JVP’s Il Viru Samaruva

Wednesday, 17 December 2025 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The JVP held its 36th annual mega commemorative rally, “Il Viru Samaruva” in November in Colombo to salute their comrades who laid their lives at the hands of their ‘enemies’, when they had valiantly struggled for the supreme objective of creating a socialist society in Sri Lanka in 1971 and in the 1988-’89 period.

Tilvin Silva, the General Secretary of the JVP, in his speech addressing that well organised event said in Sinhala, “….Our political movement has a clear vision based on optimal policies. Our fallen comrades sacrificed their lives at the hands of our enemies for the supreme cause to safeguard those policies and our vision.

“Comrade Fidel Castro once had said that any socialist movement globally should function based on strong policies. We too have policies not only to guide our movement and ourselves but also towards our enemies. Our policy towards our enemies is that we shall never forgive them….”

Generally, any leftist/ Marxist/Communist revolutionary or such a terrorist movement will have to fight against many enemies in order to usurp power or to form an administration based on their ideologies.

Enemies whom they have to face, fight against and defeat consist of owners of the factors of production, feudalists who own private properties, vassals who labour on their properties, the capitalist system consisting mainly of the bourgeoisie, monarchies, social democrats and moderates, religious establishments and others who support such ideologies.

We should not forget the fact that an arch enemy of leftist revolutionaries/terrorists world over, whom they have to fight against is the state sponsored security arm, when unleashed, by the very regimes against whom the former would launch a revolution or a coup d’état.

In 1971 and during the 1987-’88 period, the security arm of the Sri Lankan state by carrying out their bounden duty in protecting two democratically elected Governments, mercilessly annihilated not only thousands of JVP ‘comrades’ who took to arms against those Governments but also their “Beloved and Founder Leader” Rohana Wijeweera.

Slaying of Rohana Wijeweera that had supposedly happened in the hands of the state security apparatus has different versions. To a thunderous applause, at the said rally, did Tilvin Silva express his personal enmity or did he publicly declare the policy of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna with regard to the state security apparatus that had twice crushed their uprisings, “an enemy” of theirs in their struggle to create a socialist communist Sri Lanka?

H.D. Samaranayake

Battaramulla