From Comrade to Traitor: Ethical Hostility and Epistemological Closure in Sri Lankan Left Political Culture

By Udaya R. Tennakoon

This article examines the narratives surrounding the late Sri Lankan politician Nandana Gunathilaka as a lens through which to analyze a deeper ethical and epistemological crisis within contemporary left-wing political culture. While Gunathilaka was historically formed within the post-JVP political conjuncture, dominant representations foreground a later phase of political transformation framed as external to both the JVP and left ideology. Drawing on Marxist ethics, Antonio Gramsci’s theory of historical responsibility, and Walter Benjamin’s critique of historicism, the article argues that such selective historiography displaces political accountability and forecloses contradiction. The analysis further situates Gunathilaka’s case within a broader JVP cultural tradition that transforms ideological disagreement into moral hostility through the comrade–traitor paradigm. This hostile logic reveals an erosion of ethical reasoning and an epistemological closure that undermines the emancipatory claims of left politics in Sri Lanka.

Introduction: Memory, History, and the Ethics of the Left

The death of political figures often becomes a moment for the reorganization of historical memory. In Sri Lanka, the narratives produced around the recently deceased politician Nandana Gunathilaka reveal not merely an individual political trajectory but a broader crisis in how left-wing political culture confronts its own history. Rather than situating his political life within the material and ideological conditions of the post-JVP era, prevailing accounts emphasize a later phase of transformation that is framed as a moral departure from both the JVP and the left.

This article argues that such narratives are symptomatic of a deeper ethical and epistemological failure. By privileging rupture over continuity and moral redemption over historical responsibility, left political culture risks converting history into a resource for reputational management rather than ethical reckoning. The case of Gunathilaka thus serves as a critical entry point for examining how the Sri Lankan left narrates ideological change, disagreement, and responsibility.

Historical Formation: The Post-JVP Conjuncture

Nandana Gunathilaka belongs to a generation of political actors formed in the aftermath of the JVP’s second insurrection and its violent suppression in the late 1980s. This period constituted a decisive rupture in Sri Lankan political life, marked by state terror, counter-insurgency, ideological fragmentation, and the crisis of left legitimacy (Uyangoda 1997; Wickramasinghe 2006). The defeat of the JVP was not merely organizational but ethical, forcing radical politics to renegotiate its relationship to violence, discipline, and responsibility.

Scholars have emphasized that the post-1989 period reshaped the Sri Lankan left’s political imagination, producing new forms of caution, moderation, and ideological recalibration (Uyangoda 2010). Political subjectivities emerging from this conjuncture were shaped by trauma and repression, but also by unresolved moral questions. Any serious assessment of political figures formed in this period must therefore treat historical responsibility as constitutive rather than incidental.

As Marx famously noted, individuals make history under conditions not of their own choosing, yet remain responsible for their actions within those conditions (Marx 1852). Detaching political actors from their formative historical contexts evacuates both agency and ethics from political analysis.

Narrative Displacement and Selective Memory

Contemporary narratives surrounding Gunathilaka often emphasize a later period of political transformation, framed as ethical maturation or ideological transcendence beyond the JVP and left politics. While political change is neither unusual nor inherently problematic, the epistemological issue arises when transformation is narrated without historical continuity.

Such narratives operate through selective memory and strategic silence. As studies of post-war and post-insurrection memory in Sri Lanka have shown, forgetting is not passive but actively produced through discourse, commemoration, and omission (Wickramasinghe 2015). Transformation becomes detached from responsibility, allowing political subjects to be re-inscribed without ethical residue.

Walter Benjamin’s critique of historicism is particularly instructive here. Historicism, he argues, aligns itself with the moral authority of the present by narrating history as a completed and redeemed sequence (Benjamin 1968). In this mode of narration, unresolved contradictions are neutralized, and responsibility is displaced.

From Comrade to Traitor: The Culture of Hostility

A recurring paradox within left political movements is the transformation of the comrade into the traitor. This transformation marks a shift from collective totality to individual minimality. Once ideological divergence occurs, the political subject is expelled from the collective narrative and reduced to an individualized moral object. Antagonism intensifies on both sides, but within the movement it is recoded as moral hostility.

In the JVP tradition, this logic has been cultivated not only through formal organizational mechanisms but through a deeply sedimented political culture shaped by earlier practices of discipline, exclusion, and moral absolutism. The labeling of ideological deviation as betrayal retroactively criminalizes disagreement and personalizes contradiction.

The case of Gunathilaka is not exceptional; it is illustrative. His post-JVP political transformation is read not historically but morally, reinforcing a binary logic of loyalty versus treachery. Such a culture normalizes hostility as a mode of political coherence and suppresses the ethical complexity of political life.

Ethical Erosion and Moralism

From a Marxist ethical standpoint, this transformation represents a collapse of ethics into moralism. Ethics grounded in historical materialism requires sustained engagement with contradiction, responsibility, and collective memory. Moralism, by contrast, substitutes judgment for reflection and hostility for critique.

By reducing former comrades to moral abstractions, left political culture absolves itself of responsibility for its own past practices. Hostility becomes an ethical shortcut, enabling the movement to externalize contradiction rather than confront it internally. This erasure undermines the ethical foundations of solidarity and transforms political loyalty into a moral absolute.

Gramsci warned that when political organizations replace critical self-reflection with ideological rigidity, philosophy hardens into dogma and discipline replaces ethics (Gramsci 1971). In such conditions, ethical reasoning is subordinated to organizational coherence.

Epistemological Closure and the Foreclosure of Contradiction

The ethical erosion described above is inseparable from an epistemological crisis. When contradiction is expelled rather than mediated, knowledge production becomes disciplinary rather than critical. Inquiry gives way to certainty, and historical materialism is reduced to ideological orthodoxy.

This foreclosure of contradiction prevents left political culture from engaging its own unresolved histories of violence, exclusion, and failure. Political philosophy loses its critical function and becomes a tool of boundary enforcement. As a result, epistemology collapses into certainty rather than inquiry.

Benjamin’s insistence that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (Benjamin 1968, 255) underscores the ethical stakes of epistemological closure. Forgetting the past does not resolve responsibility; it merely defers it.

Conclusion: Against Ethical Amnesia

The narratives surrounding Nandana Gunathilaka reveal a deeper ethical and epistemological condition within Sri Lankan left political culture. The transformation of comrades into traitors, the cultivation of hostility, and the erasure of contradiction signal a profound crisis of political ethics.

The renewal of left politics in Sri Lanka depends not on the purification of history or the moral condemnation of deviation, but on the ethical courage to sustain contradiction as a condition of historical responsibility. Solidarity without memory becomes conformity; unity without critique becomes coercion. Only by confronting its unresolved pasts—without hostility and without erasure—can the left reclaim its emancipatory vocation.

(Udaya R. Tennakoon is a Researcher/ Writer/ Academic)