37

Linguistic Nationalism and a Socialist Experiment, 1956–1977

The Bandaranaikes In Power: The First Phase

Bandaranaike’s electoral triumph¹ of 1956 marked a watershed in Sri Lanka’s history in the rejection of so much that had come to be accepted as part of the normal order of things in post-colonial Sri Lanka.

Such elements of continuity with the policies of the UNP as there were, were clearly overshadowed by Bandaranaike’s purposeful demolition of the balance of political forces which D.S. Senanayake had endeavoured to establish and sustain as the basis of Sri Lanka’s post-colonial polity. What this amounted to was a rejection of the concept of a Sri Lankan nationalism which D.S. Senanayake had striven to nurture and the substitution for it of a more democratic and populist form of nationalism—linguistic nationalism—which was at the same time fundamentally divisive in its impact on the country.

One of the immediate consequences of the transformation of nationalism was that the concept of a multiracial polity was no longer politically viable. In Sinhala, the words for nation, race and people are practically synonymous and a multiracial or multi-communal nation or state is incomprehensible to the popular mind. The emphasis on the sense of uniqueness of the Sinhalese past and the focus on Sri Lanka as the land of the Sinhalese and the country in which Buddhism stood forth in its purest form, carried an emotional appeal compared with which a multiracial polity was a meaningless abstraction.

Second, the abandonment of the concept of a multiracial polity was justified by laying stress on the notion of a democratic sanction deriving its validity from the clear numerical superiority of the Sinhala-speaking group. At the same time, the focus continued to be an all-island one, and Sinhalese nationalism was consciously or unconsciously treated as being identical with a Sri Lanka nationalism. The minorities, and in particular the indigenous Tamils, refused to endorse the assumption that Sinhalese nationalism was interchangeable with the larger Sri Lankan nationalism. As early as 1951, at its first national convention, the Federal Party asserted that ‘the Tamil-speaking people in Ceylon constitute[d] a nation distinct from that of the Sinhalese by every fundamental test of nationhood’, and in particular stressed the ‘separate historical past’ of the Tamils and their linguistic unity and distinctiveness. This view has been consistently emphasized by the Federal Party and by other Sri Lanka Tamils in recent years and it is the foundation of their claim for a measure of regional autonomy (ranging from a unit or units in a federal structure to the more recent agitation for a separate state).

Up to the early 1950s, the Tamils’ concept of nationalism lacked coherence and cohesion despite all their talk of a linguistic, religious and cultural separateness from the Sinhalese. As with the Sinhalese, it was language which provided the sharp cutting edge of a new national self-consciousness. Indeed, the Federal Party’s crucial contribution to Tamil politics was its emphasis on the role of language as the determinant of nationhood.

Bandaranaike’s main concern at the time he became prime minister in 1956 was about limitations and curbs on Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, and these he was anxious to eliminate; but he was thinking less about the independence (Soulbury) constitution itself than about the defence agreements with Britain signed at the time of the transfer of power. Very soon he was able to satisfy himself that these agreements were not detrimental to the country’s status as a free and sovereign state—and it is significant that these agreements, for all the criticisms to which they have been subjected from time to time, were never abrogated.

The survival of the Soulbury constitution for two decades without fundamental change can be explained partly by the flexibility of the constitution and the lack of a bill of fundamental rights: these enabled the political structure to accommodate itself to a series of far-reaching changes, most if not all of which adversely affected ethnic and religious minorities. As early as 1948, the Ceylon Citizenship Act eliminated the vast majority of the Indian plantation workers from the electoral registers by the simple device of defining the right to citizenship far more rigidly than under the Donoughmore constitution. It was thus demonstrated that the constitutional obstacle of Section 29(2)(b)² would not operate provided that legislation was so framed that there might be a restriction in fact but not in legal form. The restriction was made applicable to all sections of the community and not to a specific group. When Bandaranaike’s Official Language Act was introduced in the House of Representatives in 1956, the speaker ruled that it was not a constitutional amendment and therefore required only a simple majority. (In 1960 the Roman Catholics found to their dismay that the constitution afforded them no protection in their campaign to preserve the status quo in education.)

Equally important, the nationalization of local and foreign business ventures was facilitated by the lack of any provision in the constitution for just and expeditious payment of compensation. Thus there was no constitutional protection for property rights in general.

While Bandaranaike had ridden to office on a massive wave of Sinhalese-Buddhist emotion, the sobering realities of political power compelled him to impose restraints. The riots which broke out in the wake of the introduction of the ‘Sinhala Only’ bill in 1956 had underlined the combustible nature of linguistic nationalism in a plural society. Thus, although this legislation was introduced and piloted through the legislature, its full implementation was postponed to January 1961. In the meantime, the Tamil Federal Party, at a convention held in Trincomalee in August 1956, outlined what they regarded as the main demands of the Tamils: autonomy for the Northern Province and the Eastern Province under a federal constitution, parity of status for the Sinhala and Tamil languages and a satisfactory settlement of the problem of the Indian Tamil plantation workers on the island.

In 1925–26, when Bandaranaike, who had just returned from Oxford, set out the case for a federal political structure for Sri Lanka he had received no support for it from the Tamils. His ardour for federalism cooled somewhat over the years, but it was a grim irony that he should be called upon, at the moment of his greatest political triumph, to articulate the strong opposition of the Sinhalese to any attempt to establish a federal constitution. The Sinhalese viewed the Tamils’ demand for a federal constitution as nothing less than the thin end of the wedge of a separatist movement. The fact is that the Sinhalese, although an overwhelming majority of the population of the island, nevertheless have a minority complex vis-à-vis the Tamils. They feel encircled by the more than sixty million Tamil-speaking people who inhabit the present-day Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Within Sri Lanka the Sinhalese outnumber the Tamils by more than six to one; but they in turn are outnumbered by nearly four to one by the Tamil-speaking people of south Asia.

Historical tradition and geography separate the Tamils of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu from each other. In the early years of Sri Lanka’s independence, the Tamils of the north and east of the island had showed little inclination to identify themselves with the Tamils of Tamil Nadu. The only link between the two groups was language. Nevertheless, the Sinhalese feared this possibility and the campaign for federalism aggravated these fears. There was suspicion too of the attempt by the Federal Party to make the settlement of the problem of Indian plantation workers on the island a plank in their political platform; the programme of action outlined by the Federal Party in August 1956 was regarded as having ominous long-term dangers.

While the extremists in the ranks of the coalition he led could think only in terms of maintaining pressure on the Tamils in a policy of confrontation, Bandaranaike was devising schemes for a statesmanlike settlement with them, and with this in view he conducted negotiations with the Federal Party. The terms of this compromise were made public in July 1957; first, the Tamil language was to be an official language for administrative purposes in the Northern Province and the Eastern Province; second, as a concession to the federal demand, Bandaranaike agreed to establish a scheme of devolving administrative powers to regional councils³ and third, he agreed to restrict settlement of Sinhalese colonists in irrigation schemes in the Northern Province and the Eastern Province so that the indigenous Tamils could maintain their majority position there. The moment the terms of the settlement were made public, there was a storm of protest, chiefly from the extremists in Bandaranaike’s own camp. And the UNP, looking for a means of staging a recovery, came out in opposition to the settlement. It was thus provided with an ideal opportunity to embarrass the prime minister on a politically sensitive issue, and to establish its commitment to the ‘Sinhala Only’ policy before an electorate sceptical of their motives. Confronted with mounting opposition to this compromise, the prime minister played for time, but the pressures against it were too strong for him to resist. Led by a group of bhikkhus who performed satyagraha on the lawn of his private residence in Colombo, the extremists in his own party compelled the prime minister to abrogate the pact.

The tensions generated by these pressures and counter-pressures erupted once again in riots in May 1958. To assuage the feelings of the Tamils, in August 1958, Bandaranaike secured parliamentary approval of the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act to permit the ‘reasonable’ use of Tamil in administration. It was a significant concession, but it did not mollify the Tamils. In any case, although the bill was approved by Parliament, the regulations necessary for its implementation were not passed till 1966 when Dudley Senanayake was prime minister. An important point about Bandaranaike’s abortive settlement with the Federal Party which needs to be mentioned was that despite its abrogation in 1958 it continued for about ten years thereafter to be the basis for negotiations on solutions to the Sinhalese-Tamil problem on the island.

Since the linguistic nationalism of the Sinhalese was so closely intertwined with the Buddhist resurgence, it was inevitable that there would be intensified pressure for a closer association of the state with Buddhism and for the declaration of Buddhism as the state religion. It was inevitable too that the Christian minority would come under attack because of Buddhist displeasure at its continued prestige and influence, the most conspicuous evidence of which lay in the impressive network of mission schools; also because of the sense of outrage and indignation of the Buddhists at the humiliations—and worse—inflicted on them under western rule. Yet, legislation for the declaration of Buddhism as the state religion would meet the formidable and almost insuperable obstacle of Section 29(2)(b) of the constitution. It would have taxed the ingenuity of the most skilled legal draftsman to devise legislation for this purpose which would not be ultra vires to the constitution; and it was far from certain that the legislature would provide the special majority necessary for a constitutional amendment if that were required. Bringing the mission schools under state control was an entirely different proposition, for here the Marxist and radical groups were at one with Buddhist activists, and the constitution, as we have seen, afforded no certain protection to the Christians.

On the whole, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s government was much more cautious in handling matters relating to the interests of the Christian minority than over the language issue. It was a matter of prudence and priorities. The language struggle took precedence over all else and there was no desire to add to the government’s problems by taking on an issue which was potentially just as explosive. While Bandaranaike was all in favour of restoring the traditional patronage accorded to Buddhism, he stopped well short of endorsing the demand that Buddhism be declared the state religion. His minister of education⁴ put up a stout resistance to the heavy pressure from Buddhist activists to bring all schools under state control; those applying the pressure received little encouragement and certainly no overt support from Bandaranaike himself. In February 1957, he appointed the Buddha S•sana Commission to examine questions relating to a reform of the sangha, and to make proposals regarding the general principle of ‘according to Buddhism its rightful place in the country’ to which the government was committed. The commission was soon embroiled in the complexities of a sensitive set of problems and in the inevitable interplay of pressures and counter-pressures from reformist groups and vested interests. Its recommendation, although far from radical, upset too many powerful groups in the sangha to stand any chance of implementation. One other decision—and this had nothing to do with the Buddha Sasana Commission and its recommendations—gave satisfaction to Buddhist activists, namely, that the two premier seats of Buddhist learning, the Vidyalankara and Vidyodaya Pirivenas should be raised to the status of universities.

A Ministry of Cultural Affairs and a Department of Official Language Affairs were established, the former to channel state patronage for literature and the arts and the latter to organize the implementation of the government’s language policy. In the revivalist atmosphere of the mid-1950s—with the millennial expectations of the Buddha Jayanthi and the nativistic urge to guard and preserve the Sinhala language and the Buddhist religion from the presumed ‘threats’ of the Tamils and the Christians—there was a general efflorescence of the arts. The year 1956, by a remarkable coincidence with the victory of the MEP, saw several memorable achievements in the arts. First, there was Martin Wickremesinghe’s novel Vir•gaya which in terms of significance of theme and sophistication of technique is perhaps the most outstanding work in modern Sinhala fiction. Then came E.R. Sarachchandra’s unforgettable Maname, a theoretical tour de force which breathed new life into the folk tradition in Sinhala drama and is by far the greatest achievement in the history of the Sinhala theatre. Finally, there was Lester James Peiris’s film, Rekava, a bold attempt to escape from the melodramatic stereotype which thrived under the shadow of the south Indian cinema and to bring the Sinhala film up to standards comparable with the best in world cinema.

Although none of these literary landmarks owed anything to the patronage of the state, the argument that the breakthrough they marked could be only stabilized and consolidated by active state support for the arts and literature became part of the conventional wisdom of the day. The institutional apparatus established for this purpose by the Bandaranaike government—a Ministry of Cultural Affairs—was expected to give official patronage and financial assistance to the zeal for renewal then manifest in all spheres of the arts. And almost from the beginning it was confronted with the need to hold a balance between the two main and conflicting tendencies in aesthetic ideology: one oriented towards westernization and the other going back to indigenous traditions. It became obvious that westernization in the arts and literature, for all its attractions, could hardly hold its own against the powerful forces of traditionalism.⁵

The linguistic nationalism of the mid-1950s helped establish a popular government, in contrast to the elitist constitutionalism of the early years after independence. This popular quality, despite its seeming novelty at the time when it first appeared in the mid-1950s, had its roots in the recent past, especially in the temperance movement in the early twentieth century, when a similar mixture of religious fervour and commitment to national culture had captured the imagination of the Sinhalese people, especially in the rural areas of the low country. But in the mid-1950s it was present on a wider scale and its appeal was deeper. The SLFP accommodated itself—as the UNP clearly did not—to an expanding ‘political nation’ in which a Sinhalese-Buddhist intermediary elite sought an influence commensurate with its numbers. Ideologically hazy and politically opportunistic, Bandaranaike’s ‘middle way’ promised people social change, social justice, economic independence from foreign powers and the completion of political sovereignty. It gave a sense of dignity to the common people and fortified their self-respect.

One of the notable consequences of the triumph of Sinhalese-Buddhist populism was the unexpected setback it caused to the Marxist movement. In the early months of the new administration, the LSSP was regarded—not least by itself—as a potential successor in office to Bandaranaike, should he falter and fail. Indeed, with Bandaranaike’s coalition then enmeshed in the coils of the language problem and engaged in a desperate but futile bid to reconcile the intrinsically irreconcilable—the Federal Party now taking to extra-parliamentary forms of struggle and the forces of Sinhalese extremism which had spearheaded the government’s bid for power in 1956—the LSSP was engaged in the exercise of alerting the country to the divisive effects of Bandaranaike’s language policies. But this was to no avail. The LSSP and the Communist Party had completely underestimated the strength of linguistic nationalism. As advocates at this time of parity of status for Sinhala and Tamil as national languages, their views were treated with suspicion if not distaste. Moreover, the LSSP’s trade unions launched a series of massive strikes through the years 1956–59, many of which were politically inspired and aimed at embarrassing the government. In so doing they were exploiting the greater leeway which the trade union movement enjoyed after 1956. But the effect of this irresponsible resort to trade union action was to discredit the LSSP in the country at large.

It had always aspired to the status of the alternative government, and it was this aspiration which was thwarted by the eruption of linguistic nationalism and the populist form it took in the mid-1950s. It watched the gains of the past disappear and the prospects of the future become much more limited. It found to its dismay and discomfiture that linguistic nationalism had an appeal which cut across class interests and that it evoked as deep a response from the Sinhalese working class as among the peasantry and the Sinhala-educated elite. The cosmopolitan outlook of the Marxists and their enlightened advocacy of a multiracial secular polity proved to be profoundly disadvantageous and they were compelled to compromise on these issues, but without reaping any substantial political benefits. From being an alternative government they were reduced—after 1960—to the status of an appendage of the populist SLFP.

Although the Buddhist movement was generally hostile to Marxist ideology, it had no strong opposition to the adoption of a socialist programme. Since plantation enterprise, nascent industry and the island’s trade were dominated by foreign capitalists, and the minorities were disproportionately influential within the indigenous capitalist class, Buddhist pressure groups viewed socialism as a means of redressing the balance in favour of the majority group. Every extension of state control over trade and industry could be justified on the ground that it helped to curtail the influence of foreigners and the minorities. The Sinhalese-Buddhist section of the capitalist class was not averse to socialism so long as its own economic interests were not affected. The result was that the SLFP has been able to reconcile a commitment to socialism with an advocacy of the interests of a section of the indigenous capitalist class, namely, its Sinhalese Buddhist section.

Bandaranaike has been acclaimed as the architect of neutralism in Sri Lanka’s foreign policy and the man whose initiatives in this sphere turned Sri Lanka decisively in the direction of non-alignment as the guiding principle of its external relations. But there is a striking continuity between the foreign policy of the Senanayakes in the early years of independence and that of Bandaranaike. The latter’s distinctive contribution lay in the greater emphasis he placed on aspects of the foreign policy of his predecessors than any significant departure from it. For, as A.J. Wilson has pointed out, ‘the system, the outputs, the explanation for behaviour patterns and the forms of interaction available with neighbours as well as friendly powers leaves Sri Lanka’s prime ministers little option but to operate along the only continuum of action available’.⁶ Almost immediately after he came to power, he established diplomatic relations with the communist states, beginning with the Soviet Union and China. What would appear at first glance to be a major initiative was less path-breaking that it really was. There had been no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union under the UNP governments because the Soviet Union had consistently vetoed Sri Lanka’s application for membership of the United Nations and taken up the position that she was too much under Britain’s tutelage to be regarded as an independent state. Once Sri Lanka gained admission to the United Nations, in 1955, this particular obstacle to friendly relations with the Soviet Union had been removed and Sir John Kotelawala himself, an archetypical anti-communist of the early years of the cold war, had decided on an exchange of diplomatic representatives between the two countries in 1956, the year the island went to the polls. It is doubtful, however, if a UNP regime under Sir John Kotelawala would have handled the establishment of diplomatic ties with these communist governments with Bandaranaike’s panache.

In the same way, Bandaranaike used the Suez crisis as an opportunity to make known his neutralism in international affairs to the country and to the world at large. His expression of displeasure at the invasion of Egypt was as forthright as that made by other Commonwealth leaders who ranged themselves against Eden’s government on this issue. But it is almost certain that the UNP government would have acted just as vigorously on this issue had it been in power in view of the strength of public opinion in the country against an act of aggression of these dimensions.

At the time of the transfer of power in south Asia in 1947–48, British politicians and publicists still believed in Great Britain’s role as leader of a Commonwealth and empire and as a power with global interests and responsibilities. In these early post-war years, complete awareness of Britain’s rapid international decline was delayed. But evidence of it came with dramatic suddenness with the Suez episode of 1956, the last occasion on which Britain was to act in its customary role as a great power, and the first and most telling demonstration of the fact that she was no longer one. It is in this context that one needs to view the transfer of Britain’s military and naval bases on the island to the Sri Lankan government in 1957. Bandaranaike himself preferred to treat it as a major concession to his initiatives and pressure and as a symbolic gesture—the completion of the island’s independence from British rule. In fact Britain, engaged in a reappraisal of her commitments east of Suez, was glad to be rid of a potential irritant in relations between the two countries. As for the defence agreements with Britain, he had been a prominent member of the Board of Ministers when these were negotiated and accepted and there is no record of his having raised any serious objections to them at that stage or later as a member of D.S. Senanayake’s cabinet. In the Opposition benches he had been vehemently critical of them, thus lending greater credence to the view popular in left-wing circles that these were limitations on the country’s sovereignty. Besides, Bandaranaike argued that they neither afforded the country any credible assurance of security nor ensured her neutrality in a potential confrontation between the rival power blocs in the cold war—indeed he asserted that they could lead to Sri Lanka’s involvement in such a confrontation, against her wishes and interests. D.S. Senanayake had always insisted that there was nothing irrevocable or coercive about the agreements and that they were based on the mutual interests of the two parties; the transfer of the bases in 1957 had proved him right. But significantly, once in power, Bandaranaike made no move to abrogate them, although there was considerable political advantage in so doing.

As part of the Opposition, Bandaranaike was inclined to be critical of ties with the Commonwealth; in office he was as firm as the Senanayakes in support of the Commonwealth connection. Like them, he stressed the importance of the material benefits accruing from it and the common inheritance of democratic institutions as the cornerstone of the Commonwealth bond; unlike them, he chose to emphasize the Commonwealth’s potential for development into a viable ‘third force’ distinct from the two main power blocs.

The UNP prime ministers of the period 1947–56, most notably D.S. Senanayake himself, hardly concealed their suspicions of India, which they viewed as a potential threat to the island’s independence. Bandaranaike himself shared these suspicions and fears, but was readier than the UNP prime ministers to work with Nehru in international and regional affairs and more willing to follow his lead. He was at one with his UNP predecessors in office in maintaining the friendliest relations with Pakistan, which was viewed as a counterbalance to Indian domination of the south Asian region.

Bandaranaike repeatedly emphasized the point that his neutralism should not be construed as being directed against the West; more than once he declared that their shared democratic way of life drew Sri Lanka closer to the United States than to other countries. Nevertheless, in common with a number of Afro-Asian leaders who were emerging as neutralists at this time and feeling their way towards establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, he was especially careful not to give the slightest offence to them as was illustrated by his attitude to the Soviet intervention in Hungary and China’s in Tibet. His criticisms of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the Hungarian episode were in the nature of a mild censure, while his attack on Britain and her allies in the Suez venture was unmistakably forthright, even bitter. The contrast was all the more marked because the events in question occurred at the same time. As for the Tibet affair, he preferred to view it as a purely internal matter of China’s. Tibet was an issue on which the sensibilities of a large section of Sri Lanka’s Buddhists were aroused. As a result, he drew heavy criticism from among both his supporters in the Buddhist movement and his opponents who stood to the right of his regime in the island’s political spectrum.

Bandaranaike’s great advantage was to have come to power at a time of rapid changes in the country’s political life and in its external political environment. These changes lent themselves to dramatic symbolic acts which appeared to indicate a totally new approach and the emergence of a new international order. Thus his main achievement in Sri Lanka’s foreign policy—to have securely established non-alignment as its central theme—has taken on an exaggerated importance as a dramatic new departure, which it was not. He had one other advantage, namely, the contrast between his handling of foreign affairs and, on the one hand, his predecessor’s characteristically strident and extravagant attitudes at international conferences at home and abroad, and on the other hand, the rather dogmatic and doctrinaire views of the left—communists and Trotskyites—on international affairs. In the following years the positions taken on either side of Bandaranaike were less rigid: the Marxists became less doctrinaire, especially when associated with the SLFP in coalitions, while the UNP became more strongly committed to non-alignment and was no longer, as under Sir John Kotelawala, unequivocally pro-western. In short, there came about a broad consensus between all the major political parties in the country with regard to some major areas in external relations.

Economic Policies

In economic policy Bandaranaike’s assumption of power marked a change from the previous near-laissez-faire economic doctrine of optimum opportunity for private commercial interests in the direction of a mixed economy, with greater emphasis on state controls.⁷ The political turmoil that characterized his period of office as prime minister prevented concentration of attention on major structural changes in the economy. In any case, Bandaranaike was not inclined to encourage hopes of nationalizing the plantations, the bedrock of the island’s economy, one of the main points in left-wing agitation. Thus the commanding heights of the economy continued to be in the hands of British and local commercial organizations.

Two important measures of nationalization were introduced—bus transport and the port of Colombo—and in 1958 Philip Gunawardane, Bandaranaike’s minister of food and agriculture, successfully piloted through parliament his Paddy Lands Act, which offered tenant cultivators greater security of tenure. These measures marked the beginning of a process of state control over the economy which came to be accelerated under the aegis of the SLFP in the 1960s and after. Under Bandaranaike the principle of planned economic development came to be accepted. A National Planning Council was set up soon after he assumed office and by 1958 a Ten-Year Plan of Economic Development had been formulated and published in which industrial development received higher priority than it had in the past.

Bandaranaike’s handling of the economy was one of his administration’s weak spots. The euphoria that followed his entry to power built up exaggerated hopes of redistribution of wealth and in that unrealistic atmosphere no great attention was paid to economic growth, which was necessary to sustain a policy of redistribution. At most it was assumed that structural changes such as nationalization would automatically generate additional revenues. Population growth, by itself, had increased private and consumption needs. At the same time, under pressure from the trade unions, expenditure on salaries and wages kept expanding without heed to any corresponding improvements in productivity. These two processes resulted in a steady expansion of imports and correspondingly a steady decline in the island’s external assets at a time when there was a strong and persistent tendency towards basic external imbalance. Besides, the export booms which had previously replenished the stock of foreign assets ceased to recur. As the payments position weakened, ever more stringent measures were resorted to by the government to arrest the deterioration. Thus the development effort of the late 1950s not only failed to provide a reasonably satisfactory rate of real growth in output, but also in the insufficiency of its response to the depletion of external assets.

The economic travails that beset the country in the 1960s could have been averted only if the deficits in the basic balance of payments had been corrected well before the depletion of foreign assets took place. External assets dropped from Rs 1,275 million in 1956 to Rs 541 million four years later. In 1946, the island’s external assets had been the equivalent of twenty-one months’ imports; at the height of the Korean boom this had been reduced to about twelve months and by 1954 it had declined to less than ten. But by the end of the 1960s it had fallen to just over three months. Some planned reduction of these assets from their high post-war levels would have been both inevitable and defensible, but such an exercise called for a careful assessment of a tolerable minimum level at which the depletion would be halted to hold the growth of imports within limits consistent with a basic balance in the external accounts—if not on a year-by-year basis, at least over a series of three or four years. But this was not done during the late 1950s. As a result, it was forced on the government by necessity during the early 1960s, years later than it should have been done by choice.

Bandaranaike was a visionary but no idealogue. He gave leadership to forces, the strength of which he failed to grasp and which he sought unsuccessfully to bring under control. For both these reasons, despite all the dramatic changes he initiated and all the new directions in policy he charted, his years in office have left behind the impression of a regime drifting along without much sense of priorities. His administrative skills never matched the demands imposed on him by his ambitions as a statesman. Throughout his career he demonstrated a remarkable buoyancy in the face of political difficulties, but swift, decisive moves were not his forte. Although resilience is a tremendous asset to a politician, it was often accompanied in Bandaranaike by an almost masochistic tolerance of indiscipline and turmoil. One of the main themes of his public addresses during his term of office was that the country was going through a period of transition and that so long as there was some control over the direction in which it was moving there was no need to be too anxious about the resulting tensions and turmoil. And his term of office saw a plethora of strikes, administrative breakdowns and, more important, race riots. It was as though Sri Lanka was paying, on deferred payment terms and at a tearfully high rate of interest, for the peace and stability which she had enjoyed in the first decade of independence.

During the not infrequent periods of turmoil, the administration of the country was often in the hands of Governor General Sir Oliver Goonetileke, who took control of the situation at the behest of the prime minister and in contravention of the conventions governing the role of the head of state in a parliamentary democracy. In this role of trouble-shooter Sir Oliver served Bandaranaike as devotedly as he had served D.S. Senanayake. It was a working relationship in which Sir Oliver’s long experience of public affairs and undoubted administrative skills were used with great benefit to the country and the government, however unconventional and unusual this may have been. It was a relationship based on mutual trust, confidence and respect for each other’s special skills in statecraft. This reliance on Sir Oliver was a reflection of the paucity of administrative talent and experience among the SLFP members of the cabinet; in this sense the burdens imposed on the prime minister would have been intolerable had he not been able to call upon Sir Oliver to assist him in moments of acute crisis.

Bandaranaike’s hold on parliament was more impressive than his control of the cabinet and the coalition which he led. Pressures and counter-pressures were pulling his cabinet apart within a short time of his victory in 1956, and it needed all his resources of prestige and influence to keep it together as an effective instrument of social reform. It was evident that his sympathizers were with the left-wing members of his cabinet, three of whom—Philip Gunawardane, William Silva and M.W.H. de Silva—did not belong to the SLFP. He respected their intellectual ability, their administrative skills, their sense of priorities, their purposeful approach and, above all, their integrity. But they were a minority, and the prime minister was compelled, in response to mounting and relentless pressure from the majority (who belonged to his party), to impose restraints on this innovative and reformist minority. By the beginning of 1959 the coalition was coming apart, although in Parliament the SLFP was strong enough, thanks to the disarray in the ranks of the Opposition, to continue its dominance. The first phase of the political crisis ended with the resignation of the left-wing group in the cabinet, but the prime minister was now left with a cabinet of mediocrities and a party in which the more liberal and reformist groups were becoming less influential. This bitter struggle for power within the governing party culminated in Bandaranaike’s assassination on 26 September 1959. The instrument of his assassination was a bhikkhu and the conspiracy was hatched by the most powerful political bhikkhu of the day, who had contributed greatly to Bandaranaike’s triumph in 1959 and who had engineered the elimination of the left-wing ministers from the cabinet early in 1958. In this murder conspiracy, the most sordid commercial considerations were mixed with the zest for control over the government. At the time of his assassination, Bandaranaike was no longer the masterful politician he had been in 1956–57, since when his hold on the electorate had weakened. But his murder dramatically changed the political situation. After a few months of drift and regrouping, the SLFP, under the leadership of Bandaranaike’s widow, Sirimavo, emerged more powerful than ever before. Death is the essence of myth-making and the party had before it the inestimable advantage of the Bandaranaike myth with which to face the electorate and to fashion the discomfiture of its rivals on the political scene.

The general election of 1956 marked the beginning of two decades of SLFP primacy in Sri Lanka’s politics. Except for the period 1965–70, it either formed the government on its own, or was the dominant element in a coalition government. With the break-up of the MEP coalition and Bandaranaike’s assassination in 1959, there was, for a few months, a highly confused political situation. The first of the two general elections of 1960 held in March was a throwback to the pre-1956 system in that a revived UNP faced a multiplicity of warring rivals with no electoral agreement against it. In March 1960, the LSSP had made a highly publicized but totally futile bid for electoral power on its own. The result of the general election was inconclusive. The UNP emerged as the largest single group and formed a short-lived minority government, but its recovery led to a renewal of the old combination of forces devised to keep it out of power. Within parliament, a grand coalition of parties brought down the government, and in the general election of July 1960 the SLFP had the advantage of yet another no-contest pact with the left. This had the desired effect of bringing it back to power, this time on its own, riding on the emotional wave generated by Bandaranaike’s assassination.

The SLFP’s main rival, the UNP, was kept in the political wilderness by the peculiarities of an electoral system (which gave it, when defeated, far fewer seats than it would be entitled to on the basis of the wide support it had in the country) and the device of electoral agreements and no-contest pacts among its rivals during general elections and by-elections. The new demarcation of constituencies effected in 1959 worked on the principle of counting the total population of a province in computing the number of seats to which it was entitled, without regard to the fact that in the plantation districts the resident Indian workers had largely been excluded from the franchise. This anomalous situation worked in favour of the Kandyans, who with 26 per cent of the total population of the island had 44 per cent of the seats. Thus the electoral balance was distorted even more markedly than before and the Sinhalese rural voter became very much the arbiter of the country’s politics. Since the rural vote shifted away from the UNP to the SLFP in 1956, the latter had succeeded in retaining its hold on it till 1977 and the electoral balance thus shifted against the UNP.

While the dominance of the SLFP has meant a corresponding decline in the electoral fortunes of the left-wing parties, nevertheless the apertura a sinistra was a necessary condition for keeping the UNP out of power. After the election of July 1960, the SLFP enjoyed for a brief period the support of the left, but this was soon dissipated. However, its parliamentary majority was adequate to ensure its survival. But a major challenge appeared to be emerging when the United Left Front (ULF) of the LSSP, Philip Gunawardane’s MEP and the Community Party was formed in 1963. The ULF had hardly stabilized itself when the SLFP, largely because of the manifest incompetence of its own ministerial ranks, decided to seek a coalition with the left—an initiative which resulted only in a coalition with the LSSP in June 1964. The immediate effect was the collapse of the ULF; but it also led to deep misgivings among a section of the SLFP led by Mrs Bandaranaike’s own deputy C.P. de Silva, who crossed over to the Opposition with a group of his followers and as a result brought down the government at the end of 1964.

In retrospect, it would seem that the two Bandaranaikes between them had established a new equilibrium of political forces within the country, to which their supporters and associates as well as their opponents were compelled to accommodate themselves. Its primary features were the acceptance of Sinhala as the national language, Buddhist predominance within the Sri Lankan polity and a sharp decline in the status of the ethnic and religious minorities.

The settlement reached by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1957 with the Federal Party remained the basis for future negotiations on solutions to the problem of the indigenous Tamils in a Sri Lankan polity, and it was on the assurance that it would be implemented by the SLFP under Mrs Bandaranaike that the Federal Party voted to defeat Dudley Senanayake’s minority government early in 1960. But it became politically impossible to keep this pledge, not least because the UNP had made it an election issue, and although the verdict of the electorate went substantially in favour of the SLFP, its leadership nonetheless felt obliged to rethink its position on this issue under pressure from Sinhalese extremists in its ranks and outside. Within six months of Mrs Bandaranaike’s assumption of office as prime minister, the Federal Party was totally alienated from her government, largely because of her insistence on Sinhala becoming the language of administration throughout the island from 1 January 1961, as envisaged in the ‘Sinhala Only’ bill of 1956, without any substantial concessions to the Tamils, despite the understanding reached with the Federal Party before and during the general election of July 1960. Once more there was the familiar pattern of a civil disobedience campaign in the north and east of the island in March-April 1961, the government responding with the imposition of a state of emergency in the Northern Province and the Eastern Province. Within parliament, the Federal Party moved from responsive cooperation with the government into staunch opposition. It did not change its position over the next two years and became increasingly receptive to overtures from the UNP.

Sirimavo Dias Bandaranaike

Mrs Bandaranaike, unlike her husband, was not reluctant to take on two inflammable issues at the same time. She was not interested at this stage in the more complicated issue of the status of Buddhism vis-à-vis the state, but antagonism to the Tamils on the language question was accompanied by a policy of calculated opposition to the Roman Catholic minority over the mission schools. On this issue, unlike the language question, the Buddhists were supported by Marxist and radical groups. All of them welcomed state control of education: the Marxists and radicals welcomed it because they viewed it as a matter of social justice and secularization of education as an end itself; the Buddhists welcomed it because it would redress for them a long-standing grievance and eliminate what they continued to regard as the main instrument of conversion to Christianity under western rule and the basis of Christian privilege in modern Sri Lanka. There was also a more practical consideration. Implicit in state control was the prospect of increasing Buddhist influence on education both at the national and the grass-roots level. The fact that most of the mission schools depended almost entirely on government financing, while in all but a handful of them the majority of students were Buddhists, made it nearly impossible to meet the arguments of the advocates of state control. There was also the zealous care with which all denominations of Christians avoided recruitment of non-Christians to the teaching staff in their schools, although the salaries were provided largely if not entirely by the state. There were very few exceptions in the secondary schools, and even in the village schools where employment of Buddhists and Hindus could not be avoided, there was a distinct preference shown for Christians.

Once again it was the Roman Catholics who led the resistance and bore the brunt of the attack. Although all religious groups—including the Hindus and Muslims, not to mention the Buddhists themselves⁸—were affected by the decision to bring the state-aided secondary schools directly under state control, the Roman Catholics were the biggest losers. Most of the state-aided mission schools accepted the painful decision to be absorbed by the state, but a few big schools, mostly Roman Catholic ones in the urban areas, decided to retain their independence by becoming private institutions without the benefit of state aid. Deprived by law of the right to levy fees from their students, they maintained a precarious existence under the severest financial handicaps. Thus the Buddhist agitation for state control achieved its objective under Mrs Bandaranaike’s SLFP government, but at great cost to the country in terms of the bitterness and tension it generated between the Buddhists and the powerful Roman Catholic minority. The Roman Catholics, like the Tamils, smouldered with resentment.

The government’s relations with the Roman Catholics reached their nadir in the wake of an abortive coup d’état in January 1962, in which the leadership was assumed by some Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians. The armed services and the police had so often been called upon to wield emergency powers in the maintenance of law and order in periods of communal tension since 1956 that it was almost inevitable that some groups among them would begin to entertain ideas of taking control. Besides, the reality of administrative incompetence and economic failure was eating into the government’s popularity. But the effect of the abortive coup was to revive the government’s political fortunes and to provide the rationale for government patronage to Buddhist activists in their propaganda campaigns in a war of nerves against the Roman Catholic minority.

Among the most notable achievements of Mrs Bandaranaike’s first government was the understanding she reached with Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Indian prime minister, in October 1964 on the question of the Indian minority in Sri Lanka. The citizenship legislation of 1948–49 had created as many problems as it solved. While most of the Indians in Sri Lanka had been deprived of citizenship rights, they were still physically present in Sri Lanka and the Indian government could not be persuaded to accept the position that they were Indian citizens, much less agree to their repatriation to India. The Nehru-Kotelawala pact of 1954 came nowhere near solving these issues; indeed they were aggravated by the controversies that arose in the interpretation of some of its clauses. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike never had the time to devise a solution to these problems, and by the early 1960s the whole issue had become an intractable one. Neither government was prepared to allow the position taken by the other on it. Significantly, nothing could be achieved so long as Nehru was alive, but his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was prepared to make a fresh start because he was not a party to any earlier commitment. The agreement⁹ he reached with Mrs Bandaranaike provided for the repatriation over a fifteen-year period of 5,25,000 Indian residents in Sri Lanka to India, along with their natural increase, and the absorption of 3,00,000 as citizens of Sri Lanka; the future of the remaining 1,50,000 was to be negotiated later by the two countries.

Mrs Bandaranaike was justified in claiming that the agreement reached with the Indian government in 1964 marked a great advance, for the Indian government had been persuaded to recognize its obligations to persons of Indian origin in the island by undertaking to confer Indian citizenship on those who were to be repatriated and by accepting the principle of compulsory repatriation. But very soon her government’s decision to place all persons of Indian origin—those who had already obtained Sri Lanka citizenship, as well as those who were entitled to it under the agreement of 1964—on a separate communal electoral register, antagonized all sections of the Indian minority resident on the island. They condemned this as patently discriminatory, since it established two categories of voters, one of which was distinctly inferior because its basis was ethnic and communal. The result was that the Ceylon Workers’ Congress, the most powerful trade union-cum-political party among the plantation workers, led by S. Thondaman, its president, withdrew its support from the government and in a surprising volte-face swung over to support the UNP for the first time since 1947. The reconciliation was based on the understanding that the UNP would repudiate the policy of a separate register enunciated by Mrs Bandaranaike and examine afresh the implications of the principle of compulsory repatriation.

Thus by the end of 1964, acts of commission on the part of Mrs Bandaranaike’s regime had converted erstwhile allies like the Federal Party and the Ceylon Workers’ Congress into opponents, while the Roman Catholics, who had never been allies of the SLFP, were so aggrieved that they returned to the policy, which they had abandoned since 1956, of open and energetic support of the UNP. At the same time, the Muslims whom the government wooed with great ardour did not sever their traditional links with the UNP; indeed these links were strengthened by acts of omission by the government, in particular the failure to pass legislation conferring judicial status on the quasis¹⁰ after the courts had ruled that they were not legally entitled to such powers. The outcome was that in the general election of 1965, the minorities voted overwhelmingly with the UNP, and along with a substantial shift of the Sinhalese vote from the SLFP, this was enough to bring the UNP back to power as the solid core of a coalition government, of which the Federal Party was a significant element.

S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s agreement with the Federal Party in 1957 became the basis for securing the latter’s support in the formation of a coalition government with the UNP. But the new government was placed on the defensive from the moment the Federal Party opted to join it. When the new prime minister made ethnic and religious reconciliation the keynote of his policy, he was confronted with the most virulent campaign of ethnic hostility ever waged in Sri Lanka in recent times. The Opposition unleashed a sustained barrage of racialist propaganda in which the SLFP, as the unabashed advocate of the Sinhalese-Buddhist domination of the Sri Lankan polity, was joined by the Communist Party and the LSSP. The left-wing leadership demonstrated all the ardour of recent converts in espousing a cause which they had once spurned.

Legislation introduced by the new UNP-led coalition in January 1966 implemented what were, in fact, the language provisions of Bandaranaike’s agreement with the Federal Party. But this was done against the background of massive demonstrations against it led by the SLFP and its left-wing allies who argued, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the regulations introduced by Dudley Senanayake’s government in January 1966 violated the spirit if not the letter of Bandaranaike’s language legislation of the 1950s. Once more a state of emergency was imposed, but any prospect of racial riots was nipped in the bud by decisive government action. A pledge to the Federal Party had been honoured at great cost in terms of the resulting erosion of public support.

But the limits of a policy of ethnic reconciliation were demonstrated most dramatically when Dudley Senanayake was forced in mid-1968 to abandon a bill which envisaged the setting up of district councils ‘under the control and direction of the central government’ a key feature in the Bandaranaike-Federal Party agreement of 1957 to which the UNP was now pledged. Once again, Sinhalese pressure groups organized a campaign against it which was successful, the crucial factor being the opposition to it within the government parliamentary party. Popular opposition to this bill was based on the suspicion that district councils would pave the way for a fully fledged federal structure, which in turn would be the precursor of a separation of the Tamil units of such a federation from the Sri Lankan polity.

The UNP’s recently established links with the Ceylon Workers’ Congress and the plantation workers were consolidated by the abandonment of the principle of a separate electoral register for persons of Indian origin, which Mrs Bandaranaike had sought to introduce, and by relaxation of the element of compulsion in repatriation to India. The prime minister found that concessions to the plantation workers were more manageable politically, despite opposition to this from Kandyan spokesmen, than similar concessions to the Federal Party.

It was evident that there were clear limits to the policy of ethnic and religious reconciliation to which Dudley Senanayake’s government was committed and that these limits were set by the new balance of forces established by the Bandaranaikes, husband and wife, in the decade 1956–65. The first and still the most important of these limits was acceptance of the language policy established by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. When the Federal Party joined Dudley Senanayake’s UNP in a coalition, it was itself tacitly accepting the consensus on language established between 1956 and 1965. Second, there would be no tampering with the country’s unitary constitutional structure. Bandaranaike’s district councils lost their political viability once the Federal Party became a force to be reckoned with, and even Dudley Senanayake’s assurance that the district councils he had in mind would be directly under the control of the government was inadequate to win any support for such a scheme from the Sinhalese. Third, the primacy of Buddhism had to be accepted as a hard reality and it was necessary for the government to reassure the electorate that the protection of Buddhism as the national religion was a special obligation of the state.

The UNP was always suspect to Buddhist activists as a party having links with the Roman Catholics. It is for this reason it became impossible for Dudley Senanayake’s government to make any concessions to them on the schools issue, despite the fact that the UNP had voted against the SLFP’s legislation on the takeover of schools when it came before parliament in 1960. When Dudley Senanayake’s government was formed in 1965, the Roman Catholics had expected a relaxation of some of the restrictive measures adopted by the SLFP government, but despite a formal pledge on this point in mid-1967, there was no change of policy. What is more, the Roman Catholics were aggrieved when the government introduced the poya holiday scheme under which the weekly holiday was based on the phases of the moon. Quite apart from the inconvenience of the irregularity of the weekly holiday under this scheme, the usual sabbath holiday was abandoned. In opting for the poya scheme, the government was bending over backwards to reassure the Buddhist movement about its bona fides on religion, but the effect was to cause dissatisfaction if not resentment among the Roman Catholics (despite ‘official’ acceptance of the change by the Roman Catholic hierarchy), without any substantial advantage in terms of gaining Buddhist support for the government.

Foreign Affairs

In foreign policy, the national consensus established in this decade was obscured by occasional gusts of controversy over specific issues, especially whenever non-alignment, the core of the consensus, seemed to be threatened. Within the limits set by this consensus there could be, and was, a special emphasis in regard to relations with the two major power blocs, or major powers within them, and there was a choice between activism in foreign affairs and a low-profile approach.

Mrs Bandaranaike’s first government illustrated one variation of policies possible within this consensus: an activist foreign policy with a distinct anti-western, and more particularly an anti-American, tilt. Although anti-Americanism was discernible from the beginning of her prime ministership, it was with the nationalization in late 1963 of the distribution of petroleum products, which had been controlled up to that time by Western oil companies, that relations between the two countries were quite obviously strained. When negotiations over compensation for the assets of the nationalized companies broke down, the United States government, acting under the guidelines established under the Hickenlooper amendment to the Foreign Aid Act,¹¹ stopped its programme of aid to Sri Lanka.

While relations between Sri Lanka and the United States steadily deteriorated, those with the People’s Republic of China—the bête noire of the United States—reached a peak of cordiality. Indeed, these friendly ties with China survived the tricky diplomatic initiatives over the Sino-Indian crisis of 1962, when Mrs Bandaranaike remained doggedly neutral despite the pressures from within her party and outside it—especially from the UNP—to come out in support of India. Then in 1963 came a maritime agreement with China conferring reciprocal most favoured nation treatment in relation to seaborne traffic. This decision proved to be just as controversial as Mrs Bandaranaike’s stand on the Sino-Indian crisis. Critics of the agreement—especially the UNP—contended that through it Sri Lanka was in danger of being drawn unwillingly into China’s sphere of geopolitical influence at a time when her closest neighbour, India, was under severe pressure, both diplomatic and military, from China. Thus on the question of relations with China the SLFP and UNP were sharply divided.

There was no such divergence of views on Mrs Bandaranaike’s commitment to the emerging unity of action among the non-aligned states of Asia and Africa and their search for a distinct identity as a third force in international affairs. Her years as prime minister of Sri Lanka coincided with a remarkably creative phase in the diplomacy of the non-aligned states. The conference of non-aligned states held at Belgrade in 1961 was a landmark in the history of what may be called the Third World identity. It was followed three years later by a conference at Cairo. At both, Mrs Bandaranaike was an enthusiastic participant, identifying herself and Sri Lanka unreservedly with the diplomatic initiatives which followed from the conference. For Sri Lanka herself there was one immediate benefit: stronger trade ties with the Third World, quite often on the basis of barter agreements, and through this a greater diversity in her pattern of external trade. Nothing demonstrated the activist flavour of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy better than the conference held in Colombo on Mrs Bandaranaike’s initiative in 1962 to mediate in the Sino-Indian dispute. But this one conspicuous intervention in the role of a mediator in international disputes did not achieve any significant results.

With the change of government came a new interpretation of non-alignment—away from the pro-China, anti-western stress of Mrs Bandaranaike’s regime, and much less activist in expression. Indeed, the new prime minister regarded an active foreign policy as an expensive luxury for a small country like Sri Lanka, especially one which faced such severe economic pressures.

One of the first diplomatic moves of the new government was to negotiate a settlement of the question of compensation for the nationalized oil companies. Once this was done, the United States government resumed its economic assistance programme in Sri Lanka. If Dudley Senanayake’s government regarded this as essential to the creation of a favourable climate for an increase in the flow of economic assistance from western nations, the Opposition—especially the Marxist parties—viewed it as fresh evidence of the UNP’s incorrigible subservience to the west. Few foreign policy decisions of the new government evoked as much controversy as this one.

Relations with China became distinctly less cordial than under the SLFP, although there was no change either in the unequivocal support given by Sri Lanka on the question of China’s admission to the United Nations or in the pattern of trade between the two countries, nor for that matter was there any substantial reduction of Chinese economic aid. Nevertheless, the UNP was instinctively suspicious of Chinese policies in Asia and this apprehension clouded Dudley Senanayake’s judgement in decisions involving relations with China. It was an attitude which the Indian government especially appreciated because of its concern over the nature of Sri Lanka’s ties with China in the early 1960s in the context of the crisis in Sino-Indian relations at that time, and also because of the importance of Sri Lanka in India’s defence strategy. As a result, relations between Sri Lanka and India were greatly strengthened under Dudley Senanayake’s government. The Soviet Union also viewed this new attitude to China with some satisfaction.

Links with Third World states established under the Bandaranaikes were maintained at the United Nations and elsewhere. On the critical issues of the day—Vietnam, Rhodesia, Namibia, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Arab-Israel conflict—the Senanayake government’s policies were consistent with a continuing commitment to non-alignment. Its political instincts were more liberal and humanitarian than socialist, and its natural allies were the less assertive and more moderate states of the Third World. The prime minister recoiled from any assertive role in international relations and the views of his government were expressed with a moderation that was a sharp contrast to the fervour and intensity with which his predecessor in office had chosen to demonstrate her commitment to a Third World identity. Now in Opposition, she and her political allies and associates on the left were devising a new strategy on foreign policy to be introduced if or when they returned to power. This strategy was seemingly more dynamic, more abrasively anti-western in tone and more emphatically radical in content.

The Economy In Crisis

It was in the 1960s that Sri Lanka confronted in full measure the economic crisis that had been building up ever since the collapse of the tea boom of 1954–55. The crux of the problem lay in the continued decline in the price of tea, which provided nearly two-thirds of the country’s foreign exchange. Between 1947 and 1970, the quantity of tea exported rose by over 60 per cent but the yield in foreign exchange increased by a mere 10 per cent. Rubber and coconut, the two other major sources of foreign exchange, had not fared much better either.¹²

The terms of trade steadily deteriorated since 1960 and over the years covered in this chapter, Sri Lanka’s current payments to the rest of the world often exceeded her current receipts with the sole exception of 1965. Between 1962 and 1964, the index of the terms of trade (base 1947=100 per cent) fell from 142 to 105, a decline of 26 per cent. The slide continued over the years 1965–69 from 112 to 88, a fall of 21 per cent and in 1970 the terms of trade deteriorated by 3.6 per cent.

The first signs of this malaise had been evident in the mid-1950s, but in the exhilarating and turbulent days of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s government, few people were inclined to regard the sharp drop in tea prices as anything more than a temporary phase, a trough before the next crest of the wave and a return to more prosperous times. Thus the country’s external assets, which stood at Rs 1,275 million at the end of 1956, were used to cushion it against the serious economic consequences of this fall in foreign exchange earnings and to finance imports on the same expansive scale as in the prosperous years of the Korean boom. By 1960, external assets had dropped to Rs 541 million, very little of which had been used to finance investment to sustain some growth in the economy. Most if not all of it had been spent on imports of consumer goods. The result was that controls on foreign exchange, which were imposed in 1960–61, were more severe than they need have been if these unpalatable measures had been taken earlier. All luxury goods and then, increasingly, more essential goods were eliminated from the country’s import bill in the early 1960s, but despite this the decline in gross foreign receipts could not be reversed or indeed even halted and Sri Lanka confronted what was clearly a permanent foreign exchange crisis. The import bill was trimmed almost to the bone and this too was sustained by international borrowing.

The acute shortage of foreign exchange confronting the government acted as a great stimulus to the extension of state control over vital segments of the economy, which had begun during S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s administration and indeed, in some fields, much earlier. Thus the import of rice, wheat and wheat flour, sugar and other foodstuffs had been under government control since the early 1940s, as were most of the wholesale and a great deal of the retail distribution of these items within the country. Now a much wider range of consumer articles was distributed through the network of government-sponsored cooperatives and through the state-controlled Cooperative Wholesale Establishment. Life insurance and general insurance were made a state monopoly, state control over banking was extended by the nationalization of the Bank of Ceylon, the only locally owned bank on the island, and—as we have seen in a different context in this chapter—the distribution of petroleum and kerosene was nationalized, and the assets of the oil companies operating in Sri Lanka were taken over by the state.¹³

However, this extension of state control over some sectors of the economy did nothing to increase production. It is production that ultimately matters and there, apart from a few bright patches in the field of industrial development and some improvement in rice production in 1960–61, not much progress was made. With the capacity to import so severely restrained, the need to develop means of earning or saving foreign exchange became more urgent after 1960 than before; yet progress on these lines continued to be slow. In part, at least, this was because export industries and import-substitution industries established in the early 1960s and expanded thereafter were, and have continued to be, heavily dependent on imported intermediate and capital goods.

The change of government in 1965 did not lead to any improvement on the economic front. On the contrary, 1966 saw a fall in the production—as well as in the prices—of tea and coconut, and receipts from exports declined by 12 per cent compared with the previous year. More ominously, there was a significant rise in the level of import prices—the inflationary trends in the industrial world were being imported to Sri Lanka—and the terms of trade for 1966 were the worst since 1962. The stagnation in the economy was reflected in the following figures: real increase in the GNP in 1965 was a mere 1.8 per cent; in 1966, it sank even further to 1.6 per cent.

Yet in 1967 there began a remarkable breakthrough in economic growth, the consequence of a fresh approach to economic development and social welfare.¹⁴ Welfare had been taken hitherto to mean the provision of goods and services free or at subsidized rates; the major premise of the new government’s reappraisal of policy was that the redistribution of money incomes was a self-defeating exercise so long as real resources were scarce. The most obvious means of rearranging patterns of consumption to the benefit of the poor was to increase incomes in the countryside where the minority of the population lived. This, the government proceeded to do by launching the Sri Lankan version of a ‘green revolution’, in the hope and belief that ‘equity and growth [would go] hand in hand; wider dispersal of the distribution of new assets would lead to higher GNP growth and to greater equality in personal income’.¹⁵ Dudley Senanayake, like his father, had a passion for traditional agriculture and regarded it as the key to the economic regeneration of the country. In such success as it achieved, his personal role in organizing and encouraging the national food drive was crucial.

By 1969, there had been a notable improvement in the production of paddy. Annual production had reached 68 million bushels that year, compared with the best previous achievement of 50.1 million bushels in 1964. In 1970, it reached 77 million bushels. Rice production had reached an all-time high level of 75 per cent of self-sufficiency in May 1970, when the government went to the polls. Industrial production rose from Rs 70 million to Rs 262 million between 1965 and 1968, and more significantly, there was a perceptible shift in emphasis from the production of consumer goods to intermediate goods. The breakthrough in production was reflected in the rise of the GNP from 4.4 per cent in 1967 to 8.3 per cent in 1968.

In the end, however, the political advantages anticipated from this very considerable achievement in economic development eluded the government. For one thing, by its very nature the benefits of a programme of this kind would take many years before they became evident to the electorate, and by the time of the elections of 1970, such benefits as were so far evident seemed to have accrued to the affluent, the landholders, the middlemen and the employed. While these were a substantial section of the rural population, they were a minority; there were no benefits for the landless and the unemployed, and this at a time of inflationary pressures. It was easy, therefore, for the vociferous left wing to exploit consumers’ fears of higher prices and to attribute these to the government’s agricultural programmes. Inflationary pressures and the balance of payments crisis persisted, the first because of a substantial increase in the price of imports and successive devaluations of the rupee since 1967, the second because of slack demand and falling prices for the country’s main exports. Net foreign debt more than doubled between 1964 and 1968—the government incurred substantial overseas debts to meet the import costs of its agricultural programme—and repayments to the International Monetary Fund rose sharply after 1968. On the domestic front, the government’s expenditure exceeded its income for the entire period of its administration. Above all, the expansion of the economy had not made any noticeable dent in that most intractable of all the problems that confronted governments in this decade—unemployment.

The full force of population growth over the period 1946–60 hit the labour market in the 1960s. Those between fifteen and sixty-five years of age, roughly the working group, increased from 5.25 million to over 7.5 million in this decade. More significant was the increase in the number of those aged twenty-five and less: while their proportion to the total population did not show any significant rise, they had doubled in twenty-two years from 3.8 million in 1946 to 4.9 million in 1955, 6.5 million in 1963 and 7.2 million in mid-1968. In the period 1960–70 the growth in the number of those seeking employment far outran the demand for labour being generated by the basically stagnant economy. Estimated open unemployment climbed from 3,70,000 in 1959 to 5,50,000 in 1969–70, about 14 per cent of the workforce or one twentieth of the island’s population.

The immediate effect of population growth had been to push up private and public consumption needs, thus diminishing the investable surplus. This process was continued and even accelerated in the 1960s because of the whole range of welfare services, unequalled in most parts of Asia, to which the governments of the day were committed and which the country’s diminishing resources could hardly sustain: education, irrigation projects, land redistribution schemes, health services, subsidized public transport in the form of cheap bus and rail fares, and above all food subsidies.

After 1960–61 primary and secondary education became, for all practical purposes, a state monopoly. University education had always been entirely state-financed, as for that matter were most aspects of technical education. State expenditure on primary and secondary education was one of the highest in Asia, constituting on an average a little more than 4.5 per cent of the GNP between 1959 and 1968. The literacy rate, if the 0–4 age group is excluded, was as high as 85 per cent of the total population. But as a result of its long-standing commitment to free education (in the sense of free tuition) at all levels—primary, secondary and tertiary—Sri Lanka in the 1960s became an outstanding example of the growing global phenomenon of educated unemployed.

In devising its economic strategy, Dudley Senanayake’s government had the employment potential of the programme very much in mind. Indeed his agricultural programme was regarded as a means of absorbing the growing number of unemployed into productive employment—intensive smallholder food production and related activities. But this aspect of his strategy for economic growth did not yield the results expected of it or at least not at a speed which would have benefited the government politically. Nor were these the sort of jobs in which the most articulate and volatile sector of the unemployed—the university graduates and the better-qualified school leavers—were interested. The result was that the unemployed young were enthusiastically receptive to the Opposition’s criticisms of the government’s economic and social policies.

For the government the political implications of this were ominous. Sri Lanka had been one of the first countries in the world to lower its voting age to eighteen. Although this had been done in 1959, the two elections of 1960 had been contested using the previous system of votes at twenty-one. In the general election of 1965, the voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one cast their ballots for the first time. Political observers were convinced that most of their votes went to the then Opposition. In 1970, their numbers were much larger, their alienation from the government was more pronounced and their commitment to the Opposition was correspondingly stronger.

During their years in Opposition Mrs Bandaranaike and her allies put together a broader coalition than that negotiated in June 1964. The two major Marxist parties in the country, the LSSP and the Communist Party (Moscow wing), formed a United Front (UF) with the SLFP, under Mrs Bandaranaike’s leadership. In early June 1968, a common programme was agreed upon by all three parties as their joint platform for the elections scheduled for 1970; this was in the nature of a set of alternative strategies radical in design and socialist in outlook.

In preparation for the elections, the Opposition seized upon the government’s seemingly strongest point, its food production programme, for their most vitriolic criticisms, intent on highlighting its flaws and failures so that the government’s blaze of publicity for the programme would become counterproductive. These were good and intelligent tactics against a government which seemed eminently vulnerable at the polls; but there was also a whiff of ideological conflict in it, for the left-wing parties viewed the high priority given to agriculture in economic development with a distaste bordering on contempt. For them and the intelligentsia the key to economic development and the most effective means of solving the unemployment problem was industrialization. It was not yet evident—as it was to become in the years ahead—that industry could not provide the impetus for the growth of the economy as a whole, nor was geared—because most of the island’s new factories were capital-intensive—to the provision of productive employment. Hence the argument carried conviction in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the economic benefits of the government’s programme in terms of the unemployment problem and inflation. Besides, the government’s new strategy on agricultural development had been preceded in 1966 by a cut in the rice subsidy and thus its initiative was shown to the electorate as being no more than part of a concerted attack on the welfare system. In the final stages of the campaign, the Opposition concentrated on this almost to the exclusion of other issues. After his party suffered a landslide defeat¹⁶ in the elections of May 1970, Dudley Senanayake ruefully commented that for the second time in his political career he had paid the penalty for disturbing the most cherished of the sacred cows of Sri Lanka’s welfare system—the rice subsidy.

In their election campaign of 1970, the parties of the United Front (UF)—the SLFP, the LSSP and the Communist Party (Moscow wing)—had held out, through their manifesto and speeches, the assurance of purposeful, systematic and fundamental changes in every sphere of activity. The euphoria, reminiscent of 1956, which greeted the UF’s decisive victory, seemed to suggest that it was a just reward for the skill with which its leadership had responded and given expression to the inchoate desires and feelings of the people.

Almost the first decision of the UF was to honour its election promise to make good the cuts in the rice ration imposed in 1966. This set the tone for much that happened in those early weeks, a plethora of decisions, some more important than others but all designed to dramatize a change of course and a new style of government. There was a new emphasis in the island’s foreign policy, a distinct tilt to the left. In rapid succession, North Korea and the German Democratic Republic were given diplomatic recognition, while diplomatic links with Israel, which had been tenuous at the best, were severed.

These were in the nature of easy decisions, within the government’s control. But the rhetorical flourishes indulged in during the acrimonious election campaign proved acutely embarrassing when economic conditions showed no sign of improvement and it became increasingly evident that there were no easy solutions to the problem of unemployment. Indeed, the size of the government’s parliamentary majority (over 120 seats out of a total of 157) created and sustained the illusion that nothing was impossible if the government only had the will to attempt it.

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Jvp)

Confronted by the same combination of factors that had brought down its predecessor—unemployment, rising prices and scarcities of essential items of consumption—the government, within a few months of coming to power, was floundering just as badly as Dudley Senanayake’s had done in the first phase of his rule in the mid-1960s. Well before the end of 1970, its early popularity was being eroded and with great rapidity. If the government consoled itself with the thought that the UNP was too badly demoralized by its comprehensive electoral defeat and the open rift between its leader Dudley Senanayake and the leader of its parliamentary group and also leader of the Opposition, J.R. Jayewardene, to offer much of a challenge, it soon faced one from a different but not entirely unexpected quarter. The pace of change and reform in the first ten months of the government’s tenure of office proved altogether inadequate to satisfy the aspirations of the more militant and articulate young people whose political appetites had been whetted by their zeal in working to bring the government to power. By the middle of March 1971 it was evident that the government faced a deadly threat from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), an ultra-left organization dominated by educated youths, unemployed or disadvantageously employed.

This organization had made its presence felt in the violent and threatening demonstrations—which the government had condoned—that followed in the wake of the UF victory. Within a few months it had the field to itself as the most vocal critic of the government, with the UNP totally unable to function as the major political force it was. A series of mass meetings held by the JVP all over the country was at once a stern warning to the UF and a challenge to its credibility as a genuinely socialist government. The JVP made plain its feeling that the government seemed incapable of fulfilling its election promises and made no secret of its readiness and determination to overthrow the government if the changes it desired were not introduced. Thus the insurrection that broke out in April 1971¹⁷ could hardly have been more openly proclaimed. If it took the government by surprise this was because intelligence reports were either disbelieved or misread. This arose from a refusal to believe that erstwhile supporters would react so violently against a regime they had helped bring to power and which shared their socialist aspirations.

The insurrection was from beginning to end a revolt of youth, the first large-scale revolt against the government by youth in the country and also perhaps the biggest revolt by young people in any part of the world in recorded history, the first instance of tension between generations becoming military conflict on a national scale. The creed of generational war was linked to the eradication of a colonial status which had ended two decades previously but was presumed to be still in existence. It was a movement of the new and ultra-left against the established left—the populist SLFP and the traditional parties of the left, the LSSP and the Communist Party. Although the most tenacious and defiant acts of the insurgents and the most serious centres of revolt accurately matched the large concentrations of some of the depressed castes, the Vahumpura and Batgama, caste was not the sole or even a major determinant of the insurrection. It was secondary to the class factor. The insurgents were, in general, the children of the rural poor, Sinhalese and Buddhist, and the ethnic and religious minorities played no significant role in the insurrection.

In analysing the critical factors in the outbreak of the insurrection, emphasis is generally given to the eminently exploitable social problems—the economic inequalities, exacerbated by one of the highest birth rates in Asia, creating a poverty-stricken, unemployed and frustrated element ranging from articulate university graduates to the landless unemployed. But equally important was the catalyst of the revolutionary violence, the JVP, which instilled a group consciousness, fashioned an ideology, planned a strategy, built up an organization and provided the leadership. Without this driving force, the unemployed and poor youth to whom the JVP appealed would have been far less conscious of the situation they were in and would very probably have put up with their deprivation, alienation and frustration without resort to armed insurrection.

In the immediate sense the 1971 insurgency failed. The rebels were not the spearhead of a popular outburst against a tyrannical or repressive regime, nor did they have the advantage of a dominating foreign presence against which they could have stirred up nationalist sentiment. There was no substantial support from either the rural areas or the urban working class. Besides, it was an inadequately trained and poorly equipped force that set out to do battle with the state. Once the momentum of their original thrust had been absorbed and repelled, they were unable to sustain their attack although they had the numbers to do so. The rebellion was put down with considerable ruthlessness.

The insurrection of 1971 left an indelible mark on Sri Lanka. The rebels, although defeated, played a part in shaping the future. Sri Lanka was pushed more rapidly towards being a socialist society: the moves begun under the UF in 1970 for an autochthonous constitution for Sri Lanka were hastened; a powerful impetus was given to the adoption of a series of radical economic and social changes, the most far-reaching of which were the Land Reform Law of 1972 and the nationalization of the plantations in 1975; state control in trade and industry was accelerated and expanded to the point where the state has established a dominance over the commanding heights of the economy. But there were three other consequences with which the rebels would have had less cause to be satisfied. First, the insurrection tested the army and police, whose success over the rebels gave them added prestige and, more important, put them in an immeasurably better position in terms of training, experience and equipment to face a similar threat in the future. Second, at the outbreak of the insurrection a quite incredible combination of countries came to the assistance of the government: India first and foremost, but also Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union, Egypt, Yugoslavia and Pakistan. The government insisted that there was no foreign involvement in the insurrection, but significantly the one foreign embassy that came under suspicion and was asked to close down was that of North Korea. The government’s foreign policy now came round to a more even-handed neutralism: gradually, relations with the United States became very cordial and ties with the Commonwealth were strengthened. Third, and perhaps the most significant of all, the government tended to become increasingly authoritarian. What began as an inevitable after-effect of the rebellion was continued long after the rebels had been routed and the threat to the security of the state had diminished substantially. To many of these themes we shall return later in this chapter.

By the beginning of 1972, the UF government had long since lost the air of self-assurance and confidence it had exuded in its early days in office. The insurrection contributed to this in large measure, but a more powerful but insidious corrosive force was the rapidly worsening economic situation. The UF government had inherited a serious balance of payments problem but in the years after 1971 it deteriorated further and took on the proportions of a grave crisis partly, but by no means entirely, through the operation of external forces beyond its control. The crux of the problem was that the prices of the country’s principal imports, particularly its food, rose to unprecedented heights, especially in 1973–74, with no corresponding rise in the price of its exports.

The gravity of the problem compelled the government to take a critical look at its import bill and at the food subsidies.¹⁸ The people of Sri Lanka were over-dependent on imported food, which included much of its rice, made available to them at subsidized rates. Food imports not only absorbed far too much foreign exchange, but food subsidies also constituted one-tenth of all the services and goods produced on the island. Thus any reduction in food imports would bring immediate, substantial and lasting relief to the balance of payments, just as direct cuts in subsidies would help bridge the deficit in the budget. The irony of a government, which had made a political issue of the cuts in food subsidies introduced by its predecessor and had begun its administration by restoring them, being driven to adopt precisely the same policy was not lost on an increasingly sceptical electorate.

Trimming of food subsidies and cuts in welfare expenditure actually began with the second budget of the UF government in November 1971 and continued through 1972 and 1973. Stringent austerity measures for the rich, announced in the five-year plan introduced in the last quarter of 1971 and implemented subsequently—a ceiling on incomes, land reform and limits on the ownership of houses and apartments—did little to reduce the unpopularity of the government’s new policy over food subsidies and welfare expenditure.

A second and equally notable reversal of policy was forced on the government by the foreign exchange crisis and this was an emphasis on agricultural development and self-sufficiency in food as the basis of economic recovery. This new strategy had long been preached by the government’s main challenger, the UNP, and practised by them with much greater sureness of touch. The left was ideologically committed to industrialization as the solution to the country’s problems and always believed that the UNP’s commitment to agriculture as the key to Sri Lanka’s economic regeneration was a misguided policy which only helped to perpetuate the country’s economic backwardness and its subordination to the industrial economies of the West. The left—and the SLFP—had looked with disdain on the vigorous campaign of food production which Dudley Senanayake had led during his last spell in office.

The central issue was rice production. At the end of the previous government’s term of office it had reached a record level of three-quarters of the country’s requirements of rice. Had this pace of development been sustained, dependence on imports of rice from abroad would have been marginal one-tenth by 1974 and by 1975–76 the island would have been totally independent in this respect. Instead, there was a sharp fall in production in 1971 and a precipitous decline in 1972 which continued into 1973–74. The government had contributed to this by its short-sighted dismantling of the administrative machinery and dispersal of the scientific and administrative personnel associated with its predecessor’s food production programme. It took two years to rebuild this administrative structure. In a bid to encourage rice production, the guaranteed price for paddy was raised substantially. The harvests of 1974–75 and 1975–76 were a distinct improvement on those of the three previous years, but they were still well below the levels reached in 1969–70.

The successive increases in the guaranteed price of rice might have generated a more substantial expansion of production but for two factors. The first—which was beyond the control of the government—was inflation, especially the sharp rise in the cost of fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals which were essential to boost production. The second was the government’s own decision to establish a state monopoly for the purchase of locally produced rice. Viewed through ideologically tinted glasses, this was an incentive to production, but in reality it was an artificial check on prices. It was unpopular with producers and consumers alike-producers because they could get a much higher price in the free market, and consumers because off-ration rice was less easily available in the market and the price of rice rose as a result. The strong measures of compulsion required to protect this monopoly were greatly resented by the peasants, who formed the solid core of the electoral support of the SLFP.

The most popular substitute for rice was bread, but because wheat is not cultivated locally, and the parlous state of the country’s foreign exchange resources permitted no increase in imports because of a steep rise in the price of wheat in the world market, a ceiling was imposed on imports of wheat and wheat flour. The country was treated to the novel spectacle of queues for bread in the city of Colombo and its suburbs, where demand for it was greatest. In desperation the government turned to the popularization of indigenous rice substitutes—tapioca, yams and dry grains—none of which, however, was produced in adequate quantities. This appeal to people to cut down on the consumption of rice and to resort to indigenous substitutes was nothing less than a call for a reorientation of food habits, a delicate operation requiring a degree of public support well beyond the capacity of the government to generate because of its lack of credibility. The government had, after all, come to power on—among other things—promises to increase the weekly ration of rice, to provide a plentiful supply of food and even to abolish the existing system of rationing ‘subsidiary’ foodstuff. The economic situation was all the more dismal because of the severe inflationary pressures of the years 1973–74, much of it reflecting the upward movement of prices for some primary products—wheat, sugar and rice, all essential import items for Sri Lanka—to be followed by the hardest blow of all, the unprecedented rise in the price of oil. The average person had little understanding of foreign exchange and balance of payments problems, or the imperatives of a harsh economic crisis all of which led to the shortages of food that confronted him and to the tightening of the rationing system. Instead, he could only see the increasing inability of the government to supply him with his essential food requirements in adequate quantities and at prices he could afford.

The new constitution adopted in May 1972 on the initiative of the UF government captured the mood and set the trend for a departure from the established pattern of government to a more authoritarian or less liberal one. Its salient feature was the establishment of a unicameral republican structure, a centralized democracy in which the dominant element was the political executive.¹⁹ The conception of the National State Assembly as the vehicle of the sovereignty of the people found its final expression in the provisions of the constitution which denied to the courts the power or jurisdiction to pronounce on the validity of the laws enacted by the Assembly. While the National State Assembly was described as the supreme instrument of the state power of the republic, the most notable feature of the constitution was the dominance of the executive and the absence of meaningful institutional or constitutional checks on the exercise of its powers. Moreover, through the process of constitution-making the ruling coalition used its overwhelming majority in the Constituent Assembly to give itself an extended term of two years (to May 1977) beyond the original period of five for which it had been elected in May 1970. In taking this action—probably unprecedented in the annals of constitution-making in democratic states—the government showed scant regard for any sense of public integrity.

The expansion of executive authority was not limited to the advantages that came with the new constitutional structure. There were two other powerful weapons in the government’s armoury. One of these was not new, namely emergency powers, which have been the stock-in-trade of all Sri Lanka’s governments since independence, but they have been used more frequently since 1956 than before. Under the UF government, emergency powers were invoked in dealing with the insurgency, but they were retained long after it had been crushed, and were extended from month to month, not because they were really necessary but because they were convenient in dealing with dissent. These emergency regulations in effect suspended normal political processes, if not the constitution as a whole, and conferred extraordinary powers on the government. More significant and reprehensible was the second of the government’s weapons. With the passage (and subsequent amendment) of the Interpretation Ordinance of 1972, the power of the courts to hear appeals against mala fide administrative decisions was drastically curtailed, thus removing a meaningful restraint upon the misuse of administrative power for political purposes by the government against its opponents. Once this judicial check was removed, the government had little hesitation in using the machinery of the state and administrative regulations to harass and intimidate its political opponents. One particularly vicious manifestation of this was in the acquisition of immovable property—land, factories, houses, shops and all sorts of buildings—as well as movable property such as vehicles, ostensibly for public purposes but, in fact, to deter known opponents of the government from political activity.

Freedom of the press was severely curtailed. First, the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon, the main newspaper group on the island, was converted by a special law into a government-controlled press. Next, emergency legislation was used to keep the Independent Newspapers group—which by 1973–74 had emerged as the main critic of the government—closed for nearly three years from April 1974. No such drastic measures were required to establish government influence over the Times group of newspapers: it succumbed without firing a shot. Once this happened, and with broadcasting entirely under government control, expression of critical opinion and dissent was limited to party newspapers and news-sheets, most of them maintaining a fitful existence on limited funds and circulation in a hostile environment of government controls over the allocation of newsprint, the withholding of advertisements by the government and the reluctance of business houses to advertise in Opposition newspapers for fear of offending the government thereby. With the media so completely under government control, only one other channel was available for the expression of dissent—public meetings. Here the problem was the state of emergency in the country in the wake of the insurrection. For security reasons, no public meetings were permitted except with government approval until September 1972. These restraints affected Opposition parties, but not meetings sponsored by the government parties. The first relaxation of the restrictions came with the by-elections of 1972.

By the middle of 1972 the UNP had recovered from its debacle at the polls in May 1970, and was at last in a position to mount a challenge to a government which was visibly losing public support. Its re-emergence as a viable democratic alternative was demonstrated in October 1972, when it won three out of four seats (a net gain of two) in the first set of by-elections to the Parliament elected in 1970.

Thereafter the usual pattern of Opposition meetings was resumed, with the UNP making all the running after its success at the by-elections. In the first quarter of 1973, the UNP staged a series of very successful propaganda meetings throughout the country, which attracted large crowds. Then on 13 April 1973, the UNP leader Dudley Senanayake died after a short illness. This led to unprecedented scenes of spontaneous grief and mourning throughout the island. Nearly half the entire population filed past his bier during the week beginning 14 April and the cremation of his body on 21 April attracted the largest crowd ever gathered together for any occasion in the island’s history. The millions who braved the elements and underwent great physical discomfort, standing for hours in endless queues that stretched for miles along Colombo’s streets, were doing something more than paying tribute to a much-loved national figure. It was a neat and expressive demonstration by a politically sophisticated people, who were unable at that time—because all local government elections had been postponed, among other reasons—to articulate their feelings over the problems they faced. The degree of popular participation in the funeral ceremonies and the depth of grief displayed (which bordered on mass hysteria) were almost without precedent, even in a country where the organization of political funerals was a well-developed art. It was a week that shook Sri Lanka—and frightened the government.

Its immediate effect, in fact, was to strengthen those forces within the government which pressed for increasingly authoritarian attitudes towards its political opponents. This trend was originally an after-effect of the suppression of the insurgency of 1971, but it persisted throughout the government’s tenure of office long after the threat to the security of the state had disappeared. Indeed, this authoritarianism was one of the most distinctive characteristics of Mrs Bandaranaike’s UF government, and for that reason is described in some detail in the next section of this chapter.

Encouraged by the response it had evoked and the astounding demonstration of grief at the death of its leader, the UNP surged ahead in 1973 and 1974 with a number of by-election victories to give it greater momentum and a sense of purpose. But when its campaign was leading to a crescendo, with a large number of rallies scheduled to be held simultaneously in all parts of the island in late April 1974 in what was to be the beginning of a civil disobedience movement, the government stepped in to demonstrate the limits of political action available to the Opposition. A curfew was imposed, emergency regulations of the utmost severity were introduced, and a ban which remained in force for almost a year was imposed on UNP meetings.²⁰

With its main political opponents hamstrung by these restrictions, the government now had the field to itself, even in the matter of public meetings. In June 1974, it staged the first of what was to be a series of such meetings. They were, in fact, the first government political rallies after the insurgency but, more important, they had two novel features: the full resources of the state were used to organize them and compulsion was used to gather crowds for these demonstrations. This set the pattern for the rest of the government’s period of office. There was also a flagrant misuse of state resources, including radio, newspapers, vehicles and personnel for party purposes, whether for propaganda rallies or for by-elections to the National State Assembly. State employees (especially in the lower rungs of the administration), teachers, workers in the state sector of the economy in distribution, services and manufacture and plantation workers in nationalized plantations were compelled to participate in government party rallies on threat of dismissal of temporary workers or transfer of permanent employees to uncongenial stations. The severe restrictions which had been imposed on the political activity of the Opposition parties served to emphasize the flagrancy of the discrimination in favour of the government.

One other point needs elaboration, namely, discrimination on political grounds. This form of discrimination is a comparatively novel one in the context of the liberal political traditions of Sri Lanka. Preferential treatment of supporters of the government in recruitment and promotion within the state service had always been a feature of the process of governance in Sri Lanka since independence, but now, for the first time, preferential treatment of government supporters was ‘institutionalized’. This was facilitated by the government’s repudiation of the British colonial type of administration and its basic idea of an impartial civil service. Politicization of public service was not restricted to key appointments at the policy-making levels, but extended throughout the service and intruded into the judiciary as well, although not to the same extent.²¹ The bases of appointment were political affiliation, personal connection, or still more dubious considerations. It led to both inefficiency and corruption, with the latter serving the function of mitigating the worst effects of this system of open discrimination against employment of children and close relatives of Opposition activists and supporters, and the former serving the equally important one of softening the harsher and more repressive features of the authoritarianism which the UF established and encouraged.

With no local government elections since May 1971, electoral activity was limited to by-elections to parliament. In these, the government’s record was dismal, indeed the worst of any since 1947. Only twice in its period of seven years in power did the government successfully defend a seat in a by-election, once in October 1972 and on the other occasion in August 1976. In the same period it had lost four seats in by-elections and failed to capture a single seat from the Opposition although more than a dozen opportunities came its way.

Minority Problems

The new balance of forces, of which the principal feature was the dominance of the Sinhalese and Buddhists in the Sri Lanka polity, was effectively consolidated with the victory of the UF coalition in May 1970. Although an undercurrent of hostility to the Tamils, indigenous and Indian, was discernible from the outset, the adoption of the new constitution in 1972 was the critical starting point of a new phase in communal antagonism on the island, especially in regard to relations between the Sinhalese and the indigenous Tamils. Indeed, the new constitution accurately reflected this new balance of forces.

The two main points at issue were language rights and religion. In regard to the latter, Chapter II of the constitution laid down that ‘the Republic of Sri Lanka shall give to Buddhism the foremost place and accordingly it shall be the duty of the state to protect and foster Buddhism while assuring to all religions the rights secured by Section 18(i)(d)’. With this Sri Lanka ceased to be a secular state, pure and simple, even if it did not become the theocratic state which Buddhist pressure groups would have liked it to be.

The wide support for this clause in the Constituent Assembly—the government had the support of the UNP on it—was just as notable as the fact that the Christian minority did not oppose it. Indeed, one of the remarkable new developments of the years after 1970 was the improvement in relations between the Roman Catholics and the SLFP. This was partly because the Roman Catholics themselves had come to accept the new balance of forces as a political reality. And while the government made no attempt to change its education policy, which had been the point of divergence between the SLFP and the Roman Catholics since 1960, it nevertheless became much more conciliatory.

The Tamils, however, claimed that the new constitution gave validity and confirmation to their second-class citizenship by according the ‘foremost place to Buddhism as the state religion’, and by recognizing Sinhala as the state language, with a distinctly inferior and hazy position accorded to Tamil. They regarded the special status accorded to Buddhism as a clear act of discrimination.

Opposition to the new constitution brought the two main Tamil political parties, the Federal Party and the Tamil Congress, together for the first time since 1949. Along with the leadership of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress and other Tamil politicians, they established the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), which was the main political organization of the Tamils. Previously, all attempts to bring the Indian plantation workers to the point of coordinating their political activities with those of the indigenous Tamils had failed.²² A by-product of the increasing alienation of the Tamils from the Sinhalese since the adoption of the new constitution was the conversion of a large section of the Tamils of the north to the idea of a separate state: it is an indication of the intensity of feeling in the Tamil areas at what they saw as a deliberate attempt to reduce them to subordinate status. The Federal Party itself was a recent, but not entirely reluctant, convert to this policy, and the Tamil United Liberation Front of which it was the dominant partner came out in support of a separate state for the Tamil-speaking areas of the Northern Province and the Eastern Province.

Worsening relations with the Sinhalese-dominated government tended to make a link with Tamil Nadu more attractive to the Sri Lanka Tamils, if not yet politically viable. This trend has been strengthened by the decline of the Indian National Congress in Tamil Nadu and the emergence to power of the Dravida Munnethra Kazhagam (DMK), more conscious of the rights of Tamils in the Indian subcontinent and much less inhibited in expressing its concern.

The most militant agitators for separatism were the educated unemployed, now a very substantial and very volatile element in Tamil society. They served as the link between the Tamil parliamentarians and the Tamil people. Their support of the TULF campaign was an expression of their frustration at the bleak prospects of employment that faced Tamil youth. Nothing contributed more to the alienation of the latter than the changes introduced by the UF government on admission to universities. Academic ability per se was no longer sufficient to secure admission. They regarded these changes—introduced in 1970 and continued thereafter—as patently and deliberately discriminatory.²³

In 1974, Mrs Bandaranaike negotiated the settlement, on a firm and amicable basis, of the vexed question of the status of the Indians in Sri Lanka. Nearly half a million of them would eventually be integrated into the Sri Lanka polity²⁴ and Sri Lanka citizenship will confer on them the political legitimacy which, as an ethnic group, they have not had since 1948. But relations between the government and the leadership of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress, the most powerful trade union-cum-political party of Indians in Sri Lanka, were as unfriendly as those with the leadership of the indigenous Tamils. As a result, the government was oblivious to the plight of the plantation workers on the island who, during the early 1970s, were undoubtedly the most economically depressed group. While all sections of the population felt the impact of the inflationary pressures of the 1970s, their effect on the plantation workers was devastating—a precipitous decline from a bare subsistence to grinding poverty.

The UF and in particular the SLFP had good reason for elation at detaching a substantial section of the Muslims from their traditional links with the UNP into supporting the SLFP and the UF. This was masterminded by Badiuddin Mahmud, who had held cabinet office—including the post of minister of education—in Mrs Bandaranaike’s first administration in the early 1960s. He was again given the crucial post of minister of education in the UF government. In his hands this cabinet post became at once a political base and a fountain of patronage, to be used to strengthen the ties between his community and the party to which he belonged, the SLFP. Such success as he achieved in this was by its very nature transient. He soon became a controversial figure; his education policy was one of the major points of divergence between the government and the Tamils. More significantly, by 1973 anti-Muslim sentiment was kindled among the Sinhalese by charges of favoured treatment of Muslims in the sphere of education. In 1974–75, there were sporadic Sinhalese-Muslim clashes in various parts of the island, with a dangerous confrontation at Gampola in the last week of 1975. The timely intervention of the police prevented widespread violence at Gampola. The clash that occurred in early 1975 at Puttalam, a Muslim stronghold in the north-west of the island, was—up to that time—the worst episode of communal violence since the Sinhalese-Tamil riots of the late 1950s.

This recrudescence of ethnic and religious tensions seemed menacing enough on its own, but there were other events which made the last weeks of 1975 especially sombre for the government. In the last quarter of 1975, the political alliance between the SLFP and the LSSP which had lasted, in opposition and government, since 1964 came to an end. It was always an uneasy alliance and it had lasted much longer than expected. A serious rift within the ruling coalition became public knowledge in mid-August, when a sharp difference of opinion over the mechanics of the nationalization of foreign-owned plantations on the island triggered off acrimonious bickering between the two major component units of the UF. All attempts to heal the rift proved futile and the LSSP was expelled from the government in October 1975.

The Break-Up Of The United Front, 1975–77

On reflection, the break-up of the alliance seems to have been inevitable, because the programme of action for which it had been formed was completed with the nationalization of the plantations. Both parties regarded this as a landmark achievement, the LSSP saw it as the fulfilment of a campaign it had waged since its very inception, and the SLFP—reflecting Kandyan interests—saw it as redressing a historic grievance. Both were intent on claiming the credit for it. But with state dominance of the economy securely established, the SLFP was now intent on calling a halt to any further measures of socialization. As the SLFP saw it, the range of activities allowed to private enterprise was so limited that there was no further need for the extension of government control. As a party, the SLFP was itself a coalition of interests: from trade unionists, peasants and small traders to landowners, flourishing businessmen and industrialists; from a pragmatic right-wing to a populist centre and a vocal left. What happened now was that the pragmatic right became the dominant influence and was instrumental in a series of decisions, all of them unpalatable to the left-wing of the party and all indicative of an assumption that private enterprise still had a distinct role to play in the economy.

The first decision was perhaps the easiest to take because it immediately benefited the peasants who formed the solid core of SLFP support in the country. This was the restoration of the free market in paddy and rice and the government’s role in this sphere was reduced from that of monopoly purchaser to a competitor with private traders. The range of interests which benefited from the second were more restricted, but also more influential. The ceiling on incomes was removed, taxes were reduced substantially from the levels they had reached through the budgets of the LSSP finance minister, Dr N.M. Perera, and Perera’s proposals for heavier taxes on wealth were jettisoned.

This change of course coincided with a distinct improvement in relations between Sri Lanka and the United States. It was a trend which had begun in the aftermath of the insurrection of 1971, but it reached its peak in the months before the break-up between the SLFP and LSSP.

In the last quarter of 1975, the government—or at least its dominant SLFP partner in what remained of the coalition—appeared to be confident of its capacity to cope with the political consequences of dismissing the LSSP from the coalition. It was anticipated that some left-wing SLFP MPs would defect to the Opposition in sympathy with the LSSP, but this did not happen. On the contrary, the LSSP lost two of its MPs to the SLFP and one SLFP MP who did cross over to the Opposition joined the UNP.

Yet, the break-up of the SLFP-Communist Party alliance came less than eighteen months after the expulsion of the LSSP from the government. For one thing, with the departure of the LSSP to the Opposition, the government lost its ablest debaters and, what was to be more sufficient, its two-thirds majority in the National State Assembly as well. Second, the drift to the right within the SLFP placed the left wing of the party and the Communist Party in the position of an ineffective brake on a vehicle set on a course they viewed with apprehension. Their position and influence within the government was weak and growing weaker; their votes were essential to maintain the stability of the regime, but once that was achieved their own isolation within it was more pronounced. Nevertheless, their immediate and instinctive reaction was to close ranks in support of the government.

In the first half of 1976, the government’s attention and energies were concentrated on the conference of non-aligned nations, which was scheduled for July-August 1976 and for which Colombo had been chosen as the venue. Within the country there was considerable criticism of the massive financial outlay involved in staging an important international conference of this nature, but all left wing groups (including the LSSP) backed the government’s decision to hold the conference in Colombo. For the government, the anticipated benefits lay in the prestige likely to accrue to the prime minister from the international publicity for the conference and from her position as its president. The hope was that some of this would rub off on the government itself and buttress its position in the country. As if to give credence to this, in August 1976, the government retained a parliamentary seat in a by-election, its first such success after a string of defeats stretching back to October 1972. Instead of being a morale booster to sustain its self-confidence at the general elections due in mid-1977, this victory actually strengthened moves begun during the period of the conference to secure a postponement of the elections by an amendment of the constitution. Despite the losses sustained by the departure of the LSSP, the government had the support of nearly two-thirds of the MPs in the National State Assembly. Thus, if just two or three Opposition MPs could be won over—if necessary by offers of ministerial appointments—a constitutional amendment was within its reach.²⁵

In September 1976, in the aftermath of the non-aligned nations conference and the by-election victory, the SLFP staged a series of public meetings at which one of the most persistent themes and vocal demands was the postponement of elections. For some months several senior cabinet ministers had advocated this and when in September 1976 F.R. Dias Bandaranaike, the most powerful of the SLFP cabinet ministers, joined the chorus of voices, these moves assumed the proportions of a well-organized campaign. Although the prime minister herself did not publicly support them, significantly she did not repudiate them either.

The campaign received an unexpected but serious setback when, in early October, all six Communist Party MPs (including their representative in the cabinet) and five SLFP cabinet ministers declared themselves opposed to any move to postpone the elections, striking evidence of a split in the cabinet on this issue and a sharp difference of opinion between the two coalition partners, the SLFP and the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the strategy was not immediately abandoned; only the tactics were changed and took the form of negotiations with the TULF in a bid to seek a resolution of differences between them and the government. The negotiations began in late 1976 and continued into the first quarter of 1977. Among the benefits which the SLFPs negotiators hoped for in their discussions with the TULF was the latter’s support to extend the life of the Parliament elected in 1970. This they did not get, but at least there was the bonus of substantial progress in improving relations between the two parties to the negotiations.²⁶

There was an air of unreality in the negotiations between the government and the TULF for they took place against a background of trade union agitation which culminated in a series of strikes, including some in key areas of the public sector such as the railways and the health services. The government was confronted at the beginning of 1977 with precisely the problem it had most feared, namely strikes sponsored by the LSSP. There had always been the hope that in such a confrontation the trade unions controlled by the SLFP and Communist Party would remain loyal to the government. In the event severe inflationary pressures and falling living standards led the rank and file of the pro-government trade unions to join the strike. Their sense of grievance was aggravated by the stern measures taken by the government to bring the situation under control. Although the immediate effect of the government’s action which included the jailing of some of the strikers, led to an escalation of the strikes, eventually the strikers returned to work. Nevertheless, the government paid a stiff political price for its victory over the strikers. Its tactics alienated a section of its own MPs in the left wing of the party and the Communist Party as well. The Opposition, sensing the prospect of precipitating the fall of the government through defections from its ranks, laid down a vote of ‘no confidence’ on the government’s handling of the strike situation. The debate was fixed for 19 February, but a week before this date parliament was prorogued till 19 May, only three days before 22 May when it was scheduled to be dissolved prior to the holding of the general election. This surprising move did not prevent defections from the ranks of the government to the Opposition. These came thick and fast: first five left wing SLFP MPs, followed by a SLFP cabinet minister and then, more important, the Communist Party MPs under strong pressure from the rank and file of the party. By the end of February the UF coalition was over and there was instead a SLFP government, discredited, dispirited and soon to face the general election which many members of the government had sought so desperately to avoid.