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The vacant spaces left by the death of elder statesmen can not be easily filled however wiling their successors might be to step into the shoes of the departed. The reason is that these leaders are the products of history, of specific social and political circumstances, which can not be duplicated however willing their successors may be to take their place. It is also true that these successors are not persons of the same stature. No blame can be attached to them on this account either. Great men can not be replaced:

The loss of Messrs, S. Thondaman and M. H. M. Ashraff is a case in point. It is not easy to succeed a person of the monumental stature of Mr. Thondaman but Mr. Arumugam Thondaman seems to be determined to make things even more difficult for himself. It is true that his grandfather too entered into alliances with different political parties so that he could better serve his community but he saw to it that he would preserve his own identity. However, Mr. Arumugam Thondaman appears to be little more than a tail of the UNP. Not only is he now on the same platform as Mr. Chandrasekeran who mounted the first challenge to his grandfather but he has also joined the UNP which was responsible for the unprecedented step of defeating Mr. S Thondaman's Ministry votes at the Budget debate in 1998.

Mr. Saumyamoorthy Thondaman was by any standard a monumental man. He was one of Sri Lanka's leading trade unionists but unlike most trade union leaders he was not a man of the Left. On the contrary he worked systematically to dislodge the plantation workers of Indian origin from the trade unions of the Left and rally them round the banner of his own Ceylon Workers' Congress. In the 1930s and 1940s the LSSP had used the plantations as one of their main bases and the engine of their radical movement for political change, Mr. Thondaman changed all that. In the 1960's Mr. N. Sanmugathasan's Ceylon Communist Party affiliated to Peking had made some headway on the plantations under the banner of the Red Flag Union. Mr. Thondaman changed that too. He thus became the undisputed monarch of the Plantation Raj.

Perhaps no other political leader in the recent past has been attacked as much as Mr. Thondaman. He could do nothing right in the eyes of his critics whose outlook was warped by an unhealthy communalism. To them he was merely 'Thonda' and even otherwise decent newspaper editors did nothing to disapprove of this inevitable abbreviation in the headlines. Yet he always spoke out his mind quite unaffected by the storms which raged round him. He played his cards shrewdly aligning himself with both the UNP and the PA as circumstances demanded but always safeguarding the CWC's identity. It is this lesson that Mr. Arumugam Thondaman seems not to learnt from his grandfather.

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