Into the turbulence of Jaffna
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
by Neville Jayaweera
Part 1
The story of my immersion in the turbulence of Jaffna actually begins in Badulla, in July 1963. In April of that year I had completed three gruelling years as the General Manager of the Gal Oya Dev.Board and had asked for a posting where I could catch my breath, so to say, and recuperate. The Sec. to the Treasury obliged by sending me as Government Agent (G.A.) of Badulla, where I had served as Assistant (AGA) few years earlier and where Trixie my wife, and I, quickly settled down to a more leisurely and spacious life, working amidst the welcoming and verdant villages of the Uva province.
Prime Minster Mrs Bandaranaike for tea
Our three months of quietude and recuperation ended abruptly one evening in July 1963. The Prime Minister, Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike (Mrs B) who was addressing a political meeting nearby, dropped in at the Residency (as the official residence of a GA was called in those days) for a short rest and some tea. That was my first face-to-face encounter with the redoubtable lady. I must say that contrary to the image of arrogance often associated with her, at least that evening, she was a model of grace, charm and humility. Over tea, quite casually, she turned to my wife and said,
"Mrs Jayaweera, I know that you have hardly settled down in Badulla after the hard time you both had in Gal Oya, so I don’t know how you will take this suggestion. My government is having a serious problem coming up in Jaffna, where we have to implement the Sinhala Only Act in all government departments from October this year. But the Federal Party is resisting it strongly and giving us a lot of problems. They are now planning to launch a big campaign in October, called the Secessionist Movement, to coincide with the implementation of the Sinhala only policy. I understand that your husband did a very good job at Gal Oya. So we are hoping that he will do a similar job for us in Jaffna. Would you object if I transfer him now to Jaffna?"
My wife was aghast and looked at me not knowing what to say. Mrs B continued, "I know that your husband, being a disciplined public servant will go wherever the government wants him, but I won’t ask him unless you agree first, because I know it is the wife who suffers when the husband is transferred from place to place so quickly".
Mrs B’s concern for my wife’s feelings was most disarming, but needless to say, the ensuing conversation was short and to the point and within a week I had received orders to proceed to Jaffna as GA, by the end of August of that year.
The N.Q. Dias – The Tsar!
However, before I could assume duties in my new post, Mr N.Q.Dias, the Permanent Secy, Defence and External Affairs, telephoned me one day and asked me to have lunch with him at the his favourite luncheon haunt, the terrace of the Gall Face Hotel (GFH ). At that time N.Q.Dias was not merely the Perm. Sec. Defence and External affairs, but the most powerful public servant around, and because of his influence over Mrs Bandaranaike, feared and respected even by Cabinet Ministers, and referred to publicly as The Tsar. It was therefore with some apprehension that I joined him at lunch that day.
I had met N.Q.Dias an year earlier when he visited me in Gal Oya along with his Assistant Secretary, Mr Stanley Jayaweera (my brother) to inquire whether the Gal Oya Board could turn out boats that the navy could use for anti-smuggling work. Apart from that encounter, which was brief, I had no knowledge of this man, except by reputation.
Over a gourmet meal, Dias told me that that it was he who had suggested to the PM to appoint me as GA of Jaffna, and that he had to brush aside a strong protest from the Home Ministry that I was too junior for the job. Which indeed I was, for I was only 33 then!! He said that he had asked for me because he had been impressed at the way I had managed the Gal Oya Board, with its notoriously militant trade union workforce of over 14,000 men, and felt that I was the man to handle the turbulence in Jaffna.
Dias then went on to spell out a remarkable vision of events he said are bound to unfold in the not too distant future. He had a deep conviction that within the next twenty five years or so, the Tamil protest will develop into an armed rebellion and that the Government must prepare from now (i.e.1963) to meet that outcome. He said that my principal role as the GA of Jaffna, while enforcing the Sinhala Only Act, will be to help him develop counter measures for dealing with the anticipated uprising, and then proceeded to unfold to me his grand strategy for containing it.
The grand strategy
Even as Dias was unfolding his grand strategy it struck me that he seemed to have taken a leaf from Germany’s famous Schlieffen Plan of 1905 to encircle Paris in the event of war. The centrepiece of Dias’s strategy to contain a future Tamil revolt was to be the establishment of a chain of military camps to encircle the Northern Province, all the way from Arippu, Maricchikatti, Pallai, and Thalvapadu in the Mannar District, through Pooneryn, Karainagar, Palaly, Point Pedro and Elephant Pass in the Jaffna District, and on to Mullaitivu in the Vavuniya District and Trincomalee in the East. He said that there were already two military camps of platoon strength in Pallai in Mannar and in Palaly in Jaffna and a rudimentary naval presence in Karainagar, but that he wanted to upgrade them.
He said that he was aware that any attempt by the government to establish permanent military camps in the Northern Province was bound to trigger massive protests from Tamil leaders. However, he seemed to have thought out a masterly subterfuge to disguise their true intent. He said that he was planning to make a huge public issue of two national problems, namely, illicit immigration from India into Sri Lanka, and smuggling from Sri Lanka into India, and argue that in order to choke off this two way flow, which was obviously detrimental to Sri Lanka’s national interest, his proposed military camps were absolutely necessary. The whole military operation was therefore to be disguised as if it was a measure to cope with two major national problems -illicit immigration and smuggling - and without seeming grossly unpatriotic, no one could raise a dissenting voice against it.
He went on to say that he was planning to set up a task force called TAFFI (Taskforce Anti Illicit Immigration) under the command of Lt. Col. Sepala Attygalle (later to be Gen Attygalle, Commander of the Army), ostensibly to contain illicit immigration and smuggling, but in reality designed to encircle the North militarily. He said that he will instruct Attygalle to work in close liaison with me and provide a military back-up for my administration, to facilitate which, he said he had already ordered that an SSB radio link to be installed in my private office in Jaffna. He also said that he will also be placing 3 other hand picked CCS men as GAs to the three adjacent districts, as the other actors in his grand design - I.O.K.G.Fernando to Mannar, R.M.B.Senanayake to Vavuniya and M.B.Senanayake (or Elkaduwa – am not sure ) to Trincomalee.
N.Q. Dias’s remarkable prescience encompassed other prophetic insights as well. He also envisaged that some day in the future India was bound to stoke a Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka and that Tamil Nadu will be a source of illicit arms for the rebellion. To prepare for such an outcome he said it was necessary to develop a completely new naval strategy for Sri Lanka and proceeded to ridicule the policy current then, of building a navy comprising mine sweepers and frigates such as Vijaya and Gajabahu, which he said were only of ceremonial and prestige value, but of no use for interdicting gun-running across the Palk Straits. Instead, he advocated building a fleet of small, fast boats and to this end had even contacted the US Ambassador Cecil Lyon to see whether the US government might consider gifting some old PT boats to Sri Lanka, sans the torpedo tubes, as a part of their foreign aid package!! That was at the height of the Vietnam War and PT boats were very much in the news then. I recall that when Cecil Lyon made his first official visit to Jaffna some time later, he confirmed this to me. Dias went on to say that he would submit a cabinet paper proposing that Vijaya and Gajabahu be de-commissioned and replaced with small fast boats. At that time the Dvora class FAC’s of today were not heard of, but I recall that the Sri Lankan navy did buy a hydro-foil fast boat in the mid 1960s as an experiment. I did not follow up on Sri Lanka’s naval development after I left Jaffna.
As for my role as the GA of Jaffna, Dias said that while enabling the construction of the proposed military camps girdling the Northern Province, I should be unrelenting towards Tamil demands, and wherever possible, force confrontations with them and establish the government’s undisputed ascendancy. He emphasized that the Sinhala Only Act must be enforced at any cost, and was of the view that the government had failed so far to deal with the Tamils forcefully enough and saw me as the answer to the problem! Obviously, N.Q.Dias was seeing me as an administrative Rottweiler to be let lose within the sheep pen of protesting Tamil satygrahis!
N.Q. Dias - the paradox and the prophet
A short note on N.Q.Dias (NQ as he was referred to by colleagues) is apposite here. Actually, NQ was more than merely a public servant or a military strategist. He was an iconic phenomenon, surfing the tidal wave of Sinhala- Buddhist nationalism that had erupted out of the abyss of Sri Lanka’s history. However, to understand him fully we have to grasp two totally contradictory personalities in which he was framed.
Within one frame, along with L.H.Mettananda, F.R.Jayasuriya, K.M.P.Rajaratna, and Bhikku Henpitagedera Gnanasiha, though only a public servant, NQ marched in the vanguard of the 1956 Sinhala-Buddhist renaissance and was the archetypal ultra-nationalist. When Mr S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike swept to power in May 1956 he offered NQ the choice of any public office he desired, but rather than choose to be the Secretary to the Treasury which was the highest office a Civil Servant could aspire to, he chose the comparatively lowly post of Director Cultural Affairs so as to be able to consolidate the cultural gains of Bandaranaike’s great victory. He was also the first public servant to swap western attire for the national dress. N.Q. was also an implacable xenophobic, considering Indians, the Tamil people, the Roman Catholic Church and western culture to be abominations. Not least, he was utterly paranoid about India. Having read and internalised the Panikkar Doctrine which postulated the inevitability of Indian hegemony in the Indian Ocean, he believed that India had sinister designs on Sri Lanka, if not to take the island over completely, at least to keep it permanently disabled and dependent on India.
Within the opposite frame however, N.Q.Dias was also the ultimate colonial CCS stereotype and pukka sahib. He was not fluent in Sinhala, was aloof and arrogant, was wealthy in his own right, played an impressive singles at tennis at one of Colombo’s elite clubs, and lunched regularly on the GFH terrace to the accompaniment of his favoured aperitif, gin and tonic. Although he wore the national dress, he certainly wasn’t the people’s public servant stereotype! To the contrary, everything about him, except his xenophobia, testified to a man from the decadent past, which the 1956 revolution claimed to have swept away. Not least, he never jettisoned his westernised names- Neil Quintus Dias, even as a concession to his extreme nationalist ideology. Nevertheless, his children were not named Dias and were given the Sinhala surname Dayasri. However, though most of his colleagues disliked him for his stand-offishness, they conceded that he was an honourable man, brilliant, disciplined, incorruptible and always observing the work ethic and traditions of the old Civil Service. As Head of the Foreign Office, he also preserved the dignity of the fledgling Ceylon Foreign Service, and kept the diplomatic corps posted to Colombo strictly on the leash, not allowing them to rampage through the country as they did in later years. When the UNP formed a government in 1965 he was forced into retirement, but emerged again in 1970 when Mrs Bandaranaike returned to power and was sent as High Commissioner to New Delhi. However, as to how his life unravelled as our High Commissioner to New Delhi, I am unable to discuss here.
In the course of that luncheon afternoon at the GFH in July 1963, N.Q.Dias also shared with me the story of how he metamorphosed from the stereotype CCS pukka sahib he once was, into the ultra nationalist and xenophobic he was now proud to be. It is a deeply fascinating and extraordinary human story, both spell binding and incredible! Unfortunately, to chronicle that drama will require a whole new chapter but this is not the place for such a digression. The telling of that story must wait awhile.
N.Q.Dias’s multidimensional strategic vision of an armed Tamil uprising, India’s intervention on the side of the Tamil cause, and gun-running from Tamil Nadu, began to unravel exactly as he had foreseen. To that extent Dias was a political prophet as well as a military strategist bordering on genius. His grand design for strangling a future Tamil revolt by girdling the North with a chain of military enclaves was as audacious as it was brilliant. Proof of Dias’s brilliance was that, when within two decades events began to unfold as he had prophesied, it was this iron pincer around Jaffna’s neck that served as the Sri Lankan Army’s bulwark against the Tamil militant groups. Had it not been for this chain of garrisons, the government would not have had platforms from which to mount counter strikes against the armed rebellions that have confronted the country since the 1980s.
It will not be an exaggeration to say of N.Q.Dias that he was Sri Lanka’s Clausewitz.
I did not share N.Q.Dias’s ideology or world view, except very briefly, may be for a few months, when I came under his mesmeric influence. However, I concede that he was a man of extraordinary courage, totally dedicated to his convictions, principled, unafraid and incorruptible.
The Dias paradigm
None can deny that within his paradigm, Dias’s grand strategy was brilliant, audacious and prophetic. However, the operative concept here is "within his paradigm". Paradigms are not self legitimising, especially those that concern socio-political problems. While paradigms in the physical sciences have to be tested against empirical criteria, those that pertain to politics and the social sciences have to be tested against universally held values, within which they must stand up to moral scrutiny. We must ask in respect of them, whether they uphold fundamental rights, equality, liberty and justice for all, and promote harmony and peace among all communities, regardless of ethnic or religious divisions. In that context, there are several questions to ponder about the adequacy of the Dias paradigm and I would like to turn my attention to them later on in this chapter.
However, for the moment let me turn to the dramatic events that engulfed me no sooner I had taken over as Jaffna’s new GA.
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A Sinhala conquistador
Into the turbulence of Jaffna-
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")By Neville Jayaweera
Part 2
I must confess, that being chosen as the pivot of N. Q. Dias’s master plan to enforce the Official Language Act throughout Jaffna, to encircle the North with military camps and bring the Tamils to heel, released in me a surge of gung-ho energy, and it was in a spirit of a Sinhala conquistador, resolved to plant the Lion Flag and Sinhala supremacy among a troublesome Tamil people, that I sallied forth. Except that, for a coat of shining armour I had only a thick coat of juvenile hubris and for my steed a clapped out motor car. Forty years on, I cringe in shame and disbelief when I recall that a Sinhala Sunday paper of that time, referring to my posting to Jaffna, called me the new Sapumal Kumaraya. . I have no plea to offer in mitigation except ego’s eternal vulnerability to delusions of grandeur.
So it was that one evening in late Aug. 1963, Trixie and I (our daughter Mano was not born yet) were driving into Jaffna, having relinquished duties as the GA of Badulla the previous day. As we drove past Paranthan I remarked to my wife that we seemed to be coming into a wholly different country. The lush thick vegetation of the South had given way to low, parched and scattered scrub. The undulating green hills and valleys carpeted with tea bushes and terraced paddy fields that had been our world in Uva, had yielded to rolling sand dunes, sprouting spindly topless Palmyra palms, looking like giant tooth picks stuck in the sand.
Dusk was falling as we pulled up under the porch of the Jaffna Residency and our immediate reaction was one of extreme depression. The 100 years old mansion, built as the private residence of Jaffna’s first GA, Sir Percival Acland Dyke in the 1860s, and left unoccupied for some time now, my immediate predecessor V. P Vittachi having left a few months earlier, looked vast, gaunt and ghostly. Its ancient walls, scarred by peeling plaster and held together by green ivy and lichen, were oozing with rising damp. Giant louvered doors, creaking on rusty hinges, cobwebs trailing from the ceiling like lace curtains, and the wind blowing like a torrent through the mahogany trees outside, all served to emphasize the gloom. When my wife turned the water tap to fill the kettle so that we may have a cup of tea, some foul liquid laden with dirt and rust gushed out. Every prospect seemed utterly forbidding, and Trixie was close to tears.
A wall of hostility
Uncharacteristically for an incoming GA, not a single local official was on hand to greet us, bar Ivan Samarawickrema the AGA, a Sinhala officer. Clearly, an organized boycott was on the agenda.
Things deteriorated sharply the very first morning I went to my office. Our Alsatian dog Shaami had been used to trailing me wherever I went, and my office being only a few yards from the Residency, it walked beside me to my new place of work that first morning. It was a very friendly dog, seeking only to be petted and patted by strangers, but on this occasion, totally to my dismay, lunged at the very first local who came to see me, and shredded his verti. It was all so dreadfully embarrassing, and the incident was not lost on the local journalists. The following morning, the Eelanadu, which was a vitriolic Tamil journal, blazoned out the news on its front page, "New Sinhala GA sets his dog on Tamils". I sensed a ground swell of hostility rising before me.
As the days passed, everything around me, even the very soil, seemed to shout out the unfriendliness of the Tamil people and my wife and I were oppressed by the thought that we were aliens here. The whole ambience reeked of suspicion and mistrust. It used to be the convention in my time, for senior officials of the district to call on a new GA and his wife when they first moved in, but in this instance not a single local official, bar Ivan Samarawickrema the AGA, and two burgher officials, the Suptd. of Police and the Asst. Com. of Excise, called on us. The wall of hostility was palpable and impregnable. On the other hand, my predecessor V. P. Vittachi did not have to run this gauntlet. The reason was plain to see. The word had got around that I had been handpicked and posted to Jaffna by the Prime Minister and her Perm. Sec., Mr. N. Q. Dias, to do a hatchet job on the Tamils, which of course was pretty close to the truth!
The Yogi or the Commissar
Already, within the first few days, even before I had gone into any real confrontation with the Tamil people, I had begun seriously to rethink my role as a GA consenting to work within the vision unfolded to me by N. Q. Dias. As the days passed, my failure to question the morality of that assignment initially, filled me with a deepening disquiet, and in no time the disquiet turned to anguish. I began to understand then, exactly what Leonard Woolf meant when he said that, as the AGA of Hambantota, way back in 1907, he felt as if he was a ruler and an imperialist, roles he said he loathed.
The religious beliefs I held at that time also sharpened my perplexity. At that time I was a totally committed Buddhist, and since my youth had been an ardent student of Abhihdhamma.
I understood the Thathagatha’s central doctrines, especially the concept of anatta, to mean that all identities, whether personal, or familial, or ethnic, or national, i.e. basically the "i" – "my" concept, are derived from avijja, or ignorance of things as they are, the yatharthaya, and are illusions, or maya. Logically, it followed that all ethnic and national distinctions were false and illusory and that conflict, whether between individuals, or between races, or between nations, arose because of this fundamental cognitive or spiritual error. Therefore, it seemed to me that within the Buddha’s vision, there was no room for ethnic distinctions, for nationalism or even for patriotism. It seemed to me therefore that the thinking that drove the Sinhala Only policy was spiritually flawed and untenable within the framework of the belief system that Dias and I shared at that time.
The problems that I was facing were therefore not merely administrative in character but were deeply rooted in consciousness.
I was caught at the intersection of two contradictory loyalties that kept tightening like a vice, by the day. On one hand, as a public servant, I had to be loyal to the government and its policies which I was bound to implement regardless of my perception of their moral validity. On the other hand, as a human being with an innate sense of justice and fair play, I felt that I should obey the demands of a loyalty that transcended the mundane obligation to conform to government policies. I suppose that at some point, whoever is invested with power, and is also endowed with a conscience, is called upon to resolve the dilemma between horizontal and vertical loyalties, between the expedient and the moral. To yield unquestioningly to the horizontal or the expedient is the populist way, the way to win the approval of the world and be applauded by it, whereas yielding to the vertical or the moral, is the unpopular way, guaranteed to incur the world’s wrath and ridicule, and to be condemned by those in authority.
At the risk of being overly personal, I want to digress here, and confess that throughout my career, and indeed throughout my life, this contradiction has haunted me. While the great Other, or the spiritual reality, kept stalking my mundane preoccupations,
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him.
Francis Thompson (the Hound of Heaven)
That is not to say that I refused to meet the world’s demands upon my career, but that while fulfilling them with utmost intensity, I felt constantly overshadowed by a sense of the unreality of what I was doing. The world saw only the mask, the disciplined and ruthless administrator who produced results regardless, but it had no sense of the inner torment that that mask concealed. The conflict that began stirring within me as I started to address my responsibilities as the GA of Jaffna was just one instance of that perennial predicament.
In a classic essay written in 1945, Arthur Koestler the great novelist of the Cold War era, had conceptualized that predicament as the struggle between two irreconcilable paradigms, between the Yogi and the Commissar. The Commissar, representing the outer or the mundane, sought to change the world by force, through political manipulation and through blood and iron, whereas the Yogi, the inner or the spiritual presence, insisted that the Commissar’s way will never work and that the only way forward was through inner spirituality.
The Commissar is ego or atta, the fallen man, the earthly embodiment of evil, and the product of avijja or ignorance, whereas the Yogi is non-ego or anatta, the resurrected man, the earthly embodiment of the divine and the product of vijja or illumination.
In his poem "Paracelsus", Robert Browning, summed up the Yogi’s paradigm, in the following words,
TRUTH is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whatever you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; but around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.
Throughout my career the Commissar was seemingly in total command, while unseen by the world, but insistently from within, the Yogi was pleading to be heard. It was only much later in my career that I finally took the great leap into the void and allowed the Yogi his voice.
To get back to the Jaffna narrative, amidst great inner pain, I resolved the dilemma at least temporarily, by gradually dropping the Commissar mask and resuming my role as a true public servant. However, resuming the role as a public servant demanded from me conduct that was unambiguously honest, just, and fair, by the people whose interests I was supposed to serve. It was not at all an easy task, as the unfolding events proved.
First confrontation with the MPs
It seemed as if nothing could dispel the image the Tamil leaders had of me that I was N. Q. Dias’s Rottweiler! With rumours about my supposedly tyrannical style bubbling up all around me, things could only get worse, and they did.
Two weeks into my new job, I called a conference of the District Coordinating Committee (DCC), a committee of all local Heads of Departments, numbering about 35, along with all the eleven local Members of Parliament (MPs), just to get acquainted with them. Speaking in English I opened the conference by introducing myself. I could not proceed any further before Dr. E. M. V. Naganathan, in lay life a fine gentleman but as an MP notoriously volatile, stood up and addressing me in Tamil said,
"Mr. GA, you are here as a ruler and an oppressor. We don’t want you here and you can go back to wherever you came from. If you proceed with this conference any further I shall brain you with this paper weight."
and so saying actually picked up a glass paper weight from the conference table and raised his hand as if to throw the missile at me. Pandemonium ensued. While I remained calm in my chair, officials around me sprang at Naganathan and retrieving the paperweight from him, pinned him down to his chair. Ivan Samarawickrema, my AGA, was particularly helpful, quietening things down and proffering sound advice. I had no alternative to adjourning the meeting. The Superintendent of Police, Jack van Sanden, who was a participant at the conference, wanted to prosecute the MP for attempted assault but I insisted that there should be no prosecution.
Three daunting options
It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the MPs, and the people of Jaffna, had made up their minds that I was an agent of an alien power. It also became quite obvious to me that if I was to do my job observing the demands of justice and fairplay I had first to dissipate those feelings of hostility. The task was a daunting one, requiring diplomatic skills, understanding, patience and wisdom, such as in my short career of eight years, I had not been called upon to deploy. It was like riding a bicycle on the high wire, while twirling a parasol over my head!
I had three options before me. I could resign from the Service, but that I could not do because I had a young family and needed the job. Or, I could try to suppress the upsurge of my inner discontent and somehow carry on, pretending that it was not there. That alternative was too distasteful and impractical and I could not have lived through it. Or, I could resort to the daunting option of explaining to the Prime Minister the impossibility of the task she had given me and try to persuade her to rethink her government’s policy in Jaffna. I chose the last option, however unpromising the prospect.
I mused that since Mrs. B had come all the way to Badulla to recruit me for this job, bypassing the Sec. to the Treasury and the Home Ministry, thereby violating protocol, I might bypass protocol myself and access her directly. Accordingly, one night I telephoned the Prime Minister directly to Temple Trees and explaining my predicament very briefly, asked to see her, not at an official meeting as such, but unofficially, personally and confidentially if possible, because what I had to share with her I preferred to keep off the record. Mrs. Bandaranaike seemed quite understanding and sympathetic and even deeply maternal, and agreed to see me the following day itself, but late in the evening.
Late the following evening, on arrival at Temple Trees, I found to my dismay that the PM had also invited to the discussion her Perm. Sec, N.Q. Dias, my sinister sponsor and handler. The imminent encounter with the mighty N.Q. in the presence of the Prime Minister was bound to be a horribly unequal one. Here I was, confronting the two most powerful individuals in Sri Lanka at that time, with nothing to commend my audacity but a deep conviction that what was unfolding in Jaffna was unjust. NQ had 25 years service under his belt, was the most powerful public servant around at that time, and feared, whereas I had only eight years of service to stand on, and in his eyes, a mere junior and a parvenu and above all, his protégé. This was hardly a level playing field! What was about to unravel would prove catalytic, not only for my administration as GA of Jaffna, but for the future of the Official Language Act in Jaffna as well, and for much else besides. Let me relate how the evening’s discussion unfolded.
courtesy: www.island.lk
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A confrontation at Temple Trees.........................By Neville Jayaweera
Into the turbulence of Jaffna- Part 3
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
As the curtain went up on the evening’s drama, I felt like little David facing up, not to one Goliath, but to two, I mean figuratively of course!! However, it was not the formidable Mrs. Bandaranaike who filled me with trepidation but N. Q. Dias. I have never seen N.Q. abrasive in speech or manner, being always soft and gentle in tone, but that silken exterior concealed a core of steel and resolve.
Contrary to my expectations that evening, the whole ambience was delightfully homely. The Prime Minister was meeting us not at a conference table but in the ample lounge of Temple Trees, comfortably sunk in deeply upholstered settees, and sipping orange juice to the sound of clinking ice cubes. There were no secretaries at hand and no one taking notes. She was dressed informally and was without her ubiquitous handbag, which like a sovereign’s sceptre used to announce her imperious presence. With a string of warm personal inquiries about my wife and my family, made in her familiar gravelly voice, Mrs. Bandaranaike drained whatever tension there was in the air and transformed the evening’s proceedings into an informal chat.
After the conversation had meandered aimlessly for about 30 minutes, Mrs. Bandaranaike turned to me quite casually, and as if it was an afterthought and said, "So Mr. Jayaweera, what is this big problem you have in Jaffna that you asked to see me"? That was the opening I was waiting for.
First I apologised to the PM for my presumption in not coming through the proper channels, but she quickly put my mind at rest by saying, "No, that’s alright by me, because you are seeing me unofficially. However, I hope that Felix (meaning Felix Dias Bandaranaike Minister of Finance and political head of the Public Service at the Treasury) and the Home Ministry will not give you trouble."
I then set out for the PM three problems I wanted to discuss with her informally. My first problem concerned the practicalities of implementing the Official Languages Act, (OL Act.) commencing the first of October, for which I had been specially posted to Jaffna. (the Official Languages Department functioned directly under the Prime Minister) My second problem concerned the wisdom and morality of enforcing the OL Act in Jaffna and my third problem concerned a difference of opinion I had with Mr. Dias as to how I should handle protests from the Tamil populace.
First, I explained to the PM that the implementation of the OL Act in Jaffna from the 1st of October 1963, was a practical impossibility. Of the 50 Sinhala clerical staff who had been posted to Jaffna for implementing the Act, 48 had either submitted medical certificates or had seen their MPs and had their transfer orders cancelled. Ivan Samarawickrema, my AGA, and I, and two Sinhala clerks were the only Sinhala staff throughout the District and we had one Sinhala type writer between us. To make matters worse, Samarawickrema had received transfer orders to proceed as GA of Polonnaruwa.
Secondly, I questioned the wisdom and morality of trying to enforce the OL Act in the Jaffna District. I made it clear that I was not questioning the wisdom of the Act as national policy, for to do so would have been presumptuous, but I was questioning the wisdom and morality of enforcing it in the Jaffna District, which was a question within my remit. I said that under the provisions of the Act, all receipts issued by the government for payments, all invoices, all registrations of births, marriages and deaths and all correspondence with members of the Tamil public, and the language of the courts and court records, should be in Sinhala. Apart from the practical impossibility of conforming to these requirements, I said that it was grossly unfair by the people and any attempt to force the issue will only aggravate hatred and conflict. I turned to N. Q. Dias and somewhat impudently asked,
"Sir, how would you like it to have your children’s marriage certificates issued in Tamil, or your grand children’s birth certificates issued in Tamil or your own death certificate issue to your next of kin in Tamil?" N.Q. made no response but kept fidgeting with his wristwatch.
I said that as a practical first step towards reconciliation the government must refrain from forcing the OL Act on the Tamils at least within the Jaffna District. Given that for practical reasons the Act could not be implemented in Jaffna in any case, it would be more prudent to abrogate it rather than pretend to enforce it and aggravate conflict. I said that at the same time the government must allow the GA of Jaffna to implement the Reasonable Use of Tamil Act within his district, at least in the spirit if not in the letter. This Act, conceived by her dead husband as a partial accommodation to the Tamils, had not been gazetted yet, though passed in Parliament.
Thirdly, I raised the question of how to handle the impending mass protest which the Tamil leaders were mobilising as a launching pad for the Secessionist Campaign, which was due to erupt two weeks from that day. It was to deal with this campaign that the Prime Minister had hand-picked me for Jaffna. I referred to two of her previous handpicked nominees who had been sent to Jaffna to resolve the conflict, Nissanka Wijeratne (GA for a few months in 1961) and the military co-ordinator Brig. Richard Udugama ( 1961/62) who succeeded him, and suggested an approach fundamentally different from theirs. I said that rather than be confrontational I would opt for dialogue and conciliation and suggested a slackening of the intransigence with which the government had confronted the satygrahis in 1961.
In conclusion, I said "Madame, trust me, and let me handle it my way. I promise you that before I complete my tenure in Jaffna I will create a climate there within which the government and the Tamil parties will be able to resume a dialogue. I cannot make political decisions. That is something that only the government can do, but I will give you an environment in Jaffna, in which the government leaders and Tamil leaders together can make sane decisions"
I wound up my presentation to the Prime Minister by saying that given all the facts that I had placed before her, unless there was some let up on the part of the government, it will be impossible for me to function effectively as GA of Jaffna, and that I will have to ask her very respectfully, to relieve me of my duties and post me elsewhere.
The Prime Minister’s response
The Prime Minister listened to me patiently as I talked for about thirty minutes, but I must confess, she was somewhat taken aback at the depth of my conviction and the passion with which I articulated it. However, while she kept plying me with many questions, I seemed to have plucked a sympathetic cord within her.
After I had finished speaking, an ominous silence enveloped us. No one spoke and I started buckling my brief case, expecting to be told that I should go back to Jaffna and clear out my desk.
After about three minutes, to my absolute astonishment, the Prime Minister turned to me and said that she quite understood my predicament and sympathised with me. She went on to say that as an experiment, and as long as the experiment was limited to the Jaffna District and is not publicised, she would go along with my proposals, but that there will be no official change in government policy, and neither will there be any written confirmation of what was said at this discussion. It was many years later, after I had ventured into the murky world of double-talking diplomacy, that I learnt that there is a thing called "complete deniability", which is to say that two parties can agree upon some matter secretly, but that if necessary both sides are free to deny that a meeting ever took place, or that an agreement was ever reached. This was my first exposure to that world of double-talk.
The Prime Minister said that she would watch how the experiment worked and if everything went smoothly she will bring the Cabinet into the picture.
Turning to NQ she said, "We hand- picked Mr. Jayaweera for this Jaffna job, so why don’t we let him handle it his way"? Dias was visibly displeased but the PM remained unmoved.
Let there be no confusion. The Prime Minister’s nod to me that day did not signify a turnaround in national policy, either on the language issue, or on the general attitude towards Tamil grievances. Nor did it mean that her basic thinking on the broad question of the rights of minorities had undergone a dramatic transformation. It certainly was not a decision given after consulting the Cabinet, or with its knowledge, or after a discussion within her Party. I had no illusions that it was none of these. My interpretation of the Prime Minister’s ruling given that day was that it was purely an ad hoc administrative dispensation, handed down to me unofficially for solving what she saw as a local problem and in no way did it signal an ideological shift.
I also felt that underlying Mrs. Bandaranaike’s reaction to my presentation was an implicit trust in my bona fides. While she must have been quite embarrassed by my negative reaction to her government’s policies, which she had handpicked me to implement, I believe she was also convinced that I was motivated by a genuine concern for the long term interests of her government and not least, of the country.
Let it not be forgotten that while being allegedly capable of vengefulness and pettiness, Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike could also be deeply considerate, overwhelmingly compassionate and pragmatic. Up to that moment I had seen nothing of the former characteristics in her, but an abundance of the latter.
An experiment in alternative governance
Prime Minister Mrs. Bandaranaike’s extraordinary magnanimity that evening opened the door for me to launch within the Jaffna district an experiment in governance with justice and righteousness towards all. Without any official pronouncement to that effect, I allowed the OL Act, which I was expected to enforce rigorously within my district to lapse, and instead proceeded to implement the Reasonable Use of Tamil Act.
What this meant in practice was that the policy handed down from Colombo that birth, marriage and death certificates should be written only in Sinhala and likewise all receipts and invoices, was not implemented. Instead, these documents could now be issued in any of the three languages, as requested by the recipient party. Letters written to members of the pubic by all government departments within the district continued to go out as before in Tamil or English, and the courts continued to function as before without any change in language. In the day to day administration of Jaffna it was as if the OL Act had never been enacted.
The precedent I established in Jaffna over the three years of my tenure was virtually set in concrete, in that, none of the GAs who followed me, veered from the pattern I set in respect of the OL Act.
I must emphasise that there was no stealth or duplicity on my part. Despite the commitment to secrecy that evening at Temple Trees, within a few weeks the Cabinet and the government as a whole became fully aware of what I was doing, but preferred to turn a blind eye and remain complicit. In effect therefore, though the OL Act remained on the statute book till it was effectively abrogated with the 13th Amendment in 1987, it was never effective or enforced in Jaffna.
Revisiting Dias the strategist
Before I conclude this section I would like to revisit the Dias paradigm, which earlier on in this chapter I said I will revert to later. I did not open it up for discussion that evening with the Prime Minister, but only touched on those elements in it that related to my immediate administrative problems.
In regard to the construction of a string of military camps, I assured Mr. Dias that I will faithfully carry out his instructions and ensure that all that I had to do to facilitate their construction will be done. Actually, within the first year of my tenure almost all of the infrastructure for setting up the camps had been completed, and by the time I relinquished office in 1966 all of the camps were up and running.
It is a pity that Dias’s vision of a future armed Tamil uprising and of India’s intervention on the side of the rebel cause, has not been properly chronicled and my references to it in this chapter are a paltry substitute.
At this point however, I want to refer to three other components of Dias’s remarkable strategic thinking which he had shared with me when I met him a few weeks earlier over lunch at the GFH and which I have so far omitted to mention, which further reinforce his claim to be Sri Lanka’s greatest strategic thinker of modern times.
The first component was, that his plan to set up a chain of military enclaves in the North had another strategic aim besides the long term one of throttling an armed uprising by the Tamils, and that was, to pre-empt another coup such as had been attempted in 1962. He was resolved that he will not leave room for another adventure by the military, whom in general, he held in contempt. By dispersing it as far as possible from Colombo, away from Echelon Barracks (which were still functional at that time) and Panagoda, and making it logistically impossible for them to mobilise and co-ordinate a military takeover in the capital, he placed a stopper on the army.
The second component was a plan to strengthen relations with Peking as a countervailing power to India and neutralise the latter’s overweening influence in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs. He said that he was hoping to arrange for Mrs. Bandaranaike to visit China shortly, even though he held Marxists and Communists with a terrible loathing.
The third component was a plan to clean out the military’s top command as far as possible of elements he considered incapable of patriotism, and that was principally the Roman Catholics, and to raise new infantry regiments which would owe their allegiance to Mrs. Bandaranaike, the Sinha Regiment being the first of them. The Sinha Regiment was Mrs. Bandaranaike’s Praetorian Guard. (In Roman times the Praetorian Guard was the elite Legion, always positioned in Rome, to guard the incumbent Emperor)
I did not share then, nor do I share now, Dias’s world view based on race, which I thought was tubular and divisive, more likely to aggravate conflicts and fragment the nation, rather than help build a harmonious polity. However, I want to emphasise again, that in its strategic aspects, given his assumptions, the Dias paradigm is breath-taking for its prescience and sheer brilliance. In his capacity as the Secretary for Defence it was entirely legitimate, and obligatory on him to plan well ahead for the suppression of any anticipated armed rebellion and to try and neutralise intervention by India, and he fulfilled that obligation as no one else had done before him. Sri Lanka is much in his debt.
However, and I must underscore this again, I also think that it was better had he tried to abort that uprising by removing the factors that were likely to cause it, than assume it to be inevitable and prepare militarily to combat it.
Back to the barricades
The testing time for my vision of conciliation and accommodation, as opposed to Mr. Dias’s vision of unrelenting confrontation, was only a few days away. I had to hasten back to Jaffna as the barricades beckoned and the crunch seemed imminent!
(To be continued)
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Into the turbulence of Jaffna part 4
Administrator or ManagerBy Neville Jayaweera(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
Sirima Bandaranaike
Shastri
Before I begin narrating how I faced up to the impending mass protest, I want to take some time discussing a seemingly theoretical but critical question. Should a Government Agent be an administrator or a manager? The distinction is not merely semantic or only one of form, but profoundly one of substance and content.
Naturally the answer will vary from district to district, some districts requiring strong administrators and others requiring competent managers. However, that still begs the question about what precisely distinguishes an administrator from a manager.
One of the many important lessons I learnt during my three year tenure as General Manager of the Gal Oya Development Board (GODB), between 1960 and 1963, prior to assuming responsibilities as the GA of Jaffna, was about the profound differences that distinguish an administrator from a manager. A good administrator does not always make an effective manager, nor vice versa, and few there be who excel in both roles.
A manager differs from an administrator in important ways, principally in mindset and in general outlook. Whereas the administrator is generally status oriented, embedded in the status quo, and tied down by regulations, the manager must be goal oriented, looking to change the status quo, and seeking to create precedents rather than be tied down by them. Whereas the administrator tends to be hierarchical and authoritarian, content with receiving and giving orders, the manager has to be consultative and participatory and try to ensure that all the actors are involved in decision making. Whereas the word "productivity", i.e. the ratio of returns to investments, never enters the administrator’s vocabulary, it should always at the heart of every manager’s exertions. Above all, whereas the administrator is loathe to leave the beaten track and experiment, the manager has always to be innovative, and be constantly looking out for alternative ways to realize his goals.
Peter Drucker, one of the great management consultants of all time, once summed up with a powerful metaphor what it means to be a good manager or a good leader. He said that a good manager, indeed any good leader, has to be able to keep his eyes on the stars but simultaneously keep his nose to the grindstone. What he was saying was that it was not enough for the leader or manager to be exclusively a visionary and a theoretician, or exclusively a doer and a practitioner. He had to be both. If the manager or leader has his eyes glued to the stars and is not scanning the road ahead, he is bound to end up in the ditch. On the other hand if he has his nose constantly close to the ground and has no vision of the distant scene, then also he will not know where he is going and will end up in the ditch. He has to be able to do both.
What has all this to do with my job as GA of Jaffna? Simply this! If I was to resolve the mountainous problems that were rising up before me, I could not afford to be the stereotype Civil Service administrator, content merely with enforcing the governmentfiat and seeking only to preserve law and order. I had to define my goals as broadly as possible, and those goals had to encompass a reality that was much wider than the status quo. I had to be fair and just by all. I had to be innovative. I had to break free from precedents. I had to build confidence and trust, enter into dialogue and listen not only to what the other was saying, but more importantly to what he was not saying! I had to be Peter Drucker’s good manager, made flesh. Decades before "conflict resolution" began to appear on the agenda of the intellectual’s seminar circuit, I had to practice it, without the benefit of seminar papers on the subject!
For over a hundred and fifty years, the institution of the GA had concretized as a classic administrative job. In particular, of all the nine provincial GAs posts, the post of GA of Jaffna had acquired a high profile as a result of its occupancy throughout the 19th Century by two prestigious colonial Civil Servants, Sir Percival Acland Dyke from 1829 to 1867 and by Sir William Twyneham for the rest of the 19th Century and between them they had bequeathed to the post of GA, a strongly authoritarian culture, which now virtually went with the job. The task for me was fundamentally to rethink and replace that culture.
That task was not as easy as it might seem. By legitimizing the long established hegemony of the high caste Vellalas, the Dyke-Twyneham authoritarian culture had cemented the highly stratified Tamil caste structure and the institution of the GA had fused into that structure and was in a sense its apex. Later on in this chapter I shall dwell in depth on the caste structure of the Tamils as a factor in understanding the politics of Tamil protest.
To the barricades again
To place in context the events that followed upon my return from the meeting at Temple Trees, let me go back in time a few years.
In 1961 the Federal Party (FP) launched the Satyagraha campaign and for three months brought the administration of the North and the East to a standstill. M. Srikantha, a senior Civil Servant who had been GA of Jaffna for over 7 years was transferred out and another Civil Servant, Nissanka Wijeratne, much junior to Srikantha, was posted in his place. The situation deteriorated sharply, an Emergency and curfew were declared and Wijeratne was recalled. Then, invoking Emergency Regulations, the government appointed Brig. Richard Udugama as Coordinator, but the situation continued to deteriorate producing an indissoluble impasse. However, the FP called off their Satyagraha campaign and withdrew to plan a new strategy. During the stalemate, Udugama was recalled and another Civil Servant, V. P. Vittachi was posted as GA to Jaffna. During the one-year and something that Vittachi was GA there was a relative quiet and he gave the district a professional and stable administration. However, by mid 1963, realizing that the government was not making any moves towards resolving their outstanding problems, the FP started to reformulate their strategy.
The cut-off date for implementing the Official Languages Act in Jaffna was fast approaching and in order to forestall it, the Tamil parties decided to launch what they called the Secessionist Movement. Driven by paranoia and reading into the "secessionist"concept the most diabolical motives and stratagems, the government panicked. To make matters worse, Vittachi, the incumbent GA asked to be transferred out on personal grounds.
When Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike dropped in at the Residency at Badulla in July 1963 to recruit me for the Jaffna job, it was this impending secessionist agitation and the cut off date for implementing the Official Languages Act, that she had uppermost in her mind and I was to be thrown in, rather like the little Dutch boy, to stick my finger in the dyke and hold back the swelling tide of Tamil protest!
What was in issue now was not merely the outcome of the Federal Party’s Secessionist Campaign but the viability of two contending models of governance, viz. N. Q. Dias’s model of perpetual confrontation, or my model of dialogue and conciliation.
Another confrontation
at Temple Trees
The FP announced a massive march on the Kachcheri, on a day in the first week of Oct. 1963, to kick start their Secessionist Movement. Their aim was to signal the government that unless it conceded the minimum demands of the Tamils, they will have no alternative but to "secede", whatever that meant.
The FP and TC together, planned to bring supporters in buses and by train from Batticaloa, Trinco, Vavuniya, Mannar and from throughout the Jaffna District, numbering over 20,000. They were to assemble on the esplanade near the Fort and march down Main Street and demonstrate outside the Kachcheri and Residency, which were adjacent, and the highlight of the demo was to be the burning of the effigy of the Prime Minister and a copy of the Official Languages Act.
Actually, I saw through their stratagem and realized that their true intent was to provoke me into reacting with baton charges and tear gas, whereupon, with evidence of the ensuing repression, they could stoke their flagging agitation and draw world-wide attention to their cause. I resolved that I would not fall for that ploy.
Wanting to keep strictly within the law, the Tamil parties applied to the Police for a permit to assemble and march. The Suptd.of Police, Jack van Sanden, consulted me and I said the permit should be issued. However, acting on instructions from N.Q.Dias, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), `Jingle’ Dissanayake, overruled me. There then followed an acrimonious ding-dong tussle between the grandees in the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs in Colombo, and me. At that point the Prime Minister Bandaranaike called a truce and summoned me to Temple Trees to resolve the issue between me and her officials.
Facing fearful odds
This time however, besides the formidable N. Q. Dias and the Ministry Assistant Secretary, Stanley Jayaweera, (my brother, who at that time shared some of N.Q’s. world view) there was ranged against me a solid phalanx of brass and braid, viz, IGP Dissanayake, plus the three service commanders, General Udugama, Admiral Kadirgarmar and Air Vice Marshall Amarasekera, all of the same view, that the FP and the TC should not be allowed to march and that if they did, should be crushed in their lair.
Facing these fearful odds, this solid rampart of civil and military power, I was stark alone and with no visible help. However, even as the prime minister invited me to state my problem, I felt in her benign smile at me that I had found favour in her sight.
What was in issue was simply the question whether the FP should be allowed to march and demonstrate on the day chosen by them for launching their so called secessionist campaign. The officials of the Ministry of Defence, military as well as civilian, were all adamant that the march and demonstration should be banned, while I was strongly of the opposite view.
I stated my position coolly, methodically, and unequivocally. I explained to the PM that the FP had a democratic right to assemble, to march, and to protest, and that if the government refused them permission to march, they would march regardless, and that that would make them an unlawful assembly. That would then necessitate the use of force to disperse them, baton charges, bleeding skulls, the arresting of their leaders, to be followed by prosecutions, and trials, all of which would make martyrs of the FP leaders and give them the publicity they wanted. What was worse, I said that such a chain of events would only aggravate the ethnic conflict throughout the country. I emphasized that what the Tamil leaders really wanted was precisely for the government to refuse them the right to march and thereby become a cat’s paw for them in their search for worldwide publicity.
Mrs. Bandaranaike listened intently to both sides and again and without any prevarication ruled that my approach was right and should be given a chance. Not only that. She also said that I should co-ordinate all the police and military activities on the day of the march but that the IGP must send a riot squad just in case there is trouble.
I was quite overwhelmed. However, I had the audacity to ask the Prime Minister for her ruling to be given in writing, to which also she consented! I still have in my files a copy of the minutes of that meeting. The conference had lasted barely an hour and its outcome filled N. Q. Dias, the IGP and the three service commanders with total dismay.
A comment on
Mrs. Bandaranaike
I want to make a comment here about Mrs. Bandaranaike’s decision making skills in contrast to her to dead husband’s notorious habit of prevarication. It used to be said of her husband, the great S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, product of Oxford and all that, that when a delegation or any senior official would go to him with a complex problem admitting of a range of possible solutions, rather than give them a clinical and unambiguous decision, he would drown them under an avalanche of words, often meandering into totally irrelevant areas, and after two hours leave the delegation or official concerned totally exhausted, not knowing even what their problem was, never mind knowing what the PM’s decision was!
However, when it concerned decision making, his wife, Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike, a product of St Bridget’s Covent, Colombo, was clearly of a sharper mould. Up to that moment I had met Mrs. Bandaranaike only thrice and on each occasion, she gave me the impression of being a person who, given the facts, could make quick and unambiguous decisions. There are hundreds of others who were closer to Mrs. Bandaranaike than I ever was, and I do not know whether they would share my perception of her decision making abilities. One of them was my brother Stanley Jayaweera of the Foreign Service, who during the 1960-65 era was very close to Mrs. Bandaranaike, and he used to relate to me incidents which illustrated her decisiveness and firmness. In particular he used to tell me how when he accompanied her on the delegation to New Delhi to negotiate the Sirima-Sastri pact in the early 1960s, she stood up to the might of the Indian Foreign Office and threw down the gauntlet to her counterpart, Prime Minister Shastri, saying that unless he reined in his Foreign Office men who were proving utterly obdurate, she would call off the whole negotiation and return to Colombo with her delegation. Shastri relented and the Pact became a reality, on her terms!
The two phases of Mrs. Bandaranaike
I must also hasten to add that the Mrs. Bandaranaike of the 1960-65 era, whom I have profiled so far, was a very different person from the one I encountered in the 1970s. During the period I served her government as GA of Jaffna, i.e. up to March 1965 when her government was voted out, relations between us were most cordial. She was unfailingly gracious and fair in her decisions and never encroached on my boundaries as a public servant.
However, when I served the new UNP led government of Dudley Senanayake, set up in April 1965, with the same dedication and zeal with which I had served her government, she interpreted it as an act of gross disloyalty to her and when she won a resounding victory at the polls in 1970, turned on me with great venom. She not only demoted me from the grade 1 post, I was holding at that time, as the Chairman and Director General of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, to a grade 3 post, as the GA of Vavuniya, but also caused my early retirement from service, when I was only 42 – for which I might add in parenthesis, I am most grateful now!
Just as I can testify to many magnificent qualities of her character, I have also heard many stories of her capacity for pettiness and vengefulness and her susceptibility to common tale carriers, about which I do not want to comment.
Be that as it may, I cannot conceal the admiration I had for her after the three encounters I had with her in the course of three months in 1963. Her basic sense of right and wrong and her instinct for fairness and justice were patent and admirable. Not least, she could make decisions!
Let me turn now to the fateful day of the mass demonstration and the launch of the Secessionist Movement.
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Models of governance in contention by Neville Jayaweera
Into the turbulence of Jaffna– Part 5
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
On the day of the mass demonstration in Jaffna, much more was at stake than merely the question of law and order. Two contrary models of governance were vying for credibility – the confrontational model and the conciliation model. Would the model of dialogue and conciliation advocated by me work, or would we have to fall back on the confrontational model advocated by Mr. Dias and the military. Over the five preceding years in Jaffna, the confrontational model had failed repeatedly, and the Prime Minister, in an unprecedented turnaround, had mandated me to try out the conciliation model. Now, the testing time was upon me.
Any person in authority who has to manage a major social or political conflict is always skirting moral boundaries and is in risk of encroaching on them unless he is armed with a sensitive moral compass. Therefore, my first priority was to see that all those who were involved with me on the government side that day were aware of those boundaries and that we shared a consensus. .
Conforming to the Prime Minister’s directive that the GA should co-ordinate all police and military responses to the proposed mass protest, I called a conference of police and military senior officers and of all Divisional Revenue Officers (DROs) of my district. I explained to the conference the need to look on the challenge confronting us as more than merely a law and order problem and outlined the long term political issues involved, effecting not only the incumbent government but the nation as a whole. I presented to those present two plans, Plan "A", and a fall back Plan "B", to be activated if Plan A failed.
My Plan "A" was daring and unprecedented in the experience of all present. It proposed to dismantle all barricades, keep all police and military personnel off the streets on the day of the march, lest even their very presence might be taken as a provocation, and allow the demonstrators complete freedom to march, shout slogans and burn any effigies they wanted to, except that the Suptd. of Police would stay with me in my office to help me co-ordinate the government’s response.
Fall back Plan "B", was to keep the Riot Squad which had come up from Colombo, in reserve and barracked secretly in the Jaffna Fort, to be called out if needed.
I was fully aware that, to any rational person, my Plan "A" must have seemed not only a gamble but sheer lunacy, and bound not only to fail, but also likely to put the reputations and careers of the police and the military in jeopardy. However, I showed those present why Plan "A" will not fail.
I pointed out that mass demonstrations and rallies erupt in violence and mayhem because of three reasons. Either bystanders jeer at the demonstrators or mount a counter demonstration. Or the demonstrators themselves attack bystanders and provoke them, or the police or military act as agent provocateur and precipitate the mayhem. I said that in this instance there was no threat from bystanders because far from jeering at the demonstrators they will simply urge them on. As for the likelihood of demonstrators attacking bystanders, they will be marching within their own environment and they had no reason to provoke bystanders or throw missiles through shop windows, or smash street lamps. After all, this was their own city and they were unlikely to raze it! That left the police and the military as the only possible agents provocateur, and by withdrawing them from the scene we would have eliminated all possible sources of trouble!
Even though the police and the military seemed to chafe at my reasoning, the more intelligent amongst them realized that I was not some starry-eyed dreamer but that I had thought my strategy through clearly. Furthermore, when I reminded them that the Prime Minister herself had mandated me to co-ordinate the government’s response, and on my written assurance that I took full responsibility for the outcome, they all fell in line.
The spectre of the 1961 satyagraha campaign.
A spectre was haunting us, the spectre of 1961. In 1961 the government responded to the satygrahis with blatant force and hundreds of them had to be treated in the hospital for head injuries. On the other hand, the government alleged that the satygrahis had first triggered government’s reaction by using violence on Mr. N. Q. Dias when he tried to cross the picket lines. That confrontation went on for three whole months, throughout the whole of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, leaving in its wake a great deal of acrimony and destroying any possibility of a rapprochement. We reached a consensus that we would adopt a strategy completely different from the one the government had adopted in 1961 and direct all our energies towards a constructive outcome.
However, I must hasten to add that I do not recommend Plan "A" for adoption indiscriminately in all conflict situations. Every conflict has its own specific characteristics, requiring in each case a uniquely nuanced response rather than a stereotypical one, and those in authority must be alive to the varying and subtle demands of each situation. Throughout my career I have had to handle conflicts of varying degrees of complexity, ranging from massive political protests in Jaffna, to highly militant trade union upheavals in Gal Oya and CMU led strikes at the Broadcasting Corporation, and not least, to the armed JVP uprising in 1971 in Vavuniya, and in each case my response was specifically nuanced. I must add however that all my responses shared one thing in common, and that was respect for moral boundaries.
The fateful day
The day for the march and mass demonstration arrived. It was a typical day in early October in Jaffna, with temperatures in the shade rising to 100 degrees F by 10.am! The Southwest kachan winds that blow from May to September mitigating the ferocity of the Jaffna sun had died out, and the cooling rains of the North East Monsoon had yet to commence. It was the inter-monsoonal month when the whole of the peninsula sizzles like an oven. The sky was an azure blue, untainted by even a speck of cloud. By eleven in the morning a pitiless sun had turned the tarmac road running past the Kachcheri into a river of molten black treacle and I felt a great compassion for the demonstrators who will soon have to march on this fiery furnace.
By police estimates, over 30,000, far in excess of the number anticipated even by the Tamil leaders, marched on the Kachcheri that day. The entire esplanade and the Main Street was one heaving, jostling, slogan shouting, mass of humanity. From my office, their slow approach sounded like the roar of an angry monsoon sea, making Trixie and my parents who were watching from the balcony of the Residency fearful for my personal safety. The heaving crowd swarmed outside the Kachcheri and on to the Residency grounds, and for over an hour, kept up a steady and deafening drum beat of slogans.
They carried placards denouncing the Prime Minister and several effigies of her, and shouted slogans to match. It was a tailor made situation for a conventional police response with baton and tear gas, but the police had been confined to barracks!
After the crowd’s frenzy had spent itself in Jaffna’s noon-day heat, I walked out to meet them, accompanied only by the Suptd. of Police. We were totally unprotected, there not being a policeman or soldier in sight, and as a powerful metaphor of our intentions van Sanden had even left his revolver and holster behind, and I had a Parker 51 fountain pen showing from the breast pocket of my shirt. This was not how we were supposed to react. Even when the demonstrators burnt an effigy of the Prime Minister and a copy of the Official Language Act in our presence, actions tantamount to extreme provocation, especially when perpetrated before the government’s chief representative in the district, we watched impassively.
The frenzied crowd found this response from the GA and the police totally disconcerting. They had been programmed to expect barricades, tear gas and baton charges but what they were seeing was totally unscripted.
After I had completed a short walkabout, I turned to their venerated leader S. J. V. Chelvanayagam, and within earshot of those around him, said,
"Sir, why don’t you and a few others come inside from the sun, so that we may talk things over in my office".
Mr. Chelvanayagam was very feeble, stricken with early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease even then. So, holding him by his hand, I led him into my office, followed by about six other Federal Party and Tamil Congress stalwarts, to the accompaniment of thunderous cheers from the crowd.
From an imperialist GA to a peoples’ GA
Inside my office, I listened to a long memorandum of protest citing the alleged injustices committed against the Tamil people, which Dr E.M.V. Naganathan read, and which I said I would submit to the PM for her attention. Thereafter, I invited the Tamil leaders, who, after hours of marching and shouting in the Jaffna noon day sun were thirsty and hungry, to partake of some sandwiches and cakes that Trixie had thoughtfully prepared for them, which they happily consumed. Having washed it all down with some tea and some soft drinks, and after exchanging some light hearted banter with us and shaking hands warmly with van Sanden and me, the Tamil leaders walked out into the crowd again. However, I too walked out along with them, again helping Chelvanayagam respectfully by his hand in the sight of the vast concourse. As we emerged from my office we were all greeted to a renewed round of cheers!!
The crowd was at a loss as to what to do next. Through our totally unexpected response we had neutralized their Plan "A" but they had no Plan "B" to fall back on, and the Tamil leaders’ credibility plummeted!! The whole thing seemed a huge let down, a farce, ending in a whimper rather than with a bang, and as the dejected and bedraggled demonstrators trickled away, trailing their banners and placards behind them, I suspected that their disenchantment was about to recoil on their own leaders!
The Tamil leaders had expected me to set up barricades, to call out the police and the military in strength, and to use tear gas and batons to disperse the marchers, so much so that they had instructed them to bring suitable head gear to fend off blows from police batons and scarves to wear as masks for warding off tear gas. Those headgear and scarves were never used! The critical day had arrived and passed without a canister of tear gas being fired, or a baton being wielded, or even a stone being thrown. Everyone’s rights had been respected and protected and proceedings had been totally democratic, harmonious and civilized. Above all, the much-feared Secessionist Movement that had instilled panic in Colombo had evaporated and the air was now clear for sworn enemies to start talking to each other gain.
Within a few brief hours the GA had been transformed from an imperialist oppressor into the people’s friend! As the crowd dispersed, van Sanden, my secretary Shanmugaratnam, and I polished off what remained of the sandwiches and the cakes, which tasted all the sweeter for the joys that the day had brought!
The overwhelming power of non-power
The events of that day had far reaching consequences. The negative perceptions that the Federal Party, the Tamil Congress, and the Tamils in general, had of my administration in particular, and of the government in general, had metamorphosed dramatically.
At my first meeting with him three months earlier, Mr. N. Q. Dias had instructed me to establish the government’s undisputed ascendancy over the Tamil people. In the event, I had established something far superior to anything Mr Dias had demanded. I had established the ascendancy of understanding and harmony over prejudice and conflict, and I had achieved this not by military might or by material power, but through the overwhelming power of non-power. More than anyone else, Mr. Dias should have known the power of metta (loving kindness), karuna (compassion) upekha (equanimity) and mudita (altruistic joy). It is a source of endless wonderment to me how, while talking eloquently about the Brahma Viharas many people cauterize their minds to the sublime truths set out in them, and seek ascendancy over their fellow beings.
For any government to have as one of its objectives, the establishment of ascendancy over any section of its own people is self debilitating, for wherever there is ascendancy, whether the ascendancy is of class, race, religion or economic power, there must also be oppression, as concave and convex of the same reality, and wherever there is oppression the house is divided, and however long it takes, under the weight of its own contradictions, a divided house must eventually fall.
I was hoping that the government would move swiftly to launch a new peace initiative and give constitutional substance to the harmony I had achieved on the ground, but it was not to be. The field was rich with a golden harvest but there were no gatherers!
An outpouring of government perversity infected the fruits of my toil. Once the mass demonstration had collapsed and the threatened Secessionist Movement had dribbled into the sand, the government saw the outcome as a resounding defeat of the Tamils and as an unqualified victory for the state. Rather than maintain the momentum of reconciliation, the government reverted to its combative mindset and started throwing cheap jibes at the defeated enemy. It is a sad comment on our human condition that once entrapped within the combative mould, some find it impossible to climb out, opting instead perpetually to validate their lives by prolonging conflict.
I must place on record my extreme disappointment that the Sirima Bandaranaike government of 1960-65 failed to build on the groundwork I had laid in Jaffna. Surely, the reproach of history will weigh heavily on them.
However, while the ruling SLFP government played ostrich, the UNP capitalized on the new glasnost and sent emissaries to Jaffna to talk to the Tamil leaders, and out of those talks emerged the rapprochement of 1965, between the government led by Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake and the two main Tamil parties.
It gave me great satisfaction that the Dudley-Chelvanayagam Accord was signed during the last few months of my tenure in Jaffna. That indeed was the first gathering of the harvest, the first fruits of my sowing, but alas, the gatherers soon lost heart and the fruits withered on the vine. For reasons that cannot be recounted here, that Accord too, like the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact of 1957, was abrogated by the government, unilaterally, an year after it was signed. The conflict that was renewed thereafter burgeoned and spiralled out of all control bringing violence, death and destruction to the whole Island for over 45 years.
A new political adventure
All the events I have recorded so far occurred during the first four months of my tenure as GA, i.e. between September and December 1963, and there stretched before me at least another two and a half years of tenancy.. However, before I could settle down to a normal routine and start addressing the gamut of developmental problems that constitutes the portfolio of any GA, I had to deal with a new political challenge, the existence of which neither the police nor even the conventional Tamil political parties were aware.
After the initial opposition from the Tamil leaders had abated and we had arrived at a modus vivendi, a group of youth, feeling that their leaders had sold the pass and were now collaborating with a hated Sinhala government, decided that they had to reverse the trend. However, they set about their intentions in a dramatically different fashion, portending the rise of Tamil militancy and violent rebellion two decades down the road. Let me now turn to a narration of that drama!
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Into the turbulence of Jaffna
A protest through arson
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas") Part 6 By Neville Jayaweera Even in the relative stability of the mid 1960s in Jaffna, the GA was in constant peril of a sudden ambush or of being drenched by a sudden squall, as the two events I am about to narrate will testify.
One day in the first week of February 1964, a few months after the mass demonstration and march on the Kachcheri, I had been called away to Colombo on official work. Early one morning around 2 am, the telephone in my Mt. Lavinia residence rang. At the other end my wife Trixie was very agitated. She told me that the Kachcheri was on fire and was spreading to the Residency, which was immediately adjacent. However, my parents who were staying with her at that time, had quickly summoned the police on the scene and they had fought the fire with water and sand and extinguished it before it reached the Residency.
I had an appointment to see my brother Stanley that morning, but realizing that I had to rush back to Jaffna at first dawn, called him to explain my inability to keep the appointment, and took the morning Air Lanka Dakota flight back to station. However, by the time I reached Jaffna, an Air Force plane ferrying Deputy Inspector General of Police L.I. de Silva(or Aleric Abeygunawardena, I am not sure) and police dog Rex, along with its two handlers, plus Colonel Morris Jayaweera from the army, and Commodore Darley Ingleton of the navy, was already on the ground at the Palaly Airport, having proceeded ahead of me on the orders of the Prime Minister herself. Obviously Stanley had apprised the Prime Minister early in the morning and her response had been swift and overwhelming. I was absolutely in awe of the magnitude and speed of the Prime Minister’s intervention!
I want to dwell a moment on this extraordinary characteristic of Mrs. Bandaranaike’s personality. Once she had identified any public servant as deserving of her support, her loyalty towards him was absolute. The problem however was that, as recompense, she expected from him a personal loyalty to her in perpetuity, leaving no space for him to serve any other government, as I found out to my cost when I served Dudley Senanayake’s government, with the same dedication, from 1965 -1970. Such proprietorial claims on a public servant’s loyalty is unwarranted for it not only makes a mockery of the concept of an non partisan public service, but it is also very hard on the public servant concerned, whose loyalty has always to be impersonal and directed solely towards the incumbent government. After all, a public servant must be just that, a servant of the public, rather than a lackey of any politician.
Police dog Rex
Let me return to my main narrative. By the time I arrived at the Residency, the surrounding Old Park was already swarming with uniformed men, journalists and onlookers and the police investigators and their dog Rex were already on their job.
The investigators found that, as a precautionary measure, the arsonists had used some cricketing gloves to protect their hands when pouring kerosene oil on to some ballot boxes that had been piled high in the rear of the Kachcheri veranda, which they were going to set ablaze. Unhappily for them, some kerosene oil had spilled on a glove, which also ignited when they started the fire. Whereupon, the man whose glove caught fire quickly flung it off his hand on to the floor, and in the ensuing melee left it behind. That was sufficient for smart police dog Rex. Taking the scent, Rex shot off like an arrow, vaulting over fences and parapets, followed by its two handlers, huffing and puffing, hardly able to keep the canine on the leash. Rex ran straight on to the campus of a prestigious boy's school nearby, sprinted down a corridor, went into class room and pounced on a young boy of the university entrance class. On examination, the police found some new burns, corresponding exactly with the burn hole in the glove, on the young boy’s right palm, and he had no alibi to establish his whereabouts that night.
Embarrassingly, the young man turned out to be the son of a judicial officer presiding in a provincial capital elsewhere. Because of the special circumstances of the case, the police sought my permission to prosecute the young boy, but I explained to van Sanden, the Suptd. of Police, that this case had sensitive political overtones which we had to take note of. While it enabled us to expose the ugly face of the Tamil protest, it also provided us with an excellent opportunity to show magnanimity and to consolidate the reconciliation process which had already begun. I also said that regardless of the facts of the case, a prosecution will be construed as a persecution. Furthermore, I argued that purely on moral grounds, we should not destroy the promising career of a young man merely because of an episodic indiscretion.
However, I telephoned the judge concerned and giving him the facts said that although it was within our power to prosecute his son and destroy his future and even jeopardize his own (the judge's) career, I would desist from going down that road. However, I wanted from him an assurance that he will personally reprimand his son and ensure that he will not get involved in such escapades thereafter. The judge was enormously grateful and contrite and said that he will not only discipline his son, but will also take him away from that school. However, I sent for the young man, and van Sanden and I gave him an almighty dressing down, all of which he accepted with great humility. I am glad that we did what we did, because the young man in question, never fell foul of the law thereafter, went on to qualify as a doctor, and settled down to a lucrative practice abroad.
These facts were not lost on the political leaders. It convinced them that far from persecuting the people of Jaffna, my administration was driven only by the highest moral considerations and by a constant deference to the demands of justice and fair play.
However, the ultra vitriolic Tamil paper, the Eelanadu, saw the incident in a completely different perspective. It claimed that the so called arson was in fact a set up by the police, who being disgruntled by the growing rapprochement between the Sinhala and Tamil leaders, wanted to trigger a new round of repression. This was of course an absurd story, considering the totally unbiased evidence produced by the principal witness, Rex the police dog!!
The High Commissioner’s misadventure
So far, I may have given readers the impression that my work as GA of Jaffna had to do only with the ethnic conflict and little to do with much else besides. That would be a wholly wrong impression. Although maintaining law and order, dissolving prejudices and misunderstandings between the communities, and building bridges between the government and the Tamil leaders, consumed a large portion of my time and energies, my work as GA also involved much else besides. Indeed, it involved the whole panoply of a GA's normal duties and not least, receiving High Commissioners and Ambassadors who visited the district officially. While I cannot narrate my work even in some of these sectors, without being tiresome and boring, I want to recall an extraordinary event which developed into a "diplomatic incident".
I said that one of the duties of the GA Jaffna was to receive visiting High Commissioners and Ambassadors in his office or Residency. It was a convention special to Jaffna, from a long way back, and did not normally devolve on the GAs of other districts. I believe the convention was established from as far back as the mid-eighteen eighties, long before Colombo had any foreign embassies on its soil.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the GA of Jaffna was Sir Percival Acland Dyke, a son of the Earl of Devonshire and every bit a Victorian aristocrat. He was a colourful and flamboyant personality, absolutely authoritarian and though supercilious and arrogant towards his fellow white Civil Servants, he was patriarchal and tolerant and utterly loved by the people of Jaffna, who called him the Rajah of the North. In actual fact he modelled himself as one of the Indian Rajah’s so much so that he claimed virtual autonomy from Colombo for the Northern Province and was given the exceptional privilege of communicating directly with Whitehall bypassing the Governor in Colombo. At one time Dyke was offered the Governorship of Kenya, and then of Uganda, but he turned down both offers, preferring instead to remain as GA of Jaffna. As time passed by, the governors who came to Colombo were all so junior to him in service, that he would insist that they should obtain his permission before venturing into the Northern Province. That I believe was the origin of the convention for foreign heads of mission posted to Colombo to call on the GA of Jaffna.
I believe that this convention was later consolidated by the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs because of the sensitive political circumstances prevailing in Jaffna, and visiting Heads of Mission had to be briefed about the diplomatic pitfalls and minefields waiting for them.
The normal protocol in Jaffna was for the Embassy concerned to inform the GA of the intention of its Head of Mission to visit the district and to inquire whether the HC/ Ambassador may call on him, whereupon the GA would give him a date and time to see him. During my time in Jaffna all High Commissioners and Ambassadors visiting Jaffna adhered to this protocol very strictly.
Accordingly, one day the Indian High Commission contacted me and said that their H/Commissioner (HC) would like to visit my district and would like me to give him a date to call on me. At that time, although the tension with the Federal Party leaders had abated, some radical Tamil hotheads were imploring of India to intervene on the side of the Tamil people and had actually asked the Indian HC to visit Jaffna to see the "repression" for himself and recommend to Delhi that they should intervene on the side of the Tamil cause. Against that background, I thought it would be very unwise and embarrassing for the Indian H/Commissioner to visit Jaffna at that time and accordingly advised him to put off his visit for a later date, and that if he came, he would most certainly be politically ambushed by the locals, exposing him to a grave diplomatic embarrassment. Not hearing from the HC thereafter, I assumed he had taken my advice and postponed his visit.
However, one day shortly thereafter, my Divisional Revenue Officer(DRO) Thunukai reported to me that the HC of India, whose name I shall not mention for reasons of courtesy, had been camping out in his division, i.e. well within the Jaffna District, on a shooting expedition. Even if I had ignored the violation of protocol by the HC in visiting my district without notifying me and against my advice, he had actually violated the law of the land by participating in a shooting expedition during a closed season and had now to shelter behind a claim of "diplomatic immunity" in order to avoid prosecution. Eventually when the HC got round to seeing me in my office the same week, with great courtesy but without mincing words, I pointed out to him the error of his ways. He was profusely apologetic and claimed that his office had not briefed him about the protocol and about the closed season etc, and I accepted his apology.
The diplomatic faux pas on the part of the HC was quite understandable, because he a was not a professional Indian Foreign Service diplomat, but a retired colonel from the old British Army of India, who had been rewarded with a diplomatic appointment upon retirement. He was the typical hunting, shooting, fishing, bluff and bluster military man, who had neither an understanding of, nor a taste for, diplomatic niceties, and would have been happier in an officers' mess swapping hunting and fishing yarns over whisky on the rocks, than in discussing diplomatic issues around a table. However, with his personal apology to me, as far as I was concerned, the matter was closed, and should have ended there. It was not to be.
The disloyal toast
A nondescript group of locals calling themselves "The Tamil Citizen's Movement" had organized a public reception to the visiting HC to which they had also invited me along with the Puisne Judge, the District Judge, the Magistrate, and the Suptd. of Police and a whole lot of politicians.
Although I was a bit suspicious about the bona fides of the event, I had no alternative but to go along. However, the real intentions of the organizers became evident when the time came round for toasts and speeches.
When proposing the "Loyal Toast" the chief organizer, Mr. Prerimpanayagam, who was the principal of a school, and a good speaker he was, after launching a tirade against the government, formally proposed that the HC should recommend to Delhi to intervene in SL on behalf of the Tamils, and urgently too. Not least, as he raised his glass and asked the diners to drink the "Loyal Toast" he remarked,
"Your Excellency, ladies and gentlemen, as for the loyal toast, the less said the better", and drank the toast. I could not drink to that charade of a "Loyal Toast" and I continued seated, while to my horror the High Commissioner himself raised his glass and drank to it. I not only remained seated but, as the others resumed their seats, I turned to the High Commissioner, who was seated on my right, and without addressing him as "Excellency", said, "Mr. High Commissioner, by drinking that toast you have administered a slap on the face of the country to which you have been accredited. I am amazed at your lack of diplomatic sense. Be assured, you will hear more about this", and leaning across him to the gentleman who was presiding, and who proposed the toast, Mr. Prerimpanayagam, said, "Mr. P, you have every right to express discontentment with government policy but you have no right to be a traitor". So saying I got up, and throwing my crumpled napkin on to the table, strode out in high dudgeon, for all to see.
The same night I briefed my brother Mr. Stanley Jayaweera of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked him to brief the Perm Sec. Mr. N. Q. Dias. Early the following morning I had a call from N. Q. Dias. He was in a rage with the Indian HC for conduct which he interpreted as interference in the internal affairs of the country and he summoned me to meet him the following morning in Colombo. The papers sensationalized the event to such a degree that when I arrived in the Fort Station by overnight train from Jaffna, there were a dozen or so journalists and cameramen waiting on the platform to talk to me. I drove straightaway to see the Perm. Sec. N. Q. Dias. After hearing all the facts from me, the Perm. Sec. summoned the High Commissioner to Colombo and voiced to him the government’s displeasure over his indiscretions in Jaffna. Obviously on instructions from the Prime Minister, N. Q. Dias then reported the incident to Delhi and conveyed to them the "displeasure" of the government over the conduct of its High Commissioner in Colombo. In diplomatic jargon, conveying "displeasure" over the conduct of an Ambassador or HC is only slightly less serious than declaring the diplomat concerned persona non grata. Delhi responded positively and within a few months, the HC was recalled to Delhi on the ground that his term was up in any case, which was a convenient face saving exit from a diplomatic faux pas.
In case the point is missed, I want to draw attention to the manner in which Mr. N. Q. Dias reigned over foreign Heads of Mission posted to Colombo, and prevented them from running amok in the country, as they generally did after 1977.
The caste factor
Earlier on in this chapter I referred briefly to the rigid caste structure of the Tamil people as a factor in understanding the Tamil revolt and said that I would deal with that question in depth later in on. Let me now turn to that issue.
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The wretched of the earth
Into the turbulence of Jaffna Part 7
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
By Neville Jayaweera
In the early 1960s, a black psychiatrist from Martinique named Franz Fanon wrote an explosive little book titled the "The wretched of the earth". The book provided a centre of integration for much of the New Left thinking of that era, and equally, fuelled many of the insurrectionary movements in Africa and Latin America of that time. The wretched of the earth were the faceless, anonymous, underclass of various societies, who for centuries had been crushed, degraded and marginalized by a dominant class. Generation after generation, the dominant class had programmed their minds to believe that their degradation had been ordained by the natural order of things, and in the case of the Tamil underclass by God himself, so that all self-belief and a sense of self-identity on which they could build their lives had been squeezed out of them.
Fanon’s work was based mostly on data he had collected while working as a psychiatrist in Algeria where the oppression of the local people by the French was one of the most brutal chapters in the history of colonialism. Fanon could as well have written that book had he collected his data from among the so called pariah casts of Jaffna.
The hyperbole here is deliberate. It is the only way I can draw the attention of my readers to the appalling tragedy of the Tamil underclass, at least as it was in the mid 1960s when I discovered it, and as it had been for thousands of years before that. The Tamil underclass of Jaffna was referred to variously as the depressed, scheduled or pariah castes. However, throughout the rest of this chapter I shall refer to these unfortunate people simply as non-Vellalas because on principle, I do not refer to people by names that connote inferiority or are pejorative of them. In the 1960s the underclass constituted almost 60% of a population of 700,000 Tamils in the Jaffna District.
What follows is a narration of how I got drawn into a study of that phenomenon, and a record of my paltry efforts at alleviating it.
Denial of temple entry
Once the political storms had subsided and my administration had resumed course on a seemingly calm sea, I sensed another storm cloud gathering over the horizon. However this time, it was not a conflict with the government that was rearing its head but an internal conflict, between the Brahmin and Vellala owned temple authorities on one side, and the non-Vellala castes on the other.
The Brahmins, who were at the apex of the caste ladder, were primarily a priestly group, mostly officiating in temples, and their numbers among the people of Jaffna were too minuscule to provide a basis for power.
The Vellalas were the next rung on the caste ladder. Although they constituted only about 40% of the total Tamil population, they were the dominant caste, but they were more than merely a dominant caste. They also constituted an economic class, a formidable power system, owning most of the means of production, and exercising total social, economic and political control.
The non–Vellalas were all those castes who fell outside the Vellala fold, and included even the fisher folk. They owned little or no land and had no basis for economic or social power. For thousands of years, first when they lived in India before they migrated into Jaffna, and later, throughout their sojourn in the Jaffna Peninsula, the non-Vellalas had been subjected to an existence of anonymity and degradation, and had been deprived of access to any means whereby to improve the quality of their lives. One of the most outrageous deprivations they suffered was the denial of access to temples, which was another way of saying that they did not exist even in God’s mind. They were non-persons!
By the mid 1960s I sensed that the consciousness of the non-Vellalas was hardening and that they had begun to strain at their shackles. The first overt manifestation of unrest was, a demand from them to be given access to all temples, and a readiness to force the issue through civil strife.
The Prevention of Social Disabilities Act of 1957 had made the denial of entry into places of worship on grounds of caste, an offence. However, as late as 1964 the practice of denying the non-Vellalas entry to temples in Jaffna continued, as if the Act had never been passed. Several delegations from these castes began to see me and protest the refusal of temple authorities to give them access to temples and said that if I did not take action to enforce the law they will take the law into their own hands. Significantly, there were no protests from any of the 11 MPs of my district over my failure to enforce the Social Disabilities Act, and of course they were all from the Vellala caste! Equally sinister was that all 14 DROs of my district seemed to pour cold water on any move by me to even look into the problem, and needless to say the DROs were also from the Vellala caste! I realized I had to do something, but I was hemmed in, without any space for manoeuvre. Therefore I decided that before resorting to law enforcement procedures, I should do some independent probing.
The responses I got from every leading Hindu citizen of Jaffna whom I consulted was that the denial of entry into temples, and indeed the whole Tamil caste system, was deeply embedded in the Hindu religion, and that any attempt by me to enforce the law will not only be resisted, but will be interpreted as an act of sacrilege, and furthermore, that it will embroil me in a confrontation which will be far more problematic than the attempt to enforce the Sinhala Only policy. Needless to say, all those whom I had consulted were also Vellalas!!
On the other hand the Christians whom I consulted were all of the opinion that the caste system was evil but they also conformed to it willingly and would not violate its boundaries.
I realised that the issue that was now confronting me had potential for turmoil on a horrendous scale, especially because I was a Sinhala, and it was easy to allege that that a Sinhala GA was trying to divide Tamil society for political ends.
On the other hand, I also realized that those whom I had consulted were very sincere in their belief that their religion did really sanction their rigid caste system. However, I was also aware that what they believed was not consistent with the Hindu scriptures that I knew of, but my knowing the truth subjectively was not sufficient. I had to prove it to them objectively. I reasoned therefore that my first priority must be to research the Brahmin/Vellala claim seriously and confront them with my findings before resorting to law enforcement procedures.
Research
During the ensuing two years, i.e. between 1964 and 1966, I spent nearly all of my leisure hours in the Jaffna Library (that was the one that was burnt down in the 1980s) with a pundit by my side, pouring over Hindu religious texts, most of which were available in English translations, but some only in Tamil. The outcome of these studies was a monograph running into over 15,000 words in which I proved to any unbiased and rational mind, that the claim that Hindu scriptures sanctioned the Tamil caste system or that they warranted the exclusion of any group of people from temples on grounds of case, had no basis either in the Vedas or in the Saiva scriptures.
Just when I had finished my work I received transfer orders, so I did not have the opportunity to use my research as a platform to mount any serious programme of social engineering. However, in order to ensure that it got the widest possible readership I released my work to the press, and the Daily News serialized it in a series of articles during the first week of February 1966. I also released copies of my monograph to all the protagonists of the system, especially to Professor C. Suntheralingam, who was their chief ideologue and theoretician, and sent copies to every one of the non-Vellala delegations who had interviewed me. Thereby I ensured that my research findings had been sown as widely as possible, and hoped that even after I had left Jaffna they would bear fruit.
The monograph setting out my findings on Hinduism and the Tamil caste system, involve references to a great many scriptural texts which will be out of place in the body of this chapter. However, to satisfy the curiosity of those who are driven by a deeper interest, I am attaching the monograph as an appendix to this chapter.
The storming of Maviddapuram
My research bore fruit sooner than I expected. Two years after I had left Jaffna, in June 1968, having armed themselves with the scriptural facts that I had uncovered, the non-Vellalas had finally organized themselves effectively into a mass movement, and stormed the great Maviddapuram Temple, the bastion of Brahmanism in Jaffna. Vernon Abeysekera who had succeeded me as GA, and R. Sunderalingam, who had succeeded Jack van Sanden as Suptd. of Police, had tried their best to negotiate a settlement between Prof C. Suntheralingam who was the chief protagonist for the temple authorities, and the non-Vellala crowd, but to no avail. Prof Suntheralingam had stood at the entrance to the temple, flailing his walking stick over his head and threatening anyone who came within striking distance. Eventually, the protestors stormed the temple en masse, carried the day, and once and for all, a terrible injustice that had stained Hindu worship for thousands of years was finally erased.
The police prosecuted Prof Suntheralingam under the Social Disabilities Act and the Supreme Court fined him Rs 50. In return Prof Suntheralingam filed a private suit against the R. Sunderalingam the Suptd of Police, but the case was thrown out, and Sunderalingam went on to be a Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) and later the Head of the narcotics division of Interpol.
The temple entry problem was merely the tip of an iceberg, floating on a vast ocean of unrest. Hidden from view, was a mass of people harbouring deep resentments which had been accumulating for thousands of years without an opportunity for expression, and more than 60% of the population of Jaffna constituted that mass. No one from the outside world had ever given them a thought. Worse still, no one from inside either! They were Franz Fanon’s "The wretched of the earth".
What it meant to be a non-Vellala
Up until the mid 1960s when I was GA, the non-Vellalas performed all the mundane or menial tasks of Tamil society. They were the artisans, the merchants, the potters, the toddy tappers, the tenant farmers and farm labourers, barbers, road sweepers, etc, and not least the warriors. Even the fisher-folk, who among the Sinhala have a preeminent place, were in the eyes of the Vellalas, outcastes. According to a classification done by Simon Casie Chitty of the CCS in the 19th century, there were 152 of these non-Vellala castes in Jaffna, all of them categorized as pariah and the workers and their functions were permanently locked to each other by heredity.
The central characteristic of Jaffna’s caste structure was the congruence of heredity with economic and social deprivation. That is to say, if someone was born into any of the non-Vellala castes, he was permanently locked into his prescribed role, and was also inextricably tied to his village. He had no opportunities for betterment, or for upward or territorial mobility, however clever or entrepreneurial he may be.
This was in sharp contrast to the Sinhala caste system, where anyone outside the dominant Goigama caste could not only match, but often excel the Goigama in economic and social power. That was not possible within the Tamil caste system, within which no one outside the hallowed Vellala caste could aspire to heights that were the preserve of the Vellalas.
Even in the mid 1960s, the following principles defined what it meant to be a non-Vellala.
1. Regardless of natural endowments, anyone born a non-Vellala was frozen into his particular station for all of his life, be it fishing, tree climbing, road sweeping or whatever. Heredity was a cast iron frame from which there was no escape.
2. They dared not marry anyone from the Vellala caste.
3. They were not allowed into premises occupied by the Vellalas except for doing the tasks they was born into.
4. They did not have access into temples owned or managed by Brahmins or Vellalas. In other words, they were non-persons.
5. They did not have access into Hindu schools or to proceed for higher education. This barrier was breached effectively only when missionary schools began to proliferate, much to the consternation of Hindu leaders.
6. They could not reside outside their villages.
7. They could not drink at the village well nor use any other public amenity outside their own villages.
8. They could not wear jewellery, nor ride in carriages nor use drums at any ceremony.
9. When they died they could not be cremated or buried on land reserved for the Vellalas.
Perhaps things have changed now, but in the 1960s, the Tamil caste system was nearly as oppressive as that in India.
The awakening of the non- Vellalas
In the midst of this powder keg of disaffection the missionary schools were like a slow burning fuse. For the first time in the experience of the non-Vellalas, the mission schools opened to them the benefits of education, treated them equally with the Vellalas, and gave them self-respect and dignity.
In the 1860s Arumuga Navalar, the great Hindu nationalist of Jaffna, led a campaign against the mission schools because they were destabilizing the rigid Hindu social structure. The non-Vellalas, who obviously found the mission schools a means to liberation from centuries of degradation and anonymity, opposed Arumuga Navalar’s campaign, but it was not only the non-Vellalas who opposed Navalar. So did the Vellalas, who found that the mission schools gave them access to government service which was fast becoming their main economic power base.
Modern communication technologies fanned the fuse ignited by the mission schools into a leaping flame. Even though the people could not travel beyond their villages, these technologies enabled them to travel in their minds and a radical transformation of consciousness got under way.
Working in tandem, the mission schools and modern communication technologies set in motion a spiral of rising expectations, but because the social and political structures within which the non-Vellalas were trapped gave them no scope for fulfilment, rising expectations rapidly mutated into rising frustrations.
As the consciousness of the non-Vellalas ignited it was only a matter of time before their rage would burst into a conflagration. The first evidence that the flame was taking hold came in 1970 when two youth organizations called the Marnavar Peravai and The Tamil Liberation Organisation (TLO) were founded with the declared purpose of arming their people and one of those who joined them was a young 18 years old school dropout by the name of Velupillai Pirabakaran. The flame spread rapidly and by the mid 1980s burst into a conflagration. That fire is still burning.
Two Tamil nationalisms
One of the dominant fallacies of our times is the claim that Tamil nationalism is a single, undifferentiated, and all encompassing phenomenon, which can be dealt with at a single level. I think not. There are in fact two Tamil nationalisms, the Vellala-led, bourgeois democratic nationalism which focussed primarily on the language issue and the non-Vellala led, insurrectionary, violent nationalism, which focussed on a much wider set of issues. Often they are as much in collision with each other, as they are in contention with the state. Up until about the mid 1980s, the non-Vellala insurrectionary nationalism was content to follow in the wake of the Vellala-led bourgeois nationalism, but as the latter proved increasingly impotent to deliver on the expectations of their people, the former wrested the leadership of the Tamils’ struggle. In a dramatic reversal of roles, the Vellala led bourgeois democratic nationalism started piggy-backing the non-Vellala led insurrectionary violent nationalism.
Next, I want to look more closely at the "two Tamil nationalisms" hypothesis.
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Into the turbulence of Jaffna-Part - 8
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
The twilight of the VellalasBy Neville Jayaweera
The reference to two Tamil nationalisms is not intended to deny the overarching consciousness of Tamilness that unites all Tamil speaking people. The Sri Lankan Tamils share a common history, a common language, a common religion, and the occupancy of a common territory for over a thousand years, all of which together constitute the minimum requirements of a claim to nationhood (not to be confused for statehood).
However, within that overarching unity there are also great divergences. Though they all speak the same language, and trace their origins to Tamil Nadu, Jaffna Tamils differ from Eastern Province Tamils and from the Up-Country Tamils, notably in their historical and cultural experiences, and not least in the way they speak Tamil and respond to political challenges.
The Jaffna Tamils community itself is further fragmented. Much to my surprise, one of the discoveries I made during my years in Jaffna was that the seemingly undifferentiated Jaffna Tamil society was cleft right down the middle by an almost impenetrable caste/class barrier, which virtually concretized the Jaffna Tamils into two distinct socio-economic entities, the Vellala and the non-Vellala.
However, before I turn my attention to the issue of what constitutes their separateness, I want to dispel any impression I might have created that the class divide within Jaffna Tamil society was peculiar just to the Tamils.
To the contrary, from as far back as recorded history, the divide between those who owned the means of production and those who worked them has characterized all societies, whether primitive, ancient, medieval or modern, and needless to say, that includes Sri Lanka as well.
What was unique and distinctive about Tamil society was that the rigid caste system set that divide in concrete. Once a person was born a road sweeper he remained a road sweeper throughout his life, with no possibility of escape, even if he had natural endowments that fitted him to be a scientist. The congruence of class with caste made the Tamil system pernicious and vulnerable to revolution as the only possible catalyst for change.
The Radala oppression
The Radala oppression of the Kandyan peasantry was as iniquitous as the Vellala dominance over the non-Vellalas. However, systematic government interventions following Independence helped greatly to mitigate it. In the early 1950s the government appointed a Kandyan Peasantry’s Commission to look into the problems of the Kandyan peasants resulting from the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1840, and on its recommendations successive governments initiated major rehabilitation programmes, under the Land Development Ordinance, for alleviating the plight of the upcountry peasantry.
I recall how when I was working in the Ratnapura and Badulla Districts in the 1950s/60s, we acquired large tracts of land from the surrounding tea and rubber estates and alienated them in small allotments to the landless. Likewise, we cleared whole swathes of forests and launched colonization projects also for settling the landless and for stepping up rice production. Furthermore, the Paddy Lands Act also helped to release the stranglehold that landowners exercised over the pauperized peasantry.
Kannangara’s free education scheme and a network of Central Schools, proved another great catalyst.
By helping to diminish rural landlessness, and by reducing discontentment amongst the poor, these government initiatives put a brake on social and political instability, until rapid economic growth in the decades that followed, reduced the peoples’ dependence on land and enabled a fairer distribution of the national product.
Marginalising the non-Vellalas
Such initiatives, to mitigate the effects of landlessness among the Tamils of Jaffna, were not launched on a scale in any way comparable to those in the South and discontentment among their landless and the marginalized, i.e. among the non-Vellalas, continued to escalate.
When I took over as GA of Jaffna in 1963 I was appalled to see the paucity of governments’ interventions on their behalf, and they represented 60% of the population of the district. The only fully functioning major irrigation project was Iranamadu, which had been restored by the British, pre-Independence, and most of the lands benefiting from its waters belonged to the Vellalas. The other projects, still incomplete at that time were Akkarayankulam and Tharmapuram, both in the Vanni, but they barely made an impact on the mounting sense of frustration among the non-Vellalas, and they were being driven to despair. All my personal pleas to Colombo, to Minister C.P. de Silva and to the Prime Minister herself, evoked one response - "wait for the Mahaveli diversion" - which at that time did not seem even a distant prospect.
For over a hundred years, lacking land and access to government service, which were avenues monopolized by the Vellalas, many non-Vellalas took to smuggling as a profession. Velvettiturai, the home of Pirabhakaran, was its hub, and the inhabitants of a considerable stretch of the northern coast depended on smuggling for their livelihood, supplemented of course by the fishing industry.
As far as governments in Colombo were aware, the problem of the Tamils was simply the language problem and their demand for regional autonomy. It was only a matter of time before the non-Vellalas would demonstrate that they were driven by more fundamental concerns, such as opportunities to live with dignity as human beings, free from the oppression either of the Vellalas or of the state.
A silent conspiracy
There was almost a silent conspiracy, unintended but effective nonetheless, to consign the non-Vellalas to oblivion. The members of the silent conspiracy comprised the British rulers, the Vellalas, the government, the Marxist parties and not least the intellectual class.
The British followed the age old maxim of all imperialisms, which is to co-opt the local ruling class, in this instance the Vellalas, as their comprador agents. The British did exactly the same among the Sinhala.
The Vellalas willingly submitted to co-option by the British who responded by colluding in the Vellala’s domination of the rest of the Tamil society. It is significant that throughout 500 years of colonial domination of Jaffna, after the fall of Sangkili, the last King of Jaffna, in 1581, there were no significant resistance movements against the colonial masters as there were among the Sinhala in the South. The Vellalas never produced a Keppetipola (1818) or a Gongalagoda Banda or a Puran Appu (1848) - even though the latter were both dummy heroes - as symbols of an anti colonial protest.
It was not only the colonial rulers who colluded with the Vellalas in reducing the non-Vellalas to oblivion. So did the entire political establishment in the Sinhala South.
When successive governments in the South thought that they were negotiating with the leaders of the Tamil people, they were in fact talking only to the Vellala class leaders, represented by the FP and the TC, whereas a vast 60% underclass had no status or place in those negotiations. It was as if they did not exist at all. These negotiations focused mostly on issues like language and standardization policies, which were important primarily to the Vellalas, but not to the non-Vellalas. The Vellalas campaigned on the language issue primarily because the elevation of Sinhala to the status of the official language deprived them of opportunities to make their way through the public service, and not merely because language was a fundamental right. The public service had been the stamping ground of the Vellalas and the loss of opportunities to access it, because of language, made no difference to the non-Vellalas. Likewise, when the Vellalas launched a sustained campaign to tar the "Sri" symbol on motor vehicles, it had no meaning for the non-Vellalas who not only did not own cars, but did not have even donkeys to ride on!
The Marxist parties must also share some part of the blame for keeping the non-Vellalas voiceless. Given the opportunity to integrate the oppressed castes of Jaffna into the wider class struggle, they clung to their text book doctrine that only an organized urban proletariat was capable of leading the revolution, and relegated the oppressed peasantry to a lumpen status, incapable of mounting any resistance to oppression. P. Kandiah, MP of Point Pedro (CP Moscow Wing) and N. Sanmugathasan (Peking wing) were the only noteworthy exceptions but they never developed their base in the peninsula. Pirabhakaran filled that vacuum.
The intellectual class
The intellectual class, the academics and the scholars, and the broad NGO community of the South, had neither time nor space for the non-Vellalas. They produced reams of learned papers, wrote scores of books, organized countless seminars the world over and put out impressive bibliographies, with the ethnic conflict as their subject, but how much space did they devote to looking at caste as a powerful motor driving the ethnic conflict? How much empirical research into the caste structure of Jaffna have Sri Lankan academics and scholars carried out? Granted that since 1983 empirical research would have impossible in Jaffna, why is that there have not been serious attempts at even conceptualizing the caste issue or at developing even a tentative hypothesis? To my knowledge, and I am open to correction, only two scholarly works have been published on the subject, and both were by foreigners, Bryan Plaffenberg and Peter Robb, and both were concerned more with the caste structure in Tamil Nadu than concretely with the caste system in Jaffna. Furthermore, I have a serious problem with the credibility of the methodologies adopted by both these writers.
Few things illustrate the paucity of the Sri Lankan intellectuals’ agenda, as the fact that when, in 2001, the Marga Institute sponsored what was perhaps the biggest project ever, for looking at the ethnic conflict, and produced 19 monographs on its varied aspects, they forgot to sponsor a single monograph, exclusively for looking at the caste aspect of the conflict. That is the measure of the unreality in which the intellectual class in the South has lived relative to the caste issue in Jaffna.
The twilight of the Vellalas
The Vellalas are a unique Tamil social formation, peculiar only to Sri Lanka. In Tamil Nadu for instance, except for a thin scattering throughout the State there are no indigenous Vellala concentrations of any social or political consequence.
They are also a resourceful people, very intelligent, entrepreneurial, hardworking, disciplined, and resilient, and they have made enormous contributions towards Sri Lanka’s advancement in all spheres of the nation’s life.
They are unique for another reason as well. They consider themselves superior to any other Tamil group anywhere in the world, whether it be in the Eastern Province, or in the Up-Country, or even in Tamil Nadu, and consider their own spoken Tamil to be the Gold Standard, and the Tamil spoken elsewhere as "coolie" Tamil. I can myself bear witness to the distinctiveness of the spoken Vellala Tamil. I learnt Tamil from a Vellala pundit and when I started speaking it to the ordinary people of Jaffna, their eyes boggled in disbelief and incomprehension. It had the same effect as speaking the Queen’s English to the dockyard workers of Tilbury.
The assumed superiority and hubris of the Vellala class ultimately proved their undoing. They isolated themselves from every other centre of Tamil political power, principally Tamil Nadu, and when they had their backs to the wall, there were no allies to bail them out. They had no leverage, in Sri Lanka or abroad, and as the props that supported their power disintegrated, their demise as a political force in Sri Lanka was inevitable.
Three major factors contributed towards this calamitous outcome. Vellala dominance rested on what had seemed an indestructible tripod.
1. One leg of the tripod was the patronage of the British.
2. The second leg of the tripod was access to government service and
3. The third leg was the ownership of land in the peninsula and elsewhere in the North.
Let us look at how that tripod crumbled within just fifty years.
The British gave the initial impetus to the Vellala class in their ascent to power. To gauge the extent of that impetus, one has only to read, as I have done, the daily diaries of Acland Dyke, GA of Jaffna for 38 years and of William Twyneham, GA for 28 years. Their patronage of the Vellalas was fulsome, and it enabled their young men who passed out from mission schools in Jaffna to gain speedy entry into government service. That is not to say that these young men could not have managed on their own, or did not merit their appointments. They were very intelligent, entrepreneurial, hard working, disciplined, loyal, and thrifty, qualities which any ruler would value very highly, and on the strength of which they would have progressed even unaided. They are qualities that economists and historians have identified as the driving motor of capitalism and as the foundation blocks of empire. However when the British relinquished power, the Vellalas lost the umbrella under which they had prospered for over a century, and they had to fend for themselves.
Along with the Sinhala leaders of the time, like the Senanayakes, E.W.Perera, et al, Ponnambalam Ramanathan and Ponnambalam Arunachalam positioned themselves in the vanguard of the nationalist struggle but they were from the top drawer of Tamil society, who having already appropriated economic and social power, were now seeking political power to augment their armoury. When the British left, without securing for the Vellala class the political power they craved, the Vellalas had their backs to the wall, but it took them some time to read the writing on it!
It was only after 1956 that the Vellalas began to read the writing on the wall. As the Sinhala Only policy worked its way through the system, the structure and complexion of the public services changed dramatically. In a field where they once reigned, the Vellala class found themselves progressively marginalized and reduced to a rump, and the second leg of the Vellala power tripod began to crumble.
The third leg of the tripod began to crumble not under pressure from without, but under assault from within. Post 1983, when the militant groups, principally the LTTE, began to assert power in the peninsula and started demanding monetary contributions from the only people who had money, mostly in cash and jewellery, i.e. from the Vellalas, and also started demanding from their families support for the "cause" in the form of manpower, that is, at least one son from each family, the Vellala families cut and fled, either to Colombo, or abroad, leaving their properties to be expropriated by the rebels.
Let us not forget that the Vellalas are a very bourgeois people. They are unused to living in trenches, to being bitten by fleas and ticks, and to braving the blistering Vanni sun, or of running the risk of violent death, preferring instead to work at desks, or in hospitals or in the law courts and seeking always the comforts of a respectable middle class life.
When the Vellalas abandoned their houses and lands in the peninsula, the non-Vellalas simply walked in and took them over, carrying out thereby a thoroughly radical programme of land expropriation, that had not been attempted anywhere else in Sri Lanka, and comparable to the eviction of Kulaks from their holdings in the early years of the Russian Revolution. It was not merely that the rebels moved in and took over Vellala lands but they obliterated all old boundaries, fences, and surveyors’ bench marks, so that any attempt hereafter by the original owners to reclaim their properties on the basis of their title deeds is a near impossibility.
Furthermore, from the early 1980s, as successive armies trudged backwards and forwards over their lands, and as High Security Zones widened their perimeters and as the familiar land marks and boundaries that defined privately owned plots of land were erased, most of Jaffna’s agricultural plots were reduced to a wasteland and the once green fields are now largely abandoned. The small-holding agricultural economy of the Jaffna peninsula has all but collapsed, and with it the last bastion of Vellala power.
The collapse of the Vellalas as an indigenous political force may delight many of their critics, but it has left a vacuum in the political configuration of the country, which will have far reaching ramifications and consequences, and their critics may have to think again. Let me turn now to that issue.
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The non-Vellalas unboundby Neville Jayaweera Into the turbulence of Jaffna – Part 9
(a chapter extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs, titled "Dilemmas")
For the reasons I have identified earlier in this chapter, the Vellala class has been decisively evicted from a dominant role in national politics, and for the first time in a thousand years has been reduced to a subaltern status. They now survive as an appendage to the very class, the non-Vellalas, whom they once despised and marginalized.
That should not blind us to certain facts concerning them. Regardless that the Vellalas’ perspective on national politics has been highly introverted and class based, throughout the past hundred years, their ideological commitment to the democratic process has been consistent and unequivocal, even though, since the Vaddukkottai Declaration that commitment has been tarnished somewhat. That notwithstanding, they understood liberal democratic values, they have always respected the parliamentary process and their primary commitment has been to dialogue and negotiation. Their eviction from the national political landscape has not only dented the country’s democratic fabric but it has also taken Tamil politics out of the democratic discourse and placed it in an altogether different domain.
At a personal level I can confirm that during my years in Jaffna and over the past 40 years I have interacted with the most iconic of the Vellala leaders as well as with simple Vellala middle class folk, and many of my friends hail from amongst them. I can also confess that they are some of the finest human beings I have met anywhere, cultured and dignified, never vulgar or offensive and never abusive or crude. The eviction of the Vellalas from a dominant role in Tamil and national politics saddens me, but history unfolds impersonally and relentlessly.
The eviction of the Vellalas from national politics has three major political consequences.
1. The first is the unbinding of the non-Vellalas and their elevation to the dominant place in Tamil politics.
2. The second is the impact of this ascendency on the national political process as well as on international relations and
3. The third is the rise of the Tamil diaspora.
I shall deal with each of these separately.
The upsurge of the
non-Vellalas
The vacuum created by the eviction of the Vellalas from the dominant role in Tamil politics has been filled by the non-Vellalas, who are now the major driving force of Tamil politics. After unnumbered centuries the no-Vellalas have been unbound.
Several characteristics differentiate the non-Vellalas from the Vellalas as a political force. Whereas the Vellalas enjoyed a heritage of stability and power, the non-Vellalas inherit a legacy of instability and oppression. Whereas the Vellalas have been sophisticated and bourgeois the non-Vellalas are simplistic and crude. Whereas the Vellalas have been adept at dialogue and negotiation, the non-Vellalas are bereft of negotiating skills, which has been evidenced abundantly in recent years. Whereas the Vellala consciousness emanates a quiet confidence and a sense of dignity, the non-Vellalas are driven by paranoia and are highly prone to violence.
To understand the non-Vellalas as a potential political power house, we must grasp how their psyche has been shaped in the crucible of oppression, humiliation and suffering, for untold hundreds, or even thousands of years. Throughout their long sojourn in the wilderness, in India, and for the past 1,000 years in Sri Lanka, they have known only authoritarian rule and oppression, and have never experienced democracy. If I am asked to identify one quality that characterizes their collective consciousness, more than any other, I would unhesitatingly say that it is paranoia, that is, the disposition not to trust anyone but to see enemies and conspiracies lurking everywhere. Without any malicious intention I would say that their world-view is that of troglodytes i.e. creatures who live in underground caves.
Especially noteworthy is that, through the Vellakkaras and Maravars, warrior castes who were a part of the Pandya/Chola armies that invaded Sri Lanka in the 10-11th centuries, and were later employed by the Sinhala kings as mercenaries, the non-Vellalas also inherit a tradition of militarism which is reputed for brutality and barbarism. The Portuguese and the British suppressed this militaristic tradition among the non-Vellala Tamils, but the rebel armies have readily co-opted it. The Sinhala words maravara balaya (which means, the power of intimidation) have their origin in the depredations of the Maravars in Sri Lanka during the Chola invasions.
Once the Vellala top cover had been removed exposing the non-Vellala base, this is what the government and the international community can expect to find. They will be confronted by a political entity, united by a common experience of being suppressed for aeons by the Vellalas, and of being defeated and humiliated by the state. The government must not forget that even after the killing fields have been vacated, whenever that will be, the non-Vellala Tamils in the North alone will still number over 500,000, and they will be a powerful force to reckon with.
In my view, unless Sri Lanka can produce a leader, who, while keeping his nose to the grindstone, can also keep his eyes on the stars ( Peter Drucker’s model), the next phase of Sri Lanka’s history will be more troubled than the past few decades have been. The critical question is, whether Sri Lanka can produce a leader, who is capable of that paradoxical role, of being both a Commissar and a Yogi.
Implications for
international relations
The isolation of the Vellala class from international links proved their undoing. They had no leverage abroad. That explains why the Vellala led Federal Party and Tamil Congress were never able to stir the interest either of Tamil Nadu or of New Delhi, on behalf of their cause, and why their cries rarely received a serious hearing in India.
By contrast, though they are currently proscribed by New Delhi, the non-Vellalas have historic structural links with Tamil Nadu, where over 80% of the population constitute the parent stock of the Jaffna non-Vellalas. That is why when the latter are threatened there is unrest and agitation in Tamil Nadu. Caste affinities tie the non-Vellalas of Jaffna to the majority of Tamil Nadu in a historic relationship and a lack of understanding of this axis of political power can prove critical for Sri Lanka.
How the future unfolds depends primarily on how the government in Colombo responds to this reality. If it proceeds rapidly to resolve the historic grievances of the non-Vellala people i.e. the problem of landlessness, the lack of access to jobs, their perception of being oppressed, both by the SL government as well as by the Vellalas, their resentment at having their lands treated as occupied territory, and above all, their exclusion from political power, and initiates effective measures rapidly to ameliorate them, it will be possible to cocoon them and isolate them from the Tamil Nadu giant.
On the other hand, if the government in Colombo opts for myopia and succumbs to those who ask "what grievances?", one can expect Tamil Nadu not only seriously to destabilize Sri Lanka, but equally to start rocking the Indian Union boat itself, which can then capsize Sri Lanka as well!
The rise of the diaspora
Another consequence of the fall of the Vellalas has been the emergence of a formidable Tamil Diaspora, which is now composed equally of Vellalas as well of the non-Vellalas. Wounded and humiliated by decades of Sinhala hegemonism, in a dramatic metamorphosis, the overarching consciousness of Tamilness has prevailed, and the two historic Tamil enemies, the Vellalas and non-Vellalas, have closed ranks.
Although within a matter of fifty years their world had been turned upside down, their capacity to bounce back and regain lost ground has been phenomenal, a feat matched only by the Jewish Diaspora. Today, in the UK for instance, the Tamils of both caste groups have a common business directory, titled the Tamil Pages, patterned on the regular Yellow Pages, advertising enterprises owned exclusively by them, and in 2004 the directory numbered over 700 pages, and over 26,000 registered Tamil business enterprises paying taxes in the UK, and that is not counting the thousands in the professions and over 50,000 corner shops and convenience stores which do not enter the registry. I am told that in the USA and Canada their business directories are 3-4 times as large and include many shipping lines among the registered enterprises.
All this represents an enormous entrepreneurial resource which might well have been utilized within Sri Lanka itself for generating wealth, but is now not only a net loss to the country, but is being mobilized against it, with the LTTE acting as proxy. A few years back the gross annual income generated by the Tamil Diaspora in the Western countries alone, was estimated to exceed Sri Lanka’s GDP. Like all other Diaspora that owe their origin to a deep trauma, the united Tamil Diaspora have not forgotten the past, and they are now being driven by a terrible revengist resolve.
A belated clarification
of terms
Even belatedly, I think I should clarify two words I have been using in this chapter, namely Vellala and non-Vellala. It is erroneous to assume that by Vellala I mean just the Federal Party and that by non-Vellala I mean simply the LTTE. I consider these entities to be only ephemeral manifestations of a deeper structural reality, which will persist long after the manifestations have passed from view.
Also, I have endeavoured in this chapter to avoid, as much as possible, using the words LTTE and Pirabhikaran, because they seem to evoke, even among the intelligent and the educated, highly emotional responses, which obscure their capacity to perceive the structural realities underlying them. When we confuse the manifestation for the underlying reality we are merely addressing the symptoms, leaving room for the hidden reality to flare up as another malignant manifestation, when the one confronting us currently has been obliterated.
That deeper underlying reality is caste, and the central theme of this chapter has been that unless one understands how caste has fuelled and shaped the conflict, our ability to resolve it will be proportionally impaired. I am not saying that caste is the principal factor driving the Tamil response to Sinhala hegemonism, but that it is a very important factor, and if I have appeared to over-emphasize it, it is only in order to remedy its neglect by policy makers, commentators and the intellectual community.
Caste was a mechanism evolved in India, over a two thousand year period, for allocating specific social functions to specific categories of people deemed best equipped to carry them out. The allocation of social functions to specific groups of people based on aptitude was not in and of itself evil, although social systems that practiced it tended to end up as slave societies and dictatorships, as the political philosopher Karl Popper argues in his book, "The Open Society".
The functional allocation of social tasks was first conceived of in the Rig Veda around 1000 BC and was spelled out as the Varnasrama Dharma, which was later codified minutely around 600 AD through the Manu Smriti. It was first practiced concretely in Sparta, which was the archetypal slave society, around 400 years BC and it was also embodied in Plato’s "Republic" as well as in Hegel’s concept of the perfect state.
However, in none of these cases was the allocation of social functions to specified groups of people based on heredity. What made the Tamil caste system pernicious and absolutely evil was the hereditary principle -once a road sweeper, always a road sweeper – and that was the mechanism that subjected the non-Vellalas to degradation and anonymity for over two thousand years, first in India and later in Jaffna.
Summing up
Based on my experiences in Jaffna in the 1960s, in this chapter I have tried to open a new window to our understanding of the conflict that has engulfed Sri Lanka for over three decades. Although it draws on my direct experiences, and face to face interactions, with both the Sinhala and the Tamil for many decades, both in SL and abroad, my contribution is a modest one. It is only just another paradigm through which to look at the conflict.
Commentators have generally identified the Sinhala Only policy, Sinhala chauvinism, the clash of Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms, the over centralization of power in Colombo, India’s intervention, and the pathological malevolence of Pirabhikaran, as being among the principal causes of the conflict. I do not deny the enormous impact that all of these factors have had on determining the intensity and character of the conflict. However I do not think that the Sri Lankan conflict, or for that matter, any major socio-political conflict, can be understood through just a few variables. We need a more inclusive and holistic model.
Sinhala Only policy and Sinhala chauvinism were certainly the immediate triggers for the conflict, but when seen within a wider perspective the conflict is far more complex, and its roots network over a much wider field.
If I am pushed to select a model for understanding the Sri Lankan conflict, my preferred option is the one advanced by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the last century. There are two aspects of Gramscian thought that I find relevant. First, he eschews the tendency to explain major socio-political conflicts in terms of just a few variables, and suggests instead an "ensemble of relations", i.e. an interlocking system of multiple causes, within which a change in one variable sets off changes in all variables. The other Gramscian concept I find useful is "hegemonism". As applied to the Sri Lankan conflict, hegemonism is the dominance of Sinhala over the Tamil and of Vellala over the non-Vellala.
In both instances, the dominant class seeks to impose its own view of reality on the consciousness of the subaltern class, so that the latter may see it as the natural order of things. The subaltern class reacts to this dominance sometimes through insurrection and seeks to replace the operative hegemony with their own alternative hegemony. We have seen that happen in Sri Lanka. While Sinhala hegemony has been challenged by the Tamils, it can never be overturned, much less replaced, by them. However, the Vellala hegemony has been effectively challenged and overturned by the non-Vellalas, and replaced by their own hegemony.
A Bob Dylan song
I want to end this chapter with two verses from a song that Bob Dylan, the famous American singer of the 1960s used to sing, which still move me profoundly. Bob Dylan’s powerful metaphors sum up much of what I have been trying to convey in this chapter.
How many years must a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?
How many years must some people exist,
before they’re allowed to be free?
An’ how many times can a man turn his head,
An’ pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,
The answer is blowing in the wind.
An’ how many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?
An’ how many ears must one man have
before he can hear people cry?
An’ how many deaths will it take till he knows,
that too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,
The answer is blowing in the wind.
A foot note by the author
The editor of the Sunday Island has invited me to release for publication the entirety of the chapter on Jaffna, but I am refraining from accepting his generosity. I do so because, firstly, I do not want to hog the columns of his esteemed paper, and also because much of the rest of the chapter on Jaffna, which runs into another 3-4 instalments, includes highly esoteric subjects like - Sankritization, acculturation, diversification of agriculture, fertiliser usage and the salinisation of the peninsula - which hardly make interesting reading of a Sunday morning - but they will appear in my memoirs when they are published.
Concluded
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A cyclone, a Prime Minister, and nationhood
(extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs)By Neville Jayaweera
In the last week of December 1964 a cyclone of unprecedented ferocity devastated the Northern Province. The fishing villages of Myliddy, Kankesanturai, Point Pedro, Nargakovil and several areas within the Jaffna district were reduced to a wilderness of sand dunes, stagnant salt water and windswept debris. In the Myliddy fishing village alone, several hundreds lost their lives at sea. The Collector of Ramnad District in SE Tamil Nadu (India) contacted me to say that over 200 bodies had been washed ashore there and he had no alternative but to order mass cremations on the sea shore in order to halt the spread of disease. Throughout the Jaffna District the Kalavoham crop ( the main paddy crop ) was wiped out and hundreds of fishing boats were reduced to matchwood. The distress was appalling.
When the cyclone struck, my wife and I were in Colombo on Christmas vacation and I had no way of returning to station. The Palaly Airport had been rendered unserviceable and it took me 36 hours, making tortuous detours along the way, round fallen trees and broken culverts, through Puttalam and Anuradhapura, to get back to Jaffna. Eventually, it was R. M. B. Senanayake, my colleague and GA of Vavuniya, who helped my wife and me to get back to base, by placing at our disposal a Land Rover and a driver.
On reaching Jaffna I found conditions were horrendous. Our resources were limited, having no heavy machinery for clearing roads and for rescuing people buried under fallen houses. Everything had to be done by hand and we were hard put to it, to bring relief and succour to hundreds of sorrowing families. All public services, particularly the PWD and the Irrigation Department, and my DROs and village headmen, suspended their normal work and mobilising to a man, struggled valiantly to bring some order out of the chaos. One of the first services to be restored was the telephone link to Colombo.
Call to the Prime Minister
In a personal call I made to Mrs. Bandaranaike at Temple Tress, giving her the grim picture, I pleaded that she should visit the devastated areas immediately. I told her that she should demonstrate to the people of Jaffna that she was indeed the Prime Minister of the whole country and that the Tamil people were as much her people as were the people in the South. I also pointed out that it was a magnificent opportunity for her to heal the long running wounds and to make a new beginning. She listened to me without betraying any feeling and said she will consult her advisors and let me know.
Not content with my personal pleas to the Prime Minister, I also asked my brother Stanley Jayaweera who had close personal links to her, to impress on her the utmost need for her to visit her people in Jaffna at this time of their dire need. Stanley had done exactly as I had asked him to, but her rejoinder to him shattered me.
Referring to the effigy burning that accompanied the abortive Secessionist Campaign an year earlier, she had said,
"Huh! Why should I go to them now, if they burnt my effigy a few months ago. If they did not want me then they must not expect me to come to them now."
Her response filled me with dismay and a deep sadness. It was not just that she failed to respond to her people’s anguish, but the realisation dawned on me that Sri Lanka as a nation had no leader. It was as if the Prime Minister of the country had consciously renounced responsibility for one fourth of her country’s population! Not least, the high esteem in which I had held her after meeting her on several occasions, plummeted.
The US Ambassador Cecil Lyon and the Canadian High Commissioner James George, both sent personal emissaries to condole with the people of Jaffna, and proffer whatever help was within their means to render. I realized of course that their gestures were expressions of goodwill, rather than concrete offers of assistance.
Having decided not to visit her people in their distress, the Prime Minister opted to send the Governor General, William Gopallawa and her Perm. Secr. Mr. N. Q. Dias, along with General Udugama and Admiral Rajan Kadirgamar, to deputize for her. It was a delegation which, though high on rank and heavily weighted with brass, was politically offensive, for what could be more insensitive than sending N. Q. Dias and General Udugama, both names that were symbols of oppression in the minds of the Tamil people, to represent her! The response of the local people was eloquent and scathing. As the Governor General’s convoy drove slowly through all the devastated areas, literally not one local, not even one of the grieving widows, stepped out to meet them. The silence was eerie and overpowering. It was like driving through a graveyard.
It is easy to judge Mrs. Bandaranaike as unforgiving, petty, petulant and paranoid, all of which she probably was, but I also believe that her reaction was symptomatic of a deeper malaise and that she was manifesting attributes that were more than merely personal to her. She was also a creature and victim of a cultural ethos, deeply rooted in her history, of which she was not even aware, which of course does not exculpate her, but helps us to understand the problem at a more complex level. The capacity to transcend peer pressure and one’s inherited culture, and construct one’s own cultural environment based on a set of universal values, such as the Brahma Viharas or the Fruits of the Spirit, ( love, kindness, forgiveness, equanimity, joy and peace) is vouchsafed only to a minuscule few, and clearly Mrs Banadaranike was not one of the few.
Consciousness and the constitution
The disturbing thought began to dawn on me that, none of the politicians of Sri Lanka, whether Sinhala or Tamil, seemed able to transcend their cultural conditioning and historical memories. Worse still, none of them seemed to have any concept of a fully integrated and harmonious Sri Lankan nation, and much less, of how to achieve it, the operative concept here being "nation". Most of them had a vibrant sense of Sinhalaness on one hand, or of Tamilness on the other, but both sides lacked a sense of a Sri Lankaness as a common ground. They seemed to ignore the stark facts of history, which, whether they liked it or not, had over the centuries, constituted Sri Lanka as a mosaic of diverse ethnic groups and religions. That mosaic was a given and irreversible. What Sri Lanka seemed to lack were leaders who could weld those diverse groups into a harmonious polity.
The politicians of all parties, both in the North as well as in the South seemed to reduce the problem of nation building to a constitutional issue - should Sri Lanka have a Unitary Constitution or a Federal Constitution. They did not see nation building as having to do with the more fundamental question of raising consciousness, and forgot that in the absence of a unified consciousness, constitutions by themselves cannot integrate a society, whatever checks and balances may be built into them.
Since the close of WW2 all constitutions dispensed by experts all over the world and handed down to former colonies by the erstwhile masters disappeared from the political landscape within a few decades, proving that, to really work, a constitution must embody the consciousness of the whole national community. The primary task facing a nation’s leaders must therefore be to help develop that consciousness as a necessary condition of a constitution’s viability.
Building a deseeya cintanaya
Building a consciousness of nationhood, or a deseeya cintanaya, is not a responsibility that can be left to politicians and constitutional lawyers. A deseeya chintanaya cannot be legislated, nor can it be secured through structural changes. Unlike a jathika cintanaya, whether Sinhala or Dhamila, which have roots reaching back over two thousand years, the seeds of a deseeya cintanaya have yet to be planted.
It is pre-eminently an educational task, to be initiated at the level of our schools. It requires a new way of looking at history, and helping young minds climb out of the constraints placed on their understanding by the sectarian myths, legends, and memories that are embedded in their ancient chronicles, whether they relate to their Aryan origins or to their Dravidian origins. This does not mean that children should be ignorant of, much less that they should reject, their rich historical inheritance, but that they should acquire a more global view of history and be equipped with a critical sense that will enable them to stand back and look at their respective narratives more objectively.
Building a deseeya chintanaya is a task that also devolves on Civil Society - on artists, novelists and poets, on intellectuals, on film producers, on writers of lyrics and songs, on religious leaders, and on the NGO network. Most of all, it is a task that should be undertaken by newspapers and journalists, who rather than sow to sectarian emotions, should open the minds of their readers to a broader and deeper vision of social reality.
On the other hand, if these agents of Civil Society are themselves not imbued with a deseeya chintanaya, no amount of constitution making and no amount of structural surgery can ever achieve it.
The point I am trying to make here is that our preoccupation with constitution making, whether to have a Unitary or a Federal constitution, whether to devolve and how much to devolve, misses the point. In fact, they are escape routes from reality. The reality is that in the absence of a consciousness of nationhood, constitution making is a spurious game. Constitutions do not create social reality but only reflect it. On this point I also demur from classical Marxist theory which claims that economic relations are the primary determinants of social and political relations. Marxists forget that even bringing social and political relations into sync with the underlying economic relations requires the re-engineering of consciousness, or as Paulo Frère pointed out, the "consciencetisation" of the people, which is a rather convoluted form of saying that transforming the consciousness of the people is primary.
Where there is no underlying consciousness of nationhood, constitutions and structures that claim to ensure it serve only to conceal its absence. They are merely forms without substance.
The missing X factor
So, what has been that absent X factor in shaping Sri Lanka’s consciousness as a nation? I believe that the missing X factor is leadership. More than any other single factor, it is leadership that catalyses separateness into unity, and conflict into harmony, and it requires a great leader to carry a society from tribalism to nationhood.
Sri Lanka’s inability to produce leaders who combined a great vision with moral stature, has been crucial. I believe that Sri Lanka’s leadership poverty, its lack of men and women who had caught the grander view, who could rise above the compulsions of opportunistic politics and who could envision the good of the whole country as opposed to the advantage of this or that ethnic group or this or that party, has been fundamental.
The primary commitment of the vast majority of our politicians has been to their respective sectarian constituencies, whether Sinhala or Tamil, rather than to the nation as a whole, and given Sri Lanka’s demographic structure, whoever stokes majoritarian emotions will always exercise power over the whole country, whereas whoever puts the nation first is likely to pass into political oblivion!
Ironically, as a nation, Sri Lanka has never had a constituency or a leader. This paradox can be resolved only under two conditions. Firstly, the people’s consciousness has to be raised and widened to encompass the whole nation as its domain, but since that is likely to take several decades, or even a century, rather than years, there must simultaneously emerge one or more leaders who can rise above their narrow constituency perspectives and be able to catalyze the fragmented ethnic and religious groups into a unity.
Concerning leadership
Broadly, there are two types of political leaders.
The commonest are those who have sensed the dominant mood of the people, the zeit geist, and ride it to power, like surfers ride the waves. They are the sectarian populists. Not being rooted in a set of values, and lacking a higher vision, they do not question the morality of the dominant mood, much less seek to transform it, and once ensconced in office, using all the state apparatus at their disposal, seek only to magnify it. Lacking moral goals higher than attaining or remaining in power, they are quite willing to sacrifice the nation and the long term good of the very people who brought them to power, at the altar of their ambitions. As they hurry the nation in a disintegrating downward spiral, their sectarian constituency cheers them on, and lacking any criteria by which to judge themselves or their constituency, they cease to be true leaders of the nation and become instead tribal chieftains.
The second type of leader is those who, having caught a vision of a civilized society, try to objectify it. Their take off point is not the mass but the vision, and their constant reference frame are the attributes of that higher moral order, viz .fundamental rights, righteousness, equality, justice, integrity, fairness, harmony and peace. The dominant paradigm will always resist any attempt by that higher order to intrude upon its sectarian domain, but the test of a great leader is his willingness to dilute into it those elevated attributes, so that they may start working as catalysts, like salt works in a bowl of soup. Seeing that there is a huge gap between the higher vision he is trying to objectify and the sectarian consciousness in which he is trapped, the great leader tries to bridge the gap by upgrading the latter. He starts paddling upstream, against the torrent. Sadly, such leaders belong to a miniscule minority.
My experiences in Jaffna in the mid 1960s prompted me that Sri Lanka was light years away from attaining nationhood, and the events of the decades that followed have fully confirmed that conviction. As I said earlier on, Mrs Bandaranaike’s refusal to visit her people in Jaffna in December 1964 when they were in deep distress, was more than a personal dereliction. It was symptomatic of a deep underlying national disorder. It is not without significance that since Prime Minister Sir John Kotalawela visited Jaffna in 1955, not a single incumbent Prime Minister or President, with the exception of Mr. Dudley Senanayake (n the 1965-70 govt.) has visited Jaffna. (I am open to be corrected here) It looks as if for over 55 years the Head of the Sri Lankan state has renounced responsibility for one quarter of the country’s people! Is it a wonder then that those who are thus disowned and renounced seek to set themselves up separately and go their own way?
More than the power it derives from an overwhelming superiority in numbers, what exalts any majority community, and endows it with a true greatness and moral authority, is its willingness to accord to all those other communities who lack the advantage of numbers, a status and dignity equal to its own, and never to let them feel marginalized or disadvantaged because they are fewer in number, or because they are different in colour or beliefs.
Unless and until Sri Lanka can produce leaders who can realize that truth, and are willing to act on it, it will continue to be dismembered by conflict, long after the LTTE and Pirabhikaran have passed into history.
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