Source:Island
“The middle-class of this country, a majority of them, appear to follow Jathika Chintanaya. But it’s very clear that they don’t know what Jathika Chintanaya means. Nor do they seem interested in knowing what it is. Gunadasa Amarasekara talks about Jathika Chintanaya. I talk about Chintanaye Jathikathwaya. Those not hailing from the middle-class know what Chintanaye Jathikathwaya is. But they don’t yet know how to articulate it.”
— Nalin de Silva, “Jathika Chintanaya and Chintanaye Jathikathwaya”
Despite what supporters and critics may say, from its inception Jathika Chintanaya was, as it still is, moulded by a Protestant ethic. Nalin de Silva’s famous critique of contemporary Buddhism – what he contemptuously derided as “Olcott Buddhism” – should not mislead one into thinking that followers of Chintanism questioned seriously the bourgeois Protestant ethic on which that variant of Buddhism was based. As scholars have clearly shown, despite its millenarian vision, post-19th century Sinhala nationalism ended up caving into the same merchant-rentier-comprador interests from which it sought to escape.
The experience of the last two decades bears out this latter point well: despite its intentions, Jathika Chintanaya failed to propound a version of Buddhism which was at once populist and emancipatory, which incorporated the Left while discarding its comprador elements.
A brief thaw did emerge in the early 1990s – a period I consider to have marked the peak of the movement – when Nalin de Silva and Gunadasa Amarasekara evolved a critique of the Left, as well as of processes which the Left had traditionally critiqued.
The thaw was largely epitomised by Nalin de Silva’s campaigns against Coca-Cola and the Kandalama Hotel. I consider these campaigns to have been justified, even if they did not go far enough in preventing Coca-Cola or Kandalama. I do so because in calling for the boycott of the one and the closure of the other, de Silva more or less put into question the credentials of “Left” outfits and activists who, far from critiquing the forces of globalisation and multinational capital which underlay the beverage and the hotel, welcomed them on the grounds that these forces would transcend the traditional “feudal” relations within Sinhala-Buddhist communities. This was what the “Left” magazine Pravada propounded in its editorial on the Kandalama Hotel as a response to activists organising protests against it: that while giving leeway to large companies was not kosher, the breakup of such “traditional relations” resulting from the project was deemed eminently desirable.
In welcoming the intrusion of metropolitan capital into the country, the editors of Pravada, and other like-minded publications projected the impression that they preferred even neoliberalism to the conservation of a traditional way of life: a somewhat peculiar conclusion for a paper identifying itself with the Left! The error stemmed from a fundamental misconception of “traditional relations,” and of capitalist enterprise in general. In any case, whatever it was, such postures from the New Left only served to vindicate the opposing stances of Jathika Chintanaya.
With the benefit of hindsight, it can be said that the latter faced its moment of reckoning at this point. Accordingly, these tactics should have been what informed its strategy. The JVP, decimated by the second insurrection, had adopted a similar line (of deploying Leftist rhetoric on nationalist issues) years earlier, so it was hardly unprecedented.
Yet for some reason, it was that strategy the Chintanawadeen chose not to take. I believe this failure reveals, at one level, the class limitations of Chintanism, an ideology rooted today in a Sinhala petty bourgeoisie. At a time when the founding ideologues of the Jathika Chintanaya seem to have split – Gunadasa Amarasekara in an overwhelmingly middle-class camp, Nalin de Silva in a non-middle class one (what he calls “Chintanaye Jathikathwaya”, which I shall explore later) – these limitations deserve further explication and analysis.
It goes without saying that both Amarasekara and Champika Ranawaka, foes in the battle of nationalist ideology today, continue to aim at, and appeal to, the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie: Amarasekara from what remains of Jathika Chintanaya, and Champika Ranawaka from his newly constituted “43 Senankaya”, which targets a disgruntled class of suburban Sinhala Buddhist professionals. What is pertinent here, of course, is not whether such a strategy can help win votes, but what it has done to, and how it has modified, the relationship between the Sinhala nationalists and the (economic) forces they opposed decades ago.
The Sihala Urumaya in the run up to the 2000 election gave a series of interviews in which its representatives expressed their ideas on globalisation and socialism. Their arguments revealed the transition the party was undergoing then: cautioning against the “ruinous” policies of the 1970-1977 regime which the “destroyed” Sinhala businessman, they made the point that globalisation, of a radically different sort, should be welcomed.
This did not mean the reinstatement of the “open economy,” which they critiqued, but neither did it mean a withdrawal from such an economy; it merely meant the recasting of neoliberal globalisation along lines more favourable to “indigenous” traders and merchants. The inadequacies of this approach are apparent enough, for it does not differ fundamentally from the neoliberal prescription of growth driven by – who else? – traders and merchants.
What we’re seeing here is a radical departure from how proponents of Sinhala nationalism once thought about political-economic matters in the wake of the 1987 Accord. Of particular interest is their currently Janus-faced attitude to the open and the closed economy: their critique of both is framed in terms of what these economic systems did, and did not do, for the local businessman. Very much in line with their petty bourgeois inclinations, they oppose globalisation from a cultural standpoint, while welcoming it from an economic standpoint. As for socialist alternatives, they view them as undesirable and in fact opposed to nationalism.
Tilak Karunaratne, General Secretary of the Sihala Urumaya, summed up these sentiments better than most, in an interview with The Island: “The things the SLFP did after they came into power starting with the bus nationalisation [were] done to hit the Sinhalese businessmen who were all UNPers. This was not at all done with a socialist intent. He thought by doing this he could destroy the UNP but he actually destroyed the Sinhalese. . . . The same happened with Insurance nationalisation, Port nationalisation and worst to hit the Sinhalese was the Plantation nationalisation. The economic clout was destroyed of the Sinhalese.”
Now, the point to note about these ideologues is that they tend to change. From critiquing the open economy and attacking nationalisation then, the Chintanavadeen seem to have come round to opposing the one and supporting the other on all fronts, and not just from a cultural perspective. Thus Gunadasa Amarasekara, in an article published around a year ago in this paper, reflects on the flaws of an economic model dependent on extraction, workers’ remittances, and tourism. The critique is cerebral, and the turnaround to be welcomed, even if inadequate. Yet these are a far cry from the positions the proponents of Sinhala nationalism adopted just two decades ago.
In offering a critique of globalisation, Jathika Chintanaya appears again to be subscribing to the stances it took in the immediate post-Cold War conjuncture, when it opposed multinational beverage brands and large-scale hotel development projects with an eloquence hardly matched by “Left” activists. This does not tone down my criticism of the movement or its ideologues, however: its failure to come up a more pluralist ideology that at once incorporated the more genuine sections of the Left, while discarding left-liberal and foreign donor-driven elements, when only a commitment to such a strategy could have transformed it from a purely communalist perspective to a radically non-comprador one.
Had it followed such a line, Jathika Chintanaya could no doubt have accomplished a transition which neither the Old Left at its nadir, nor the JVP after its entry into the democratic mainstream managed. Instead, the Chintanawadeen opted to chart the worst political-economic course: a regressive petty-bourgeois ideology impotent before neoliberalism and globalisation.
It’s easy to understand where the adherents of Jathika Chintanaya (as distinct from Nalin de Silva’s Chintanaye Jathikathwaya) went wrong: in battling petty enemies, they lost sight of the larger adversaries of systemic proportions. The consequences of these errors are to be seen in the debates over the leasing of the East Container Terminal: while the Left (along with Wimal Weerawansa and Gevindu Cumaratunga) spearheaded trade union action, several prominent nationalists chose to underscore the importance of foreign investment.
The irony became most apparent when it transpired that these were the same nationalists who berated India over other issues, like devolution. Now to harbour fears of Indian intervention, yet welcome the leasing of a strategic asset to non-nationals, seems to me an intellectual leap unworthy of such ideologues. But that is a leap they have been only too willing to make.
The writing is on the wall: as long as Jathika Chintanaya engages in pettifogging instead of serious debate, the world will move on, and civilisations will crumble down, under the weight of forces misapprehended if not altogether missed by their nationalist adherents. In the face of these forces of fragmentation, indeed of modernity itself, all that is solid melts into air – even the beloved nation.
Note 1: In Part I of this piece, I wrote that Nalin de Silva’s Old Left associations began in the NSSP. In actual fact they began in the LSSP, and only later shifted to the NSSP.
Note 2: Professor Kanishka Goonewardena of the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto has authored an interesting essay that dwells on Jathika Chintanaya. Titled “Populism, nationalism and Marxism in Sri Lanka”, it is, I daresay, a must-read, for the simple reason that it deviates from the generalisations one usually encounters with liberal scholars on the subject.
The writer can be reached at udakdevl@gmail.com
