S.B.Dissanayake, the controversial national organizer of the UNP and a keen student of JVP politics from his university days, speaks to C.A.Chandraprema on the latest split in the party. He directs scathing criticism not just at the party but at all the dissidents who have broken away from the JVP in recent times as well. He says that the JVP dissidents like Nandana Gunatilleke and now Wimal Weerawansa are talking only about the symptoms of the malady without dealing with the root cause of the problem.

Q. The split in the JVP with Wimal Weerawansa and 11 other JVP parliamentarians is by far the biggest split in the JVP since that which took place during the 1971 insurgency. What is your view on this turn of events?

A. If we take the history of the JVP, there were splits before 1971 when people like G.I.D.Dharmasekera and Reginald Cooray (The present WP Chief Minister) broke away and formed the Organisation for the Protection of the Motherland. At that time there was an attack on the American Embassy widely believed to be carried out by this organization, and the JVP at that time said that this was a conspiracy to expose the JVP. Then there was a division during the 1971 insurgency where the party split into several factions. Then by the time of the July 1983 proscription, a lot of people had left the JVP. The splits stopped after 1983 because the party went underground and until the terror of the late eighties, there was no room for splits to take place.

By 1990, there was nothing left of the JVP for any splits to take place, because almost all the key figures were dead. Somawansa Amarasinghe managed to save his skin by fleeing the country. These people who are now prominent in the JVP, were not key figures, but podiyans, almost all of whom would never have even seen Wijeweera. This kind of crisis is not something limited to the JVP. The same has happened to other Marxist parties like the LSSP and the Communist Party as well. If you count the number of factions that the LSSP has split into, since their heyday in the 1940s, the number would be around eleven.

Even people like Wickramabahu Karunaratne and Vasudeva Nanayakkara were originally members of the LSSP.

The communist party also split into the Moscow and the Peking Wings and the Peking Wing in turn split when Rohana Wijeweera and some others broke away to form the JVP. The same malady has affected the Indian Communist Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This is a ‘genetic’ fault endemic to all Marxist parties. See what happened to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They captured power and then suffered a split while in power. Then they lost the next election.

There is also the point that what we saw in the JVP was a case of a ‘deformed’ man trying to build an unnatural organization. The people in the JVP are supposed to have no desire for power or for wealth, and no desire for the pleasures of the five senses. Plato said that the desire for power, wealth and the pleasures of the senses are the determining factors in human affairs. But these people sought to go against that dictum and create a wholly ‘unnatural’ man. This attempt was doomed to failure.

When they try to create a man against the dictates of nature, that man tends to deviate from the ideal. What he is not supposed to do openly, he does surreptitiously. Now the salary of these JVP MPs is taken by the party and they are given a worker’s salary. But the children of these MPs go to big schools. Their wives often use cars. They all use hand phones. Then they go to good hotels for their meals. When I travel, I don’t stop at wayside boutiques. I stop at ‘middle class’ places for my meals. And on some occasions, their staff had told me that such and such JVP MP also just had a meal and left. The JVP MP could have gone to the ordinary boutique next door and had a meal for a fraction of the cost. But he chose the middle class restaurant instead. That is human nature at work.

Therefore, I think the JVP is an aberration that seeks to go against human nature. The drama that we are witnessing now is what happens when you try to build an organization that goes against the grain of human nature. Why did communism collapse? They were not prepared to accept that something called entrepreneurship existed. They thought that the only important factors in production was capital, labour and land. Today, this world runs on entrepreneurship and management. This is why communism fell by the wayside and capitalism triumphed.

Then communism also refused to accept competition. But without competition, there will be no efficiency. So this is a case of an organization trying to create an unnatural man. To be a good member of the JVP, it would not suffice even if you had attained the Sotapanna stage in Buddhism because even Sotapannas have not conquered the defilements entirely, and do tend to be swayed by worldly considerations.

To be a successful JVP member, it would be necessary to be at least an Anagami – the stage just below Arahantship! They were trying to build a community of ascetics! The kind of purity expected in the JVP can’t be expected even within the community of Buddhist monks today. So all this that we are seeing today is the surfacing of the genetic fault inherent in Marxism.

Q. If we take what you say into consideration, then the correct faction is Weerawansa’s faction, because they are closer to the natural man that you talk of…

A. No. I see both factions as being wrong. Both these factions have not gone to the root of the malady. They are both talking only about the symptoms of the disease. Look at what the dissident JVP MP Nandana Gunatilleke says. He talks of conducting an ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle before getting on to the ‘anti-capitalist’ struggle. What is this imperialism that he is talking about? Is India going to walk in and take over this country? Do they think that Norway has come here because of possible oil deposits in the territorial waters of Sri Lanka? Such views are all diseases of the mind.

Norway is a country that has done oil exploration for twenty powerful oil producing countries. Norway is also one of the world’s richest countries in terms of per capita income. Their per capita income is around USD 64,000. The USA has a much lower per capita GDP. So to say that they are eying Sri Lanka is just madness. And to talk of the anti-imperialist struggle and the anti-capitalist struggle in today’s context is just insanity.

Somawansa Amarasinghe asks everyone here to lead ascetic lives, but his children are being educated abroad and they eat well, ride BMWs and live in good houses. But here they take even the salary of the poor pradesheeya sabha members for the party fund. This is why people like Weerawansa have allegedly been reduced to collecting money from casino owners and the like. Weerawansa’s wife uses a car. But you can’t maintain a car on the labourer’s salary that they get. Both these factions are wrong. There was an excellent cartoon in some paper where Amarasinghe the crab was telling Weerawansa the crab to walk straight. You can’t create the men that the JVP aspires to create. Somawansa leads the high life at the England, London level. The problem with these people is that they have not understood human nature, and both factions are trying to create an unnatural man.

Q. From Weerawansa’s point of view, isn’t it a blessing in disguise for him to be kicked out of the party? He might be able to do something useful with his life at least now.

A. In the past, it was Weerawansa who had the most number of allegations leveled at him. Weerawansa did not lead the kind of life led my most other JVP MPs. Even his marriage was one that was done according to his personal wishes. It appears that most others have married party full timers. From what we learnt of the Sunil Handunnetti affair, even though his wife sleeps with him at night, the wife works with Tilvin Silva and the other leaders of the JVP by day. She has links with the party independent of her husband.

Weerawansa is not like that. He was also involved in some business such as an agency post office. In the recent past, all allegations about his hair gel, his cell phone, his wife and his wife’s car was directed at Weerawansa. Such allegations were not leveled against Tilvin Silva or Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Also if you take Piyasiri Wijenayake who spoke out for Weerawansa at that press conference called by the 11 dissident JVP MPs, he too has similar allegations leveled at him. One can’t really say that this is the lily white faction of the JVP. They too have allegations against them.

In Nandana Gunatilleke’s articles to the Divaina, one thing that he has revealed is that when criticism and self criticism sessions are held within the party, about half the criticism is against Weerawansa. Gunatilleke says that that was because Weerawansa was very active, but then the same criticism has not been leveled against Anura Kumara Dissanayake, even though he too is active.

Q. Lets get back to that question of natural and unnatural men. The faction that is closest to natural man is Weerawansa and his group, because they have tried to break free of the irrational strictures imposed by the party…

A. No they haven’t moved away from that fallacy. Like Nandana Gunatilleke, even the JVP dissidents are trying to perpetuate the myth of a perfect man which the JVP tried to propagate. In the future, when both sides start trading blows, we are going to hear some really good revelations. Nandana Gunatilleke has already said that a large amount of money has been misappropriated from the party headquarters building project. But both these factions are still in that dream world called Marxism. Even the dissidents have not understood where the Soviet Union went wrong, where Marx went wrong, where Lenin went wrong.

Q. You seem to be finding this split in the JVP very entertaining…

A. I don’t find it entertaining. What I am sorry about is that Weerawansa never thought that this could happen to him. If he knew that this was going to happen to him, he would not have taken steps to deprive me of my parliamentary seat. It was he who raised the question that led to my removal from parliament. What has happened in the JVP is a split that was bound to occur.

Q. Don’t you feel that Weerawansa will have better future outside the JVP?