Archives

Independence : an assessment

by Ajith Samaranayake

Fifty five years after Independence Sri Lanka has reached her most crucial intersection. If the settlement of the Tamil National Question has become the dominant problem of our politics then how much of it originated in British colonial rule and to what extent was the post-Independence leadership responsible for the situation to so deteriorate? The question can be debated ad nauseam but the brutal reality is that even if imperial rule sowed the seeds it was the failure of the Sri Lankan political elite to build the nation round itself which has brought about the present condition of all-round national discontent.

Who was the villain of the piece? Was it British rule which inscribed on its imperial banner that insidious motto 'Divide Et Impera' or our own leaders, no doubt all good and great men and women, who could not transcend their petty differences and rise to the call of the nation?

Oldtimers will no doubt recall those days of communal bonhomie when the Ramanathans, the Arunachalams, the Senanayakes and the Pieries joined forces in the Ceylon National Congress. But again the ghosts from the past pop up to disturb our uneasy sleep.

Why did that Sinhala-Tamil alliance break up? Was it because of colonial designs which took the form of a seat for Educated Ceylonese and pitted one community against the other and even introduced caste factors or was it because of majoritarian tendencies among the Sinhala leadership which led to the original sin of the Pan-Sinhala Cabinet (the formula for which was paradoxically enough offered by a Tamil Prof. C. Suntheralingam who in a different incarnation was also the father of Tamil Eelam)?

The answer perhaps lies somewhere in between. Whether Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim or Burgher the leadership of the time belonged to an educated elite which took certain things for granted.

They believed in the essential unity of all communities and also believed that under the system of parliamentary democracy bestowed on us by the British a new nation could emerge.

Was that illusion or reality? We certainly have to give the benefit of the doubt to our political elders but again the harsh truth was that self-government brought in its wake its own baggage of evils.

Race, caste, family, dynastic rule all became the items of politics in no time until new fissures were introduced into the system. So the original Senanayakist vision which brought G.G. Ponnambalam into the Cabinet collapsed and the Federal Party emerged as the dominant force in Tamil politics.

Was there something intrinsically wrong in the Westminster system that the minority communities could not be accommodated at the Centre and so had to agitate for a federal system or was it again the majoritarian tendencies of the Sinhala leadership which precipitated the situation?

S. Sathananthan for example has contended that Sri Lanka never enjoyed democracy but only majoritarian Sinhala rule but even if that is too harsh an indictment it has surely to be conceded in retrospect that our post-independence political system was not able to accommodate not merely the minority communities but even the less privileged and marginalised classes, segments and social groups.

The early leadership of Sri Lanka (which was primarily UNP) believed in a liberal secular philosophy but again in retrospect it can be argued that they were too complacent and did not take account of the emerging new social forces.

This surely is the explanation for the emergence of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike (a founder member of the UNP and the first Leader of the House) in the vanguard of a nationalist-socialist alliance which for the first time since Independence was able to dislodge a Government.

Did Bandaranaike reap the rewards of the Left Movement which had emerged during British rule and indeed challenged the mighty British Raj during that long twilight of imperialism in Ceylon? This question has often been posed particularly against the context of the Hartal of August 1953 which preceded Bandaranaike's own victory in April 1956.

It gains relevance in the sense that Bandaranaike was seen to gain an advantage because of championing Sinhala nationalism as against the LSSP and the CP which stood for parity of status for both Sinhala and Tamil languages.

But what is perhaps more relevant is not that Bandaranaike championed Sinhala nationalism so much but that he stood for certain social forces which were then yearning to be released into the political and social arena for so long dominated by a westernised elite.

If Bandaranaike released these forces into the arena observers such as Gunadasa Amarasekera have noted that the April 1971 generation are the children of Bandaranaike. While Bandaranaike's was the famous 'Silent Revolution' the JVP's revolt in 1971 and what is more in 1987-89 was the real stuff.

But again can it not be argued that it was not the marginalisation of the youth, both of the South and the North, which has led to our present discontents?

Since Independence Governments have broadly affected a mixed economy.

This has, of course, varied according to a particular Government's bent, UNP Governments have generally paid more heed to the private sector and SLFP or Coalition Governments to the public sector.

It is common knowledge that this was drastically changed under President Jayewardene's rule when with the introduction of the open market economy the country was incorporated into the global capitalist economy from which no government has since deviated in any substantial measure.

But after 55 years of Independence why has not a combination of parliamentary democracy, Welfare State and a generally informed civil society (to use that vogue word of the pundits) been able to deliver the goods?

That is a question for bigger minds than us. However the harsh truth which stares us in the face today is that the political system in one way or another has to accommodate the aspirations of the rising generations of all communities and the under-privileged masses if we are not to face collective jeopardy.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager