Sri Lanka’s ‘Thrasthawadi’

The Janata Vimukthi Peramuna presents itself as a Marxist organisation, and the affinity with Maoism was initially quite obvious. But it can never sustain itself on imported ideology married to terror politics.

Along and drawn-out crisis confronted the left parties of Sri Lanka in the 1960s, particularly after the Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party entered into a coalition alliance with Sirimavo Bandaranaike´s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1964. This action led to a series of splits within the collective Left movement, and disgruntled young radicals such as Rohana Wijeweera went on to found the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, the People´s Liberation Front) in late 1967 as a movement dedicated to armed revolution. Wijeweera had started his political career as a youth sympathiser of the Ceylon Communist Party (Moscow Wing), and was later attracted to Maoist politics while a medical student in the Soviet Union. When his student visa was not renewed as a result, Wijeweera returned to Sri Lanka in 1964 and joined the Ceylon Communist Party (Peking Wing) which had split from the CCP (Moscow Wing) the year previously. But soon Wijeweera and his radical colleagues lost confidence in the Peking Wing´s ability to foster armed revolution. They also saw the party´s preoccupation with trade union politics as indication of its unwillingness to grant the peasantry its legitimate place in revolution.