A Dressing Down For JVP Anura

By TU Senan -June 5, 2014

TU Senan

JVP Leader Fails To Satisfy London Meeting Seeking Answers

A late arrival was not enough to save JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayakefrom a barrage of questions. At a meeting held on Saturday 31 May in East Ham, London, organisers prevented the JVP from putting up their banners. This was not ‘a JVP propaganda meeting’ we were informed – and the organisers must be congratulated for showing the JVP for what it still is, a Sinhala nationalist organisation trying to hide behind Marxist rhetoric. But Anura himself was key to exposing this reality.

The JVP is incapable of organising a meeting of this kind anywhere outside Sri Lanka, hence they had to rely on others to organise the event. Not so surprisingly there is no way they can attract Tamils or Muslim minorities to their meetings. This, however, did not stop the JVP from boasting to the Sinhala media in Sri Lanka that they’d held ‘successful meetings internationally’. But the truth is somewhat on the contrary.

The JVP has been trying to revamp their war-tainted image by selecting a new leader and claiming to have changed. Relying on a bit of nationalism, they made a relatively successful comeback in the last provincial elections. However, their support among the Sinhala Diaspora remains very weak.

The creation of the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and the international tour by its leader Kumar Gunaratnam has also done huge damage to the JVP. The aim of Anura’s visit, supposedly to recover from this, can without exaggeration be said to have failed.

The London meeting once more demonstrated the inability of the JVP to attract revolutionary sections of the community. Faced with questions, Anura resorted to diplomatic dodging rather than actually attempting to provide answers.

Anura had an opportunity to explain the mistakes of the past to his audience – the JVP’s false perspective that led them to enter a coalition with an anti-worker, capitalist government and to be complicit in the genocidal slaughter of Tamil-speaking people that took place in 2009. But, despite repeated probing, he touched on none of these issues. For Anura these issues may be in the long-forgotten past but they are firmly centred in the minds of many participants at the meeting.

The audience was told not to dwell on the past and instructed to ask questions about the current situation. But the attendees were well informed and the questions were not restricted to issues specifically of interest to Tamils.

                        Read More