Post-July '83 JVP, evil Israeli State and US global hegemony

IT is only appropriate that Black July 1983 was remembered this month, but the recollection stopped at the ghastly events, their causation and immediate aftermath.

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

The narrative is that sections of the UNP, predominantly those associated with Minister Cyril Mathew and the UNP trade union wing he headed, the JSS, played a key role in the anti-Tamil pogrom. The Jayewardene government then cynically framed the JVP for the violence which it had absolutely nothing to do with and proscribed the party, driving it into clandestinity and rearmament. The interventionist role of India then prompted/provoked the JVP into a massive armed uprising which threatened state power itself. That's the accepted narrative and is true, but is an incomplete truth.

To stop there and refuse to inquire further, deprives us of the complete lessons of the post-July '83 tragedy and the connecting tissue with current reality. The question must be raised "how did the JVP react to July '83, what did it do, and what does its response reveal?" The answers must be sought to shed light on the present state of the Sri Lankan crisis and what must be done to prevent another cycle of polarization and possible conflict, whatever its form and agency.

There were two intertwined but distinguishable political phenomena that dominated the Southern landscape in the aftermath of July '83.

■The shift of focus to a political solution for the Tamil Question.

■The growing role of India.

The carnage of July '83 revived the search for a political solution based on the devolution of power, because it was realized that Sri Lanka was very far from a society like France or Singapore in which the state would or could play a role that didn't favour one community over any other.

Furthermore, the gulf between the communities had widened drastically with July '83. The solution was understood to inevitably involve a search for power-sharing at the periphery, i.e., revisiting the core of the agreement between SWRD Bandaranaike and SJV Chelvanayagam in 1957 which envisaged semi-autonomous self-administration in the North and East.