Two years after sweeping into power, the ruling coalition’s kava (study circle) teaches prospective cadre, including NPPers, how to engage in propaganda and organise “the party”. Despite its name, seats are arranged lecture-style. A JVP organiser leads the session, and watching him speak, it is striking how closely he mimics the cadence of the party’s founder, Rohana Wijeweera, and the hand gestures of its current leader, Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
Party organising, the speaker explains, is necessary to bring about “social transformation” — a task the NPP feels unequipped for right now. “The state is not with us yet, they can undermine the government’s power at any given moment.” This is a common view in the party. Earlier this year Lal Kantha, a JVP politburo member and cabinet minister, remarked, “We have the government’s power, but we must continue our struggle to capture state power. Only then will our struggle be complete, in a way.”
Back at the study circle, the lecturer goes on to explain that the “party” would helm the state. But what is this party today, two years after its dramatic ascent to power?
Go JVP or go home?
Helming the state is changing the party. The once underground and intensely insular JVP has now opened its doors to NPPers. Its political machinery is gradually absorbing those who rallied under the compass, from MPs to local organisers.
The Marxist-Leninist party’s political classes, long vested with almost mystical significance, are one key recruitment avenue. Non-JVPers are welcome to join some of the classes.
For NPPers they’re an important way of understanding how to get things done. One NPP local councillor from Colombo said that he attended education camps because it was difficult to work in the party without knowing the political theories it was based on.
After attending the camps, he began a Facebook group for others like him, which illuminates their thinking. He shared that their enemies were on the one hand “liquidationists” (Russian communists who believed politics should be done completely by legal means as opposed to the Bolsheviks’ conspiratorial methods) and, on the other hand, “recallists” (communists who wanted to boycott the Russian parliament because they believed participating in legal state institutions under the Tsars compromised revolutionary principles.)
Now he’s in the process of becoming a card-carrying JVPer. For him, this party is the heart of the NPP and joining it would make him feel like an “insider” and protected like one. A close friend of senior NPPers felt that when people join the JVP, it's because it’s the “real deal”.
Nihal Abeysinghe, the NPP’s general secretary who isn’t a JVP member, said they don’t oppose NPPers attending JVP classes or joining the party. “These educational activities are run by the JVP. We are not involved. But we have no objection to anyone attending them”, he said.
Three insiders told The Examiner that Vraie Balthazaar, the Colombo mayor, has become a card carrying member. When asked about NPP members becoming JVPers, the JVP party officers didn’t confirm or deny. “They go as NPP, if such a time comes where they run for the elections as the JVP, then we will see.”
Kaushalya Ariyaratne, the deputy media minister, also took part in classes even before running for parliament. Yet she didn’t want to commit to full-time work.
“Now I am full-time, and I will work with them, but I don’t want to engage at the level of deciding who will become JVP leader and such things,” she said “In the future, if I feel like becoming a full-time member I will.”
Then there are those in the NPP who’ve started distancing themselves, feeling that the JVP was dominating the coalition.
JVPers are supported by their party, making it possible to do extensive political work. Not so for NPPers. Liyanage Amarakeerthi, a university professor who was a member of the NPP’s apex body, the National Executive Council, campaigned for the NPP in the last election, paying for travel expenses out of his own pocket. After the election, he was asked to give talks in different districts and continue to pay his own way, but refused as “bearing all these costs on my own simply wasn’t sustainable.”
Amarakeerthi was discouraged by the disparity in how resources were allocated post-election. While NPP members who transitioned into government roles were well-protected and heavily supported, he felt others were left completely on their own.
