In article ‘My thoughts on (Asoka) Handagama’s Rani’ published in a privately-owned newspaper on 28 March, artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator, Prof. Jagath Weerasinghe, extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Handagama’s recent film ‘Rani’. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history.
The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988-1990 period — enforced disappearances, death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence — were not the products of concrete political decisions, class-based interests, and specific agencies of State and party power; instead, they were the result of a society in which ‘violence had become systemic and normalised.’ Weerasinghe’s indictment reads: ”violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit — whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”
This pseudo sociological claim — that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses — leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. ‘Rani’, the eponymous protagonist, and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, and the unemployed youth, who were terrorised for their lives both by the fascism and by repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.
Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses — an implication clearly shared by the director (Handagama) — this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the ‘ordinary’ masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific — and, it serves a definite class interest.
The capitalist agents of terror, its political leadership, and the misdirected cadre are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of ‘ordinary citizens.’ They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless ‘we.’ The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Zoysa was not necessarily ordered by a President, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the State off the hook.
Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for State crimes — pogroms, wars, and genocides — is shifted onto ‘society’ or ‘human nature.’ One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust’ (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political programme of German imperialism and the fascist State of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent anti-semitism among the ‘ordinary’ German people. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, notably David North, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications that it carries.
Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims — nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. Instead, similar unsubstantiated ideas have been drawn from discredited psychological experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip George Zimbardo, which suggest that ordinary people naturally submit to cruelty under authority. These studies, widely criticised for flawed methods and ethics, are misused to promote a deterministic view of human behaviour. They obscure the class-based forces and political programmes that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms — thereby absolving the State and the ruling elite of political responsibility.
In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by a leader of the Frontline Socialist Party, Pubudu Jayagoda, who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese ‘society.’ This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it also plays directly into the hands of the capitalist State and the chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent a unified struggle.
The quest for the truth begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led insurrection and its methods? What class-based forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilised the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist State?
The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party. In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth — disillusioned by the Parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalisation policies of the J.R. Jayewardene regime — were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.
The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organisation. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign that paralysed the working class and the middle class. The response of the State was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.
This was not a case of a generalised ‘ideology of violence’ within the society. It was class-based warfare, waged from above by the capitalist State to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve the bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organisations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.
However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the world party of the working class, the International Committee of the Fourth International, which alone insisted that the fascist violence and the State terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a socialist and internationalist programme. In November 1988, in order to mobilise the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organisations to fight both State repression and fascism.
None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to ‘push’ the contemporary youth ‘to the very edges of these established frameworks.’
Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/National People’s Power (NPP) as its saviour. Its recent tabling and debating of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the United National Party, nor the interests of imperialism.
The working class and the rural poor must reject the ‘common guilt’ thesis advanced in ‘Rani’ and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe.
The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. ‘Rani’ fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.
(The writer is an attorney, lecturer, writer and political activist)
…………………………………………………
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication