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Sunday essay by Ajith Samaranayake

He got a chance of straddling two vastly different political worlds within the UNP itself

The 60th birth anniversary of Gamini Dissanayake offers us the opportunity to reflect on his cruelly foreshortened life and the promise of fulfilment which he was irrevocably denied. For Gamini Dissanayake was a modern politician who belonged to the first generation of Sri Lankan leaders to have progressed to maturity in post-independence times and in an intellectual and political milieu formed essentially by indigenous social forces. Born six years before Sri Lanka received political Independence Dissanayake's political career can be seen as a parable of our troubled times.

Educated at Trinity College, Kandy and the Colombo Law College Gamini Dissanayake like his leader J.R. Jayewardene was a home-grown politician. However, unlike his political elder Gamini was relatively unencumbered by the colonial intellectual baggage which formed an essential part of the paraphernalia of that earlier political generation. He was a modern politician in the sense that he was fully receptive to the new intellectual winds blowing through the metropolis but his origins in Kotmale which were reinforced by his association with the Mahaweli also gave him a kind of rootedness in the soil which was invaluable to a town-based politician.

On another level Gamini Dissanayake can be seen as a figure who lay dormant for quite a while before bursting on the political and social skies with the dazzle of a meteor. From all accounts he was no more than an average student at school but as a politician he matured fast so fast indeed that after only seven years in Opposition he was more than ready for ministerial office in 1977 and 17 years later had reached the very apogee of his career when he was cut down in his prime. A clue to this process is perhaps to be found in the one year he had spent at the village school in Kotmale as a student of the then Higher School Certificate HSC class. These lost years of Gamini in Kotmale (somewhat similar to the lost years of Prince Dutugemunu in the same locale while he lay in waiting to sally forth to Anuradhapura for his epochal due with King Elara) will be invaluable for future biographers exploring the forming of his character.

His focus was on a coming Global Village

Gamini Dissanayake's initiation into politics was as an Opposition MP and this too was to prove invaluable for him. As a member of the depleted UNP team of 1970 he was not only formed by the baptismal fires of opposition but also went through another initiation rite which a new member is normally not called upon to undergo. He had to face a by-election to retain his Nuwara Eliya seat and this he did placing the final stamp on his mastery of the political process.

Gamini Dissanayake was also privy to another experience which was to prove invaluable. This was the chance he got of straddling two vastly different political worlds within the UNP itself. He came into UNP politics during the premiership of Mr. Dudley Senanayake but his best years as a parliamentarian were spent under the tutelage of Mr. J.R. Jayewardene. No doubt he profited from both the strengths as well as weaknesses of both. While Dudley was tolerant, easy-going and liberal J.R. was determined, knew what he wanted and was not above bending the rules if that was necessary to take him to his goal. While Gamini like every other member of the Jayewardene Cabinet went along with some of the most controversial measures of that Government there is no reason to believe that he dissented on some sensitive decisions although necessarily within the secrecy of the Cabinet room.

Historically the UNP has been a party famously dismissive of ideology (President Premadasa for example insisting that the only 'ism' the UNP knew was pragmatism) but Gamini Dissanayake had a vision for Sri Lanka which although necessarily eclectic he had not the time to articulate as a philosophy. If he had lived longer this might have been possible encouraged no doubt by his late immersion in academia but one can see the contours of such a world view in his speeches. This was basically a vision of a modernised agrarian economy allied to industry and profiting from all the advances taking place at the time in communication technology and modern science. In this sense he was, as we have already observed, a modern, even an urban politician, but his association with the peasantry would have made it easier to take such a vision to the country and popularise it among the newly-risen youth.

In his last years Gamini Dissanayake was recognised as the staunchest defender of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement (the others being Ronnie de Mel and President Jayewardene when all the others had fled) and while this might in hindsight appear an exaggerated expectation there is no doubt that he honestly believed that this provided the foundation for Sri Lanka's recovery. I remember the ground-breaking press conference he chaired at the Hotel Oberoi to prepare the mass media for the Accord days before all hell seemed to have broken loose against the intrusion of Big Brother with even some very powerful cabinet Ministers taking up arms against the Accord. Gamini Dissanayake's manifesto for the 1994 Presidential Election which he was destined never to face was even more radical in the solution it offered to the National Question.

Far be if from me to suggest that Gamini Dissanayake was a political saint. For one thing there are no saints in politics however pious your individual politician might appear to be. Gamini Dissanayake was a fighter and sometimes he might have fought rough. For he was fighting at a time when the Queensberry Rules no longer governed politics. However, his politics was conducted within an essentially liberal milieu but his focus was not on a conservative past but a coming Global Village. It is a tragedy that the country should have been deprived of his mature leadership for that would have been the style of leadership of a necessarily indigenous post-independence generation of political leaders.

Finally if I am permitted to end on a personal note this tribute has been long over due. The circumstances of Gamini Dissanayake's death and the tensions generated by the substitution of his widow Srima as the UNP's Presidential candidate made an objective assessment well-nigh impossible at the time. I had just taken over as the editor of the 'Sunday Observer' and these circumstances were compounded by the fact that I met with an accident on the day of his funeral which while not being serious confined me to bed until the Presidential Election. But now eight years later I am able to discharge my debt to a political leader who had treated me with the utmost courtesy at all times although sensing well sometimes that I was not quite there with him.

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