All about Dissanayake’s JVP, its failed uprisings, and 2022 turnaround

The Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front) has given Sri Lanka its first Marxist president in Anura Kumara Dissanayake. The party, which is about to come to power riding the 2022 economic meltdown and the associated protests, has an intriguing history.

The JVP was founded in 1965, initially with a view to set up a socialist state. But within six years after its formation, the party unleashed a violent movement to grab power, igniting terrible violence that left thousands of people dead on both sides.

Bloody beginning

The leader of the revolution was JVP founder-leader Rohana Wijeweera, son of a communist. He was educated at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow.

He expressed disgust at the traditional Leftist parties in the country, dismissing them contemptuously as “Old Left” and as “lackeys” of the established order for joining hands with mainstream parties.

Amid the Sino-Soviet rivalry, Wijeweera gave up his pro-Soviet leanings and decided that the way to power lay through the gun.

Poll rout

Poorly trained and equally poorly armed JVP cadres, dominantly young men, captured as many as 76 police posts across the country in 1971.

North Korea came out openly in support of the JVP putsch but the uprising was put down with a heavy hand by Sri Lanka with the backing of friendly countries such as India.

A chastened JVP contested parliamentary elections in 1977 and was routed.

Second insurrection

Five years down the line, Wijeweera — whose photographs showing a bearded and bespectacled man with a Mao cap still figure prominently in JVP publications — was a candidate in the presidential elections but finished poorly.

Once India and Sri Lanka signed an agreement in 1987 to deploy Indian troops in the island’s north and east to curb Tamil separatism, the JVP orchestrated another armed uprising, uniting the Sinhalese, the dominant community, against the Indian military presence, which was dubbed a national insult.

Wijeweera and his top lieutenants were killed — some say extra-judicially — after this 1988-89 insurrection ended on a bloody note as well, leaving thousands of combatants and non-combatants dead.

Enter Dissanayake

This was the period when Anura Dissanayake, then a young student, joined the JVP, whose leadership he would eventually assume in early 2014.

The JVP continued to dabble in mainstream politics but it remained largely on the fringe. It managed to enter some governments but the maximum number of seats it could win in the 225-member Sri Lankan parliament was 39.

The JVP was a strong and vocal backer of the military’s war against Tamil Tigers. It openly supported then president Mahinda Rajapaksa for crushing the Tigers in 2009.

Amity with military

The party is also a virulent opponent of the provincial councils which were set up in the line with the 1987 India-Sri Lanka accord and has repeatedly vowed to dismantle them.

The JVP leadership remains firmly opposed to any international scrutiny of the alleged war crimes blamed on the military, particularly during the end stages of the civil war.

This is one reason the JVP could not attract many votes compared to its leading rivals in the country’s north and parts of the east where Tamils live in large numbers.

At the same time, the JVP has expanded its support base among the serving and retired members of the military, as well as other security forces, in particular among the middle and lower echelons.

Rise since 2022

It was the 2022 economic meltdown — which triggered unprecedented shortages of even essential goods — that helped the JVP to take over a massive mass movement that toppled the then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Although the JVP’s membership runs into thousands, almost all of them Sinhalese, it has since won widespread influence by pledging to end income inequalities as well as deep-rooted corruption.

The JVP has not looked back since 2022. It is no wonder that from a measly 3 per cent of votes it gathered in the last presidential battle in 2019, the party is now on the course to taking power in Sri Lanka.

Take a look at the votes, percentage-wise, each presidential candidate got