H. L. D. Mahindapala

Three separate political events that gathered momentum and ran in three different directions to dominate the political landscape in the post-independent era took place simultaneously on February 4, 1948 — the first independence day —  in the city of Colombo. Oddly enough, all three events occurred in  between Galle Face Green at the  top end  and Wellawatte at the bottom  end. None of the leaders of the triple events knew how the forces they unleashed would unfold in the remaining  part of  the 20th century.  As these events spilled over to the 21st century only the democratic centre survived, more or less like a limping soldier covered in blood-stained bandages. The other two events went their separate ways into violence which had disastrous consequences, putting the clock back by at least half a century.

This is a brief outline of how political  events moved from what was seemingly normal events into gigantic historical forces. The post-independent movement  of events unravelled in unpredictable ways baffling even  those who presumed that they possessed the keys to unlock the  hidden forces of history and direct them to predetermined goals.  As usual, once politics moved into history the latter took  on a life of  its  own to influence the next phase of politics. While history moved in its own inexorable paths, interpretations of what happened  in history evolved simultaneously as a menacing  force, distorting reality. It is not what  happened that mattered but  the  interpretations of  what happened that over-determined the events that escalated into unmanageable proportions. Post-independent interpretations of what happened in history became one of the biggest  growth industries in academia and foreign-funded NGOs.  History was politicised to serve partisan agendas. Demonization of the other” led to the escalation  and worsening of the  inter-ethnic relations every step of the way.These interpretations have played a critical role in driving the course of events that ran all the way to Nandikadal.

By and large, it has been of a narrative that has been doctored to promote a mono-causal theory to blame only one party (namely, Sinhala-Buddhists), excluding the multiple forces that interacted and snaked their way into a tragic history that need not have happened.  The utter failure of our partisan social scientists, academics and the commentariat to get out of the box in which they were  cocooned and stepped back a bit to take a broader view of the intertwining multifarious North-South forces has been a fundamental factor in driving the escalating inter-ethnic forces  into intransigent political stances. My focus here is only on three events which foreshadowed the future that was waiting to blow up into volcanic eruptions. A holistic approach needs volumes. I have sketched only the three main events that cast their shadows over the 20th century.

February 4 1948 dawned as any other halcyon day of the dying  British Empire without any signs of the violence that was to surface in the subsequent years. No one had an inkling that the unintended consequences of the interplay of these three events would explode as they rolled down the post-independence decades. These intertwining triple forces sometimes coexisted in relative / uneasy peace and sometimes clashed head-on in the streets, parliament and other political arenas. Eventually, these three events spiralled down like a double helix, lurching  from crisis to crisis, sucking everybody into it. Each in their separate ways exacerbated the other as they flowed down the  passage of time until all three met at a confluence streaming with blood. It need not have happened the way it did. But those who were in it made it  happen. There are always alternatives available at the open-ended frontiers of history looking for a way out of the haunting past. It is the road not taken that made all the difference to the post-independent tragedy from which we are yet to recover.

Two of the major events of the Independence Day took place on the city end of Galle Road. In the geographical order of the events, the Marxists can be placed at the head of the three events because they held a mass rally at the Galle Face Green. The other two events took place further down the Galle Road.  The Marxists meeting began around 2.00 p.m. and the stage built for the stellar speakers of the Left was located at the lower end, closer to the beach, right in front of Galle Face Hotel, overlooking the length and breadth of the green filled with a sea of heads, as I remember it.

The Marxists assembled to condemn the fake independence” (eeniya nidahasa) granted by the departing British colonial masters to the oppressive and exploiting capitalist  class, led by D. S. Senanayake”. This was the main message conveyed by speaker after speaker. Their story was that  it was fake  independence” because the Senanayakes and the Bandaranaikes had sold their souls and the nation’s strategic bases, like Trincomalee, to the imperialists of  the West. This was at a time when nationalist movements were sweeping Afro-Asia and Cold War politics was reigning  supreme in the West. It was also the time when Left-Right ideologies coloured every shade of politics. The Right saw a red under every bed. And the Left raised the cry of the imperialists/capitalists waiting round every corner to plunder the Third World and oppress the natives.

The political landscape in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon, as it was known then) too was divided right down the middle into Right-wing UNP, led by D. S.Senanayake and the Left-wing headed a group of ideological Marxists who were gouging each others eyes more than fighting their common class enemy in the UNP. The choice then was between the UNP and the Left. There was no middle ground on Independence Day. The battle lines were drawn clearly between the Right and the Left.

At Galle Face the setting sun was hitting the eyes of the seething mass of left-wing believers who were squinting at the ball of blazing white  heat, changing colour by the minute into a rosy tint, as it took its own time to sink into the horizon. I was among them, a 17-year-old teenager, waiting patiently in the wilting sun to take in every word that fell from the lips of legendary Marxist leaders, some of whom had attained the status of heroic revolutionaries for having challenged the might of the British Empire. Our heads were filled  with the  romantic tales of the legendary Marxists slipping out of British jails at the height of World War II. Having  come out as heroes they were respected for the sacrifices they made on behalf of the people. At that time they had gathered sufficient public support to be the most formidable political force outside the first independent government headed by D. S. Senanayake.

The Marxist leaders came from the upper-middle-class plantocracy. Some were also city-based professionals, academics and intellectuals. But they were fragmented into bitter ideological camps. In the main they were divided into rival Stalinist and Trotskyite parties. The Trotskyites too were divided into Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) headed by Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene,  Bernard Soyza etc., and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party led by Dr. N. M. Perera – Philip Gunawardena faction. Later, in the fifties, Philip Gunawardena, who was also known as the father of Marxism”, split from the Lanka Sama Samaja Party when Dr. N. M. Perera decided to merge with the BLPI. Philip formed the Viplawakari Lanka Sama Samaja Party. The Stalinists were led by Dr. S. A. Wickremesinghe, the loquacious doctor from Matara ably assisted by Pieter Keuneman, the son of a Supreme Court judge, and N. Shamuganathan etc. Pieter, a Burgher whose Dutch ancestors were also from Matara, returned from Cambridge University indoctrinated to the gills with Stalinism. Cambridge, of course, was the fertile breeding  ground for Stalinists. For instance, the British establishment was shocked when they discovered one morning that Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, the two noted British spies for KGB, too were products of Cambridge.

On the first day of independence the fragmented Marxists decided to shed their ideological differences temporarily to unite against the United National Party-led government headed by D. S. Senanayake — a coalition of multi-ethnic, multi-party leaders who had joined hands to set sail on uncharted waters. Their main task was to define the identity of the new nation and to charter a course for the future as they went along. The upper-class Tamils, the Muslims, the Burghers and some Europeans rallied round D. S. Senanayake who had earned the coveted status of being the Father of the Nation”. Even G. G. Ponnambalam, the acknowledged leader of the Tamils, dropped all his anti-Sinhala-Buddhist charges and joined the  government as a Cabinet Minister.

1. S. Senanayake, the first Prime Minister, was a Thomian who failed to pass even the equivalent of the O-level at the time. This boy from Botale was better known for his down-to-earth nativism. He was better known by his sobriquet Kalay John”. Nevertheless, with his consummate political manoeuvres, he outwitted his local rivals and excelled in his negotiations with the British to win independence. His pragmatism and political craftsmanship proved that he had all the qualities to wear the crown once the mud was washed off his back. His innate leadership qualities helped him to steer his way through the colonial maze and even to beat the double-doctors who came from the Western universities. It was a bit incongruous though when he appeared on Independence Day dressed in a top hat and tails. But that was his way of saying that he is the equal of the white masters. He  had a commanding presence and a wealth of experience having fought his way through the Legislative Council in the twenties and the State Council in the thirties. Whether we like him or not, he was the man picked by the invisible hand of history to lay the foundations for a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, tolerant democracy. The elitist attendees at Temple Trees”, dressed in their best finery, had a sense of pride in gathering round the first native Prime Minister of a nation that had won independence after nearly 500 years of colonialism. But  I wasn’t impressed. Blinded by ideology and the rhetoric of Dr. Colvin R. de Silva I was leaning more  towards the BLPI, the more  theoretical wing of the Trotskyites.

The glitterati celebrating independence at Temple Trees”, the official residence of the Prime Minister, D. S. Senanayake, I thought, were lotus-eaters drifting in a world of their own. Ensconced in the Right-wing bastion, they did not hear the thundering of the Left going at  the Galle Face Green, which was only a stone’s throw away from Temple Trees”. Geographically speaking, this was the second big event of the day down Galle Road, though officially it was the No.1 event to celebrate independence. As I saw it then, the two big forces of the coming class war were packed into these two spaces – the Galle Face Green and Temple Trees”. Their collision seemed  inevitable (there were no other formidable political forces in the arena) and D. S. Senanayake, like all Right-wing leaders of the world, was focusing all his energies in fighting the menace of the reds. There was nothing whatsoever to indicate that an ethnic tsunami was coming over the horizon to drown everything in its wake. On the  surface, everything seemed calm as the sea which looked like a sheet of shining glass lying still all the way to the horizon.

The Galle Face meeting was over around 8 p.m. and I still remember the opening words of  Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, always the last speaker because his dazzling verbal fireworks was the piece de resistance that kept the crowd going till the last minute. He  opened his  speech with a rhetorical flourish. Speaking in English he said : If there are enemies in this Galle Face Green I address them also. Therefore, I say comrades, friends and enemies!” It reverberated in my ears like a clap of thunder. These words were still ringing in my ears as I boarded the bus that took me home that night. The bus went pass the Temple Trees”, illuminated like a Wesak lantern. It did not inspire any nationalist fervour in me. I was more in tune with the anti-establishment Marxists at the Galle Face Green. I was a Trotskyite, though not a card-carrying member. To me Temple Trees”  looked like a den of decadent debauchees doomed to disappear down the road to the future.

I was drifting in the political currents of the time. As they said at the time, there would have been something wrong  with my heart if I was not a red in my salad days. Later – much later – I learnt that  something would have been wrong with my head if I continued to be a red. My disillusionment came when the LSSP abandoned  all Marxist principles and, after an agonising debate at the New Town Hall, opposite Vihara Maha Devi Park, decided to accept portfolios in Mrs. Bandaranaike’s government. Leslie Goonewardene had flown down a representative from  the Fourth International in Paris to oppose any coalition with the feudal-bourgeois regime. I was among  the pack of reporters waiting anxiously for  the outcome of the divided LSSP debating whether to join Mrs. Bandaranaike or not. Dr. Perera, who had  packed the Hall with his ‘catchers’ from his Ruanwella electorate won the day, beating the Colvin-Bala Tampoe-Edmund Samarakkody revolutionaries. One of  Dr. Perera’s main arguments to defeat the revolutionaries was that there has been no  revolutions  in democracies.

From then onwards they were submerged in the diluted politics of compromise which took their shine away. Their politics were directed more at defending their ministerial seats than fighting the good battles for socialism. Dr. Perera, as Finance Minister, was seen as a good managerial CEO refining the status quo of the capitalist system rather than laying the foundations for a new social order. Revolutionary theoreticians like Dr. Colvin R. de Silva and Doric de Souza to whom religion was the opium of the masses were photographed taking mal wattiyas to pay pooja at the Temple of Tooth Relic in Kandy. The fact that they were arm-chair revolutionaries was confirmed when Doric de Souza found greater  pleasure in playing cards at the Twentieth Century Club than getting  his  hands soiled in the sweaty grime of his working class comrades”. Dr. Perera was vying for presidency at the Otters Swimming Club, dealing with controversial issues of whether to serve or not to serve arrack in the premises. They ended their careers as middle-class reformists allied to the ruling elites of the SLFP or the UNP. But on  Independence Day they were the most formidable opposition. They were the only organized political parties that could challenge the power of the UNP. In fact, they stood as the only alternative to the Right-wing UNP.

The Marxists formed the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1935. It was not only the vanguard of the leftist movement in Sri Lanka but also earned the reputation of being the first major Trotskyite party in the world. When Dr. N. M. Perera won  the mayoralty of the Colombo Municipality The New York Times ran a page-one story to announce it. At the height of World War II when Stalin joined the Western Allies the anti-British Trotskyites threw out the local Stalinists in 1940. The Stalinists broke away and formed the Communist Party. The LSSP remained loyal to Trotsky’s Fourth International, which was nothing more than a hole-in-wall somewhere in Paris, something which I discovered later. Their anti-British activities, however, caught the imagination and the spirit of the times. Dr. N. M. Perera, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Philip Gunawardena emerged as folk heroes when they broke jail on April 7, 1942 and fled to India. Earlier they had slipped out of jail to attend secret Politbureau meetings. Their heroism was infectious and inspirational. When they came out of jail after the governor released them  unconditionally on 24 June 1945 they were national heroes. The Marxists also had emerged as the alternative political force in the opposition, waiting in the wings, after the 1947 election.

In  the rural areas they had managed to win the hearts and minds of the village folk in some selected electorates not because the peasantry took to Marxism with doctrinal conviction but because the Marxists came before them as social workers serving the victims of malaria which was the scourge in the  thirties and  forties. In fact, Dr. N. M. Perera was known among the villagers as Parippu Mahathya” for distributing dhal among the poor. As in other parts of Asia, the peasants rallied behind the Marxists because they represented two key factors : 1. anti-imperialist nationalism and 2. the new political morality of being protectors and defenders of the underdogs. The vast mass of Asians hardly understood the subtleties and the complexities of Marxist economics and  dialectics. The unquenchable and everlasting thirst in politics has been the search for renewal with purity, shedding  the corrupted past, and the Marxists represented that element.

Though the Left represented both these forces, they failed to break into the villages either as a revolutionary force or even as an electoral force. When I interviewed Dr. N. M. Perera and asked him about the failure of the Left to win the hearts and minds of the peasantry he shot back saying : Why not? I have always won in Ruanwella – a village constituency!”. The Marxists always deluded themselves with rationalisations that consoled them. He refused to accept  that he won in Ruanwella only because he had earned reputation as a caring  social worker, distributing parippu” to the needy in the midst of the malaria epidemic and not as a doctrinaire Marxist. I’ve seen Pieter doling out a few rupees to the poor who came to his  place. He  would also not hesitate to place call to the Police station on behalf of his constituents. It was this caring attitude that won them their place in the electorate. But they were more stuck in Marxist theory. This was the fundamental flaw in the Marxists. In their theoretical analyses they failed to recognise that Sri Lanka was neither Russia nor China. The dynamic dialectics necessary for class war was not there.

Despite this, they were hoping  to re-enact  the Russian drama sooner than later even though the Russian  conditions were not  there for them to ride  into power. There was no formidable working class outside the estates to overthrow the semi-capitalist establishment. In any case, the Indian estate workers were following their community leaders and not the Marxists. Besides,  there was no industrial growth to  produce the working class necessary for a revolution as prescribed by Marx. The biggest working class, outside the estates, was not in factories but in houses where men and women and even children were employed as domestics. They were hardly the stuff of revolutions.

Kumari Jayawardena, a scholarly researcher, described this in  her thesis on the working class in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, I can’t  find my copy of it to track down the figures. From memory it was around 90,000. So there was neither a formidable working class nor a decadent ruling class for the Marxist leaders to re-enact the Russian Revolution. They failed totally in  reading the signs of  the time correctly. They were lost in the theories of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and believed that the Russian experiences and theories were applicable directly to Sri Lanka. They were expecting history to repeat itself, neither as a comedy or a tragedy, but as a reality of evolving history. Overwhelmed by theories they ignored the forces rising from the depths of history and driving the nation in a totally different direction.

They dismissed the rising grass root forces with Marxist clichés and it was too late when they realised that history had passed by, leaving them in the middle of nowhere. Their  faith in Marxism was greater than  the ground  realities that were undercutting them. They sincerely believed that the theories they brought home from Western  universities would take root and grow into a red-red revolution. They touted class warfare but the working class – the white collar and  the brown collar ones – did not go along with them. They were with them only get welfare benefits like higher wages and not for a revolution.

In the meantime, the Trotskyites and the Stalinist waged a war of their own in a desperate bid to grab and hold the helpless workers in their respective camps as a tool to strengthen their political bases.  One of the main focus points was the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills, in Havelock town, by the side of the canal which ran  from there to the sea. Both parties were competing to grab total control of the workers at the Mills. The LSSP managed to gain control of the larger section of workers. The Marxists were hoping to capture power through the trade unions. They were using strikes to  paralyse and, if possible, overthrow the ruling regimes. In the absence  of a dynamic revolutionary working class they also focused their attention on the white-collar workers in the Government Clerical Service Union and the mercantile sector. Bala Tampoe was the iron-fisted Tsar of the mercantile sector. He ran a show of  his own, allied to the extreme  theoretical wing of Trotskyism which refused to have any truck with the mercantile / bourgeois / comprador / feudal class.

This motley gathering was hardly a force for a Trotskyite Revolution. But the Trotskyite leaders like Dr. Colvin R. de Silva believed  in it. In may salad days I too believed in the coming revolution which I  hoped would usher in the Doop-pathun Nathi Lokaya  (World without the Poor), the title of the short story book of one of my favourite writers, G. B. Senanayake. But the subterranean forces moving the electoral  bases of power were drifting away from theoretical Marxism and heading towards their historical roots. In  the meantime, the Marxists were splitting theoretical hairs about what Lenin or Trotsky would do and not what Punchi Banda and Sinnathamby would do. Their best chances, if any, was in an electoral victory. They came close to defeating the UNP in 1947. Even in 1952, when Dudley Senanayake swept the polls on the sympathy vote of his father’s sudden death, they remained as a potential force. But then in  1956 S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike emerged as the third force sweeping the Left into a margin from which they never regained their prestige or political clout. Bandaranaike emerged as the democratic alternative to the Left which made all the difference to post-independent politics.

The Left was dying. The legacy they left behind was political violence. They legitimised violence as a means to an end. The ruling class would never give up power without a fight. Revolution was the only way out. And they remained as the political fathers who produced the first children of what they called revolutionary justice : the fasict JVP. Shooting, killing, torturing, eliminating enemies became the accepted norm. Revolutionary justice justified violence. Prof. Laksiri Jayasuriya’s Siri” who was bent on shooting Dudley Senanayake at Peradeniya Campus was born out of the Marxist ideology that legitimised violence.

The nation had  to pay dearly, with their lives, for the violence legitimised by the Marxists.

The ominous signs of the next wave of violence too were looming in the shadows hidden on Independence Day. It was the third event that took place on Independence Day.

(See next article.)