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Dissecting Dayan Jayatilleka�s Past and Present
29 February 2008
 Currently, I�m reading Charlton Heston�s invigorating autobiography �In the
Arena� (1995). After 300 pages, I�m half-way through. Still another 275
pages to go. While describing his troubles in shooting the movie, �55 Days at
Peking�(1962) that retold the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 for the movie screen,
Charlton Heston had the following appreciative words for his co-star David Niven.
I quote the short paragraph verbatim:
�David Niven is my happiest memory of that whole shoot. He was that
increasingly rara avis, a true gentleman, funny as only Brits can be, a
flawless professional and best of all, a superb actor. When he�d won his
Best Actor Oscar for Separate Tables, he stumbled going up the steps
to the stage. Improvising a thin gag about falling because he was loaded
with so many good luck pieces he was top-heavy, he said, �The reason I fell
is that I was loaded�� and was drowned in the largest laugh in the history
of Academy acceptances (admittedly not a rich mine of wit).� [pp. 292-293]
After reading this paragraph, my thoughts drifted to the recent scribblings of
the Sinhalese political analyst-actor, now performing in Geneva. Unlike the
debonair and witty David Niven on that Oscar Awards night, this political
analyst-actor
Dayan Jayatilleka - currently performing as the Goebbelsian Gong of President
Mahinda Rajapakse � appears to be top-heavy with maldigested Marxian chaff.
Having positioned himself as the Sri Lanka�s head barker in Geneva since last
year, the bottom line in all the scribblings of this soothsayer amounts to �The
LTTE � not the Tamils, not Tamil nationalism, not Sinhala nationalism- is The
Absolute Enemy. It poses no less than an existential threat to us Sri Lankans.
We cannot coexist with it. It must be fought and defeated.� [Island,
Colombo, Jan.31, 2008].
As a Tamil observer, should one be silent? The past flip-flops of this
Goebbelsian Gong needs some exposure. To do this without any rancor, first I
provide two published evaluations on Jayatilleka�s credentials by his fellow
Sinhalese peers, who have no love either for Tamil nationalism or for
Pirabhakaran. This strategy, somewhat eliminates the pro-Tamil bias which I may
be accused of.
The thoughts of Rajpal Abeynayake in 1997
The following excerpts, appeared in an opinion piece with the caption, �What has
Laurent Kabila got to do with the Lanka Guardian?� [Sunday Times,
Colombo, June 1, 1997].
�Dayan is currently the Editor of the Lanka Guardian, founded by his
father, senior journalist Mervyn de Silva. For those with short memories,
Jayatilleke was better known as Anuruddha Tilakasiri during the Premadasa
era, when he wrote a regular column for the Observer, taking on most
of Premadasa�s many pugnacious detractors. Now, Jayatilleke has
metamorphosed into Editor, turning the Lanka Guardian into a magazine
that is largely a reflection of the Editor�s convictions.�
Abeynayake continued further:
�If the Lanka Guardian is a reflection of Dayan�s ideology, then its
not surprising that the Guardian has also carried various tracts and
analysis intermittently on Marxist doctrinal affairs. But, compared to the
force of the pro-Premadasist, fiercely anti-PA stance [note: PA refers to
the People�s Alliance headed by Chandrika Kumaratunga, the then President]
that the magazine now regularly adopts, the little nod at dialectical
Marxism is a quaint aberration it appears.
To me, Jayatileke embodies the noveau capitalist ideologue, and since
�capitalist ideologues� did not exist in the same sense that �Marxist
ideologues� existed, I see Jayatilleke as one among a new breed of
ideologues who have emerged in the vacuum created by the �death� of Marxist
ideologues in the post-Cold War political discourse.
For example, one cannot accuse the Guardian these days of not taking
a stand. This is not to say the magazine is devoid of its intellectual
flavour, but since Dayan took over the day-to-day operation of the
Guardian, the magazine has become a pro-active political organ as
opposed to a purely journalistic device which it used to be when Dayan�s
father Mr Mervyn de Silva ran operations.�
The thoughts of Malinda Seneviratne in 2000
The following excerpts, appeared in a rebuttal to Dayan Jayatilleka with the
caption, �Some mild thoughts on Dayan Jayatilleka� [Island, Colombo,
Oct.9, 2000].
�Take away all the spurious linguistic theatrics in Dayan�s article and a
couple of issues emerge. First. He does talk about the alleged Sinhala
Buddhist hegemonism and what he chooses to call �the new global reality��
Dayan complains that my �howl� against globalization is insincere because I
have failed to �acknowledge the positive Sri Lankan experience of 1989/90 �
1993�. Being a sycophant of Ranasinghe Premadasa, I suppose Dayan is obliged
to say nice things about the man. Premadasa was the architect of the most
violent period of our post-independence history. True the JVP is not as
innocent as their spokesmen claim. I don�t know from which piece of Marxist
literature Dayan found solace (if he was a sincere Marxist) during those
times of defending Premadasa, but 60,000 people being tortured and killed
during a person�s tenure as head of state is a far cry from a �positive
experience��
About Dayan�s history, let me say it all in one line: it includes a
particularly funny way of handing over nomination papers, a funny way of
popping in and out of the country, offering an abject public apology to J.R.
Jayewardene, not to mention defending the party lines of the various groups
in power (nationally and regionally). It would suffice to say �Danno Danithi�
at this point.
Dayan must be familiar with the phrase �A rose by any other name would smell
as sweet�. By the same token, rubbish, even if covered by a layer of Marx
and Gramsci would still stink. Premadasa remains a tyrant.�
What Dayan Jayatilleka wrote in 1982
The Lanka Guardian magazine of Feb.1, 1982, featured a three page
commentary by a 25 year-old Dayan Jayatilleka, who then portrayed himself as a
Sinhalese contra carrying a flag of a pro-Tamil agitator. It was entitled,
�Jaffna: Individual terrorism or guerilla war?� Here are excerpts from that
commentary. The words or phrases in bold font are as in the original.
�The steady, selective liquidation of Tamil militants is accompanied by the
parallel process of a deliberate attempt to �de-legitimize� and
�criminalize� the political-military struggle in the North. Both are the
work of the bourgeois state, using the repressive apparatus for the physical
action and the ideological apparatus for the physical action and the
ideological apparatus, the mass media, for the psychological exercise. One
seeks to destroy the physical being; the other his identity.
Thus the bourgeois state has succeeded in organizing a consensus to support
the most repressive legislation that the State now employs against its �main
enemy� � the Tamil �terrorists�.
That the Sri Lanka Freedom Party � this faction or that � should support
this consensus is no surprise to anyone. There�s no greater Sinhala
chauvinist than Sirimavo Bandaranaike and neither the Maoists nor the
Trotskyists, her present supporters, can erase that fact just as her past
partners, the LSSP and CP could not wash her away the guilt of 1971. But
what does surprise one is that the Left movement, succumbing to the
ideological psychological warfare of the bourgeois state should also join
this consensus and denounce Tamil �terrorism� or �individual terrorism�.
This unfortunately has drawn significant layers of the proletariat into the
reactionary consensus. My purpose then is to make two points:
(a) The armed actions in the North are not terroristic and alien to
Marxism-Leninism but are in fact typical of an early stage of a
protracted peoples war of national liberation.
(b) These actions are very much in the authentic tradition of the Bolsheviks
under Lenin.�
Dayan Jayatilleka continued to propound his thoughts as follows:
�The Tamil guerillas, while being in the phase of �Strategic Defensive�, are
accumulating strength through a series of relatively minor tactical
offensives. The massive retaliation by the State reveals to the Tamil
people their enemy in all its bestial ferocity. But this is not all. The
repression which, making no distinction between the armed combatants and
unarmed youth, encompasses in its scale and scope, the entire Tamil nation
in the North. Every Tamil there, by the very fact of his or her Tamilness,
is deemed an enemy and treated as such in practice. This forces the Tamil
people to see themselves as the State sees them at the very time it tries to
deny it, i.e., as a separate nation! Thus, the inexorable dialectic of
vanguard violence and state repression enables the Tamil people to know
themselves and know their enemy. It raises their political consciousness
from the level of a nation un sich to that of a nation fur sich.
The dialectic also forces sectors like the TULF and the Sinhala Left to take
up positions on either side of the fence. Trying to straddle the barbed wire
proving uncomfortable to their lower extremities.
The sudden, spectacular and successful military actions by the urban
guerillas against definable sources of repression and visible institutions
of the State, begin to convince broader and broader layers of the populace
that armed struggle is possible as well as morally justifiable
and absolutely necessary to break free from oppression. As this
happens, the masses themselves begin to enter the struggle. A Peoples Army
of national liberation will, in the obvious conception of the Tamil
militants, emerge through a gradual accretion of guerilla fighters as the
struggle proceeds from hit-and-run attacks (low intensity/small unit
operations) via skirmishes, on to confrontations of wider scope. Right now
what the guerillas are trying to do is to offer practical proof to the
masses of the effectiveness and feasibility of an armed struggle strategy
for the achievement of Eelam, in the face of the manifest failure of the
TULF�s parliamentary strategy and the continuation/escalation of military
repression. This is known as the tactic of armed propaganda.
What have the armed Tamil youth achieved so far?
(1) According to Habash, the inability of the enemy to destroy the
movement in embryo is in itself a victory for the movement. The Tamil
militants have achieved this victory.
(2) They have prevented the State from �normalizing� the situation.
(3) They have withstood the shift in counter-guerilla operations from the
hands of the police to that of the regular Army. The Tupamaros could not
survive this qualitative shift. (Admittedly they were operating in a
different context � that of class warfare.)
(4) They have eliminated the information gathering capacity of the special
(political) police in the North. (Learning to combat the political police is
a necessary attribute of a revolutionary cadre according to Lenin�s �What
Is To Be Done?�)
(5) They have accumulated a sufficient minimum of fire-power as well as
considerable financial strength.
(6) They have re-introduced the problematique of revolutionary violence,
first posed by the JVP (its great historic merit) into the debate within the
Left movement, while providing a necessary critique (in practice, by weapon)
of the JVP�s strategy then and now (parliamentarism).�
Hyping the mule-brained EPRLF
Many, including Dayan Jayatilleka himself, may find it difficult to gulp what
the current lead barker for annihilation of LTTE, wrote in his salad days in
1982. The vehicle Dayan Jayatilleka boarded in early 1980s was EPRLF and its
hodge-podge mix of Marxist rhetoric and Tamil nationalism.
While I have read Dayan�s homages to the EPRLF and its leader K.Padmanabha in
the Lanka Guardian magazine and other mouthpieces of Sinhalese
majoritarianism, I have not seen any mention or rebuke from Dayan on the issue
of that demented 1984 kidnapping of newly-wed Ohio couple (Stanley and Mary
Allen) in Jaffna and ransom demand made by his EPRLF pals, among whom Douglas
Devananda was one, who now parades as a virtuous democrat in President Mahinda
Rajapakse Cabinet. I refrain from repeating here, what I had already written on
the abysmal failure of EPRLF leadership and the reasons for its dismal
performance among Eelam Tamils for recognition, in my Pirabhakaran Phenomenon
(2005) book.
While re-reading in 2008, what Dayan Jayatilleka had written in 1982, check
again the phrases such as, �tactical offensives�, �vanguard violence and state
repression�, �manifest failure of the TULF�s parliamentary strategy�,
�sufficient minimum fire-power as well as considerable financial strength�, all
of which have come to characterize the LTTE imprints, and not the EPRLF that
danced to Indian puppeteers� strings.
Hyping Karuna
Since March 2004, when Karuna was evicted from the LTTE, one of Karunas�s
voluble cheer-leaders was Dayan, a von Clausewitz , who never saw field action
in a battle field. Here are four excerpts from what he had written hyping Karuna,
between 2004 and 2007.:
Item 1:
�Karuna�s great strength is that he has a cause, an idea: he has
raised the standard of revolt and liberty against a brutal tyranny. He has
wisely refrained from unveiling a detailed programme which could narrow his
appeal and options or prove divisive among potential allies, and narrowed
the target to Prabhakaran�s dictatorship and the domination of the East.
His great achievements are fourfold: (i) Staying alive (ii) weathering the
storms of the April retreat/dispersion, the Kottawa killings and Reggie�s
death (iii) becoming internationally known, recognisable and (iv)
expeditiously achieving a politico-military capacity by combining the
classic �armed propaganda� of selective attacks with the formation of a
political front�.Karuna�s great underlying strength is that his struggle is
in keeping with the spirit of the times, the strongest force in human
history: the search for a wider freedom, for liberty.� [�In defence of
Karuna�, Asian Tribune website, Oct. 19, 2004]
Item
2
�We can be certain of winning the war even in the largely mono-ethnic Jaffna
and Wanni theatres if (a) Karuna has been involved in drawing up the battle
plans and (b) the opposing LTTE cadres know that in addition to the Sri
Lankan armed forces, their legendary former commander has taken the field,
leading a well-trained, equipped and formidable Tamil formation.� [�The
Morning After Muhamalai�, Asian Tribune website, Oct.14, 2006.]
Item 3
�A Karuna�dominated
Eastern council would achieve two positive results:
(1).
It would enable Karuna to strengthen himself and expand his base, which in
turn would mean that we could hand over many security functions to the
Eastern council (the law and order function is devolved and there is
provision to raise a police force, hence the earlier North east Provincial
Council�s CVF militia) draw down our forces from the East and commit them to
defeating the Tigers in the North. (2). With the patronage he is able
to extend through the Council, Karuna would be able to raise an army in the
East which can work in parallel with the Sri Lankan armed forces in any
offensive in the North and the Wanni. [�De-merger: Give Karuna the Eastern
Council�, Lanka Academic Forum website, Oct.28, 2006]
Item 4
�Sun
Tzu says the target of all strategy is the mind of the enemy commander. Col.
Karuna should be asked to war-game, anticipate Prabhakaran's moves, while
bearing in mind that Prabhakaran will anticipate this and strive to use new,
post-Karuna tactics.
Karuna,
given his impressive performance against Jayasikuru and at Elephant Pass,
and Douglas Devananda, given his knowledge of the North and its people,
should be intimately and organically involved in designing the campaign, and
invited to make operational, problem-solving inputs as the process unfurls.�
[�Pushing 60: Independence Day Manifesto�, Sunday Observer, Colombo,
Feb.4, 2007]
That
Karuna�s stars didn�t glitter either in East Eelam or in North Eelam
as Dayan Jayatilleka had naively hoped and that Karuna - the great hype of Dayan
- is now literally �counting bars� in a London slammer, should have been an
utter disappointment for this anti-LTTE scribe.
For
obvious reasons, during the past two months, Karuna name-droppings have
disappeared from Dayan�s scribblings. The reasons Dayan attributed as Karuna�s
�great achievements� in his �defence of Karuna� polemic in late 2004, have been
proved right in a perverse sense in 2008; �becoming
internationally known, recognisable and staying alive� in a London slammer!� not
for any liberation-related cause for which Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had
gone to prison, but for illegal entry with a forged diplomatic passport under
the Sinhalese name Kokila Gunawardana � purported Director General of Wildlife
Conservation.. Huh! Anyone for Hubris?
Coda
There is one plausible reason for Dayan Jayatilleka�s continuing drivel against
the LTTE. And Charlton Heston has noted it, in his autobiography. �We�re all
sensitive to other actors� assaults on great roles we�ve played too.� Dayan in
his salad days of 1980s dreamt himself as a Sri Lankan militant revolutionary
a la Fidel Castro, leading his raggedy bunch of companeros under the banner
Vikalpa Kandayama � only to fail miserably, negotiate an amnesty deal
with his then adversary (J.R.Jayewardene) in 1988, and then launch his career.
The successes of Pirabhakaran as a militant revolutionary probably make Dayan
puke, day in and day out. The bottom line is, unlike Dayan Jayatilleka, the LTTE
leader never allowed his battle-field adversaries to gain an upper hand on him,
and did send Jayewardene and his three successors who posed as Commander in
Chiefs into permanent political retirement. As the title of Charlton Heston�s
autobiography is tagged, Pirabhakaran is still active �In the Arena�, decades
after the likes of Dayan have settled for a diplomatic cover, while praying for
a wounded and wilting Sarath Fonseka (GOSL�s current Army Chief, the 12th
man in the job since mid 1970s!) to work a miracle.
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