Between 2001 and 2004, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) emerged at the vanguard of a broad campaign of opposition to the peace process underway between the UNP-led government of Ranil Wickremasinghe and the LTTE. In the months after the signing of the ceasefire agreement in February 2002, the JVP articulated a powerful and coherent ideo-political programme of opposition to the internationally-sponsored peace process, and its foreign sponsors, which it propagated energetically and relentlessly. It successfully capitalised on the growing momentum of economic discontent against the UNF's market reform policies and used its growing influence in the union movement to instigate a series of public sector strikes in hospitals and trains in late 2003 and early 2004. The JVP played a decisive role in mobilising and coalescing public opinion against the peace process, and in bringing about its collapse.

After the 2004 parliamentary election, the JVP's influence as a stubborn and uncompromising coalition partner within the new United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) government contributed to the failure of all subsequent attempts over the following two years to re-ignite the peace process. The JVP posed impossible pre-conditions to be met before agreeing to talks, refused to tolerate any agreement with the LTTE over joint post-tsunami aid distribution in early 2005, and backed the successful presidential campaign of Mahinda Rajapaksa on a platform explicitly opposed to the peace process. From early 2006 onwards, the JVP openly promoted a military solution to the conflict, goading the government to resume the war that finally resumed in July–August 2006.

This chapter examines the role of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the collapse of the 2001–2004 peace process, and draws on this as an entry point to a broader historical exploration of the JVP as a phenomenon, and to the central themes raised in this book. The material in this chapter must be viewed in close connection to that on the UNP in the previous chapter, which is in many ways, its mirror image. The evolution of the JVP's anti-peace process agenda occurred in parallel to, and in the context of, the same circumstances within which the UNP developed its pro-peace agenda.