Cohabitation with Rathu Sahodarayas is always problematic. Securing their support to win an election is like obtaining a loan from a village money lender (poli mudalali). One who makes the mistake of borrowing from a village Shylock has to cough up compound interest and ends up paying many times the amount borrowed. Worst of all, he has to stomach all the humiliation dished out by the mudalali in public for the slightest delay in payment. President Mahinda Rajapakse is in a similar predicament, having obtained the JVP’s support to win the Presidential Election. The JVP is demanding its pound of flesh closest to his heart and the bearded Red Shirts who were eating out of his palm not many moons ago could be seen sharpening their knives.

JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva is reported to have told a public meeting at Dambulla that unless President Rajapakse returns to the ‘right track’, the JVP will be compelled to engineer his downfall by forming a government with the help of all those who made him President.

When the JVP helped Mr. Rajapakse with the Presidential Election, it was only making a virtue of necessity. It was desperate to prevent UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe becoming President and saw in Mr. Rajapakse a person capable of defeating him. Ironically, the JVP had preferred the late Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar to Mr. Rajapakse when the question of who the UPFA’s PM should be came up after the 2004 General Election. And, Mr. Rajapakse had been averse to an SLFP-JVP alliance before that election.

With the then President Chandrika Kumaratunga colluding with the UNP, Prime Minister Rajapakse had to turn to the JVP in the run for the presidency. Adversity, they say, makes strange bedfellows! Both parties gained at the Presidential Election. The JVP had Mr. Wickremesinghe defeated and Mr. Rajapakse became President.

Having the JVP as a partner in governance is like recruiting an Al Quaeda member as a co-pilot. Reality dawned on President Rajapakse only after his election. He found that the JVP was trying to hijack his government. And he was compelled to a take a huge political gamble at the last Local Government polls by rejecting a pact with the JVP, which never anticipated such a move. The outcome was loss of face for the JVP, though the UPFA could have fared much better, if there had been no split in the anti-UNP vote. The President’s message was loud and clear to the JVP: "We can manage without you!"

The JVP may pretend that it is prepared to face an election at this juncture. But in reality it cannot afford to contest a general election without riding the SLFP piggy back, having failed to win at least a local government election on its own.

The JVP’s rhetoric is indicative of its political difficulties. The 2004 election marked the zenith of its performance—it secured 39 seats as a partner of the UPFA coalition! It has no way of either maintaining the momentum so gained or enhancing its performance. Worse, its unity is threatened as evident from the Nandana affair and speculation is that it is getting dissolved in the SLFP. Parties with a revolutionary outlook have an appeal to the electorate so long as they are in the Opposition. The traditional leftist parties have become mere name boards sans popular support because they have been in power as coalition partners of the SLFP for too long. For leftists, the problem of being in power is that reality compels them to practise the opposite of what they preach. The people may take such hypocrisy of a mainstream party for granted but in an ultra radical party, it leads to the disillusionment of the membership. That may explain why the traditional left is devoid of any growth. It has the same old faces and they, too, are screaming away.

If the JVP remains in a government for a long time, it will also run the risk of losing popular support, disintegration and ending up as an appendage of the SLFP. Hence, its refusal to rejoin the UPFA government, even after the exit of its bete noire President Kumratunga and the victory of President Rajapakse.