Tilvin Silva’s China visit and questions Opposition will not raise

JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva led a delegation on a visit to China at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) traveling to different areas of the country, and meeting with senior officials. Among those who met this week was Liu Jianchao, Head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, in Beijing. The visit has been described as one aimed at deepening the existing relations between the JVP and the CCP.

The Sri Lankan delegation comprised Deputy Ministers Eranga Gunasekara and Muneer Mulafer, MPs M. Jegadeeswaran, Deepti Wasalathilake and Dharmapriya Wijesinghe as well as JVP party members.

Tilvin Silva has never contested an election in keeping with the policy of the JVP where the General Secretary is confined to running party affairs full time while others take on the public role by contesting elections, but he remains the power behind the outfit. His visit to China and that too at the highest level for a party-to-party interaction shows that the JVP is eager to consolidate and further strengthen and promote its leftist ideology.

During the talks, Chinese officials, while emphasising the long-standing friendship between the JVP and the CCP, underscored the importance of continuously enhancing the political and theoretical knowledge of party cadres. The two sides agreed to share experiences while China also extended support to the country’s economic recovery.

The Opposition is not questioning who is funding the visit, how useful it is for the country, etc. unlike how the JVP members would have done had the tables been turned but these are the privileges of being in power.

It is well known that the JVP links with China go back a long way with the party’s founder Rohana Wijeweera choosing the Chinese form of communism over the Russian one. When the Communist Party of Sri Lanka split over ideological differences, Wijeweera sided with the Peking Wing of the party which cost the medical degree which he was pursuing at the Lumumba University in Moscow in the early 1960s. But he stuck to his faith in the ideology of Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 though later years proved that Wijeweera had chosen a separate path to all these ideologies which brought about his destruction as well as the destruction to many thousands of others.

Tilvin Silva, the current General Secretary, remains the power behind the scenes in the National People’s Power (NPP), which is the JVP in all but name. It’s 20 other alliance partners; even if all put together command little public support and need the JVP brand to get any political recognition. Silva remains the only remaining link to the old guard of Wijeweera’s JVP and given he bears no public responsibility as he never contests an election, his dabbling in the affairs of the State needs more scrutiny than what it gets at present.

All political parties, be it the UNP or the SLFP, align themselves to political parties in other countries with which they share the same ideology and hence the JVP doing the same with the CCP is nothing out of the ordinary but there are marked differences in the political systems in the two countries. China is a one-party state and the CCP holds the monopoly on power unlike in Sri Lanka, which is a functioning democracy, flawed but functioning, with many political parties, regular elections and changes in government.

While Sri Lanka is far from a one-party state, the internal workings of the JVP are likely more aligned with how the CPC runs its internal affairs. The JVP is controlled by its political bureau, the leader of which is the President Anura Kumara Disanayake while it has a 28-member central committee of which the political bureau members are also members. Other than its annual convention, its inner workings remain shrouded in secrecy.

Tilvin Silva’s visit would have given him an insight into the working of the CCP and he may want to adapt these to suit his party which he and others in his party are welcome to do. But trying to impose such setups on a country like Sri Lanka as a whole, now that the JVP is in power, is something that will not go down well with the people of the country. They like changing rulers at regular intervals too much to favour one party in power for too long.