Dayan Jayatilleke: Smart Patriot or Failed Opportunist

(Lanka-e-News -28.July.2016, 11.00PM) Opportunists have never been scarce in Sri Lankan politics. We’ve had S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Faustian pact with Sinhala Only in 1956, the great Colvin de Silva’s capitulation in the promulgation of the 1972 constitution, Amirthalingam’s casual, but ultimately fatal, flirting with militancy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

One mustn’t let the UNP off the hook either: from D.S. Senanayake’s disenfranchisement of estate labour, J.R.’s lethal Padha Yathra to Kandy and the 1983 riots, Premadasa’s Black Cats and Ranil’s burning of the 2000 Constitutional Proposals, the UNP has also kow-towed at the altar of expediency. 

In more recent years, we have endured the greatest opportunist of them all, - Mahinda Rajapaksa. The human rights defender for whom Geneva was a second home became the greatest purveyor of terror - all while in his slippery fashion being all things to all men.

Neither has Sri Lankan opportunism been confined to politics. We have seen the brave journalists of the Premadasa era, like Lucien Rajakarunanayke, become apologists for the most dastardly regime Sri Lanka has seen since independence.

But there is one major difference between these gentlemen and Dayan Jayatilleke. They were successful opportunists. Dayan, on the other hand, is a failed opportunist.

 Despite his turn-coat chameleon ways, he has not succeeded in becoming a Minister, much the less an MP. Nor has he even become Ambassador in Delhi, Washington, New York or Beijing. Despite repeated requests the late Lakshman Kadirgamar would not even make him First Secretary in Washington. As for his coup at the ‘Geneva battlefield’, a rather undiplomatic and confrontational characterisation, I have shown how Genaralissmo Dayan’s victories are all machismo: he wins battles but loses wars. 

On the academic front, he is not taken seriously.  There are many journalists, including his late father, who have many more citations for their writing than Dayan. Don’t trust me: search for Dayan Jayatilleke on Google Scholar and see how many of his works are cited by other academics.

While Dayan’s opportunism is well known, for the benefit of the young who have not lived through his twists and turns, and the old who in their advanced years may have forgotten his foibles, it may be worth recounting a few choice moments in Dayan’s long career which almost account to a Seven Ages of Dayan Jayatilleke. 

First, Dayan de Silvaat some point abandoned his comprador origins in name and embraced the ‘earthy’ Jayatilleke. While this does not smack of outright opportunism in itself, and if the rest of Dayan’s life where different could be held up as an example, the facts belie such a generous interpretation. He changed his name for political benefit, to obscure his comprador origins and win people’s trust on false pretences. 

Second, the period when Dayan wanted to play an Eelamist Che Guevera. Joining the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Front, he fought under their flag, becoming a minister in the North-Eastern Provincial Council Board of Ministers. It was during the tenure of this Board of Ministers that the Unilateral Declaration of Independence was issued. It was during this period in the early 1980s that Dayan was constantly seeking to overthrow the state, even hiding in India for a year. 

With the Unilateral Declaration of Independence’s failure and his arrest under the PTA, Dayan did his famous u-turn becoming an apologist for the state and the Premadasa regime at the height of its vigilante violence. Writing under the pseudonym Anurudda Tillakasiri in the Sunday Observer he was the Rajpal Abeynaike of his day. So much so that at Lalith Athulathmudalli’s funeral the mourners were enraged and stripped him of his clothes and chased him off. But poor Dayan, for all his u-turns, Premadasa only made him was a Director of Conflict Studies at IPS. 

The next decade was a lean one for Dayan. Chandrika ignored him. Ranil ignored him. The LTTE ignored him. Now one took any notice of his ‘towering intellect’ so he revived his family heirloom, the Lanka Guardian, and started a Phd - all the while pestering LK for a diplomatic appointment. His ideology at the time was a mish-mash but he firmly supported the devolution of power well beyond the 13th Amendment. With this he would have slowly faded into Carlo Fonseka-like oblivion. But Mahinda then came along. 

Mahinda found someone as slippery as himself who could also speak English. When Dayan berated, in English, what Mahinda wanted to say to him in English - obviously something that would set Sri Lanka on a course for confrontation with the world’s sole superpower and Sri Lanka’s largest export market - he found a new patron. So with a father-figure in the form of Mahida, Dayan’s writing went from confused to outright chauvinistic - they went from 13+, to 13, to 13 minus and now they more or less refuse to acknowledge the existence of an ethnic conflict. Now with Mahinda looking weaker and weaker by the day, he seems to be trying to worm himself into Maithripala Sirisena’s camp. 

To summarise, Dayan the third world revolutionary, became the cosmopolitan apologist for a right-wing regime and now Dayan is the English face of a primordial chauvinist. But despite such blatant opportunism, Dayan today still roams the political wilderness mis-quoting philosophers he hasn’t read and concepts he doesn’t understand, while pleading for posting, position or simply recognition.

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by   Armando Perera   (2016-07-28 17:42:36)