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| Sunday, 11 April 2004 |
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The many stirrings of April Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The victory of the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) at an April General Election is bound to evoke twin parallels. For it was after all at another April election that the founder of the SLFP, the main UPFA constituent, Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, swept into power in 1956 to form the first non-UNP Government after Independence. It was also in April, in fact on April 5, the day the contours of the present election result was taking shape that the JVP, the other main constituent partner of the UPFA, staged its abortive first Insurrection in 1971, the first time an extra-parliamentary challenge had been mounted against an elected Sri Lankan Government. These dates can be dismissed as mere coincidences but can they be merely rejected as historical accidents or aberrations? Is there no underlying pattern or logic to which the workings of history are subjected? Prime Minister Bandaranaike's triumph in 1956 was widely hailed as more than a mere election victory the most celebrated verdict being by Sri Lanka's most illustrious writer Martin Wickramasinghe who saw it as the defeat of a Brahmin class. This was that anglicised upper middle class elite which had been bred by the colonial order and was widely perceived by the people at large as having inherited Independence from the imperial power and denied them of the just fruits of freedom. It was this groundswell of opinion which made the people flock to Parliament in 1956 on the day of its opening and even sit on the Speaker's chair, a move which caused consternation among the purists. Sadly for the infant Sri Lankan nation the 1956 victory had its own tragic undertones. Perhaps because a sense of patriotism was not permitted to assert itself at the birth of Independence itself when this did burst on the landscape in 1956 it took a distorted form which made it collide with Tamil nationalism which itself had not been allowed into a broad national consensus on which alone a real polity could be built. Thus parity of representation or what was caricatured as 50-50, Federalism and Sinhala Only came to occupy the political stage in a disproportionate form. Sinhala nationalism and Tamil nationalism which should have been subsumed in the common current of an overarching sense of patriotism were thus fatally set on a fratricidal collision course. It could be argued that the early political elite which inherited Independence was not overtly sensitive to nationalist aspirations since they were wedded to the secularist ethos of the modern nation state. In fact it is popularly believed that soon after Independence a high-level delegation of Buddhist prelates had called on the first Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake and urged on him that Buddhism should be made the state religion. The Prime Minister had explained to them that this would breach the separation of State and Church on which the secular state is founded. Thus the UNP elite of the day may have acted genuinely out of good faith but the result was that the feeling of national efflorescence which should have asserted itself at Independence was sent underground during the first crucial years of Independence. In this context it is worth remembering that India which too was wedded to secularism managed to reconcile this with a popular national resurgence but of course, Sri Lanka's Independence was not the fruit of a popular struggle. However, in the context of the collision of nationalisms which took place after 1956 it should be borne in mind that Prime Minister Bandaranaike was ready address the issue through the mechanism of the Regional Councils in terms of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact and it was the opposition of UNP leader J. R. Jayewardene and a body of powerful monks which led him to abrogate the proposal. In this context it is another irony that at this April General Election a different body of monks should have breached the separation of State and Church and should take up the position that the Tamil National Question should only be settled in terms which fall short of even the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam proposals. In fact the Department of Political Irony is working overtime here for the Tamil representation in the present Parliament consists of that very same Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi or Federal Party of Mr. Chelvanayakam which has supplanted the TULF which stood for a separate state. Is the Federal Party and its political mentors, the LTTE, then ready to settle for a federal structure? In the context of a North-East schism within the once monolithic LTTE what of the Tamil people of the East? What of the temporarily-merged North-East and what can be the outcome of any Referendum there? On another level the 1956 election victory also brought into the mainstream of politics the urban and rural middle and lower-middle classes which had hitherto been confined to its fringes. But in spite of Martin Wickramasinghe's obsequies to it the Brahmin class refused to die or wither away gracefully. It was the survival of this class in a different guise which led the JVP to take up arms against a popularly-elected Government in April 1971. The further irony of course is that 34 years after that event the JVP which has been popularly dubbed the 'children of 1956' should now have breached the citadels of power through a popular victory. It is easy to gloat over the discomfort of senior SLFP leaders who have had to play second fiddle to the JVP in their districts but this also completes another historic cycle. The children of 1956 have come into their own and much will depend on the maturity and political sagacity of the young JVP leaders who will step into the shoes of the Old Left which they once derided for accepting Cabinet office and betraying the revolution. In his eulogistic assessment of the 'The Ceylonese Insurrection' in the book 'Explosion on the Sub-continent' Fred Halliday, a then luminary of the English New Left wrote: 'The JVP was able to win decisive popular support because it expressed the underlying crisis of the Ceylonese society itself - a crisis that was ignored by the political parties which dominated the island's life and concealed the philo-British oligarchy of Colombo from the urban and rural masses. This crisis has not disappeared since the insurrection; it has deepened. There is little prospect of halting the remorseless rise in unemployment, the growing pressure on the land or the increasing disaffection of the younger generation... It was the insurrection which gave authentic voice, for the first time since independence, to the real crisis of Ceylonese society.' To Halliday's catalogue has to be added the deepened Tamil National Question with its new regional twist which will not go away however much we might invoke the mantra of the unitary state. While the disaffected youth of the South which the JVP represents at least has the semblance of a prospect of being brought into the social mainstream the question of Tamil disaffection remains. Again we are back at the problem of the failure of the post-Independence political elite which Halliday berates to build the Sri Lankan nation round itself and contain the conflicts between Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms. In that sense 56 years after Independence, 48 years after 1956 April and 33 years after 1971 April the country is again face to face with the bitter truths and private demons of its past at a decisive moment of national self-revelation. |
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