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| Sunday, 17 August 2003 |
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Twenty fourth death anniversary tribute : The realpolitik of Dr. N.M. Perera SUNDAY ESSAY BY AJITH SAMARANAYAKE It is 24 years now since the death of Dr. N.M. Perera on August 14, 1979 and if I might strike a personal note (which seems to be becoming endemic to this column in recent times) it is one news event which I covered which remains firmly imprinted in my memory.
Dr. Perera who had been defeated in his Yatiyanthota seat at the General Election of 1977 for the first time since he entered the second State Council in 1936 at the age of 31 (thus closing a 41-year parliamentary career) had led an almost ascetic life at his home on Kotte Road at Borella (now the elegantly-appointed N.M. Perera Centre equipped with one of the best libraries of Left literature and an auditorium). There he had been working on his prophetic book 'Critical Analysis of the New Constitution of the Sri Lanka Government promulgated on 31-8-1978' (to which we shall return later) and writing regularly to a weekly tabloid newspaper 'Focus' which was published for some time by Multipacks Limited, and edited by Nihal Ratnaike. For several days N.M. had been struggling for his life at the Intensive Care Unit of the Colombo General Hospital and on the morning of August 14 came the news as we were preparing the first edition of the evening 'Observer'. Dr. N.M. Perera was dead leaving behind his unfinished struggle. Manik de Silva immediately sat down to type the obituary and later in the early afternoon the late Carlton Seneviratne, the News Editor despatched me to Borella where they had brought him home. The late Sarath Navana, journalist and that most idiosyncratic of the second line of LSSP leaders, took me to N.M.'s study where although the rationalists might scoff a statue of the Buddha was displayed prominently. The late W.P.P. de Silva who was Chief Sub Editor gave a memorable headline to the piece I wrote next day, 'Home they brought the warrior dead.' Later they carried him to the old Parliament by the sea where he had been Independent Sri Lanka's first Leader of the Opposition and finally to the Independence Square and to his funeral pyre. President J.R. Jayewardene sent his antagonist of decades on his final journey with the Biblical words 'Well done thou good and faithful servant' and a visibly moved Dr. Colvin R. de Silva made the final funeral oration. Young women of the LSSP Women's Brigade wept openly after the Central Committee and Politiburo members of the LSSP had given their fallen leader their final clenched-fist salute and the pyre (constructed by the late Mapalagama Vipulasara Thero) had been lit sending the flames high up into the sombre night air. The almost statelike funeral which had been accorded the LSSP chief, drew a rather mordant but typically incisive assessment of N.M. the politician from the early and long disenchanted Trotskyist Regi Siriwardena in the 'Lanka Guardian' in which he juxtaposed the revolutionary and the reformist N.M. but that development was itself intrinsic to N.M.'s political character as well as the development of politics in Sri Lanka at least from 1953. Nanayakkara Pathirage Martin Perera was born on June 6, 1905 to a modest middle-class family in Thotalanga and on that account was jeered at by his snooty bourgeois rivals as 'Thotalanga Martiya' which N.M. took as a compliment to his origins. His father was by the standards of those times a man of some means, however, so that he was educated at St. Joseph's College, Modera, S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia capping his secondary school career at Ananda College, that contemporaneous cradle of nationalism and incipient radicalism. He proceeded to Britain where he studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science, another cradle of the emerging radicalism of the Third World, under the tutelage of Harold Laksi, the ideological guru of the British Labour Party. There he obtained two doctorates, the PhD and the DSc, the first for a comparative study of the legislative system of Britain and the USA and the second for a thesis on the political economy. Hence his expertise in both politics and the economy. This essay is not meant to be a biographical sketch of Dr. N.M. Perera. His role as a prominent leader of the LSSP, Sri Lanka's first political party, the confrontations he and his comrades engaged in with the colonial Government of the day and its coercive arm, the Police, proscription of the party for agitating against the British war effort, the arrest and incarceration of its leaders at the Bogambara prison, their bold breakout from it and the subsequent perilous flight to India and their underground political activities in India itself are now an indelible part of the heroic Left folklore as well as contemporary political history. Rather this is an attempt, tentative at best, to assess N.M.'s politics. The main political criticism which has been made against N.M. was that he was not really a Marxist or even a socialist in the proper sense of the word but a Fabian of the British Labour Party type. Certainly the pre-war LSSP whose principal leaders were Philip Gunawardena, N.M., Dr. Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene had declared the revolutionary overthrow of the State and the installation of a socialist Government as its objective. Adhering to their guru Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution they believed that the war in which the imperial powers were locked would lead to upheavals in the colonial countries culminating in Revolution. There is reason to believe that the LSSP held this view at least upto the early 1950s although by that time they had decided to contest Parliamentary Elections and indeed had become the largest single Opposition Party in the first Parliament. This was explained at the time as a tactic of using Parliament as a platform for agitation while not abandoning the revolutionary goal but the LSSP's later decision to enter into a coalition with the SLFP and use Parliament itself as an instrument for its socialist project was to vindicate at least in part N.M.'s identification with the British Labour Party as the only effective party of the Left, the kind of party which could gradually move society in a socialist direction. Further evidence is provided by the rift which developed in the LSSP after its leaders returned from India at the end of the war. While the more radical or doctrinaire wing of the party (depending on how you looked at it) led by Colvin and Leslie condemned the Independence granted by the British as a fake and along with the Communist Party held a mass rally against it the wing led by N.M. and Philip Gunawardena (which had abstained from voting on the Independence motion while the Colvin-Leslie faction and the CP had voted against it) appeared to believe in a gradualist progress towards Independence and condemned the mass rally as 'adventurist' and 'exhibitionistic' at a time when the UNP was busy drugging the masses with ultra-nationalist sentiments against the backdrop of the retreat of the working class which followed the suppression of the May-July General Strike of public servants led by the GCSU whose leader then incidentally was T.B. Illangaratne, a Cabinet colleague finally of all these antagonists, namely Philip, N.M., Colvin and Leslie variously in three respective Bandaranaike Government. What all this points to perhaps is that N.M. was as both a student of politics and economics a practical politician or an advocate of realpolitik. He knew that the ultimate goal of politics was to capture state power but appeared to believe that this was still possible through parliamentary means a view to which the Colvin-Leslie faction too ultimately came round. Not being a theoretician like Colvin or Doric de Souza may have helped N.M. get a clearer and hard-headed view of reality. Whatever the reason may have been the acid test for the LSSP (the two factions having united in 1950) came with the Special Conference of June 6-7, 1964 which led to the LSSP ultimately joining the SLFP Government of the day in a coalition on the initiative of N.M. Perera. This too can be seen as a sign of pragmatism on the part of N.M. although it was flaunted by the dissident Samasamajists who broke away and even more vociferously by the JVP later as the greatest betrayal of the masses and socialism by the LSSP and principally by N.M. But this whole question calls for a more substantial discussion which we shall resume next week. (To be continued) Source: The details pertaining to the split in the LSSP after the war are taken from 'A statement by N.M. Perera' and 'A Letter from Ceylon' by S.B. Dissanayake reproduced in 'Blows Against the Empire - Trotskyism in Ceylon - the Lanka Samasamaja Party 1935-1964' published by Socialist Platform Limited as Revolutionary History Volume 6, No. 4. |
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