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| Sunday, 14 November 2004 |
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President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga completes ten years in office : Redrawing the contours of the new Sri Lanka Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga completes her 10th year as President under paradoxical circumstances. Her critics who are legion will say for example that she remains as President after promising to abolish the Presidency as soon as she assumed office but what is little realised is that the abolition of the Presidency was integral to the new Constitution which the People's Alliance Government of 1994 was committed to introduce as part of the movement to take the country away from despotic rule. The thinking underpinning Chandrika Kumaratunga's assumption of office was an effective solution to the National Question which would call for a restructuring of the post-colonial Sri Lankan State but that was not to be. But by a historical irony the negotiations which broke down with the LTTE at her first assumption of office now show signs of being on track again. But much water has flowed down all of Sri Lanka's rivers since then and a great effort of political will on all sides will be called for to revive that feeling of elan which permeated society in 1994 and called for a reasonable solution to the problem of ethnic relations which has dogged the country from the dawn of Independence. But the resolution of the National Question has always been at the heart of Chandrika Kumaratunga's politics. It was after all Vijaya and Chandrika who travelled to Tamil Nadu to speak to the Tamil rebel leaders in exile when that was treated as heretical by the rest of Sinhala society at the time. The Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya which they formed broke the mould of conventional Sinhala politics by advocating a dignified resolution of the National Question. Later historians will judge whether S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was correct or not in his decision to make Sinhala the Official Language but what is also common knowledge is that this was done as a response to the rising nativistic sentiments following Independence to which the anglicised ruling class of the time was deaf and that after Bandaranaike negotiated a settlement with S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the respected elder statesman of Tamil nationalism, which would have paved the way for a permanent solution if it had not been impeded by J. R. Jayewardene and some intransigent Buddhist monks who had brought Bandaranaike to power. By the time Mrs. Kumaratunga had assumed office the problem had become much more complex and it was not as an expiation of sin but as a honourable gesture to the Tamil people that she held out her hand to the LTTE. Now the historic cycle has come full circle and this time round it is for the two parties to place the interests of their respective peoples before that of their own sectional interests. It is easy for her critics to dismiss her as the product of dynastic rule but Chandrika Kumaratunga is in many ways an embodiment of our times. Her father described her with his usual prescience as 'my political daughter' and after the trauma of her father's assassination her own path to a political career which by no means has been a red carpet was to take her to Sorbonne University during the tumultuous days of student struggle described by Tariq Ali, the Pakistani Trostkyite who was one of the emblematic leaders of the time, as Street Fighting Years. On her return to Sri Lanka with her mother as the Prime Minister who had been compelled to suppress the first rebellion of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna she started work at the Land Reform Commission which had undertaken the historic if incomplete task of reorganising rural society. President Kumaratunga has never feared to break the conventional categories of Sri Lankan politics. after the disastrous defeat of the SLFP Government in 1977 she inaugurated the 'Dinakara' newspaper which brought new dimensions to Sinhala journalism. And during the long rule of the UNP in which the SLFP had been decimated and the National Question had come to the forefront as a result of the LTTE's campaign she along with her husband Vijaya braved conventional wisdom and brought the issue to the upper reaches of the political agenda. In the process the SLFP, the party established by her own father was split and while it is up to later historians to interpret the implications what can be said at the moment is that this intervention made it possible for non-communal Sinhala progressive political forces to take a hand in the resolution of the outstanding political problem of our times. The settlement of the National Question and the problem of evolving Sri Lankan society in a non-capitalist direction in consonance with the sentiments of the mass of the country's people has been central to President Kumaratunga's thinking. It was after all her father S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike who charted a new direction for the country which would take it away both from full-blooded capitalism as well as doctrinaire socialism and hopefully would bring it to the happy haven of a middle path, a strand of thinking which was common to statesmen of the times ranging from Nasser to Nehru. And just as in 1956 her father was able to form a broad progressive coalition against capitalism and imperialism President Kumaratunga in quite changed circumstances has been able to bring the JVP which waged a revolt against her mother's Government first into an alliance. On the face of it and her critics revel in making this point it can cause problems for her rather than resolving them. Creating tension between the SLFP and the JVP has in fact become the stock-in-trade of some sections of the media. In these circumstances the JVP too has to act with political adroitness. If the LTTE represents the alienated and marginalised youth belonging to the Tamil community the JVP must see its own image in the LTTE. The historic challenge of our times then can be seen in terms of drawing in the marginalised young people of all communities into the mainstream of political and social life and making them partners in the country's forward march. For this all political parties must demonstrate a sense of political will to re-conceptualise and revisualise the nature of the Sri Lankan State in keeping with the unfolding realities of the new millennium without getting bogged down in parochial politics or becoming prisoners of archetypal fears and primordial phobias. |
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