Hobbes & Locke: Dayan Jayatilleka & The Opposition Reset

By Uditha Devapriya –FEBRUARY 2, 2021

Uditha Devapriya

When both the Sinhala Alt-Right and neoliberal Right start attacking you, you know you’re occupying a centrist moral high ground. Appointing Dr Dayan Jayatilleka as the Samagi Jana Balavegaya’s Senior International Relations Advisor – no Junior Advisor as of yet – portends, I think, a world of possibility, for an Opposition bruised and battered by a quarter-century of self-manslaughter. The appointment as it stands doesn’t really amount to much, unless you place it in its proper context: what we have is a key theoretician, the only theoretician who can pose a credible enough challenge to what the government is doing. I do not necessarily agree with everything he has said and written over the last few months, but I do agree that the Opposition needs a radical reset. And it’s becoming more and more clear that the man best capable of handling the surgery to see that through is Dr Jayatilleka. 

The key to a successful Opposition is not to be high on principles, but to offer a practical and tous azimuts course of action that squares the circle. It must talk about democracy, it must talk about decentralisation, it must talk about empowering the people, yet it must not do so loftily. The Opposition’s rhetoric must reach the people: this is as simple a political axiom as the Samagi Jana Balavegaya is going to get. The SJB is not the UNP, nor should it try to be. It is for this reason that Dr Jayatilleka’s appointment is needed, since, as he has emphasised in column after column, any cohesive critique of the government must incorporate a cohesive if not comprehensive critique of the Opposition too. And going by the flurry of contradictory statements, tweets, and posts made by SJB personnel, Dr Jayatilleka’s critiques are needed more than ever. To put it in perspective, then: the SJB cannot be UNP Lite.

The problem with the SJB is that it is acting more and more like a many-headed hydra facing a rapacious but determined behemoth. To match the behemoth, the Opposition must meet it headfirst; it must critique the state’s more questionable actions while matching its better ideals. In three areas it should seek to go beyond the UNP’s paradigm: domestic economics, foreign relations, and the constitution. It’s no coincidence that Dr Jayatilleka’s critique of the government rests on these three areas, and it’s no coincidence that it’s from those vantage points that his critics – from BOTH the Alt-Right and the neoliberal Right – continue to attack and denigrate him. The first strategy must therefore be to purge the Opposition, not in the old authoritarian sense, but in the sense of removing remnants of what Dr Jayatilleka calls Ranilism: that failed neoliberal, anti-Presidential yahapalanist policy.

The yahapalana neoliberal project failed, but not because Sri Lankans are averse to a liberal polity. It all depends on what kind of liberal policies the yahapalana government was trying to dish out. At the centre of its project was a fatal disjuncture between its populist roots and its avowed policy of “liberalising and globalising” (Mangala Samaraweera, Budget Speech 2017). People voted for a social market economy; what they got was anything but. In other words the yahapalanists failed to reconcile the timeless rift between social liberalism (with its emphasis on state interventionism and state-directed equity) and economic liberalism (with its emphasis on the rollback of the state). High on principles, and lofty ones at that, it floundered. For that reason, we cannot go back to 2015. We should not try to do so.

Given this, how should the SJB craft its policies in those areas? On the domestic economic front, the SJB must abandon, totally and considerably, that earlier policy of liberalising and globalising. It must think of production, since the biggest, most persistent problem facing this country’s economy today is its absence of a proper manufacturing base. It cannot hope to achieve this with piecemeal solutions; there must be state intervention, what Dr Dayan calls “a new, New Deal, Rooseveltian-Keynesian.” I am no economist, so I can’t really detail the specifics of this new New Deal. I do know, however, what it should not be: the old UNP-yahapalanist neoliberal paradigm. The new policy must be progressive, state-led though not state-monopolised, and driven by local manufacture.

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