| by Manik De Silva
( December 30,2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The predicament of Sri
Lanka’s old left, whose glory days are long gone, was tragically captured by
LSSP leader Tissa Vitarana, instructing a party MP to sign the impeachment
resolution against the Chief Justice and the party deciding that it must be
withdrawn. The MP, perhaps the only one elected on the LSSP ticket, duly
complied. The public is not privy to what Vitarana, Dr. N.M. Perera’s nephew,
told the LSSP’s Politbureau or Central Committee, its inner councils. The fact
that he continues to be a member of the Mahinda Rajapaksa cabinet suggests that
the problem, at least for the time being, has been ``shaped’’ if we may borrow
a term that the president recently used. Ministers DEW Gunasekera of the Communist
Party of Sri Lanka and Vasudeva Nanayakkara, leading his own left party as only
a shadow of his once fiery self, are no better off. It is not going to be long
before the matter of impeaching CJ Shirani Bandaranayake comes up for a vote in
Parliament and whether the president, out of the goodness of his heart, will
permit his now writhing leftist allies to either vote according to the lines
set by their parties, abstain or be absent will soon become clear. As one of
our regular columnists has said in this page, will they be once again be
reduced to the ignominy of saying `No’ in principle but `Aye Aye, Sir’ in
practice as in the case of the 18th Amendment?
 |
The rationale for the politics of the old left today is that an SLFP-led regime is better than a government of the UNP. Participating in such a government is both a lifeline and one of sustenance. It used to be said in the old days that the left had to cling to Sirima Bandaranaike’s sari pota to survive in politics. Today Mahinda Rajapaksa’s sataka has given way to the sari pota of yore.
It would have been no easy task for a government of that time to attempt
such exercises as impeaching a chief justice without observing the norms of
both propriety and due process in the face of such formidable opposition, a far
cry from what prevails today. Whether the socialist dispensation they offered
the people would have been good or bad for the country, we were never destined
to know. They did influence the emergence of welfare measures including
subsidized rice, free health and free education that the Lankan poor benefited
from. A capitalist development model of the sort JRJ attempted post-1977, it
could be speculated, may have emerged earlier but for the country’s strong left
movement. Had the old left been able to subordinate ideological differences and
prevent Mr. D.S. Senanayake and the UNP forming the first post-Independence
government, whether this country would be better or worse off than it is can
only be subject of conjecture.
The old left undoubtedly helped Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to usher what
many regard as the nationalist revolution of 1956. The no contest pact between
Bandaranaike’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna and the left parties helped
Bandaranaike to ride a nationalist wave and decimate the UNP which was still
able to poll more votes in 1956 than did the SLFP which led the MEP landslide.
This, of course, was due to the UNP contesting more seats than the SLFP because
of the electoral arrangements between the then anti-UNP parties. Only Phillip
Gunawardena with his VLSSP (Viplavakari Lanka Sama Samaja Party) of the old
left leaders fought together the MEP coalition and he and P.H. William de Silva
joined the Bandaranaike cabinet of 1956. But they did not last there long with
the prime minister under tremendous pressure from rightist supporters to resist
Philip’s radical measures. The other LSSP too faced a similar problem when it
joined the Sirima Bandaranaike government, first in 1964 and thereafter in
1970. The LSSP split owning to the 1964 coalition decision with radicals
including Bala Tampoe and Edmund Samarakkody breaking away to form the
Revolutionary LSSP, while centrists including Colvin. R. de Silva and Leslie
Goonewardene, declined cabinet office and retained the right to canvass within
the party against the majority decision. But by 1970, the situation had changed
and all the LSSP leaders were members of the United Front government of Mrs.
Bandaranaike. That lasted five years, having survived the `new left’ JVP’s
first adventure of 1971. The new Constitution drafted by Colvin had to perforce
include the nationalist views of the SLFP (Buddhism shall enjoy the foremost
place in the Republic) whose Sinhala Only of 1956 was resisted by the LSSP that
stood for parity of status for Sinhala and Tamil. The rightist inclinations of
the SLFP did not permit Finance Minister N.M. Perera to steer the economy in
the leftward direction his party demanded and the LSSP quit the government.
The rationale for the politics of the old left today is that an SLFP-led
regime is better than a government of the UNP. Participating in such a
government is both a lifeline and one of sustenance. It used to be said in the
old days that the left had to cling to Sirima Bandaranaike’s sari pota to
survive in politics. Today Mahinda Rajapaksa’s sataka has given way to the sari
pota of yore. The revolution that the old left preached was seriously attempted
by the JVP which analysts like to think of as the new left. There are those who
believe that the JVP, smarting under its crushing by the military in 1971,
assisted the UNP landslide of 1977 just as it did the Sirima-led United Front
landslide seven years earlier. It then attempted to topple those whom it helped
elect in 1977 in a second adventure that peaked in the late eighties and was
crushed even more brutally than the first foray in 1971. The new left might
have captured the imagination of the electorate if it forced good governance on
the CBK regime as it attempted to do with a `probationary’ arrangement. But
Chandrika Kumaratunga used the dissolution tool to good advantage dethroning
Ranil Wickremesinghe and reducing the new left too to where the old left had
descended.
( The Writer, Editor of the Sunday Island, where this piece was
originally appeared)
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