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| Sunday, 28 April 2002 |
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The triumph and tragedy of Ranasinghe Premadasa Sunday essay by Ajith Samaranayake Nine years after his sudden and violent death it should be possible to see the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa in some kind of dispassionate perspective. The very manner and circumstances of his death made this near impossible at that time. Indeed in retrospect after the passage of nine years it is possible to see his death as part of an almost karmic sequence of events beginning with the assassination of Lalith Athulathmudali and leading on to the advent of Chandrika Bandranaike Kumaratunga as Chief Minister of the Western Province, Prime Minister and President, the assassination of Gamini Dissanayake and the emergence of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as the leader of the UNP. In fact it is worth keeping in mind that it was initially the loss of President Premadasa which paved the way for Mr. Wickremesinghe to first become Prime Minister Succeeding Mr. D. B. Wijetunge who became President. President Premadasa was in many ways a paradoxical personality and this was the source of his strengths as well as frailties. A man who came of humble stock he was nevertheless while in power given to trace a different lineage. Although not possessed of an advanced education he had native wit and shrewdness in abundance but not without that inverse intellectual arrogance which led him to belittle mere book-learning. A man who was reared in the city he nevertheless saw Sri Lanka's destiny in the countryside. A man who by birth and circumstances should have been a member of the SLFP he nevertheless became the supreme leader, albeit briefly of the UNP, the party of the Establishment and the pillar of property. This was both his triumph and tragedy. Platform speaker Why Premadasa did not join the SLFP was perhaps tied up with the politics of his guru A. E. Goonesinha who incidentally was born on a first of May. Goonesinha, the flaming Labour leader joined the first Government after Independence formed by D. S. Senanayake as Minister without portfolio somewhat in the manner of the British labour leader Ramsay Mcdonald who became Prime Minister of a National Government. While the SLFP has never been possessed of a coherent or rounded philosophy it was nevertheless perhaps too much to the left for Premadasa's liking. Being a man who came up the hard way he had the respect for conservative values inherent in people of that class. What is more he had found a ready sponsor and mentor in Prime Minister Dudley Senanayeke who in turn found in him a valuable asset both as a platform speaker as well as a mascot who could be relied on to give the 'common touch' to the party of the elite. Pramadasa made up for his lack of book-learning by a flair for hard work and indeed turned his lack of a formal education into a powerful weapon with which to mock the bookishness of his doctrinaire rivals. In his own way he also fashioned some kind of world view rooted in nativistic values. He believed that if given a hand through programmes such as Janasaviya the people at large could make a life for themselves and improve both their own lot as well as that of the villages in which they lived. Even his scheme of taking garment factories to the village was a means of stemming the influx to the towns and reviving the dormant countryside. On the political level he believed in small self-governing units which may have been some kind of sentimental throw-back to a romantic concept of a 'grama rajya' but which he upheld as a means of solving both economic problems as well as meeting the desire of the national minorities to determine their own destiny. Unlike most Sinhala politicians Premadasa was not a communalist and indeed this was made impossible by his roots in the multi-racial Colombo Central constituency. His anti-Indianism was perhaps a throwback to his guru A.E. Goonesinha's own antipathy to Indian workers in Colombo largely of Malayali origin. Similarly his later authoritarian tendencies too may have stemmed from Goonesinha's admiration for the Superman. It was after all no accident that the name of Goonesinha's newspaper should have been 'Veeraya'. While Premadasa made it to the top in the party of privilege and property it also carried the seeds of his undoing. He famously complained after becoming President that as Prime Minister he was little more than a peon. He was made the Presidential candidate at the eleventh hour and from this fateful event stemmed the whole cataclysmic feud between him and Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali which seemed for some time to tear the UNP asunder. To those who are addicted to good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, black and white it looked as if the elite was ganging up against the poor boy, a scenario straight out of a Sinhala commercial film by Robin Tampoe. Torch lit at both ends On being made President Premadasa said in pithy Sinhala that he had been given a country which was like a torch which was lit at both ends. In the North as well as the South there were fierce insurgencies and what is more an Indian army which was here presumably to keep the peace but the presence of which had contributed to kindling the war at both geographical and communal poles. It was typical of Premadasa that he should have thought that coming from under-privileged backgrounds both Prabhakaran and Wijeweera should be prepared to make peace with him, a man from a similar setting. But Prabhakaran wanted a separate state while Wijeweera thought he was on the verge of capturing the country (although we do not know what plans he had to deal with Prabhakaran in that event) so that was not to be. But more than Prabhakaran and Wijeweera it was perhaps the sense of uncertainty and unease which he felt about his own party which led to some of President Premadasa's most calamitous actions. He was a man in a hurry prodding everybody round him to keep his own pace since he knew in his bones that he would not get another chance. Having made it to the top he was nevertheless isolated. It is lonely at the summit no doubt. But to add to the loneliness there was the sense of being an outsider. His near authoritarian style of leadership is finally to be explained by this set of circumstances. In that sense the fact that he was killed by a LTTE suicide bomber does not even appear to be of any consequence. It is almost like a grim joke. I would rather see Premadasa's death as the sad and tragic end of a man whom our system for all our high falutin obeisance to egalitarianism could not accommodate. A man of humble origins who made it to the top through sheer grit he had to invent his own fictions but knowing that he would not get another chance he drove himself too hard and like Icarus came too close to the sun and burnt himself out. |
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