Elite competition in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth had been a matter of caste rivalry among the Sinhalese rather than a conflict between the Sinhalese and the ethnic minorities, in particular the Tamils. In the years covered in this chapter, these divisions among the Sinhalese persisted and caste was indeed as divisive a force in the early 1920s as it had been earlier.1 It was a factor in the general elections to the Legislative Council in 1921 and 1924 and a rather embarrassed leadership of the Ceylon National Congress adopted a resolution urging its members to desist from raising caste issues at election time. The increase in the number of voters in the 1920s was sufficiently large to cause a momentous shift in the balance of caste influence. The Goyigamas were able to assert, for the first time, their majority status (it was not the ‘first-class’ Goyigamas of old who emerged as the dominant factor, but rising men of wealth, education and achievement) and the Kar•va influence in politics and public life was reduced from a position of dominance to one merely of significance.
But two other problems manifested themselves. The first was a fresh point of division among the Sinhalese, with competition between the Kandyans and low-country Sinhalese revealed as a noteworthy ingredient in politics. Even more important, ethnicity became a decisive factor in elite competition in the form of rivalry and conflict between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The present chapter surveys the unfolding of these various problems and issues in the political arena and national life.
The hopes of men like Arunachalam that the foundation of the Ceylon National Congress would mark a turning point in Sri Lanka’s politics, were never fulfilled. There were two reasons for this. First, the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership who gained control committed the Congress to a narrow and unimaginative course of action, contriving that the Congress did not aspire to the role of a political party with a mass base. This was no more than a tactical adjustment of attitudes to political realities, but associated with it was a mixture of rigidity and overcaution which exasperated the more venturesome spirits like Arunachalam, for example, and alienated the younger radicals both within the Congress and outside it.
The second factor had to do with the arrival in 1919 of Sir William Manning, one of the most masterful British governors of the island. Despite the self-imposed limits on its political methods and ambitions, Manning regarded the Ceylon National Congress as an intolerable challenge and set about fashioning its discomfiture with a grim determination befitting a more formidable adversary. He was totally insensitive to the need for any substantial measure of constitutional reforms. Indeed, he believed that any readjustment of the constitutional structure was detrimental to the British position in Sri Lanka and should, therefore, be resisted at all costs. At the time of Manning’s arrival, the Ceylon National Congress was in the throes of formation. He watched those proceedings with a jaundiced eye. The vistas of political change which the newly established organization seemed to presage jarred his conservative instincts, and even as the ‘constitutionalists’ were celebrating the success of their endeavours he was devising plans to upset them. That these plans bore fruit within two years owed as much to the intrinsic brittleness of the Ceylon National Congress as a political structure as to the skill with which Manning exploited its potential points of weakness.2 It is most unlikely that it would have come apart so soon had he not stepped in with such zest to speed it on its way to self-destruction.
Very early he had decided that the Congress was more vulnerable on its right flank than its left, that is to say there was more to gain by pandering to the fears of the conservative groups to its right, who had suspicions about the Congress as an instrument of low country Sinhalese domination of the island’s politics, than by hoping for advantages from the vocal criticisms of the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership from radicals on its left. He turned to the Kandyans.3 The appearance early in 1920 of a pamphlet entitled Present Politics and the Rights of the Kandyans should have given the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership warning of the potentially divisive effect of Kandyan aspirations as embodied in that document. There the tradition of Kandyan ‘resistance’ was invoked not against the British but against the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership. The crux of the argument was that the ‘lawful and just aspirations of the Kandyans’ were threatened by the demands of the ‘constitutionalists’. ‘[Where] the Kandyan heritage begins’, the author of the pamphlet asserted, ‘there the low-country Sinhalese claim for it ends’. The Kandyans were urged to regard the British as ‘trustees of Kandyan nationality’ under whose guidance and tutelage there should be a separate administrative structure for the Kandyan provinces with ‘full control over internal management’.
The author of this pamphlet, J.A. Halangoda, was soon to be a member of a three-man delegation of Kandyan representatives (the others being T.B.L. Moonemalle and G.E. Madawala), all lawyers, who arrived in London and were received by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Viscount Milner, on 22 June 1920. It was a command performance with Manning as the impresario.4 This delegation urged that the Kandyans be allowed to elect their representatives through communal electorates. At the outset Milner was not inclined to extend the communal principle to the Kandyans, but eventually he conceded it in the face of unremitting pressure from Manning, who wanted it as part of a scheme of checks and balances in the readjustment of the constitutional structure in Sri Lanka. It was indeed far more than a matter of checks and balances, for Manning had succeeded in extending the principle of communal electorates to a section of the Sinhalese and in gaining Colonial Office endorsement of his extraordinary contention that the Kandyans were a minority community. The Kandyan delegation had done their work extremely well and greatly impressed Milner. Their charge that the Congress politicians aimed at conserving ‘the whole of the administrative power in their hands and [at] dominat[ing] the weaker minorities’ seemed sufficiently convincing. This undoubtedly queered the pitch for the Congress delegates led by Arunachalam who met Milner the next day.
There were many reasons why the Kandyans took shelter under the colonial umbrella and offered collaboration in return for certain minimum requirements being met. The most important of these, it would appear, were the economic ones. Although the Kandyan region was the main centre of the plantation industry, fewer benefits from this process of economic development had accrued to the Kandyans themselves than to any other group among the Sri Lankans. In general, the Kandyans had been left far behind by the low country Sinhalese and the Tamils in the exploitation of the avenues of advancement available after the consolidation of British rule in the nineteenth century in trade, commerce and plantation activity, and in education and the professions. When a high level of education and property qualifications were laid down as conditions for the exercise of the vote under the reforms of 1910–12, the Kandyans had seen the low country Sinhalese and Tamil lead in these spheres converted into the hard reality of political advantage in the electorate (the educated Ceylonese electorate). They felt incapable of meeting unaided the challenge of the more enterprising segments of the Sri Lanka community and were willing to assist Manning in frustrating the expectations of the ‘constitutionalist’ elite.
Although he had won a section of the Kandyans over to his side in 1920, Manning had no intention of falling captive to a single collaborating group. When a rift between the Sinhalese and Tamils developed after the elections to the reformed Legislative Council in early 1921, he was presented with an opportunity for detaching the Tamils in the Ceylon National Congress from that organization and from their association with the low country Sinhalese in the common purpose of agitation for constitutional reform. The potential advantages of such a course of action were enormous: for the Tamils, though fewer in number than the Kandyans, were politically more sophisticated and articulate; besides, they were regarded, not least by Manning himself, as a majority community.
As with the Kandyans, it was the mechanism of representation that provided Manning with an exploitable opening. The first elections to the reformed Legislative Council had returned thirteen Sinhalese to territorial constituencies as against three Tamils, whereas in the old Legislative Council there had been a near equality in representation between the Sinhalese and Tamil unofficial members. Soon after the new Legislative Council met, influential Tamils began to campaign for the restoration of the proportion of Tamil to Sinhalese representation that had existed before 1920. It was against the background of this demand that a written undertaking given in December 1918 by James Pieris and E.J. Samarawickreme, in their respective capacities as presidents of the Ceylon National Association and Ceylon Reform League,5 regarding the creation of a special seat for the Tamils in the Western Province, was revived. Surprisingly, Pieris and Samarawickreme asserted that their pledge involved no precise commitment to this peculiar concession, but was merely an agreement ‘to accept any scheme which the Jaffna Association may put forward so long as, it is not inconsistent with the various principles contained in the resolutions [adopted at the constitutional conference of December 1918] the most important of which was that of territorial representation’. In a few months, this seemingly trivial issue assumed the proportions of a major controversy both within the Congress and without. Manning, in fact, had little to do but watch the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership shuffling from one costly blunder to another in coping with this problem. The dénouement—Arunachalam’s departure from the Congress—was as shattering in its impact on that organization as it was unexpected.
Arunachalam indeed had been at odds, since the middle of 1920 and even earlier, with his colleagues in the Congress leadership on the tactics to be adopted to respond to Manning’s initiatives and objectives. It was ironical, however, that he left the Congress in a dispute over the special communal seat for the Tamils in the Western Province. The written undertaking on this given by Pieris and Samarawickreme in December 1918 to the Jaffna Association had been crucial in winning the latter over to supporting the formation of the Ceylon National Congress. More to the point, Arunachalam had negotiated this settlement and thrown the full weight of his prestige behind it. It would thus seem that the public disavowal of this pledge shattered his confidence in the leadership of the Ceylon National Congress irretrievably. By the end of 1921 he was, if not an ally, at least the co-belligerent of his brother Ramanathan and men like Ambalavanar Kanagasabhai.6 Their narrow outlook and conservative politics would have appalled him before he began his drift to their camp; a man with a radical outlook and a strong social conscience, he had remained a Gladstonian liberal throughout his public career. In contrast, Ramanathan had shed his liberalism well before the dawn of the century. His defiant condemnation of the repressive measures taken by the British authorities in Sri Lanka in the wake of the riots of 1915 was a spontaneous visceral reaction against injustice and not a political campaign with wider objectives. Shortly thereafter he made it clear that he was opposed to any far-reaching reform of the constitution—he was against the principle of an elected majority in the Legislative Council.7 Arunachalam had been reluctant to associate himself too closely in political activity with his brother and yet the pressures of elite conflict drove him, in the twilight of his distinguished public career, into the camp of ‘communal’ politics though he was never comfortable in its ranks. The Tamils had by now begun to think of themselves as a minority community and Arunachalam himself was inclined to share this view. When, however, the Tamils in their new role of a minority community looked for leadership, they turned to Ramanathan rather than to Arunachalam. It was an astute choice since Arunachalam did not relish the transition from national to communal leadership and could not have filled the latter role with the conviction and panache which Ramanathan was to demonstrate.
The prime beneficiary of the shifts and changes in the political scene was Manning. The initiative was now unmistakably with him and he seized it with unconcealed pleasure to fashion the complete discomfiture of the Congress. In this he had Ramanathan as his collaborator. In mid-November 1921, two conferences were held in a desperate bid at reconciliation between the Sinhalese and Tamil leadership, but these broke down because of one crucial issue—the Tamils were not prepared to relinquish their claim to a special reserved seat in the Western Province. Manning’s political instincts were as sharp as ever and throughout 1922 and 1923 he contrived to keep this issue alive with occasional but well-timed public expressions of support for the Tamils on it.8 The support of other minority groups was more easily obtained. Their political survival depended on the continuation of communal representation and they viewed the Congress demand for a legislature in which a clear majority of members were to be representative of territorial electorates as a threat to their interests.
Despite Manning’s formidable skills as a political manipulator, he would scarcely have achieved all he eventually did had the Sinhalese leaders of the Ceylon National Congress not contributed to their own discomfiture. Their tactics and strategy alike were woefully inadequate in this contest with a man of Manning’s resourcefulness. For one thing, they allowed themselves to be embroiled in a needless conflict on an intrinsically unimportant issue—the reserved seat for the Tamils in the Western Province—when a timely concession generously made would have removed it from the arena of political controversy. Second, they rejected the appeal of radicals like A.E. Goonesinha within their organization that Congress should adopt more forceful techniques of agitation to demonstrate their antipathy to Manning’s policies. Instead, they persisted with their conventional mode of agitation, which, without in any way disturbing Manning’s composure, only drove the radicals to despair. Thus, although the constitutions introduced in 1920 and 1923 fell far short of their demands, Congress leaders would not resort to a policy of boycott and non-cooperation but preferred to help in working the new constitutional machinery. In doing so they enabled Manning to retain the initiative. It would be easy to argue that all this is evidence that they were more afraid of their radical critics than of Manning except that Congress leaders believed that the adoption of the tactics advocated by the radicals would be self-defeating because they would have contributed to the irrevocable alienation of the minorities. In this mood the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership in the Congress were easily outwitted by Manning.
By the beginning of 1925, Manning’s triumph was complete when, in the aftermath of the elections of 1924, the rapprochement between the Congress leadership and the Kandyans was shattered. Under the 1920 constitution, the Kandyans had been given separate communal electorates; but in 1923 this concession was rescinded. Kandyan opinion acquiesced in this because of assurances given by the Congress leadership that ‘seats in the Kandyan provinces would not be contested by low-country Sinhalese’. This was an undertaking which could never have been honoured, for Congress leaders had neither the party machinery nor party discipline which could have enforced this decision on their supporters. In the 1924 elections, only three Kandyan seats returned Kandyans to the Legislative Council. To explain the defeat of the Kandyans as being the result of their lack of sophistication in political matters, a consequence of their resistance to the liberalizing influences of western rule, as many did at that time,9 afforded them little consolation. Indeed, after the elections of 1924, the prominent Kandyan members of the Congress—most notably A.F. Molamure, Dr T.B. Kobbakaduva and P.B. Ratnayake—joined in the demand that ‘the Kandyan race should be separately represented in our Legislative Assembly, and that our entity as a separate and distinct community should otherwise too be recognised and maintained’.10 A Kandyan communal organization, the Kandyan National Assembly, was formed in 1923 in opposition to the Congress. At its inaugural sessions, held in December that year, the Kandyan demand for separate representation was affirmed. By November 1927, the Kandyan National Assembly put forward a demand for a federal state with regional autonomy for the Kandyans.11 The faith in federalism as the solution to the Kandyan problem remained a keynote of their demands for more than a decade thereafter. They found Manning and his successor, Sir Hugh Clifford, very sympathetic to their demands and indeed quite eager to support their claims to a special status, in the hope of using the Kandyans as a conservative buffer against the forces of political agitation and reform.
There were at this time other advocates of the federal solution: S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, a Congressman himself and then in the earliest phase of his remarkable political career, came out in favour of a federal governmental structure as a means of bringing about better understanding among the several ethnic groups on the island.12 It was for a time the main plank in the political platform of the youthful and far from influential political group, the Progressive Nationalist Party, which he headed at this time. But the more influential political leaders of the day, Sinhalese as well as Tamil, were not at all receptive to these demands for a federal constitutional structure for the island.
One feature of the political life of this period has not received the attention it richly deserves. This was the Sinhala Mah•jana Sabh• established in 1919 under the auspices of the Ceylon National Congress with the prime objective of reaching the ‘great masses of the people’. It soon established a network of local sabh•s or associations,13 a notable feature of whose membership was the presence in them of peasant cultivators, who formed a majority of the membership in many.
The aims of these societies were social reform and rural regeneration. There was, in general, an emphasis on religious and cultural activities, including temperance agitation. We have seen in the previous chapter how the temperance movement did not recover its original vitality after the riots of 1915, but interest in temperance activity survived, and more important than that the network of temperance societies established prior to 1915 did not become extinct. It remained dormant for a while and many of its component units were transformed into mah•jana sabh•s.
The link with the pre-1915 temperance movement was evident also in the leadership of the Sinhala Mah•jana Sabh•: the Senanayake brothers and D.B. Jayatilaka were in control. F.R. Senanayake was the undisputed leader and he gave lavishly of his wealth to keep the movement going. He served as its president from its inception in 1919 to his untimely death in December 1925 when D.C. Senanayake took his place at the helm of affairs in the movement.
In regard to the main political objective of the movement—attainment of self-government for Sri Lanka—the Sinhala Mah•jana Sabh• and its provincial units were affiliated to the Ceylon National Congress, within which it and these local sabh•s retained their distinctive identity and considerable freedom of action. In the other spheres of activity the quite explicit aim was for the mah•jana sabh•s to pursue an independent role. Although it was originally intended that the political activities of these associations should be secondary to the social ones, gradually more emphasis was given to the former than was anticipated at the time of the movement’s inauguration and political activity gained greater momentum with the rapid increase in the number of branches on the island.
Through the sabh•s the ‘constitutionalists’ sought to bring the rural population into politics as auxiliaries of the elite. Characteristically, they refused to face up to the implications of this restrained exercise in politicization. In retrospect, it would seem that these sabh•s existed not so much to mobilize popular support for the political objectives of the Ceylon National Congress as to demonstrate that such support was available if necessary, evidence once again of the rock-hewn moderation of the ‘constitutionalists’. It was politicization without enthusiasm or a sense of commitment. The relationship between the leadership and the rank and file was basically deferential on the part of the latter.
From the start, the mah•jana sabh•s conducted their proceedings in Sinhalese, and their rules and regulations were printed in that language. This emphasis on Sinhalese had the inevitable effect of strengthening ethnicity, as a cohesive force within the sabh•s, and from this it was but a short step to emphasizing ethnicity as a point of distinction or separation from rival groups. During the political squabbles of 1923, the Tamils accused F.R. Senanayake of rousing communal feelings against them (he had threatened a boycotting campaign) through the mah•jana sabh• movement. Similarly, the mah•jana sabh•s emphasized a second point of distinction, religion: they sponsored the cause of Buddhist candidates and stood opposed to Christians. In this sense they were, under F.R. Senanayake, very much in the tradition of the religious nationalism of men like the Anagarika Dharmapala and precursors of the Sinhala Maha Sabh• of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) of the mid- and late 1950s. The same forces were at work: Buddhist activists (laymen14 and bhikkhus), the rural sub-elite of ayurvedic physicians, traders, teachers, cultivators and the Sinhalese-speaking intelligentsia. The difference between the mah•jana sabh•s and their successors lay in the tight rein that F.R. Senanayake and D.B. Jayatilaka had on the movement, dampening excessive enthusiasm and zeal and keeping the incipient ‘populist’ tendencies very much under control. It was this populism and mass enthusiasm which distinguished the MEP of the 1950s from the mah•jana sabh•s and largely also from the Sinhala Mah• Sabh•.
The political initiative—such as it was—demonstrated in the mah•jana sabh• movement received a serious setback with the untimely death, at the age of forty-four, of F.R. Senanayake. Deprived of his leadership, the movement survived fitfully for a few more years without a sense of purpose or direction. The strata of society to which it appealed did not lose their interest in politics, it took another ten years before a similar organization was set up to give them leadership. This was the Sinhala Mah• Sabh• of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who in the mid-1920s served his apprenticeship in the mah•jana sabh• movement in the Veyangoda area (the country home and subsequent political base of the Bandaranaikes) under the Senanayakes.
While the mah•jana sabh•s were seeking to revitalize the rural areas and to politicize the peasantry, the Young Lanka League under the leadership of A.E. Goonesinha was engaged in an enterprising bid to politicize the urban working class of Colombo. Infinitely smaller in numbers than the peasantry who formed the natural constituency of the mah•jana sabh•s, the urban working class had a more restricted geographical base, but it was also much more cohesive and volatile as a political force. The most significant difference between the two lay in the fact that the radicalism of the Young Lanka League challenged—no doubt ineffectively but challenged nevertheless—the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership by setting out viable alternatives in terms of political objectives and methods of action.
The keynote of the new radicalism was its interest in trade unionism and labour activity. During the years following the end of the First World War, there was widespread unrest among the urban working class of Colombo as a result of the economic dislocation of that time; in particular, there was a shortage of rice and a consequent increase in its price when there was no corresponding rise in wages. In 1920, these conditions sparked off a series of industrial disputes, first among the railway workers and then the first major strike in the Colombo harbour. The existing workmen’s organizations, sponsored if not run by the ‘constitutionalists’ in the Congress, proved to be totally incapable of meeting the situation created by this wave of labour unrest and significantly the workers themselves, particularly the dockers, preferred to rely on their own resources. The ‘constitutionalists’ had clearly failed and into the void created by their failure stepped the radicals led by A.E. Goonesinha, who supplied a new and more forceful leadership.15
The first major political initiative of the Young Lanka League in the post-war period was their organization of opposition to the poll tax under which all adult males were required to pay Rs 2 annually, or work six days on road construction in lieu. The really irksome and onerous part—road construction work—fell only on the very poor who could not afford the money payment. There was thus great resentment against this tax, which ran deep and strong among the urban poor of Colombo. Its abolition in 1922, largely as a result of a sustained campaign against it by Goonesinha and his associates in the Young Lanka League, was a triumph for the radicals and a demonstrable vindication of the techniques of agitation which they had devised for the purpose.
They turned next to trade union activity. Clearly there was need for a trade union organization which would be something more than a mechanism for conciliation between employers and their workers in the event of labour disputes—the function performed by the Ceylon Workers Federation controlled by the ‘constitutionalists’. Goonesinha’s Ceylon Labour Union, formed on 10 September 1922, was the new model trade union. Its establishment was timely for in February and March 1923 it led Colombo’s working class in a spectacular show of solidarity and strength—a general strike which dislocated the economic life of the city. Although the strike eventually collapsed, its message rang out clear: there was a new mood of militancy among the workers, who therefore would not tolerate a return to labour practices of the past to which the employers were accustomed. There was a political dimension to this message, directed at the ‘constitutionalist’ leadership of the Congress no less than at the colonial administration: the working class was making its entry into the political arena, bringing with it new styles of action, making novel demands and introducing a new and less deferential tone into politics.
By 1923 Goonesinha was already a popular figure, a folk hero and a politician of great promise who had emerged from the ordeal of these strikes with a keener appreciation of the political potential of the masses. The Ceylon Labour Union was by then at once the leading trade union in the country seeking to consolidate its position as the dominant influence on the urban working population and the most radical force in politics. In 1922, it affiliated with the Congress: the hope was that, with the Young Lanka League, it could influence the Congress’ policies and transform its outlook to the point where its political objectives would take on a sharper and more radical focus by greater responsiveness to the social and economic problems of the masses. In short, it would oversee the transformation of the Ceylon National Congress into a dynamic mass organization on the lines of its Indian prototype. On the other hand, the energies of the ‘constitutionalists’ who effectively controlled the Congress were aimed at preventing just such a transformation.
When Goonesinha urged his colleagues in the Congress to adopt Gandhian tactics in their forlorn struggle against Manning’s administration, he was recommending an extension of the scale and scope of political activity which would have undermined their own position even more than Manning’s. More dispassionately, he was thinking in terms of the success the radicals had achieved in the agitation against the poll tax and no doubt hoping that similar tactics in national politics would bring better results than had been achieved so far by the indestructible moderation and respectability of the ‘constitutionalists’. But they would not be shifted from the cosy orthodoxies of elitist politics. Certainly, few among them welcomed—as the radicals did—the politicization of the urban working class, or were anxious to channel its energies into the national political struggle. On the contrary, they were perturbed by the militancy of the labour movement as reflected in the strikes of 1920 and 1923. They regarded Goonesinha as a troublemaker and irresponsible agitator, and lent him no support during the general strike of 1923. (Significantly, the men who were most consistent in their support of Goonesinha and the strikers were C.E. Victor Corea, a militant nationalist at this stage and Anagarika Dharmapala, now in the last phase of his career, who consistently looked upon strikes by Sri Lankan workers as a manifestation of a spirit of nationalism.) The ‘constitutionalist’ leadership in the Congress demonstrated very little interest in the problems of the urban working class, although the industrial disputes of the 1920s had brought these increasingly to public attention. There was substantial justice in the charge laid against Congress members of the Legislative Council by radical critics that they had shown no initiative in securing the introduction and adoption of legislation on issues which vitally affected the working class—the right to form trade unions, the principle of a statutory minimum wage, unemployment relief and workmen’s compensation through insurance against industrial hazards.
An even more significant point of divergence between the radicals and the ‘constitutionalists’ related to suffrage. The ‘constitutionalist’ leadership in the Congress had always been notably unenthusiastic about the extension of the franchise. Arunachalam had been one of the early advocates of manhood suffrage,16 as early as 20 September 1919 in his address (in Sinhalese) at the inauguration of the Lankan Mahajana Sabha17 and then—even more pointedly and emphatically—four days later at a public lecture in Colombo. But in this he had no support from the ‘constitutionalists’, whom he was at this point seeking to coax into establishing the Ceylon National Congress.
From 1923 onwards Goonesinha took up the cry for representative government based on manhood suffrage and repeatedly urged the Congress to accept that principle. But he found its leaders—now that Arunachalam was no longer one of their number—coldly unsympathetic on this issue. No doubt Goonesinha’s advocacy of manhood suffrage stemmed from his realization of the political potential of the urban working class. Manhood suffrage would be the means for converting his influence and prestige in that quarter into a substantial base for his own political advancement and for an effective challenge to the position of the educated elite in the public life of the country—a consideration which must have made manhood suffrage all the more unpalatable to ‘constitutionalists’. The differences between Goonesinha and the Congress leadership were brought into even sharper focus, before the public’s gaze, in 1925–26. In June 1925, he had embarrassed them greatly by his vociferous opposition to a move, sponsored by them, to raise funds from the public to commemorate the award of a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) to the mah• mudaliy•r, Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike. Late in 1926, they struck back by supporting the mah• mudaliy•r’s son, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, in a contest with him for election to the Maradana ward of the Colombo Municipal Council. Goonesinha’s defeat on this occasion was a stunning but only temporary setback to his political career. It did little to detract from the substance of his achievement in politics in the dozen years from the foundation of the Young Lanka League. He had made a notable contribution to the growth of nationalism in Sri Lanka, first by giving leadership in the process of politicizing the working class and then by demonstrating the dynamic role of social and economic reform, both as essential ingredients in national regeneration.