Sri Lanka’s lurch into universal suffrage in 1931 had certain consequences for the Left. For one thing, it compelled the Left to seek a balance between a radical socialist programme and the challenges of mass electoral politics. Upon its establishment in 1935, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), brought together by an unusual and exceptional cohort of Western-educated anti-imperialist activists, sought to achieve this balance. It fielded candidates across the country, concentrated along the southwestern quadrant where support for the Left was strongest, and fought within a parliamentary framework.
The D. S. Senanayake Government’s (1947-1952) disenfranchisement of the Indian Tamil community deprived the Left, by now divided between the Trotskyites and the Communists, of its strongest electoral base. Radical historiography holds it that this is what pushed the Left to embrace Sinhala nationalism, even chauvinism, to the exclusion of more progressive forces. Kumari Jayawardena, for instance, has commented that “a marked preoccupation with electoral success led to the erosion of the internationalist attitudes the Left had adopted from the outset.” Accordingly, from opposing Sinhala Only in 1956, the LSSP and Communist Party capitulated to popular nationalist forces soon thereafter.
In later years, splinter groups from the LSSP and Communist Party – and of course the JVP – heavily criticised the coalitions that the Old Left built with the SLFP. The latter’s political orientation, not surprisingly, became a subject of hot debate within the Left. The LSSP and Communist Party preferred to view it as a petty bourgeois outfit, capable of radicalisation despite a profusion of right-wing forces. The dissenting groups within the Old Left, including the LSSP (Revolutionary) wing, begged to differ. The JVP went one step ahead and deigned to call it a bourgeois formation, no different to the United National Party.
Contradictory class interests
Perhaps the most correct characterisation of the SLFP would be petty bourgeois, or small capitalist. From its inception, it was backed by a vague combination of often contradictory class interests: from petty merchants to Buddhist monks to the peasantry and urban workers. They did not speak in one voice. In terms of class, nothing substantive brought them together. The anti-imperialist politics they espoused and championed, as Newton Gunasinghe has reminded us, was not so much in relation to the ownership of the means of production in the country as the identity, specifically ethnicity, of the owners themselves. While that does not belittle the radicalism many of them harboured, it has to be admitted that their radicalism was somewhat ideologically sterile.
Politics does not, to be sure, operate in a vacuum. As Vinod Moonesinghe has reminded us, the Left’s forays into parliamentarianism – into coalition-building and no contest pacts with the nationalistpetty bourgeoisie – were guided by necessity rather than expedience: they had no alternative but to use the electoral process. The difference between the Old and New Left, in this regard, is that from the inception the Old Left were aware of the need to target the masses through the vote, while the New Left, five or six years into their history, mounted independent Sri Lanka’s first anti-State insurrection. A decade later, the JVP tried to work within the electoral system, but was pre-emptively ejected, first by the meagre results of the 1982 polls and then by the UNP’s proscription of the party.
My critique of the Old Left – that is, those who chose to cohabit with the SLFP – is that they did not challenge Mrs Bandaranaike’s lurch to the right as forcefully as they should have. The United Front, elected on a massive wave of anti-UNP sentiment in 1970, represented South Asia’s broadest left-wing alliance. Both the LSSP and Communist Party could have, or should have, made it clear that they mattered as much to the SLFP as the SLFP mattered to them. Historians of the Old Left point to two developments that forestalled such possibilities: the insurrection and the subsequent economic crisis. Yet these, by themselves, should not have made the Old Left handmaidens of the SLFP, and Mrs Bandaranaike.
Bourgeois nationalist leaders
The most historically accurate interpretation of what happened to Mrs Bandaranaike by 1975 – the year of rupture, when the SLFP and Old Left parted ways – is that she went the way of other bourgeois nationalist leaders in the Third World. As with Nasser in 1965, she could not prevent her own government, housed by members of her family, from pushing it to the right. This tendency, which came to be represented by Felix Dias Bandaranaike her nephew and Minister of Justice, should not in itself have aborted the Left’s project. Yet by 1975, with the world on the cusp of transition to neoliberal globalisation – Sri Lanka under J. R. Jayewardene later became the first South Asian state to open to neoliberalism – the Left had been consumed by the very forces it chose to cohabit with.
I neither defend nor deride the Old Left’s choices here, though I will reiterate that it should have been more strident about where it stood in relation, and in opposition, to the SLFP. There are those who fault the LSSP for caving into Sinhala nationalist forces. My critique is not that they caved into or kowtowed to them – purely because, in the context of mass politics in the country, it was impossible to do business without them – but that it became supinely incapable of radicalising such forces.
When, today, nationalist commentators claim that the likes of N. M. Perera destroyed the Sinhalese businessmen through the United Front Government’s land reforms, one realises how futile it was to expect nationalist ideologues to be handmaidens in any radical programme. Perhaps the lesson here is not that nationalist forces cannot be turned to the Left, but that the Left must play an active role in turning them to the Left. In this, the Old Left failed – somewhat dismally.
Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at [email protected]. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.
United Front Cabinet, 1970
