A perceptive observer watching the collapse of European empires in Asia after the Second World War would have been struck by the contrast between the situation in Sri Lanka and that in the rest of south Asia and Burma. It could hardly be expected that the transfer of power in the Indian subcontinent would be free of turmoil, but the violence that raged over British India on the eve of independence was on a scale which few but the most pessimistic could have anticipated. The dawn of Indian independence was marred by massacres and migrations in Punjab on a scale unparalleled in world history in a time of peace; these occurred also in eastern India. The subcontinent seemed on the verge of a calamitous civil war.1 Aung San, the youthful leader of Burma’s independence struggle, did not live to see the signing of the treaty (which he had negotiated) between Britain and Burma on 17 October 1947, which granted Burma her independence; he was assassinated along with a group of his closest associates on 19 June that year. If the civil war which at one stage seemed India’s inevitable fate was avoided through the drastic device of partition, Burma was not so fortunate; violence erupted there almost from the very first week of the existence of the new Burmese republic.
Sri Lanka in 1948 was, in contrast, an oasis of stability, peace and order. Set against the contemporary catastrophes in the rest of the former British possessions in south Asia in the scale of violence involved, the industrial disputes and the general strike of the years 1945–47 paled into utter insignificance. The transfer of power in Sri Lanka was smooth and peaceful; little was seen of the divisions and bitterness which were tearing at the recent independence of the new nations of south Asia. Within a few months of independence in 1948, one of the most intractable political issues in the country—the Tamil problem—which had absorbed the energies of its politicians and the British themselves to an inordinate degree since the early 1920s, seemed on the way to amicable settlement. G.G. Ponnambalam, who had led the Tamils in their political campaigns since his entry into the State Council in 1934, became a member of the cabinet, bringing with him into the government most of the leadership and members of the Tamil Congress. In so doing, he helped convert the government into what was very much a consensus of moderate political opinion in the country. In Ponnambalam’s decision to join Senanayake’s government there was, as is usual in these matters, a mixture of motives. On a personal level, there was a realistic assessment of the undoubted advantages of working with an old rival whose political attitudes were so much like his own. There were also the attractions of office with all that it meant in terms of power, influence on policy and patronage. But above all, in responding thus to Senanayake’s political initiative, Ponnambalam was acknowledging that the prime minister’s sensitivity to minority interests was genuine.
For Senanayake, the Sri Lankan polity was one and indivisible. While his deep conviction of the need for generous concessions to the minorities was much more than a matter of political realism, he was nevertheless acutely aware that these were essential to ensure political stability in a plural society such as Sri Lanka in the vital last phase in the transfer of power. An analysis of his response to the political implications of minority anxiety on Sri Lanka’s development as an independent state would need to emphasize three main points of interest.
First, there were the guarantees preventing legislation discriminating against minorities which were incorporated in the Soulbury Constitution. These guarantees had been borrowed from provisions in the Board of Ministers’ draft constitution of 1944, which had been introduced on D.S. Senanayake’s initiative as a gesture of generosity and reassurance to the minorities. In retrospect, it would seem that the rights of minorities had not received adequate protection in the Soulbury Constitution, but in 1946–47, the constitutional guarantees against discriminatory legislation seemed sufficiently reassuring to them largely because of their trust and confidence in D.S. Senanayake. Second, there was the initiative he took in forming the United National Party (UNP). This was designed to make a fresh start in politics in the direction of a consensus of moderate opinion in national politics. It was to be a political party necessarily representative of the majority community, but at the same time acceptable to the minorities. His own standing in the country was sufficient guarantee of its being acceptable to the majority, but its position among the Sinhalese was strengthened by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s decision to bring in his Sinhala Mah• Sabh• From the beginning it had the enthusiastic approval of the small but influential Christian minority. The Muslims, who in the past had given substantial support to the Tamils in their political campaigns, at last broke away and sought association with the new party. When the Tamil Congress crossed over to the government in 1948, the equilibrium of political forces which D.S. Senanayake had sought to establish was stabilized at a level which he found acceptable, even though the Tamil Congress did not lose its separate identity and despite the fact that a section broke away from it into a stubborn but, at that time, seemingly futile opposition. Only the Indian community, consisting mainly of plantation workers, was left out. But there was a special reason for that: it was regarded as an unassimilated group without roots in the country. The decision to leave the Indians out was deliberately taken on that account. To the extent that he shared the attitudes and prejudices of the great majority of Sinhalese politicians over the Indian question—the status of Indian plantation workers in the Sri Lankan polity and, more specifically, the denial to them of unrestricted rights to the franchise—his conception of a multiracial polity was flawed.
Third, D.S. Senanayake thwarted all efforts to abandon the concept of a secular state and the principle of the state’s religious neutrality. He succeeded in this to the extent that in 1948, despite some Buddhist displeasure over the continued prestige and influence enjoyed by the Christians, there seemed little or no evidence of the religious turmoil and linguistic conflicts which were to burst to the surface in the mid-1950s.
The island’s political leadership within the Board of Ministers and its successor, the new cabinet, took pride in the smooth and uneventful nature of the transfer of power. Thus, the last British governor of the colony became the first Governor General of the new dominion. If there was a parallel for this in the case of India and Mountbatten, there was also, as we have seen in a previous chapter, a notable difference between the constitutional and legal instruments which conferred independence on Sri Lanka and the cognate process in India, Pakistan and Burma. This created, for some time at least, the illusion of a qualitative difference in the political status conferred on Sri Lanka compared to that of the other successors to the British Raj in south Asia. The constitution under which the new dominion began its political existence was of British origin in contrast to the autochthonous constitution drafted for the Indian republic by a constituent assembly. Once again, there was an element of exaggeration in this criticism, for the new constitution of Sri Lanka was basically the Board of Ministers’ draft constitution of 1944—approved subsequently by the State Council—modified to suit the needs of the changed circumstances of 1946–47. There was also an emphasis on the Commonwealth connection and the maintenance of the link with the Crown as head of the Commonwealth after India and Pakistan had opted for republican status. India’s acceptance of membership of the Commonwealth went a long way towards demonstrating that dominion status had no connotation of constitutional subordination to Britain and, in fact, meant complete independence, with the advantages of membership of a worldwide Commonwealth. Above all, the agreements on defence and external affairs, negotiated before the transfer of power, helped to give an air of credibility to the argument that the independence achieved by Sri Lanka was flawed.
Thus the real worth of D.S. Senanayake’s achievement over the transfer of power came to be denied because the means adopted for the attainment of independence under his leadership were not as robust and dramatic as they should have been. By laying so much stress on the decorous and peaceful processes of constitutional agitation, he and the Board of Ministers had deprived themselves, perhaps consciously, of the opportunities of exploiting the numerous chances they had of making a more emotional and vigorous commitment to nationalism. Left wing critics of the government were able to argue that the independence achieved in 1947–48 was ‘spurious’. The jibe of ‘fake’ independence, which they kept hurling at the government evoked a response from a wider circle of the political nation than the left wing alone, largely because the Indian experience seemed to provide a more emotionally satisfying example than the process by which power had been transferred in Sri Lanka. Independence granted from above was regarded as much less satisfying to the spirit of nationalism than if it had been won after prolonged strife and unstinting sacrifice.
In the general elections of 1947, left-wing parties made substantial if not spectacular, gains and held between themselves and their fellow-travellers about a quarter of the elected seats. Earlier they had organized a series of major strikes culminating in the general strike of 1947. These strikes had been the most noteworthy demonstrations of solidarity of the working class and white-collar workers up to that time. The strikes were as much political demonstrations as they were trade disputes—one of the main demands was the rejection of the Soulbury constitution. The strife generated by these strikes served the purpose of underlining the difference in approach between two concepts of nationalism. The ‘moderates’ had come into their inheritance and the ‘radicals’—in the sense of the left-wing—had demonstrated their determination to deprive them of it. They had taken a stand against the Soulbury Constitution and they dismissed the grant of independence in February 1948 as a cynical deal between the imperial power and its pliant agents in Sri Lanka to preserve the old order under a guise of independence.
If D.S. Senanayake was sanguine about the prospects of ethnic harmony and a fair balance of responsibility and duty between the majority and the minorities (religious and ethnic), he paid exaggerated importance to the presumed threat from the left and took extraordinary steps to meet it. There were, first of all, the advantages accruing to him from the demarcation, in which he had had no hand or influence, of constituencies to the new Parliament, where the electoral balance was heavily in favour of the rural areas, which were generally more conservative in outlook.2 But more important were decisions in which the initiative was his. Of these, the most notable were, first, the Citizenship Act of 1948, the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act of 1949 and the Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Act of 1949, which deprived the great majority of the Indian Tamils resident in Sri Lanka of their citizenship rights and franchise. Sinhalese opinion, especially in the Kandyan areas, was deeply suspicious of the Indian Tamils and apprehensive of the prospect of Indian domination of the central highlands of the island. There was another fear as well—the Indian plantation workers as an additional source of political strength to the indigenous Tamils. More important, and this mattered most to Senanayake, left-wing groups began to look upon the Indian workers, if they could be weaned away from the Ceylon Indian Congress which controlled them, as a potentially powerful component of their own trade unions. In the general elections of 1947 the Indian vote was decidedly anti-UNP. Where there were no candidates of the Ceylon Indian Congress, the Indians had voted enthusiastically for the left-wing parties and left ‘independents’. And within the new Parliament representatives of the Ceylon Indian Congress sat on the opposition benches and gave their support to the ‘left’. Thus the new citizenship legislation not only served to assuage the fears and suspicions of the Sinhalese in general and the Kandyans in particular, but also to demolish a potentially powerful prop of the left-wing groups. The immediate effect of this was to distort the electoral balance even more markedly than before and to make the Sinhalese rural voter the arbiter of the country’s politics: with each fresh delimitation of constituencies up to 1976, the Sinhalese rural voters’ position was strengthened. This new electoral balance gave the UNP and its allies a decisive advantage in the general elections of 1952, and the left-wing parties were greatly handicapped. Second, the Public Security Act of 1947 and the Trade Union (Amendment) Act of 1948 were directed against the Marxist-dominated working class organizations and were the direct result of the working class agitation and industrial turmoil of 1945–47, when the LSSP leadership, recently released from prison, were flexing their muscles in anticipation of the general elections scheduled for 1947.
The left-wing challenge to the government appeared more formidable than it really was. At the general elections of 1947, the left-wing parties reaped the electoral rewards that were available to any credible opponents of the newly formed UNP, most of whose leaders had enjoyed power since the 1930s. Besides, while only the UNP presented itself to the electors as a party making a serious bid for power, its party organization was rudimentary at best, and UNP candidates cheerfully fought each other in many constituencies, sometimes with three or even four candidates standing as representatives of the party. Not surprisingly, their opponents did remarkably well. Never again were the Trotskyists and the communists so well represented in Parliament as they were after the general elections of 1947, when they and their fellow-travellers held about one-fifth of the membership. Indeed, in the heady aftermath of the elections there were sanguine expectations in some quarters of the possibility (admittedly somewhat remote) of the left wing forming the nucleus of an alternative government to one dominated by the UNP.
Within a year of independence, the UNP had stabilized its position, not least because of the patronage it had at its disposal. In contrast, the left-wing parties were as divided—by personality conflicts and ideological disputes—in 1950 as they had been in 1947 when the elections were held. For almost three years they could not agree among themselves on a leader of the Opposition. The LSSP, the largest opposition group, was in favour of its leader accepting this position, but the more doctrinaire Trotskyist group, the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party, was hostile to the suggestion, and so for that matter were the communists. It was in June 1950, after the two Trotskyist groups had merged, that the LSSP leader, Dr N.M. Perera, took office as leader of Opposition. The communists gave him no support in this.
In the meantime, the UNP had improved its parliamentary position quite substantially with the entry of G.G. Ponnambalam and most of the Tamil Congress members into the government. Not only were the ranks of the opposition depleted, but the government was able to acquire the formidable oratorical and forensic skills of the Tamil Congress leader. Those members of the Tamil Congress who opposed the new alignment of forces formed a rival Tamil organization, the Federal Party, in December 1948, but this latter organization was very much a voice in the wilderness until the general elections of 1956 when it emerged as by far the most influential of the Tamil parties.
The social welfare schemes of the Donoughmore era were continued beyond 1947, partly at least as a means of blunting the challenge of the Marxist left. Sri Lanka, poor though she was, enjoyed a much higher standard of living than India, Pakistan and Burma, and the national finances seemed adequate to maintain the welfare measures to which the country had grown accustomed in the last years of British rule. In 1947, the total expenditure on welfare absorbed 56.1 per cent of the government’s resources; the corresponding figure for the late 1920s had been a mere 16.4 per cent. It was not yet evident that the burgeoning costs of these welfare measures were an unsupportable burden for a developing country and one which added a dimension of weakness to an economy of which the principal feature was its dependence on the vagaries of a world market.
Ironically, however, neither of the protagonists—the government led by D.S. Senanayake and its left-wing critics—showed much understanding of the Buddhists’ sense of outrage and indignation at what they regarded as the historic injustices suffered by their religion under Western rule. The affront was to culture no less than to religion, and the resentment was felt even more strongly by the ayurvedic physician, the Sinhalese schoolmaster and the notary than by the bhikkhus. And as regards religion it was the withdrawal of the traditional patronage and the consequent precedence and prestige that was resented. Beneath the surface, these religious, cultural and linguistic issues were gathering momentum and developing into a force too powerful for the existing social and political set-up to accommodate or absorb. They were to tear the country apart within a decade of 1948 and to accomplish the discomfiture of both the UNP and its left-wing critics.
Indeed, the Marxists placed as much emphasis as did Senanayake himself on Sri Lanka as a multiracial polity, as a secular state and on a territorial concept of citizenship. (Their version of this polity was much more comprehensive because it also encompassed the Indian plantation workers, whom not even the most liberal of the ‘constitutionalists’ was willing to regard as an integral element of a Sri Lanka polity.) In this emphasis on a secular state there was much more in common between Senanayake with his supporters among the ‘constitutionalists’ and the Marxists than between the former and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s adherents within the ‘constitutionalist’ camp.
The political settlement established by D.S. Senanayake was less stable than it appeared to be. The forces that sought to upset it were as insidious as they were truly formidable. In order to grasp their significance we need to turn to the nature of nationalism in Sri Lanka. There was always a tendency on the part of the Sinhalese to equate their own ethnic nationalism with a wider all-island one, to assume that these—Sinhalese nationalism and Sri Lankan nationalism—were one and the same. In support of this they advanced arguments based on history and immemorial tradition. But this was a short-sighted and unrealistic attitude. The Tamils, the most numerous and articulate group among the minorities, passionately rejected this identification of the sectional interests of the majority with the wider all-island focus of Sri Lankan nationalism. The Christians (among the Sinhalese and Tamils), particularly the Roman Catholics, were equally apprehensive and resentful of the common tendency to equate Sinhalese nationalism with Buddhism. The Tamils, for their part, developed an inward-looking ethnic nationalism of their own, although this, like its Sinhalese counterpart, lacked cohesion or even the touch of authenticity till language became, after independence, the basis of these rival nationalisms.
The other version of nationalism, a Ceylon or Sri Lankan nationalism, emphasized the common interests of the island’s various ethnic and religious groups. It had as its basis an acceptance of the reality of a plural society and sought the reconciliation of the legitimate interests of the majority and minorities within the context of an all-island polity. Its most influential advocate at the time of the transfer of power was D.S. Senanayake. In 1948, this version of nationalism seemed to be a viable alternative to the narrower sectionalisms described earlier, and held out the prospect of peace and stability in the vital first phase of independence. It was based on a double compromise: the softening of Sinhalese dominance by the establishment of an equilibrium of political forces, the keynote of which was moderation, and an emphasis on secularism, a refusal to mix state power and politics with religion, even though the concept of a special responsibility for Buddhism was tacitly accepted. This Sri Lankan nationalism had a crucial flaw. It was basically elitist in conception and it had little popular support extending beyond the political establishment. It required D.S. Senanayake’s enormous personal prestige and consummate statecraft to make it viable.
The first major challenge to this system had appeared when S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike crossed over to the Opposition in July 1951 with a small group of his supporters. In September 1951, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was inaugurated as a centrist political force which deliberately sought to become the focal point of all interest groups which were dissatisfied with the UNP and at the same time opposed to Marxist solutions to the country’s problems. The nucleus of a democratic alternative to the UNP had emerged. Its populist programme was directed at the large protest vote that went to the Marxist parties for want of an alternative, and to the rural areas which formed the basis of the UNP’s hold on political power in the country. The Marxist left had failed to make much of an impact on the rural areas and its perennial ideological disputes, its rifts and shifts and realignments, which were incomprehensible to most of the electors in the country, carried no meaning to any save true believers. Besides, the left was just as unsympathetic as the UNP leadership to the religious, linguistic and cultural aspirations of the Buddhist activists, and it was to this group with its deep sense of grievance, its social and economic discontent, its resentment at being neglected by both the left and the UNP, that the SLFP as the successors of the Sinhala Mah• Sabh• turned.
In the years after independence one of the major preoccupations of the government under D.S. Senanayake had been with the need to establish securely a Sri Lankan nationalism and during the time of his leadership there had been a policy of subordinating communal differences to the common goal of fostering parliamentary democratic institutions and strengthening the foundations of nationhood. The primary aim was the establishment of an equilibrium of ethnic forces within a multiracial polity. For some time it seemed as though these policies were succeeding, but under the surface powerful forces were at work to upset the equilibrium thus established. This shift was in tune with the essence of democratic politics in which, given a common basis of agreement, the numerically larger group can peacefully alter the power structure. It was to this process that S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike sought to give leadership, and the ideals of communal reconciliation and harmony were soon to give way before the stresses released by the divisive forces of language and religion. The Sinhalese-Buddhist majority, long dormant, was beginning once more to assert its national dominance. The first casualties were the concepts of a multiracial polity, a Sri Lankan nationalism and a secular state.
The prospect of a classic confrontation between D.S. Senanayake and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike as the advocates of two diametrically opposed versions of nationalism vanished with the death of D.S. Senanayake on 22 March 1952. He was succeeded as prime minister by his son Dudley after a brief but bitter squabble for the leadership within the inner circles of the UNP. The younger Senanayake was forty years old at this time. While he shared his father’s views on secularism, communal harmony and resistance to the demands of Buddhist activists, he was also more receptive to the winds of change that were blowing over the island. He was much more amenable to reasonable concessions to the Buddhist movement and the trade unions. In short, he had reservations about many aspects of the status quo. He, therefore, could not defend it with his father’s sense of commitment.
It was no great surprise when he led the UNP and its allies to a remarkable electoral victory in July 1952 over a formidable array of opponents—S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s SLFP, the Marxists and the Tamil Federal Party. The election took place in an atmosphere of emotionalism following the death of D.S. Senanayake. The massive victory won by Dudley Senanayake was in many ways a ringing endorsement given by the electorate to his father’s life’s work. The equilibrium of forces he had sought to establish was seemingly stabilized by the massive electoral support received by his successor. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike did not make much of an impact on the rural areas. The left lost ground heavily and the Federal Party made no impression at all in the Tamil areas, with its leader S.J.V. Chelvanayakam losing his seat to a UNP candidate.
But the forces aligned against the new prime minister were formidable. The left gave him a taste of the problems he faced when they organized a massive demonstration just after the elections in protest against alleged electoral frauds. There was no evidence that any frauds had been perpetrated, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, for one, never gave any serious support to this canard. The government responded by organizing an equally massive counter-rally.
More significantly, the SLFP emerged from the election as a viable democratic alternative to the UNP and its leader took on the role of leader of the Opposition on the traditional Westminster model. The Marxist groups within parliament and in the country were hopelessly divided and a section of them preferred to acknowledge Bandaranaike’s leadership of the opposition within the parliament rather than that of the LSSP leader, Dr N.M. Perera. But even so, their attitude to Bandaranaike and his policies was at best ambivalent. They had much greater faith than he in strikes, mass action and extra-parliamentary struggles as forms of protest against the government. And in August 1953 they were offered precisely the opportunity of embarrassing the government that they had been waiting for.
The new government took office against the background of an emerging economic crisis. The boom conditions which Sri Lanka’s exports had enjoyed during the Korean War were soon followed by a sharp worsening of the terms of trade and a fall in rubber prices. It was evident that Sri Lanka could no longer afford the massive expenditure on food subsidies to which the country had grown accustomed in the days of D.S. Senanayake’s government. Acting on the advice of a visiting World Bank mission, Dudley Senanayake sought to reduce the crippling burden of the rice subsidy. This move was doubly provocative: the price rose from 25 cents a measure (0.908 kg) to 75 cents in spite of the fact that during the election campaign of 1952, government spokesmen had capitalized on the popularity of the rice subsidy and promised to maintain it at the same level.
When public protests rose against the increase in the price of rice, the Marxist unions, with the Trotskyist LSSP in the lead, were mobilized to stage a one-day hartal (a mass stoppage of work). S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike declined to let his party get involved in this hartal, but the Marxists proceeded with it undismayed. The turbulent demonstrations that followed in the wake of the hartal exceeded the expectations of the Marxist leadership and several demonstrators were killed when the police opened fire.
The hartal had fateful political consequences for the UNP in the sense that it was one of the factors contributing to the resignation of Dudley Senanayake in October 1953. His successor was Sir John Kotelawala, who had neither the former’s political vision nor any substantial reserves of committed public support beyond the ranks of the urban elite. The parliamentary majority he inherited was large enough to enable him to stabilize his position and to cope successfully with the problems caused by his predecessor’s resignation. He could even afford to exclude some members of his predecessor’s cabinet when he formed his government, but his political judgement went astray when he dropped a man of G.G. Ponnambalam’s ability and standing; a few disgruntled members of parliament (MP) maintained a sullen silence, while others drifted into the opposition—potential recruits for a broad-based movement that would bring down the UNP. But the prime minister’s hold on Parliament grew stronger.
It was not in parliament, however, that the real opposition to Kotelawala and the UNP lay. Religion, language and culture were emerging as the central issues of the day, and with regard to these he was so patently unsympathetic and lacking in understanding that the position of his government and the UNP was successfully undermined.3
The Sinhala-educated intelligentsia found that rewarding careers were closed to them by the pervasive dominance of English as the language of administration. Although they were not without influence in the villages, they had seldom in the past been able to exert any influence on a national scale and they felt that they had been unjustly excluded from a share of power commensurate with their numbers by the Western-educated elite. More important, they felt that they were better able than the latter to speak for the villagers. They also felt that the Tamil community had taken an unfair share of power by virtue of its superior educational opportunities. In addition, they believed that in its spiritual home Theravada Buddhism and the culture associated with it were not receiving sufficient support or respect. The worldwide celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the parinibb•na of the Buddha was scheduled for 1956. This afforded Buddhist activists a marvellous opportunity for their campaigns. At the same time a report by a prestigious non-government commission (consisting of eminent Buddhist personalities) on the deplorable state of Buddhism in Sri Lanka heightened these fears—they levelled the charge that the value of independence was ‘vitiated’ by the fact that the ruling elite was ‘completely dominated by an alien outlook and values, and estranged from their national history and culture’.
If religious fervour was the prime determinant of change, the language question was its sharp cutting edge. Indeed the two elements—Buddhism and Sinhala—were so closely intertwined that it was impossible to treat either one in isolation. The anxiety to preserve and strengthen the Sinhala language stemmed partly at least from a fear that if it fell into decay in Sri Lanka, its religious and cultural tradition would die with it. What occurred at this time was a profoundly significant transformation of nationalism with language becoming its basis. (The most appropriate analogy for this would be the linguistic nationalism which erupted in Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century.) This transformation of nationalism affected both the Sinhalese and Tamil population.4
To the Buddhist activists the prime minister was both an anachronism and a philistine and they sought to replace him by a more representative figure. Their first choice, significantly, was Dudley Senanayake, then a backbencher, semi-retired from active politics. But he declined their offer, first because his health was troubling him and, second, because he saw the political implications of the programme he was being called upon to champion, and these disturbed him. It was at this point that they turned to Bandaranaike. He had fewer compunctions about accepting the programme because he had been advocating much the same policies for many years. The profound political consequences of the programme did not deter him from adopting it with enthusiasm, because he was confident of his ability to ride the storm and to control the forces he was being asked to lead.
The crucial issue was language. Sir John Kotelawala’s maladroit handling of this issue converted it into a highly inflammable one. The problem that faced him was to satisfy the aspirations of the Sinhala, who were increasingly insistent on the immediate imposition of Sinhalese as the sole official language in breach of the compromise on language reached in 1944 and the fears of the Tamils, who realized that such a step would place them at a severe disadvantage in the competition for posts in government service. Late in 1955, the prime minister, while on an official visit to the Tamil north, made a public pronouncement that he would make constitutional provision for parity of status for the Sinhala and Tamil languages. The thunderstorm of protests against this that arose in the Sinhalese areas took every section of opinion by surprise. Nobody had anticipated such a profoundly hostile reaction. The SLFP which, like the UNP and all other national parties, stood for Sinhala and Tamil as the official language of the country, capitalized on the situation by declaring itself in favour of Sinhalese as the only official language—with a provision for the ‘reasonable use’, of the Tamil language. Within a few months of this the UNP too (in February 1956) reversed its position on language rights and adopted one that was even more thoroughgoing in its commitment to Sinhalese as the official language than that of the SLFP. But the patent insincerity of the conversion discredited both the prime minister and the UNP. They lost the support of the Tamils, and as events were to demonstrate so dramatically, made not the slightest headway among the Sinhalese.
Sir John Kotelawala completely misread the trends of the day in believing that this last-minute volte-face on language would enable him to return to power at the next general elections. Scheduled for 1957, these were now advanced to 1956 in the hope that the UNP could capitalize on its stand on language at a time when the left wing parties were handicapped by their commitment to the policy of parity of status for Sinhala and Tamil. Sir John’s chances of pulling off the elections seemed good enough not merely to his own advisers, but also to some of Bandaranaike’s close associates who chose this moment to cross over to the government, thus demonstrating that a position in the centre of the political arena is not often the best place from which to judge which way the wind is blowing. But the decision to hold the general elections in 1956 offended Buddhist activists who preferred to keep the year free of political agitation and partisan politics for the Buddha Jayanthi, the worldwide celebration in May of that year of the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha’s parinibb•na or death. They exhorted the prime minister to postpone the elections until after the celebration, but he refused to do so. Instead he aggravated the offence by initiating the first phase of the Buddha Jayanthi celebrations before the elections, which the most articulate sections of the sangha—a majority, in fact—regarded as a blatant exploitation of religious sentiment by a man whom they believed to have neither a sense of occasion nor any genuine love for Buddhism.
The opposition parties were now better prepared than ever before for their encounter with the UNP. This time the forces ranged against the UNP were altogether more formidable and more united than they had been in 1952 or 1947. It was recognized that Bandaranaike’s SLFP was the most viable alternative to the UNP and that it should be given all possible support in the prime objective of defeating the UNP. Bandaranaike had protected his left flank by arranging a no-contest pact with the two leading Marxist parties, the LSSP and the Communist Party, in September-October 1955. In the meantime, the SLFP had joined forces with a section of the LSSP (under Philip Gunawardane) and two smaller Sinhalese parties, in the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) (the People’s United Front), in which the common links were a commitment to Sinhala as the official language and to a populist programme of social and economic change.
The UNP went it alone. Its Tamil Congress allies in the north had left them long before the elections and there the way was clear for the Federal Party. Dudley Senanayake stood aloof from this contest and did not give the UNP any assistance. His absence and that of the Senanayake family in general was skilfully exploited to the UNP’s disadvantage. For the leadership of the UNP the defeat they suffered was all the more stunning for being so totally unexpected; few people, whether politicians or publicists, had correctly predicted that the outcome of the elections would be the crushing defeat of the UNP under Sir John Kotelawala. Not even the victors of this electoral struggle had gauged the real strength of the grass-roots movement which welled up under the direction of an army of concerned bhikkhus under the banner of an improvised organization, the Eksath Bhikkhu Peramuna5 which transcended the traditional nik•ya divisions. Buddhist activists succeeded in converting what might have been a conventional election campaign into a symbolic struggle between the forces of evil—the UNP—and righteousness.
In retrospect, the formation of the UNP and the strong government it provided for eight vitally important years were positive, even essential, achievements of the first decade of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history.6 The party ensured order and an orderly transition to democratic politics under a two-party system. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, for one, was well aware of the symbiotic relationship between the founding of the UNP and the stability of democracy in Sri Lanka in the early years of independence. The UNP gave Sri Lanka, he said, ‘the stability of government which was needed, particularly at the beginning of a new era of freedom’.7
After the election of 1952, especially the overwhelming dominance of the UNP appeared to be leading inevitably towards the institutionalization of a monolithic party system as was happening elsewhere among new states. The victory of the MEP in 1956 and the smooth transfer of power from the UNP to that new force were a watershed in Sri Lanka’s political evolution. They marked a change from a political structure in which one party was in a position of clear predominance to a multiparty system in which two major parties are in constant competition for power and each is joined at one time or another in coalition by smaller groups. This was also the coming of age of Sri Lanka’s system of parliamentary democracy.
Concerning the economy, even more than the political structure, the mood at the time of the transfer of power was singularly sober and realistic though not unduly pessimistic. There were on the contrary, high hopes of economic achievement. The country’s assets were not unimpressive; although the population was increasing rapidly, it was compared with other countries in south Asia, well fed and literate; the government of Sri Lanka was the largest landholder in the country, controlling no less than 1,315,228 hectares (mostly waste forest which needed the provision of roads and electricity to be made productive); the administration was competent, and above all, there were large sterling balances accumulated during the war.
Nevertheless, the economic legacy left behind by the British was just as ambiguous as the political one—perhaps even more so. The crux of the problem was that foreign income which ‘directly or indirectly constituted the bulk of the national income began to fall rapidly’, while at the same time there was a rise in the cost of imports. This was reflected in the country’s balance of payments which fell consistently from ‘a handsome surplus in 1945 to a heavy deficit in 1947’. For a country which practically lives by foreign trade, a contemporary economic survey pointed out,7 ‘no economic indices could be more significant. It represented a fall in national income and a march towards greater poverty and insecurity’.8
D.S. Senanayake’s government inherited an undiversified export economy dependent principally on the three crops, namely, tea (the most important in terms of export earnings), rubber and coconut. The weakness of the economy lay in the wide fluctuations to which the revenues from these exports were subject, a reflex of world economic conditions. This was quite apart from the dominant, if not controlling, position of foreign commercial firms—largely British—in the plantations, especially tea and rubber, and in the export of plantation products. One of the most striking features of this economic structure was the absence of an industrial sector independent of the processing of tea, rubber and coconut for export and the related engineering and mechanical requirements. Nevertheless, there had been since 1931, and particularly since the outbreak of the Second World War, some state-sponsored industrial ventures. None of these was of more than marginal significance and on the whole little progress had been made. Private enterprise was reluctant to embark on industrial ventures in the absence of firm support from the government. Although the new government declared that the country cannot ‘depend on agriculture alone to provide the minimum standard we are aiming at for our rapidly increasing people’, this was merely lip service to the almost religious faith among the intelligentsia in industrialization as the panacea for Sri Lanka’s economic problems.
Traditional agriculture—subsistence farming—lagged far behind the efficient plantation sector in productivity because of the long-term impact of a multiplicity of factors. Sri Lanka could not produce all the rice needed to feed a growing population: most of the country’s requirements in rice and subsidiary foodstuffs were imported and accounted for more than half the imports.
Looking ahead to the years after independence, the Senanayake regime placed its hopes on the achievement of self-sufficiency in rice and subsidiary foodstuffs: ‘Increased production, particularly in the matter of home-grown food’, it declared, ‘will be given a place of supreme importance in the policy of the Government’.9 The principal means of achieving this objective was the rapid development of the dry zone, the heartland of the ancient irrigation civilization of Sri Lanka. Thus, in this enterprise one discerned too the search for inspiration from the past and the traditional sources of legitimacy of Sri Lanka’s rulers.
All in all, however, there was no great emphasis on far-reaching changes in the economic structure inherited from the British. This latter had taken firm root in the period of British rule and the process of introducing changes in it was more difficult than it seemed to be, while any hope of dismantling it was beyond the realms of practical politics. For ‘the export of estate products enabled the people of [Sri Lanka], or a large part of them, to be fed and clothed’.10 Besides, the system itself was still viable and its potential for expansion was, if not undiminished, at least reasonably good. And it was also true that the political leadership of the day was reluctant to make changes in an economic system with which their own interests were identified. The result was that in the economic structure, as in the political, there was an emphasis on the maintenance of the status quo.
The first decade of independence was a period of significant if not sustainable economic growth, stimulated by two boom periods for the island’s exports in the years 1950–55 and a remarkable expansion in paddy production.11 The first strong upsurge of the gross national product (GNP) was in 1950–51, the Korean War boom. Export earnings increased by 79 per cent between 1949 and 1951, largely as a result of a 65 per cent increase in export prices. In 1950, the country enjoyed a record trade surplus of Rs 396 million, or 10 per cent of the gross national output for the year; this represented an increase of Rs 362 million over the previous year. The improvement in the terms of trade from 1949 to 1951 was as much as 35 per cent. With the collapse of the Korean boom in April 1951, the demand for exports declined considerably and the terms of trade turned adverse with a sharp drop in the GNP, although disposable income still grew at a steady and fairly rapid rate.
One of the most dynamic sectors of the island’s economy in the 1950s—in terms of output, productivity and, certainly, employment growth—was peasant agriculture. At the end of the Second World War, it was still on the whole both backward and stagnant. Its rapid transformation in the post-war period is, therefore, all the more impressive. D.S. Senanayake was passionately interested in the development of peasant agriculture and under his leadership the UNP in its early years of power stressed the building up of traditional agriculture, especially its extension in area through land development and irrigation schemes such as the massive Gal Oya Scheme, the first major project since the days of the Polonnaruva kings.
Paddy production increased from 16.7 million bushels in 1947 and 22 million in 1950 and 1951 to 37.7 million in 1955. This steady progress in paddy production, at a rate unsurpassed even by the most modern sectors of the economy, was especially remarkable since it was mainly a peasant activity. Most of the progress can be attributed to government policies directed towards regeneration of the peasant sector. One of these policies was the extension of the area under paddy cultivation by means of irrigation projects and peasant colonization schemes. But basically, the astonishing growth of peasant agriculture in this decade could be attributed to the sheer strength of market incentives; paddy output grew so fast because cultivators were rewarded for their production by guaranteed purchase at prices which were not only unprecedented but represented a subsidy of approximately 50 per cent over world market prices.
The UNP governments of this period are liable to criticism for having allowed the economy to drift for too long without putting a workable long-term development strategy into operation. The UNP’s approach to development was partly a product of party ideology and partly a natural, if short-sighted, reaction to the fact that the early 1950s were good years for Sri Lanka’s economic well-being. One characteristic of the economy in the 1950s was an exceedingly buoyant consumption level: both private and public current account expenditure tended to increase rapidly—in retrospect, far too rapidly—throughout most of the decade. The strong upsurge of the GNP in 1950–51 had been followed by an equally strong rise in consumption. In 1952, when the export boom came to its sudden end, consumption was still rising and indeed the consumption ratio increased sharply. It remained fairly stable at its higher post boom level in 1953–54 and rose again in response to the boom conditions of 1955. When the boom of 1955–56 came to an end, consumption fell very little from its new higher boom-inspired level. Although after 1952 there was heightened concern for the economy’s future and the UNP began to act with increasing boldness (as in the Six-Year Programme of Investment), investment remained below 10 per cent of GNP till 1956.
In contrast to the solid achievement in traditional agriculture was the lack of any substantial progress in refurbishing existing export industries or channelling investment into new industrial ventures. The failure to achieve rapid industrial development meant that the substitution of local production for imports (with the notable exception of rice) proceeded very slowly. So the structure of production changed little as population grew and when the foreign exchange problem had worsened rapidly after 1955.
There was, in this period, a sharp increase in population growth. From 2.5 per cent in 1946, it reached a peak of 3.0 per cent in 1950 and remained between 2.7 and 2.9 per cent throughout the 1950s. The crude death rate had been halved by 1953 and fell to 8.6 in 1960, while the birth rate of 39.6 in 1946 declined much more slowly to around 36.5 in the period 1955–60. Sir Ivor Jennings, commenting on the island’s affairs in 1949, warned of the economic implications of the island’s astonishing rate of population increase which had reached 3.0 per annum that year and he asserted with uncharacteristic exaggeration that this ‘was the fundamental problem, of [Sri Lanka’s] economy’.12 If it was not quite that, this was because the increase in population was not concentrated in the under-25 group but spread through all age groups; in the decade 1950–59 the under-25 age group rose from 56 to 60 per cent of the gross population, a rate of growth which did not pose any insuperable problems as long as the expanding economy could cope with an annual addition to the labour force of around 54,000, as it did between 1946 and 1953. Thus the political system was not much disturbed by population pressure. Nevertheless, this rapid growth of population had the immediate effect of pushing up private and public consumption needs and reducing the surplus available for investment.
At the time of the transfer of power, scant attention was paid to external policy and the external environment. There was a consciousness of the island’s strategic position in the Indian Ocean and its inability to defend itself. D.S. Senanayake had willingly signed the agreements on defence and external affairs with the United Kingdom before the grant of dominion status to Sri Lanka, for on these matters there was substantial identity of views between D.S. Senanayake and Whitehall. These agreements, as we have seen, were subjected to severe criticism both within and outside parliament in Sri Lanka, especially but not exclusively from Marxist groups.
Senanayake feared that with the British withdrawal the British empire in Asia in the familiar form in which it had existed would have ended and the political prospects in Asia would be hardly encouraging. A profound suspicion of India was the dominant strand in his external policy. Accordingly, it was as a policy of reinsurance for the country during the early years of independence, when it was not impossible that there might be a political vacuum in south Asia, that he viewed the agreements. Similarly, in the early years of independence, he claimed that membership of the Commonwealth would provide a ‘counter-force’ against any possibility of aggression from India in the future.
In these circumstances there is a natural tendency to overlook the fact that the first prime minister was also the original protagonist of non-alignment and neutralism’.13 In 1948, D.S. Senanayake’s government, along with other Asian powers, came out in forthright opposition to the Dutch police action against the republic of Indonesia. His was also one of the first governments to recognize the People’s Republic of China and to sever diplomatic relations with the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan. More important, in 1951, speaking over the BBC in London, he emphasized the point that he wished his country to follow a ‘middle path’ in international politics and not entangle itself in the power and ideological conflicts of the cold war. This was indeed the very first time that a Sri Lankan statesman had articulated a definite guideline on foreign policy.
Thus the trend towards non-alignment had begun under D.S. Senanayake himself, a fact which has not received much attention for two reasons. First, it was a gradual development emerging from dramatic considerations without any semblance of ideological commitment. Second, Sri Lanka was embroiled in the ideological conflicts of the cold war and the Soviet Union regularly vetoed Sri Lanka’s membership of the United Nations, urging in support of this, the argument that she was too much in the shadow of British power, a contention which dovetailed into the political battles in the island, where the local Marxist parties which were in direct opposition to the UNP and Senanayake’s government in turn adopted a completely negative attitude towards communist countries and consistently refused to establish diplomatic or cultural links with any of them. Apart from fears that communist embassies in Colombo would inevitably strengthen local Marxist parties, there was, more logically, the view that it would not be to Sri Lanka’s advantage to establish diplomatic links with countries which refused to acknowledge her status as an independent state.
Under his successors, his son Dudley (1952–53) and Sir John Kotelawala (1953–56), however, relations with communist states expanded, although these did not develop into firm diplomatic links. First there was the rubber-rice trade agreement with China in 1952; and then under Kotelawala, trade relations were established with Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1955 and Romania in 1956. The rubber-rice trade agreement with China was greeted with considerable dismay in the United States and the Sri Lanka government came under strong pressure from that quarter once it became known that such an agreement was being negotiated. Thus this agreement was at once a vigorous demonstration of Sri Lanka’s independence in external relations and of her capacity to withstand pressures from Western powers.
Kotelawala, however, carried Sri Lanka well into the western camp, choosing the United States rather than Britain as the main ally. The commitment to Britain of course remained and British assistance continued to be the mainstay of Sri Lanka’s defence, although by now she had begun to build up her own armed forces. His alignment with the west was best demonstrated when he permitted landing rights in Sri Lanka for United States airforce planes ferrying French troops to Indo-China.
Kotelawala’s strong pro-western bias was a reflection of his anti-communist position in international affairs. He was responsible for initiating the Colombo Conference of 1954, at which Asian powers discussed the Indo-China problem. His ideological commitment was manifest here when he advocated the adoption of a resolution condemning ‘aggressive communism’, in addition to one critical of ‘colonialism’ favoured by a majority of the delegation. Again, at the path-breaking Bandung Conference held the following year, in which not only Asian but also African nations were represented, Kotelawala took up the same position. There were indeed fears that Sri Lanka would seek membership of South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); but despite his strong anti-communist outlook, he recognized that there would be strong opposition within the country—and not from opposition groups alone—to any move in that direction. And more than once he asserted that he had no intention of guiding Sri Lanka into joining any power bloc.
It was during his premiership that Sri Lanka was admitted to the United Nations in 1955 with the withdrawal of the Soviet veto. Trade links were established with some communist countries in 1955 and 1956. While this was a significant new development, Kotelawala, did not establish any diplomatic links with communist powers. However, such links were being contemplated by his government in its last months in office and when the country went to the polls in 1956 the decision to establish them had already been taken. Once more, pragmatic considerations governed a major diplomatic initiative.