It was a different ball game that the warring Wansas of the JVP played on Sunday. JVP leader Somawansa Amerasinghe and his blue eyed boy turned bête noire Wimal Weerawansa, going for each other’s jugular, played cricket together in their home town, Kalutara, where the alumni of their schools had a 25-over cricketing encounter. Somawansa proved his spinning skills, taking as he did two wickets but Weerawansa got out for a duck in the penultimate over. (We hope he won’t blame his failure on an international conspiracy.) His dismissal prevented Weerawansa from facing Somawansa’s spin attack. Did he throw his wicket away, not wanting to be dismissed by his boss? Somawansa didn’t bat—did he fear a bouncer from Weerawansa? In the end, Somawansa’s side won.

What is of great import in cricket is not the number of wickets one takes or the runs one scores but how the game is played. Sir Henry Newbolt’s poetic gem, Vitai Lampada, comes to mind, especially its last stanza:

What has become of sportsmanship of Weerawansa and Somawansa? Did it desert them upon their leaving school? Both of them played schools cricket. (Master Blaster Sanath is said to have a high regard for Weerawansa as a cricketer!) But, going by the way they are behaving vis-à-vis a party crisis, it looks as if they hadn’t even played marbles as children let alone play cricket. Weerawansa, the politician well past his school days, unlike the cricketer in Newbolt’s poem, is obviously playing ‘for the sake of a ribboned coat and selfish hope of a season’s fame’ and it is not his captain’s hand’ that he has on his shoulder; he says he has a dagger stuck on his back. Not simply cricket, eh?

It is not only the leaders of Rathu Sahodarayas who have played the so-called gentlemen’s game but not learnt anything from it other than chucking and match fixing. We have had national leaders who had played cricket in their formative years. But in politics they have fared worse than even chakgudu players. Some of them lofted public funds into offshore accounts to the tune of billions of rupees. When put into the crucible of power politics and business, even good men and women turn out to be tyrants and rogues!

As for the sportive Rathu Sahodarayas, we didn’t hear ‘the voice of the schoolboy’ rally ‘the ranks’ saying ‘Play up, Play up and play the game!’ when their ‘regiment’ was ‘ blind with dust and smoke’ in the late 1980s. Instead, they swung into action with galkatas and machetes and went on a killing spree. Innocent men, women and children were shot and chopped to death in their thousands. Public property worth billions of rupees was destroyed. They kept the river of blood in full spate for over two years, while their much refined counterparts in the rival camp with a fetish for cricket, turned counter insurgency ops into a human blood sport.

Never mind cricket, sportsmanship, values, character building and all that. Whoever thought Reds would revere vestiges of colonialism like cricket, which the rank and file of JVP contemptuously dismisses as a metaphor for vainglory of the elite? We thought only the traditional leftists from an elitist background disported themselves in such practices while feinting to take the hoi polloi to a communist utopia. Once a leader of the left movement, confronted by a comrade who scoffed at his leaders’ love for scotch famously said socialism didn’t mean leaders avoiding whisky but working towards enabling the proletariat as well to enjoy it!

So, Somawansa and Weerawansa, too, can peddle a similar argument if someone asks them why they have failed to wean themselves away from cricket even after becoming inveterate anti-imperialists. (We seem to be offering them free advice!) They can say there is nothing wrong with playing cricket and their aim is to help everyone in this country play it without allowing the capitalist class to have a monopoly over it. Somawansa may use the same argument to silence his critics who ruffle his feathers and try to stump him in TV interviews by asking him to explain why his son is studying in a British university while his party is disrupting the local university system and denying Sri Lankan students their right to higher education. He can say he is on a campaign to enable the progeny of the ordinary masses as well to study overseas like his son. (We see a remarkable similarity between Prabhakaran and Somawansa in this regard: Both are damn good fathers! They keep disrupting the education of others’ children and making them die for a macabre cause, while their own children are studying abroad in safety.)

What does the JVP leader’s and his dissident counterpart’s predilection for a bourgeois game signify? Their mindset is not different from that of the traditional leftist leaders whose idiosyncrasy reduced their parties to mere name boards with the passage of time. Weerawansa recently likened the treatment the JVP leadership had meted out to him to forcibly discharging a patient from hospital. It is surprising that he doesn’t know he has been completely cured of the disease he had been afflicted with for twenty long years—anarchism. Many others in the party have fully recovered as could be seen from their gravitation towards the two main parties. All pseudo Marxists plunging into revolutionary politics seeking a kick get well after they enjoy good things in life and see the world. Thereafter, either they should leave the party of their own volition or be prepared to get thrown out. That has happened to many others earlier like Mahinda Wijesekera, Kelly Senanayake and Lionel Bopage.