction of a wind power project in the island nation’s northeastern regions of Mannar and Pooneryn.

The Adani Group was set to invest over $440 million in the 20-year agreement for the development of 484 megawatts of wind power in the region.

Editorial | Back from the brink: On the Sri Lankan elections and the road ahead

Petitioners have raised environmental concerns and lack of transparency in the bidding process to grant Adani Green Energy the go-ahead.

Petitioners have also argued that the agreed tariff of $0.0826 per kWh would be a loss to Sri Lanka and should be lowered to $0.005 per kWh.

The story so far: On February 5, an unlikely visitor landed in Delhi from Sri Lanka on an official invitation. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, received a red carpet welcome, following which two top officials spent time with him in the capital. The main constituent of the NPP is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), and Mr. Dissanayake is its leader. The Indian outreach to the JVP has set off much speculation in Sri Lanka. The country is to go through a presidential election this year followed by parliamentary elections this year or the next. A survey conducted by the Health Policy Institute showed that 50% of respondents favoured Mr. Dissanayake as the next President. Since its inception, the party has had a bad history with India. But Mr. Dissanayake’s meetings with National Security Adviser A. K. Doval and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar have created new optics in the run-up to the election.

Who are the JVP?

Over its five decade-existence, the JVP, which calls itself Marxist, but has been mostly a Sinhala nationalist party, has viewed India as an expansionist power seeking to colonise Sri Lanka.

The JVP was formed in 1965. Its founder Rohana Wijeweera, who came from a family of modest means in coastal southern Sri Lanka, already had exposure to leftist ideologies through the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, before he went as a student to Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba International University, where he mingled with leftists from all over the world. On his return, he aligned himself with the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist), before breaking away to form the JVP, with the intention of creating a revolution to turn Sri Lanka into a socialist state. Its members were mostly the youth who were unable to find jobs in the Sri Lankan economy, comprising British-era trading houses manned by Colombo’s English-speaking elites.

The cadres of JVP imbibed the party ideology from lectures known as the Five Classes — on the crisis of the capitalist system in Sri Lanka; history of Sri Lanka’s left movement; history of socialist revolutions; Indian expansionism; and the path of revolution in Sri Lanka. However, within no time, JVP found it more expedient to push class struggle to the back-burner, and became a vehicle for majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist sentiments.

What happened in 1971?

In the 1970 election, the JVP campaigned for Sirima Bandaranaike’s leftist United Front coalition comprising of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party. But the JVP’s support for Sri Lanka’s ‘bourgeois’ left was short-lived. In April 1971, it carried out an armed insurrection. The plan was to take over police stations first. The government, despite receiving prior intelligence, was caught unprepared. A state of Emergency was declared and Wijeweera was jailed. But the Sri Lankan tri-services were a ceremonial force and the government had to appeal to foreign nations for help. The Indian Army, Navy and Air Force played a part in thwarting the rebellion. The insurrection was overcome after a few weeks and some 15,000 JVP cadres were arrested. The death toll was over a 1,000, including civilians, police personnel and Sri Lankan armed forces personnel.

In 1977, with the election of J. R. Jayewardene, who went on to politically dominate the country for a decade, the Sri Lankan economy changed full tilt from the Bandarnaike era of socialist nationalisation, to liberalisation and the entry of free market forces. Jayewardene also released all JVP prisoners including Wijeweera, who went on to contest the 1982 presidential election, polling 4% of the vote. Some make the case that Jayewardene used the JVP to weaken the SLFP and the “old left”. Indeed, the JVP made SLFP’s Sinhala Buddhist plank its own from about the time of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots and the flaring up of the Sinhala-Tamil ethnic conflict.

What was the context for the JVP’s second insurrection?

Delhi’s growing involvement in the conflict led to anti-India sentiment among the Sinhalese majority. In June 1987, the Indian Air Force carried out Operation Poomalai to airdrop food to the north of Sri Lanka, which was Tamil-dominated, at a time when Sri Lankan forces had laid siege to the province, believing that they had cornered the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The next month came the India-Sri Lanka Accord under which Sri Lanka introduced an amendment in its Constitution to devolve political power to the Tamil north and east. However, the LTTE rejected the Accord, and the soldiers that India sent under the banner of the Indian Peace Keeping Force to disarm the LTTE, soon found themselves in a war against the group.

JVP launched protests against the presence of Indian troops on Sri Lankan soil. Among the Sinhalese, the protests found widespread support. The Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when he was attacked by a sailor at a guard of honour at the airport after the signing of the Accord in Colombo. Even SLFP workers joined hands with the JVP on the ground. However, the JVP did not take on the Indian Army or even the Tamils, directing its violence on fellow Sinhalese in southern Sri Lanka. Government officials, police personnel, teachers, students of rival unions and political activists — with its lists of “traitors”, the JVP went after all of them. Lampost hangings, tyre pyres and bodies on roads were a common sight. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s husband, Vijaya Kumaratunga, a charismatic film star-turned-politician, was shot dead. The government’s brutality in putting down the insurgency was no less. The bloodbath lasted until 1989. The number of people killed is cited as 60,000. Wijeweera was also among the dead.

What happened to the JVP after that?

In the 1990s, the JVP tried to put its past behind and entered the political mainstream under a new leadership. It won one seat in the parliamentary elections of 1994. It even contested elections for provincial councils, which it had opposed as an Indian imposition under the 13th Amendment.

In the 2001 parliamentary election, the JVP won 16 seats, indicating that it had gained the trust of sections of voters. Its high point came when it contested in coalition with the SLFP-led People’s Alliance in 2004. The election was fought on an anti-ceasefire plank. The previous United National Party (UNP) government had entered into a Norway-brokered truce with the LTTE in 2002, on terms that were seen as favouring the LTTE. In 2004, President Kumaratunga called for fresh elections, naming Mahinda Rajapaksa as the prime ministerial face of the People’s Alliance-JVP coalition, called the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Of the 105 seats UPFA won in the 225-seat parliament, the JVP’s share was 39, its highest ever tally. Months later it pulled out of the cabinet over the mechanics of sharing tsunami relief aid with the LTTE. It continued to support the government from the outside, and also supported Rajapaksa’s campaign in the 2005 presidential election.

However, in the post-war period, JVP’s fortunes waned. Not only did President Mahinda Rajapaksa dominate the political landscape as the architect of the May 2009 military victory over the LTTE, a host of Buddhist nationalist parties that had come up by then were competing for the same space as JVP. In 2008, the JVP also suffered a vertical split.

In 2015, Mr. Dissanayake formed a coalition with 25 other organisations, including civil society groups, women’s organisations and others called the NPP. The JVP now contests elections under the banner of the NPP, seen by some as a “rebranding” exercise to shake off its violent past that continues to haunt it. Mr. Dissanayake has described the NPP as a national liberation movement.

How does the NPP function now?

When the mass uprising against the Gotabaya Rajapaksa regime began in March 2022 over worsening economic circumstances, the protests were at first neighbourhood candle light vigils that grew to large gatherings in the city’s Galle Face sea front. Later, opposition parties including the NPP and JVP, breakaway organisations like the Frontline Socialist Party and Inter University Students’ Federation also converged at Galle Face. The involvement of these organisations, and some incidents of violence became the justification for a crackdown on the protests by the government under the new leadership of President Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Subsequently, the JVP/NPP position against the International Monetary Fund deal, whose conditions included sale of public sector enterprises, higher utility bills, higher taxes and other “anti-people” measures, earned it praise and a huge following. It has also taken popular positions against the “sale of national assets” to foreigners. In 2020-21, it had been steadfast in its opposition to the plan to offer 49% stake in the East Container Terminal at Colombo Port to the Adani group, which led the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government to cancel a tripartite agreement with India and Japan to develop the terminal. It also questioned the wind farm deal with Adani, and the deal with India to develop the oil tank farm in Trincomalee. It has been an opponent of the Indian Oil Corporation’s presence and expansion in Sri Lanka since 2002, when IOC first began operations in Sri Lanka. In 2017, despite its reported proximity to China, it had also protested the sale of the Hambantota Port to China.

However, of late, the JVP is of the view that the reality of India as Sri Lanka’s closest neighbour and “major political and economic centre” cannot be ignored. While India and JVP have had some contact previously, this is the first time that its leaders were invited to Delhi as an opposition party. In politically charged Sri Lanka, various signals are being read from this new friendship. But perhaps India is learning from its experience in the Maldives, where a new President that India failed to get to know better before his election, has junked his predecessor’s “India First” foreign policy, and given a distinct pro-China tilt to his foreign policy.

The writer is an independent journalist.