Kethesh's unwitting self-portrait

These glimpses of Kethesh Loganthan's life path and thinking are extracts from an article by him entitled "Mervyn's Insights were Foresights' published on June 19, 2005 in the Sunday Observer.

....But, first let me begin with my personal interactions with Mervyn de Silva. Those interactions, of course, began as it did for many young intellectuals and activists during the late 70s when Mervyn launched the Lanka Guardian. That was the period when I had returned to Sri Lanka as an "internationalist" after my studies abroad.

Through Dayan Jayatilleka, a former comrade, an "interim" adversary and presently and hopefully a "permanent" friend, I had the privilege of interacting with his father Mervyn de Silva and making occasional contributions to the Lanka Guardian.

My contacts with Mervyn during the late 70s, when I was a young researcher at Marga Institute and later the Social Scientists' Association, and the early 80s, when I was based in Jaffna working for a consultancy organisation started by my late father, continued despite my being propelled into the orbit of the Tamil national movement following July'83 anti-Tamil pogrom.

As a political exile in India I had the opportunity of running into Mervyn in New Delhi and Madras on a couple of occasions while he was attending conferences.

My frequent trips to Delhi from Madras where I was then based as a spokesperson of EPRLF was more to do with lobbying with the Indian Government, political parties, intelligentsia and media in Delhi, as well as foreign missions and representatives of liberation movements spanning the PLO, ANC, SWAPO, Polisario etc.

The chance meetings with Mervyn in Delhi during that turbulent period in the mid 80s gave me the opportunity to glean from him the happenings in the corridors of power in Colombo, while it gave him the opportunity to gather from me the trends and tendencies in the Tamil struggle.

The only difference was that while I spoke with typical intensity and passion, he spoke with his typical twinkle in the eye, which spoke volumes.

Our discussions would obviously also focus on India's role and the Colombo establishment's aversion towards it. In this context, Mervyn cautioned against the suicidal and adventurist posturing of J.R. Jayewardene and his advisors towards India.

In an article titled "Marooned Elite" written a year after the 1983 July anti-Tamil pogrom and India assuming a proactive and interventionist role in Sri Lanka's ethnic imbroglio, he noted, "the weaker and the more vulnerable the individual nation, the greater surely should be the care and intelligence with which choices of action and courses of conduct that incur suspicion and hostility, or are perceived by more powerful neighbours as hostile to their 'self-interest' are followed.

It is 'enlightened self-interest' which dictates such commonsense in our approach to our foreign policy problems and options".

This absence of "enlightened self-interest" in my opinion, although now largely rectified in relation to Indo-Lanka relations but not necessarily irreversible, continues to dog the Colombo political establishment on other matters relating to the peace process, and has provided the LTTE its very mode of existence.

The confusion between engagement and appeasement of the LTTE is a case in point. Another is the failure to forge a southern consensus on the Ethnic Question based on self-rule and shared-rule....

And, in another incisive observation that present day surviving socialism has come to recognise, Mervyn wrote "socialism (in Ceylon) was interpreted as a system of redistribution and scarcely a thought was given to productivity and increasing the nation's wealth". ("Sri Lanka: The End of Welfare Politics", South Asian Review, 1973).

He was correct in arguing that socialism was more than mere welfarism, although he did recognize that welfarism was driven by a combination of humanitarian response of a ruling class and populism which also served as the "shock absorbers of extremism and violence".

The problem however was that welfarism could not be sustained in the absence of economic growth and development, while violence and extremism often tends to assume an existence that is independent of the causes that led to it in the first place.

In this context, it is pertinent to refer to an article that I came across written by my late father Chelliah Loganathan, who shared similar views with Mervyn on the subject of the limitations of social welfarism and the challenge of combining growth with equity and justice.

In one of his series of lectures broadcast over the National Service of the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation in October and November 1967 on what came to be known as the "Loganathan Plan", my father observed that, "Democracy (in Asia) can and could survive, and would also be capable of vigorous growth, only in a climate - social, political and economic - that will be conducive to increased national output to meet the modern needs of a fast growing population, and capable of achieving an optimum measure of social justice...The problem is how to bring about a suitable climate that will preserve democracy and at the same time achieve increased output and provide social justice".

While exchanging notes with Dayan, it transpired that my father, who while being the Chief Executive of the Bank of Ceylon was then advocating the case for the broad basing of ownership of both the State and private corporate sectors, was having regular discussions on this topic with Mervyn de Silva who was then in the Lake House.

This was during the '60s.

That the sons ended up having radically different viewpoints with their fathers at a given time and later came to respect those views while perhaps disagreeing with them is perhaps more typical than unique.

But then I speak for myself and do not wish to make Dayan a fait accompli!

To end my tribute to Mervyn de Silva which I have sought to do by combining my impressions based on my personal interaction with him with a close study of his articles....... I ended up thinking about my own father's contribution to some of the concerns expressed by Mervyn de Silva in his writings.