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| Sunday, 26 December 2004 |
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M.A. Justin : The romantic hero of youth politics Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake On the first Sunday of the penultimate month of the year a large and assorted crowd all of whom had been young in the 1960s gathered before a pyre at the Mount Lavinia crematorium for a sad farewell.
So there was a palpable feeling of loss both for the man who was being consigned to the flames as well as the era which he personified. M.A. Justin was the most charismatic Sri Lankan student leader of the 1960s years in which student rebellion had spread to practically all universities in the world. As President of both the Arts Faculty Students' Union and the Students' Council of the Colombo University Justin was in the eye of the storm leading the student struggle with an elan and verve which was all his own and which was recollected with poignant nostalgia by many in the gathering that day and was celebrated in two stirring funeral orations by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse and former MP Vasudeva Nanayakkara. There were several reasons why the 1960s should have been the decade of the students. While the first post-Independence decade had been a fairly comfortable and placid time it was in the 1960s that the intimations of the coming crises were first felt. The MEP election victory of 1956 had unleashed new social forces. While the students of an earlier generation had been drawn largely from the upper classes or the upper reaches of the middle-classes, by the 1960s more and more students from the lower echelons of the village middle-classes were entering the universities. On an average they would be more likely to be the sons and daughters of farmers rather than as before those of school teachers or ayurvedic practitioners, two of the emblematic forces of the 'Pancha Maha Balavegaya.' What is more the economy too had entered upon a period of recession and contraction so that governments were finding it difficult to satisfy the expectations of this new upwardly mobile middle class even as the Welfare State was fostering such fond expectations. The best illustration of this unrealistic fostering of expectations was the Colombo University itself so that it was no accident that it should have become the flashpoint of revolt. It had been expanded beyond all its natural capabilities for political reasons so that lectures had to be held in the quite unsuitable conditions of the grandstand of the then defunct Race Course. This was the ideal seedbed for revolt and recently I met a retired banker who told me that he had dropped out after six months since the situation was so chaotic. This was the period of Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake's Government and Justin naturally as a leading figure of the LSSP - backed Ceylon Students' Federation was in the thick of the struggle. International events too impinged on the Sri Lankan condition. The continuing war in Vietnam where the United States Government of President Johnson was relentlessly bombing a backward peasantry which however was amazing the world by fighting the world's most powerful nation successfully had created considerable sympathy for the Vietnamese and their leader Ho Chi Minh among large parts of the world. Tens of thousands of young people demonstrated in London against the war and the collusion of their own Government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson in it. In France students fought the Police on the streets where they had used paving stones to erect barricades. In the USA itself students occupied the Berkeley University in California and had their own teach-in. West Germany was rocked by student rebellion. Names of student leaders such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit of France, Rudi Dutschke of Germany and Tariq Ali of Britain suddenly became by-words of revolt in a pantheon of folk heroes. It was this collision between the rising expections which could not be satisfied within the university system and the convulsions in the world outside which produced the militancy of M. A. Justin. We do not know how much the events of the US, France, Germany and England influenced him but what we do know is that he borrowed some of their methods for his protests. He was for example the first and so far the only student leader to encircle Parliament and actually enter its lobby with his batallions. To fool the Police he instructed the students to come to the old Parliament from five directions in the manner of courting couples going to various places of rendezvous. By the time the Police knew something was up the students were within the house (security being at a minimum then) and Justin had mounted a chair and was addressing them in the lobby. He received the support of MPs Maithripala Senanayake and Prins Gunasekera in this coup de'tat while that old warhorse S. D. Bandaranayake, then enjoying a dalliance with the Maoist Communist Party and sporting a huge Mao badge, delighted in the sounds of the coming revolution emanating from the lobbies. Drawing inspiration from the American teach-ins Justin organised a teach-in at the residence of Leslie and Vivienne Goonawardene at Pedris Road opposite the Colombo University. This was one of the more inspiring innovations of the time and could be described as having genuinely opened up the discourse on the Left at the time. Situated as it was in the heart of the Colombo residential zone and thus able to draw upon the social, cultural and intellectual resources of the best elements of Colombo, the Thurstan Road university, formerly the University College, Sri Lanka's first seat of higher education, was at that time a throbbing centre of high rebellion and youthful high spirits. Among the other leaders of the time were the present long time Editor of 'The Island' Gamini Weerakoon who led the Science Faculty, normally an apolitical lot, and Attorney-at-Law Terrence Wickremesinghe who led the Law Faculty. Belonging to the Revolutionary Communist League, an extreme Trotskyist group of the time, Terrence was well to the left of Justin and was his ideological antagonist. Other students of the Law Faculty at the time were Messrs. Ranil Wickremesinghe and Charitha Ratwatte. Set against what followed in the next decade - the JVP's Insurrection, its suppression by the United Front Government and the national retreat into quiescent politics and conservatism during the UNP's long rule - the happenings of the 1960s might appear trivial and even absurd. But they were the prelude and the curtain-raiser. For the fact is that student politics during the next decade took quite a different turn and set quite different goals in front of itself. Justin's was the last generation to pass out of the universities and find ready employment, as teachers, lawyers, journalists and Government servants. Even as Justin was encircling Parliament Rohana Wijeweera was already at work with quite different objectives in mind. His constituency was not so much the university students as that whole swathe of the disenchanted, disgruntled and marginalise youth excluded from the post-Independence political system, created by the Welfare State but excluded from its benefits and thus nursing a huge grievance against a society still ruled by an English-speaking brahmin caste whatever pieties and shibboleths may have been mouthed from platforms and pulpits. Most of them were students in the higher grades in secondary schools and a large bulk of them were from castes not even spoken about in polite society.On an international scale too the illusion of students capturing power was to be dissipated. The French students occupied the universities in 1968 and the younger workers some of the factories but their rebellion did not receive the support of the largest trade union which was controlled by the Communist Party, the CGT. The lesson again was that the youth by themselves cannot lead any revolution to a successful conclusion in the absence of mass participation. But 1968 was a time of high hopes, social passions and idealism transcending the pettiness, banality and self-centredness of so much of middle-class existence and that is why looking back from the hindsight of the wasted years which have followed the death of M.A. Justin has the quality of a final epiphany. |
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All farewells are sad but there are some which are poignantly so
because they come at unexpected times and catch you unawares. M.A. Justin
whom they were mourning was certainly not at an age where death could be
expected to lay its hands on him although some of them had been aware that
he had not lately been in the best of health.
