The Citizens’ Camp

The camp the SJB must be at the helm and the centre of is the Citizens’ Camp; the camp that represents the pressing concerns and the interests of the citizenry; the camp that can be credibly expected to uplift the quality of life of the citizenry at large and strive for “the public good”

•  Rejoinder to my critic

By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

What is clear however is his/her complete inability to grasp ‘the political’. This is evidenced, to give but one example, from these lines: “…Ranil Wickremasinghe almost won a Presidential Election in 2005, coming on a completely pro-devolution platform, save for an LTTE-led voting boycott. Despite personal differences or dislikes, a complex historical context cannot be squibbed to a ‘jinx’.” (The new camp of Sri Lanka’s progressive politics | Daily FT)

C’mon, “almost won…save for an LTTE-led voting boycott?” The LTTE boycotted the entire election, not just one candidate. Why didn’t the boycott destroy Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Presidential run as it did Ranil’s? Because Mahinda didn’t stupidly build his campaign on expectations of the LTTE vote. Then again, why didn’t Ranil win in 1999 when the LTTE didn’t boycott but tilted to him against CBK? Because he, unlike CBK was perceived by the voter, as tilting to the LTTE. Therefore, whether the LTTE boycotted (2005) or supported (1999) Ranil, he lost. That’s a ‘jinx’—of structural un-electability.

The people’s camp

My critic places the question of ‘camps’ front and centre. However, one must know how and why a camp is constituted or constitutes itself, what kind of camp should be constituted and why, and why one should opt for a particular camp than another. 

A camp should not be entered or identified with because it constitutes one’s long-standing ideological comfort zone. This is most especially so if that comfort-zone has proved over a long period, a zone of utter discomfort to a vast majority of the citizen-voter. Nor must one identify oneself with a camp simply because it happens to be the most popular at the moment, especially if it constitutes a huge danger to the country and the wellbeing of its citizenry. 

The new progressive camp must be one that can encompass the middle classes and the working people, the have-nots, not trade-off one for the other or privilege the middle-class over the masses. “…The millions of small people—the workers and the peasants—are the hardcore of our society. They are the very foundations of our country.” (Ranasinghe Premadasa, Gam Udawa, 23 June 1987) This is what the Biden candidacy did, building on and broadening the appeal and catalytic contribution of the Sanders campaign.  The ‘camp’ must be a ‘camp’ of all the people; the whole of society; the 99%, not the 1%. It must be the camp of the citizenry.  The SJB must establish itself as a camp of the progressive centre; one which is capable of recovering voters who were lost by the UNP, attracting voters who opted massively for Gotabaya Rajapaksa (2019) and the Mahinda-led SLPP (2020), while appealing to new voters.

My critic fails to understand both the trajectory of the UNP as well as the nature of the SLPP. Ignorance about either, greatly hampers any ability to outline a viable strategic perspective for the democratic Opposition.

The UNP of the last quarter-century does not belong in the same camp as it classically did. This point is not original to me. It was first made by Dr. Sarath Amunugama in the 1990s, underscoring the abandonment of D.S. Senanayake’s welfarism and agrarianism by Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP. It was made consistently by a second generation UNPer, former head of the UNP’s youth and student wings, Imtiaz Bakeer Markar. It was made by President J.R. Jayewardene’s grandson Pradip in newspaper interviews explaining his resignation from JRJ’s party. 

I too made the point at the precise moment of the deviation by Wickremesinghe. I had no personal motivation because I had supported him from 1994-1996, when he had declared publicly that he stood for social democracy (in an interview with me in the Sunday Observer) and the Premadasa development philosophy. I broke with him exactly when he made the turn which placed him and his party in a global camp in a manner that was unprecedented, and signed up to an agreement that shifted the party drastically in local politics. He enrolled the UNP in the International Democratic Union, founded by the US Republicans and the British Conservatives, while signing up to the Liam Fox agreement which displaced the party’s position on the LTTE and the unitary state. 

The UNP before that, including under Ranil, may not have been a progressive party. I certainly did not regard it as such which I why I declined President Premadasa’s kind invitation to enter Parliament through the national list and take a portfolio. I was and remain a Premadasist, not a UNPer, just as later, I supported Mahinda and the JO, but never joined either the SLFP or the SLPP. However, the UNP did have a progressive aspect and progressive interludes, especially during the Premadasa Presidency. Even during the quarter-century of Ranil Wickremesinghe, the UNP retained progressive elements, the most progressive of which was Sajith Premadasa, whom I supported publicly from 2010.

Political realism

A Realist privileges the content and substance of democracy over technicalities. When the millions of Sinhalese who voted for Mahinda Rajapaksa a moderate Sinhala nationalist, felt themselves disenfranchised when the war-winning ex-President was deprived of the Opposition leadership and the TNA Leader was accorded it instead, despite having a fraction of the number of MPs, it only radicalised Sinhala sentiment, generating a backlash against perceived minoritarianism and opening the door to the Alt-Right Gotabaya project. (And by the way, when the Communist party split in 1972, with Pieter Keuneman in the Cabinet and Dr. S.A. Wickremasinghe and Sarath Muttetuwegama crossing over to the Opposition, both factions were recognised by Parliament.)

Similarly, a Realist take would find it impossible to imagine several security chiefs giving the answer that they did not feel impelled to report the Indian intelligence warnings of the impending Easter attacks to the President or the PM, had the Sirisena-Mahinda bloc with MR as PM, with a new Secretary/Defence, been in place instead of MS-RW. In short, a Realist take would indicate that on balance, the Easter massacres could have been avoided. Apart from my Realism, that means much more to me as a Catholic than other considerations. It is also the Easter massacre and perceptions of regime laxity that provided the final liftoff for the GR victory. 

Realism would have also told the UNP after its disaster at the local authorities election of February 2018 at the hands of the SLPP, that time was running against it, eroding its base, and an early election (as sought by President Sirisena) would be better for it, than one held later, after the mandatory 4½ years. 

Demarcating the new democratic camp

It is profoundly counterproductive to the SJB and the anti-regime democratic struggle for it to be regarded as in the same camp as the UNP of the last quarter century, though it must certainly be regarded as the inheritor of the positive aspects of the UNP before that, going right back to its inception in 1946, while eschewing those abidingly reactionary, elitist, anti-national aspects that wiped it out in 1956, 1970 and almost destroyed it physically in 1988 before Premadasa rescued it against impossible odds. 

Simply put, it is negative for the SJB to regard itself as belonging to the same camp as (a) the UNP of the ‘long downswing’ of the past quarter-century under Ranil and (b) those aspects of the UNP that made it turn Sri Lanka into a country of two civil wars and foreign intervention, described by candidate Ranasinghe Premadasa as ‘a torch ablaze at both ends’ which he was bequeathed.  

If the SJB is perceived as belonging to the camp of the UNP or on a continuum with it, by which I mean the Ranilist UNP as well as the negative policies of before, that Ranasinghe Premadasa abandoned or rectified, it will be unable to lead a democratic camp that attracts voters from both sides, or more accurately from all points of the compass. 

The camp the SJB must be at the helm and the centre of is the Citizens’ Camp; the camp that represents the pressing concerns and the interests of the citizenry; the camp that can be credibly expected to uplift the quality of life of the citizenry at large and strive for “the public good”. (Premadasa, Gam Udawa, 24 June 1986) 

The camp and the constellation 

What is necessary is the creation of a broad camp of which the enemy is despotism, proto-fascism, militarism, ultranationalism and xenophobia, i.e., the dictatorial Far-Right. 

The camp of democracy must of necessity identify and accommodate the positive aspects of the Mahinda years and achievement as part of a broad national democratic narrative that cuts across parties, bringing together the development paradigm and ‘multiethnic democracy’ of Ranasinghe Premadasa and the positive contributions in domestic and foreign policy of an array of national leaders and figures, including the Bandaranaikes, Vijaya Kumaratunga and Lakshman Kadirgamar, in an ideological constellation.

My critic’s ignorance is not limited to the SLPP but, unsurprisingly to Ranasinghe Premadasa. How to classify Premadasa, where to locate his progressivism, I leave the readers to judge from his deeds—Janasaviya, the Housing Program, Free School Uniforms, the Presidential Task Force on Land redistribution, the Sevana Sarana Foster parents scheme—and his stated, overarching goal, to “transform the have-nots into haves” and” “to correct this imbalance between power and people”. (Harare, Zimbabwe, 3.9. 1986). 

My critic wishes to know how the “SJB’s version of patriotism, social-democratic approach, and peasant heartland politics, and centre-space are going to be different from SLPP…” Surely it is equally important to know how the SJB’s version of development, democracy, devolution and going to be different from the UNP? Evidently, not for my critic, but almost certainly for the voters.

Anyway, the answer to my critic’s query is easy. Even at its best, the JO-SLPP under Mahinda, and before the cave-in to the Gotabaya Alt-Right, the SLPP was never primarily about the people, especially the have-nots. It was about the nation, or the people (only) as the nation, which is lop-sided, ‘de-centred’. Under the hegemony of the Gotabaya faction and line, the SLPP has not dissented from the equation of the nation with the state and the state with the military, and thus the nation with the military. 

If MR was ‘Country First’, GR is ‘Military First’, while the Premadasa line of both father and son, is ‘People First’ or ‘Citizenry First’. MR was more a democrat than not, while Gotabaya is uncommitted and unmoored to democracy. Sajith and the SJB are deeply and consistently committed to pluralist democracy. The SLPP is ambiguous about devolution while GR is opposed, but Sajith’s SJB is committed to the 13th Amendment, no less, no more. The SLPP has back-peddled on pluralism and doesn’t attack chauvinism except of the minority variant, while Sajith and the SJB attack extremism and racism from all quarters. 

New democratic progressivism: A framework

Today’s task in Sri Lanka as in the world, is to win back the public imagination from far-right authoritarian ultranationalism. Last year a volume was published which dealt precisely with this problem: ‘On Public Imagination’, subtitled ‘A Political and Ethical Imperative’, edited by Victor Faessel, Richard Falk and Michael Curtin (Routledge 2020). Falk and Faessel describe the problem they are targeting: “…the election of autocratic and demagogic leaders adhering to ultranationalist agendas… resurgent right-wing nationalism and in many cases, authoritarianism…more primitive, chauvinist forms of collective political imagination are asserting themselves over what now appears to be a vanishing veneer of tolerance and political civility…and [have] engendered toxic forms of polarisation…” 

The contributors include two respected former Foreign Ministers, Celso Amorim (Brazil) Ahmet Davutoglu (Turkey), iconic futurist thinker Johan Galtung, top journalists and writer Victoria Brittain, famous civil society figure Chandra Muzaffer, and respected senior academics Fred Dallmayr, Stephen Gill, Marjorie Cohn, Mary Kaldor and Neera Chandhoke. I was privileged to be invited to contribute. 

A few short extracts from my contribution to the volume would outline my general framework: 

• “…What we have are competing blocs of opinion, each of which contains legitimate and justifiable elements. But these competing and internally contradictory blocs of opinion collide and collude, forming unprecedentedly complex, heterodox, and fluid patterns…As the century and the millennium turned, progressivism was being identified with liberalism, and liberalism with the neoliberal status quo…Devoid of a viable progressive alternative, the neoliberal world order was spawning a new fundamentalism within what Jose Marti called ‘the belly of the beast’.” 
  
   
• “…The second greatest failure of contemporary progressives…which must be addressed in order to construct a new public imagination, are the unavoidable issues of the nation, nationalism, and patriotism. Suffering in a fascist jail, Antonio Gramsci wrestled with what had gone wrong in his time and what needed to be done to put it right. Our left contemporaries learned from much of what he wrote on hegemony and culture but missed one of his most important themes, that of the nation, nation building and state building. He understood that the left had abandoned those tasks and argued that picking up where Machiavelli left off, was a task of the left, by which he meant wrestling with the tasks of nation and state building. Indisputably an internationalist, he notably criticised “cosmopolitanism” as a doctrine that hampered the task of nation building…Gramsci combined class, mass and nation into a bloc, and it was a “majoritarian” bloc in the best sense of the word, not a collocation of minorities.” 
  
   
• “A neo-progressive project needs to grapple with the crisis of neoliberalism, learning from the Latin American left to reject hegemonic liberal-“humanitarian” interventionism which destroys national/state sovereignty in the global South, while nevertheless fighting against terrorism as well as the conditions that create it, and eschewing rightwing nationalism while refusing to concede the nation and patriotism to the right. This project must turn to Gramsci so as to rediscover and re-appropriate the nation, reimagine a “people-nation” and build a “national popular” bloc. Intellectuals such as Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall diligently deployed Antonio Gramsci’s thinking to unpack Margaret Thatcher’s authoritarian populism and its reworking of nationalism. They prescribed the application of Gramsci’s concept of the ‘national popular’.” 

(All quotes from Dayan Jayatilleka, The Great Gramsci | Taylor & Francis Group)

This is the conceptual-strategic perspective which I apply to Sri Lanka and the present situation, most notably the fight for democracy against despotism.

The SJB must not regard itself as being in the old camp of the UNP and/or the centre-right, any more than Buddhism was in the old camp of Brahminism/Hinduism and Christianity was in the old camp of the Jewish faith. 

What is needed is a new camp that represents a new ‘national popular’ synthesis.