By Peter Main
The MASS protests that ended with the storming of the presidential palace and Rajapakse’s flight began when even the slightly better-off residents felt the impact of the rapidly deteriorating 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 the 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 to find a way of quelling the unrest, 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 movement began to ebb. A rescue plan was quickly cobbled together. Former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was appointed interim president by an assortment of his supposed opponents, including the Rajapakse clan.
JVP
Although also absent from Galle Face Green, one party was not involved in this parliamentary fraud, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Founded in the mid 1960s as an insurrectionary force, and heavily influenced by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, it had already passed through several political changes.
These included two adventurist armed insurrections; a mobilisation to break the 1980 general strike; a murderous armed campaign against the left; 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, it turned to grassroots electoralism, diluting its politics in the National People’s Power and holding rallies to denounce the government. 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.
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 the worst aspects of that deal. This would ensure that the next tranche of IMF bailout 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.
Faced with a hostile parliamentary majority, he has done the obvious thing and dissolved parliament. Elections will be held on 14 November, in which 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 means continued assaults on living standards. The JVP is not a workers’ party but it does have the leadership of several unions. Members of all unions, including the JVP’s, should demand their leaders coordinate actions to oppose every attempt to solve Sri Lanka’s 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 develop tactics towards the building of a workers’ party. 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 can be won to the need for a new party to fight for the interests of the working class and oppressed. Within that, revolutionaries will campaign for a party committed to overthrowing the entire capitalist order and the formation of a state based on the workers’ own organisations.