A frontrunner in the September 21 presidential vote, Dissanayake’s party, the JVP, twice fought violent battles to overthrow the very Sri Lankan state that he now wants to run.
The 55-year-old Sri Lankan politician is not in government. National People’s Power, the political alliance he leads, isn’t even the principal opposition. It has only three seats in the country’s 225-member parliament, where it’s the fourth-largest force. And his party has often been seen as close to China, India’s principal geopolitical rival.
But for months now, Dissanayake has enjoyed a different kind of authority within Sri Lankan politics, which has in turn earned him recognition as a rising political force even from regional superpower India.
He is a surprise top contender for the country’s presidency, when the Indian Ocean island votes on September 21. Some opinion polls even suggest he could be the frontrunner, among a crowd of 38 candidates.
It’s a lineup littered with familiar faces from the country’s most prominent political families: Namal Rajapaksa, the eldest son of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa; Sajith Premadasa, the son of another former president, R Premadasa; and incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinge, a nephew of the country’s first executive President JR Jayewardene.
Dissanayake stands out among that set: He is the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a party that has never previously been close to national power and that twice led Marxist insurrections against the very state Dissanayake now wants to rule.
The turning point for the party and the NPP, the coalition it leads, came in 2022, when the country’s economy collapsed, leading to widespread shortages of essential goods and skyrocketing inflation.
A mass protest movement – known as the Aragalaya [Sinhalese for ‘struggle’] – against the ruling government forced then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation after his brother Mahinda, the prime minister, also had to quit. The brothers were forced to flee an angry nation.
Though no political party officially claimed the leadership of the Aragalaya movement, the JVP played an active role, holding daily protests, erecting tents in Colombo’s picturesque Galle Face and organising general strikes. The power vacuum created by the resignation of the Rajapaksa brothers paved the way for Dissanayake and the JVP to amplify calls for broader change, attracting disillusioned citizens to their advocacy for social justice and against corruption. From the margins, the party grew into a credible, major political force. And Dissanayake’s personal appeal has soared with his party’s.
“I see he is honest in attempting to change the system,” writer and political analyst Gamini Viyangoda told Al Jazeera. Viyangoda is a co-convenor of the Purawesi Balaya civil society movement that campaigns for democratic reform in Sri Lanka.
“When he says he’d close the doors to corruption, I believe he means it. Whether he’d manage to do it or not is another matter, but I haven’t seen this genuineness in any other political leader,” Viyangoda said.
From insurrection to popular appeal
Born in a rural middle-class family in the village of Thambuttegama, 177km (110 miles) from the capital Colombo, in Sri Lanka’s Anuradhapura district, Dissanayake graduated with a science degree from the University of Kelaniya.
He had been involved with the JVP since his school days and first became a member of parliament in 2000.
Dissanayake was appointed the JVP leader in 2014 and has since tried to reimagine the party’s image as distinct from its violent past.
In 1971 and then in the late 1980s, the party had led failed Marxist-inspired insurrections. The armed uprising launched by the JVP in 1988-89, calling for the overthrow of what they saw as the imperialist and capitalist regime of Presidents JR Jayawardene and R Premadasa, became one of the bloodiest periods in Sri Lankan history.
Widespread killings and political assassinations, unofficial curfews, sabotage and strikes called by the JVP were the order of the day. The JVP’s victims – the Marxists are believed to have killed thousands of people – included intellectuals, artists and trade unionists in addition to political opponents. The state retaliated by brutally crushing the rebellion with mass arrests, torture, abductions and mass murder. At least 60,000 people were killed in the government crackdown, including most senior JVP leaders, among them its founder Rohana Wijeweera.
Dissanayake was appointed to the JVP politburo after the failed insurrection when the party abandoned violence and turned to electoral democracy.
Speaking with the BBC in May 2014, soon after he became the leader of the JVP, Dissanayake apologised for the party’s past crimes. It was the first and the last time ever that the JVP has apologised for the violence it had unleashed on Sri Lanka in its earlier avatar.
Criticised by some members of the party and by sections of the Sri Lankan left for apologising, Dissanayake has since been more careful in framing the past. He has since expressed regret several times but has stopped short of apologising again.
To be sure, the past still haunts the JVP and the country. Wickremesinge, now president, was a senior minister in Premadasa’s government at the time of the JVP insurrection in the 1980s, and is still battling accusations that he played an active role in the crackdown. Meanwhile, many older Sri Lankans haven’t forgotten the JVP’s terror either.
AL JAZEERA