13th death anniversary falls tomorrow:

A memoir of Chanaka

Julian ROCHE

Everyone’s perception of an individual is of course very different, just as individual memories of events differ. What impressed, what influenced, even what stays in the memory - all these differ. So much goes together to make up one person’s view of another: when they met, their relative status, their shared, different or conflicting views, ambitions and actions. So it was with Chanaka Amaratunga the student, the young man I originally met way back in 1978. My view of him at the time, my memories, and even how I view him now - these are all intensely personal.

Oxford Union

What I first remember was seeing from my lonely perch far above someone exalted: watching the Secretary of the Oxford Union in full flood, addressing the House on some matter of great administrative importance. Ah, but you have to remember what sheer importance the Oxford Union possessed to a fresher of a political mind, especially in those days. Who could forget what had happened there less than half a century ago, or even some of the figures gracing the walls in more recent times? Just two years before the President had been Benezir Bhutto, and even then great things had been expected of her.

There was no reason not to think that the current generation - the very people in white tie down below me - would not eventually rise to similar eminence. Casual research soon gleaned the information that the Secretary was Sri Lanka - ah yes, tea and Trincomalee - and that a predecessor had become a Minister in Colombo. Not for a moment did I imagine that such a titan could become my friend, unless I became one myself. In my second term he succeeded in rising to the next step on the ladder, and became Treasurer. I am sure I voted for him: I would always vote for an excellent speaker, and he was the best in the Union.

How, or why, or even exactly when, he and I became friends I can’t remember. I suppose it must just have been because we sat together at tea in the Union tea rooms, where discussion could range over everything from sartorial correctness at dinner to the right solution to Britain’s industrial relations problems.

Now there, I quickly discovered, was a genuine Liberal. And here, he equally quickly discovered, was a Marxist. Both species were thin on the ground at the Union, where the dominant political philosophy was rapidly becoming a torrid worship of Thatcher and a conviction that neither liberty nor equality were fit to lie in the line of battle besides money, authority and power. Marxists and Liberals, and undergraduates generally, have much to debate.

Intellectual debt

I would like to think I introduced Chanaka to something, here and there - perhaps to force him to think more about economics, to read some Marx and Gramsci from time to time, not to be so dismissive of Hobbes and Machiavelli either.

But the intellectual debt I owe him was certainly greater - Plato, notably, but there is great merit in forcing socialists to discuss Mill, Morley, Hayek, Rawls and others. We talked of our lives and loves, drank port and toasted Monarchs, sketched out futures and examined our consciences on a daily basis. We never doubted that we would spend our lives in political struggle - he for individual freedom, me for social justice.

I feel it became rather too easy for us to spend time together debating - either privately on the Union floor and attending dinners, and dining with our mutual friends, and rather too difficult for Chanaka as a Liberal to win the Tory factional support he would have required to succeed in winning the Union Presidency. As I write this, I look up and see on my study wall a photograph from Trinity (Summer) Term 1980 of a long-gone dining society: there’s Chanaka, dressed as the Ayatollah, and me, as Fidel Castro.

I think we both thought: we may as well enjoy ourselves, the rest of life is going to be complex, perhaps difficult. Shortly afterwards Chanaka sat his Finals and then took himself off to Sri Lanka for a year, leaving me perhaps rather more time to concentrate on work in my Final year than I and the rest of this friends had allowed him.

When Chanaka returned, and began his PhD in Anglo-Iranian diplomacy at the London School of Economics, a hugely productive time for his writing, our friendship entered a new phase. I was down at Exeter University by this stage, but in London from time to time, and became a regular guest at the flat his mother, as First Secretary at the Embassy, maintained in Paddington.

Totalitarianism

When we were there, the old times could be revived. Late at night I remember once wandering Queensway, dining eventually at some unreasonable hour in a German restaurant, but by then his mind was beginning to turn to his homeland, and with ample justification. By the time I myself arrived in London to work, he was gone. But I still have - of course - his kind gift in 1985 of a book on Lenin, and remember his comment that a true Liberal should be able to grant even an advocate of totalitarianism their space. The following year, 1986, Chanaka kindly invited me to stay with his family in Colombo. It was, I am ashamed to say, my first trip East of Suez. He gave generously of his time and we drove around the whole island. I still have vivid memories of that stay; and we talked more of practical politics than of philosophy.

If as the 1990s progressed I saw much less of Chanaka, that was entirely my fault and not his. Whereas I floundered and thrashed this way and that in what seemed a perpetually Tory Britain, he did exactly what he always said he would: return to his homeland and fight, unceasingly, with complete conviction and utter fearlessness, for the values and objectives he cherished and believed in with all his heart and all his intellect. In practice - and I could see this happening when we occasionally met - the racial tensions that bedeviled Sri Lanka came to dominate his practical political action as they have done of all Sri Lanka’s politicians for decades.

He naturally recognized that only a resolution of the Tamil question in Sri Lankan politics could open the way for the discussion, promotion and adoption of genuine Liberal principles in Sri Lankan politics. And so with a relentless logic he applied himself to its resolution, seeing that entirely as a stepping-stone to a return to democratic politics and a liberal agenda.

From what I could see, he achieved a great deal, and set out the right way to resolve the question. Whether you are a socialist, a liberal or even a pragmatic conservative, it is quite apparent that stamping out national ambitions with rifles is eventually ineffective. I predict that one day his outline for a solution will become, more or less, the way it is resolved.

For me, the strongest legacy of my friendship with Chanaka is as a spur to my political conscience. I do not mean in the conventional sense of political right and wrong, because although traditional socialism is as far away as it has ever been and liberal ideas often challenged, here is still not sufficient political consensus as would enable two followers of such different ideologies frequently to agree.

Better place

I mean in the broader sense of a spur to action: when I think about what I should do, I can never forget what we agreed upon, and so completely that we never, as I recall, even discussed it: that the purpose of a life such as his, and in a lesser way mine, is to leave the world a better place than we entered it. He enriched it greatly, not only through his active political life and his sage advice, but also through his writings and his friendships. I would like to think that if he is passing comment on me now, he will say that I too have the public good first in mind and that like him, I did my best.

The last time I saw my friend was at his favourite haunt in London, the National Liberal Club. It had become a home away from home, I think, with just the right combination of a progressive front shielding a rather decent Club behind. I told him to take care of himself as we parted. He was smiling when I last saw him - but then, he usually was.