A Final Educational Fling – 1. Accepting another task

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Chandrika Kumaratunga, Electoral Reform, English medium, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Maithripala Sirisena, Mangala Samaraweera, Mohan Pieris, No Confidence, Parliament, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sarath Buddhadasa, vocational training

but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done

When, just over a year ago, I was not put into Parliament, I thought it was time to call it a day. I had a house to live in, and a beautiful country cottage, I enjoyed reading and writing, and there seemed no point in knocking my head against brick walls. Though I continue to believe that Mahinda Rajapaksa did more for this country as its leader than his two predecessors, I had registered the appalling nature of those who dominated the last years of his government, and had indeed dissected them throughout 2014 in numerous articles, in particular the series called ‘Mahinda Rajapaksa and the Seven Dwarfs’. So I did not regret having worked for Maithripala Sirisena’s election as President in January 2015. But I realized that my old friend Dayan Jayatilleka had been right in predicting that, decent though the President was, he would be dominated by Ranil Wickremesinghe and Chandrika Kumaratunga.

I had hoped he would realize soon how awful both of them were, and how out of touch with the country at large, but this seemed to be taking a long time. He had allowed himself to be dragooned by them and their allies into calling an early General Election, contrary to his commitment to ensure that Electoral Reform was enacted before Parliament was dissolved. However I thought he then made the right decision in putting President Rajapaksa on the UPFA list for the General Election, since without him the UNP would have romped home.

But sadly polarizing forces made it impossible for the two of them to work together. I later told President Rajapaksa that he had to appreciate how nervous the President had been made by the pronouncements of some of the candidates on the UPFA slate, that they would destroy the President if they won a majority. Mahinda told me that the President should not have taken such pronouncements seriously, since they were uttered by youngsters, but it was a pity he did not rein such people in.

Indeed even experienced politicians such as Vasudeva Nanayakkara behaved foolishly in claiming that, with the election going well, the main task at hand was to make sure that those within the UPFA who had supported the President would not be elected. I told him this was utterly foolish, since campaigning in such a manner would confuse the voters. But once Vasu gets an idea into his head, he cannot think straight. Indeed he told me later that they had all been wrong in insisting that, were a vote of No Confidence in the Prime Minister to succeed before Parliament had been dissolved, a Prime Minister acceptable to the UPFA group should be appointed.

He claimed that this was because they were a majority in Parliament, but he had obviously forgotten, as Ranil did way back in 2003, that the President had the power to dissolve Parliament whenever he wished.

New Horizons – 10 Colombo constrictions

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Chanaka Amaratunga, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Colombo, Gamini Athukorale, Gamini Dissanayake, GELT, Lalith Athulathmudali, Mahaweli, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sri Lanka, Srima Dissanayake, UGC, UNP

While the world outside Colombo was figuring with increasing importance in my life in the mid-nineties, at home the lights, as Edward Grey described the onset of war in Europe in 1914, were going out one by one. My grandmother died in June 1994, on my father’s birthday, when my mother had arranged to have the British High Commissioner over for dinner. It had been a longstanding obligation, but she had wanted a date when I too was available, which had been difficult to fix. The dinner had of course to be cancelled, and I do not think I attended another formal dinner at Lakmahal until January 1997, just before my mother left for the operation in Oxford from which she did not recover.

I was still attached to Sri Jayewardenepura University in the middle of 1994, having celebrated my 40th birthday in May, with 40 guests. I had found it difficult to fill up the number, which made me realize how out of touch I had got with Colombo over the preceding couple of years. When I resigned from the British Council in 1992, I had celebrated my birthday – and the recurrence of Wesak, in the 19 year cycle of full moons – with a retirement party, which had been a very jolly occasion. After 1994, I did not celebrate a birthday again at Lakmahal, travelling to Oxford for my 50th, after I realized that one’s closest friends are generally those with whom one grows to maturity.

My grandmother had been ailing for a long time, her tenacious hold on life slipping when first she lost her sight, and then when she had to use a wheel-chair. It was odd to see her reduced to helplessness, since for most of my forty years I had thought of her as ruling over Lakmahal with a will of iron. Widowed in 1945, losing all her sons, the last two in rapid succession in 1983 and 1985, she had still maintained her authority, which I fear acted as a curb on my mother. Latterly I had begun to understand why my mother spent so much time at Girl Guide Headquarters, which allowed for the full flowering of her equally vibrant, but much more gentle, personality.

My grandmother’s death, though it left an enormous hollow, should also have been a liberation for my mother. This did not follow, because my brother, who had been in Hong Kong for the last two years with his family, decided to continue there but send his children back to be looked after by my parents. Previously they had looked after his son for years, while he and his wife were pursuing higher qualifications in England. But they had seemed to enjoy this, even taking on responsibility for the boy when, after his parents came back from England, his mother got pregnant again, and found looking after two children difficult.

But that it was a responsibility they could not readily fulfil as age advanced I understood, when I came back once on a Sunday afternoon after a trip to Yala with my sister, to find my mother almost in hysterics because her grandson had not come home after church. She was trying to convince my father, who was enjoying an afternoon nap, that he should go and drive round the church premises, to see if the boy could be traced. I tried to tell her not to worry, that doubtless the boy was hanging around with friends, as all of us had done at that age, without parents worrying overmuch. But she quelled me by saying, with a quaver in her voice ‘Other people’s children….…’ Her relief, when they called the vicar and found the boy had spent the day there, was palpable.

New Horizons – 7 Upheavals

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Anura Bandaranaike, Arjuna Aluwihare, Asitha Perera, Chanaka Amaratunga, Chandrika Kumaratunga, D B Wijetunge, Gamini Dissanayake, Leslie Panditharatne, Muslim Congress, Premadasa, Prof Balasuriya, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sirisena Cooray, Siron Rajaratnam, University Grants Commission

In the political sphere, Wijetunge meanwhile was doing everything he could to destroy himself electorally. He engaged in machinations in the Southern Provincial Council, which led to another poll, whereby the slim majority against the government was turned into a virtual landslide. Then, when he realized that there was some criticism of his style – and lack of substance – within the party, he turned on Sirisena Cooray, who had been Premadasa’s chief henchman. The occasion for this was in fact an article Chanaka had written, which was published in the ‘Sunday Observer’, suggesting that the main problem with the government was its leader. Wijetunge however was quick to prevent this snowballing into a revolt, and he promptly dismissed the Chairman of the Lake House Group who was known to be close to Cooray.

He then asked for Cooray’s resignation. Cooray said he would consider the matter but, when Chanaka went to visit him, he found him relaxing, not calling up members of the party for support as Chanaka had expected him to do. His explanation was simple. He told Chanaka that he had indicated his worries in order to save the party, not himself, since he had only entered active politics in support of Premadasa. If Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was the Prime Minister, and in Cooray’s view the best successor to Premadasa, was not prepared to stand up for him, he would gladly give up.

On cue, Ranil declared that the problem was one between the President and the General Secretary of the Party, and it was not up to him to intervene. Wijetunge also managed to get a statement of support from the Premadasa family, which was bizarre, since he it was who had sidelined them immediately he had taken over as President. But with such reactions Cooray resigned and went on holiday, and from then on the decline of the UNP was inexorable.

New Horizons – 5 The death of President Premadasa

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Amparai, Asitha Perera, Bellagio, Chandrika Kumaratunga, D B Wijetunge, Gamini Dissanayake, garment factories, Lalith Athulathmudali, Liberal Party, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Premadasa, Ranjan Wijeratne, Richard de Zoysa, Rohan Edrisinha, Siron Rajaratnam, Tissa Jayatilaka, Tissawewa Resthouse, UNP, Walter Ladduwahetty, Wijeyadasa Liyanaarachchi

I had left for Bellagio at a tempestuous time, just after the death of President Premadasa, in that extraordinary assassination on May Day 1993.That had followed on the murder of Lalith Athulathmudali the week before. The latter incident I heard of while at Anuradhapura, upstairs in the vast dining hall of the Tourist Board Resthouse that catered to the impecunious. The older Resthouses were now relatively upmarket hotels under the management of Quickshaw’s. I had loved staying in them, in particular in the old Tissawewa Resthouse, in my youth and again when British Council work took me there. But working for the government, and indeed having to pay my own way much of the time, precluded such indulgence.

Premadasa’s death occurred a week later, while I was running a training workshop for both AUC and USJP English Teaching staff at the University. I had persuaded Scott Richards to run the programme, but I think he had not turned up at the time we were told that a curfew had been declared. I saw everyone off and it was only when I got home, after driving through ominously quiet streets, that I heard that the President had been killed – after which I heard crackers, which has always struck me as perhaps the worst example of the viciousness that characterizes Sri Lankan politics.

I was quite cut off from news in Bellagio, in those days before email became common, so I had no idea what was going on in Colombo while I was there. The occasional cursory letter from home told me that Premadasa’s preposterous Prime Minister, D B Wijetunge, who had taken over as Acting President, and then been confirmed in the post by Parliament, was doing well. Indeed I was told that he was Doing Bloody Well, in line with his initials. I was therefore quite optimistic when I got back to Sri Lanka, but Chanaka soon gave me a much more bleak picture.

The Liberal Party had finally decided to support President Premadasa in the Provincial Council elections that had taken place in May. I had not been sure this was the best decision possible, and had indeed stood out against it when the question first came up, and suggested we wait and review the situation. I was the President of the party, and though executive power lay with the Leader, Chanaka respected forms and accepted the suggestion I made from the chair. But I believe those in the UNP he was talking to were impatient, and he and his old friend Asitha Perera, the most fervent at that stage about the alliance, pushed the matter through at the next meeting.

Travels with Ena: Yala and other travels – Part 8

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Academic Affairs Board, Acts of Faith, Ayagama, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Deniyaya, Ena de Silva, Getamanna, Hayes-Lauderdale Road, Kalawana, Karu Jayasuriya, Karunasena Kodituwakku, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Minister of Education, Ministry of Education, National Institute of Education, Panadura-Ratnapura Road, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sabaragamuwa University, Sooriyakanda, Teldeniya, Tissamaharama, UNP

In 2005 I had a sabbatical, but spent most of it in Sri Lanka, partly because, for the last six months of that year I continued to be a Consultant in English at the Ministry of Education. My main task was to revitalize the English medium programme we had started in 2001, which had flagged in the period in which Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister and seemed determined to kill it. Fortunately his Minister of Education, Karunasena Kodituwakku, was supportive, which helped it to survive until Tara de Mel came back as Secretary in 2004 and got me back in service.

She also got a lot more out of me, since I chaired the Academic Affairs Board of the National Institute of Education, and we started a radical programme of syllabus revision. Unfortunately we began too late, and it was only in 2005 that she overcame the objections of the educational establishment, so we had a lot of hectic work that year, very little of which unfortunately survived her departure when a new Minister who disliked her intensely took over. Though he told me he wanted me to stay on, I realized the old guard were back with a vengeance, so at the end of the year I took myself away. This allowed me to have a few months abroad early in 2006, for the launch of the Italian translation of Acts of Faith, which ended in the Ena figure marrying the President.