Rohan Gunaratna's account deals with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the movement founded and led by Rohana Wijeweera, and with the JVP's second attempt to bring down the government of Sri Lanka. It is a study of an armed insurrection and of the state's response to it, written from a security-studies standpoint rather than as a political memoir or a party history.
The subject is one of the harder episodes in the country's post-independence history: a clandestine organisation, a leadership operating underground, and a confrontation with the security forces that reached into villages, campuses and government offices across the south. Gunaratna traces the movement's development under Wijeweera, its structures and methods, and the course of the insurrection itself. The title's question mark is doing real work — the book is concerned with why the attempt failed as well as with how it was mounted.
The book carries illustrations, including some in colour, and portraits of figures involved. That visual material sits alongside the narrative rather than decorating it, giving faces and places to an organisation that operated largely out of sight.
Gunaratna was writing here early in a career that has since been given over to the study of political violence; he went on to head the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The book was published by the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Kandy.
Readers who come to this will mostly be readers of Sri Lankan political history, of insurgency and counter-insurgency, or of the wider question of how revolutionary movements organise and how states meet them. It is also read by people who lived through the period and want an ordered account of events they experienced in fragments — curfews, disappearances, roadblocks, rumour. The approach is analytical and the material is grim; there is no attempt to soften what happened on either side.
For anyone building a shelf on Sri Lanka's insurrections, this belongs with the literature on the JVP specifically, distinct from the far larger body of writing on the war in the north and east. The two conflicts overlapped in time and occasionally in consequence, but the JVP's story is its own, and this book is concerned with that story from within the movement's own history and from the vantage point of those who fought it.
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