Colombo Changes 12 – JR’s vindictiveness

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Bandaranaike, BCIS, Colombo, J R Jayewardene, Lakshman Kadirgamar

Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies

While I was away in 1981, I had the first inklings of the way in which society had changed in Colombo. Or perhaps it was simply that I had grown up, and come to understand the intensity of politics, which previously I had thought a separate compartment in life. My mother wrote to tell me that the Director of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies had called to find when I was coming back, and she thought that he sounded worried.

Before I had left, I had applied for the post of Director of Studies that the BCIS had advertised, and I was duly interviewed and selected. The Governing Board of the BCIS, as I remember it, included the Director, Premadasa Udagama, who had been Secretary to the Ministry of Education in the 1970 government. Other members included Mrs Bandaranaike herself, K H Jayasinghe, Professor of Politics at Peradeniya and one of the Gang of Four who were associated with the previous regime, Mr Dorakumbura, the Librarian at Sri Jayewardenepura University, who subsequently became Vice-Chancellor when I worked there, and Mervyn de Silva, who had tried to run Lake House as a moderate government establishment after the Bandaranaike government had taken it over, only to be turned out soon enough by those who wanted extreme adulation rather than critical support.

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Lakmahal 14 – Different Perspectives: New Politics

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Dudley Senanayake, Esmond Wickremesinghe, J R Jayewardene, John Kotelawala

Esmond Wickremasinghe

By the time I knew him, my mother’s eldest brother Esmond was emphatically a supporter of the UNP. Soon after I was born he had been sent to New York by Sir John Kotelawala, to negotiate the entry of Ceylon into the United Nations, and family legend had it that it was the charm displayed by him and his wife that finally ensured our admission. Until then the Soviet Union had opposed this, on the grounds that we were still a colony, with the British still having troops here. But, long before Mr Bandaranaike came into power and asked them to leave, Esmond had succeeded in averting a Soviet veto, in terms of a compromise that saw the admission also of other countries that had been disputed.

Esmond was by then seen as Sir John’s right hand man, or rather one of them, for that wily old bird made use of several capable people. But none of them was able to prevent his shattering defeat in 1956, when he led his party to an election called prematurely. Blaming him however would be wrong, for a clear reading of what happened that year suggests that he was forced into calling an election he did not want, and contesting it on a platform he abhorred. Or, rather, blaming him alone – he cannot escape all responsibility for allowing such a situation to arise, and letting himself be carried along by it, a practice that has been followed since by many other Sri Lankan leaders.

Colombo Changes 11 – Resignation

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Bandaranaike, J R Jayewardene, Jaffna Library, Lakshman Wickremesinghe, Peradeniya

Innocence about what was going on in Sri Lanka did not in fact last very long. Though the country had seemed full of hope after the economic reforms introduced by the Jayewardene government in 1977, by 1980 the flip side of the reforms was evident. In July there occurred the General Strike that was dealt with, not so much firmly, as brutally.

That particular episode did not worry me unduly, for it seemed to me that an elected government had every right to try out new policies. If the opposition decided on violent confrontation, government was entitled to respond. The relentless critiques of my uncle Lakshman however, Chairman by then I think of the Civil Rights Movement, in addition to being Bishop of Kurunagala, made me realize that the government’s response was disproportionate. Perhaps as a mark of what still interested me most, what brought home to me most vividly the determination of the government to use violence to crush even mild opposition was the manhandling of Prof Sarachchandra, when he was to deliver a lecture that would have been simply mildly critical of government policies.

The bitter anguish of the students who insisted on taking me to see the burnt out shell …

Lakshman was more concerned by then about what was going on in the North. Though initially I had thought he was being dramatic in predicting civil war if the government did not moderate its violence, it gradually became clear that Jayewardene’s policies were almost deliberately provocative. I only properly understood the situation however in 1981, when I went to lecture at Jaffna University shortly after government goons had set fire to the Public Library. The bitter anguish of the students who insisted on taking me to see the burnt out shell made me realize the great gulf the government had created in trying to impose its will on the North.