topic: JVP

ජවිපෙ අර්බුදය කොයිබට ද?

The attempt to strip Weerawansa of his position has turned him round to attack the party, and ten of its members of parliament have publicly backed him. Ivan reads it as a split that cannot be contained, predicts where the pieces will go at the next election, and traces the decline to a movement that never acquired the political knowledge its constituency needed.

ප්‍රචණ්ඩත්වය වන්දනාමාන කිරීම

The JVP rose twice in arms and the LTTE is still fighting; between them more than a hundred thousand are dead, and both movements commemorate their own dead without distinction as heroes. Ivan says the JVP’s transformation into a parliamentary party is good and incomplete: it has not yet given up honouring its own violence, and among the heroes it commemorates are people who killed without reason.

සෝමවංශ සේ ම වීරවංශ ද

The argument inside the JVP matters, Ivan writes, because until it began the party’s spokesmen described it as the cleanest in the country. He reads the sources — Nandana Gunathilaka’s series, Somawansa’s speech at the 1971 commemoration, Weerawansa’s answer in parliament — and works back through the party’s money to the years when its leaders needed intermediaries and protection.

What is More Decisive: Ethnicity or Class?

Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s crisis is not only ethnic: caste, which the youth commission found behind the second JVP rising, cuts across it. He draws on his own custody after 1971, when he was known as Podi Athula, on the caste make-up of the JVP and LTTE, and on the killing of a school principal during the second insurrection.

යක්ෂයාට ගිය ජවිපෙ සදාචාරය

Starting from a gift of Li Zhisui’s memoir of Mao, Ivan turns to the morality the JVP claims for itself: the party that says it is the cleanest in the country, and the accounts of extortion from businesses, the sale of party services, and the misuse of money that its own internal quarrel has now brought into the open.

Defeating Mr. President All But Impossible

Despite corruption, rights abuses, nepotism and rising prices, Ivan argues that President Rajapaksa is almost impossible to unseat before the presidential election of 2011. The UNP can defeat the budget only with the JVP, which gains too much from the government to risk it, and the rules of the system favour the President over the opposition.

Where the LTTE Went Wrong

Ivan argues that the LTTE, like the JVP in 1989, failed to trade armed struggle for politics when it held the advantage, and helped elect the government now bent on crushing it. He compares Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s role against the LTTE to the ruthless suppression of the second JVP uprising and concludes that armed struggle brings only blood and destruction.

The Future is Uncertain

Victor Ivan finds the President immobilised. He cannot abandon the JVP after the support it gave him at the presidential election, yet dropping it would mean placing full faith in Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom he does not trust; and a president dependent on the JVP is trapped in its framework, as Chandrika Kumaratunga discovered. Neither party can transform the other, so nothing moves without the JVP’s consent. Ivan sees the same deadlock between the government and the LTTE, each blocked by India — which will permit neither the oppression of Tamils in the north and east nor a separate state. He puts the negotiating gap in a simile: the LTTE asked for tens of thousands of buns, was offered thousands, refused, and is now invited to the table for one. A government proposing decentralisation within a unitary framework is offering less than the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1958, and cannot raise the offer while the JVP and Hela Urumaya hold it in place. With no negotiated route left, Ivan warns the LTTE may settle accounts by war and may seek borders drawn by community — an attack on the Sinhalese of the East making it impossible for Tamils to live in the south, and opening the way to massacre and mutual slaughter.

The President and the JVP

Victor Ivan argues that unless Mahinda Rajapaksa resumes talks in defiance of the memoranda he signed with the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya, war will return. He has already tested the limits: Norway remains facilitator despite an undertaking to remove it, talks look likely outside Asia against a condition that they be held within it, and Anton Balasingham has been summoned without objection. But Ivan doubts the JVP will let him go much further, and explains why its leaders cannot retreat even if some now privately doubt their own conditions — admitting error would expose them to their own members as politically shallow, so they must keep defending a position that no longer fits. The President’s first problem, he writes, is choosing between the JVP and the country. He then draws the parallel with Chandrika Kumaratunga, freed from the UNP’s encirclement by the JVP only to find herself in its prison instead, and notes that Rajapaksa faces the same choice in far better conditions: the UNP fragmented, its alliances weakened, and the LTTE no longer friendly to it.