Continued from yesterday

My father was very skeptical about politics and politicians, and dissuaded him about it and anyway told him, don’t go into politics unless you’re financially independent because you have to be your own master. That he listened to but his relatives in Jaffna said, if you do not speak Tamil and you have not lived here, you will not make it. So he threw himself into being a lawyer and of course, he was very successful.

Then came 1971, the insurrection, which rattled him. I am afraid, I think, I see President Kumaratunga in the audience, but I think of the squeeze economic policies of the times also made him realize that he could not succeed as an independent lawyer here. So he went back to England and those were, in some ways, years of exile for him till he went back to Geneva and was successful in the UN. But I know that this is not really just his life story that I’m recounting, but what he meant to us in the family, as an uncle, as a brother, as a brother-in-law, he had a very special place. I think what was special for us as children is that he saw us as adults and he would engage with us as adults.

I did notice that he was able to communicate with people, irrespective of class or religion or ethnicity. Maybe that was a trait he picked up in Trinity or it may have been his own ingrained personality, but he did manage to cross those worlds which I thought was very special. It is ironic and wonderful, in a way, that he realized his dream to go back into politics when President Kumaratunga asked him to join. At that time, I was very enthusiastic, but I thought he could be a bridge between Tamils and Sinhalese and also between the UNP and the SLFP, which was more hostile to each other than anything else but politics has a life of its own, I think. His own personal life was also such that he was now transiting into a different space in his life, that I think, in some ways, the man we knew and were very familiar with, to some extent, we lost him when the nation gained him. His move into politics really meant an end to the informal gatherings and moving and intellectual challenges that we were able to have with him, and I felt there was more of an isolation from him at that time.

But what are some of the takeaways that I think of with my uncle? I mean, on a personal level, I always thought that I was his favorite niece till I met my cousin who lived in America, who said, no, no, I thought I was his favorite niece. So I said, perhaps he had a way of making each one feel special, specially engaged but some things he reminded me, which I will remember. He did make a reference saying, I was emotionally detached after my mother died and I think that sort of helped, whether helped or hindered him, in the way he navigated life. He did not take things intensely personal. He also gave me a lesson in life when I told him I was going to wing it at some exam and he told me, nothing is ever winged.

You do not know how much hard work goes into making things look seamlessly effortless. So I realized that behind that, there was a very dedicated professional and I think that showed a lot, even in his interactions in Parliament and as a politician. Even today, if I get into an Uber or PickMe they see my name and they ask me whether I’m related to Lakshman Kadirgamar and mourn that the country doesn’t have politicians like him. I would remind them that when President Kumaratunga wanted him to be Prime Minister, people said he could not be Prime Minister because he is not a Sinhalese or a Buddhist and then they mourn it and say, we should have gone with that. So, this is the time that I’m going to pass on to Dayan. So where I finish with my own memories of him as an uncle and what he meant to us in our family and Dayan, you now take over with the Foreign Minister….”

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka :

“…Lakshman Kadirgamar be friended me after the death of his friend, my father, Mervyn de Silva. I think it was at some event when he had suddenly turned around, he told me, he suddenly turned around because he had heard a laugh just like Mervyn’s and it happened to be me because he knew Mervyn had died, and he did not know who it was. So that’s how we got to know each other personally. My father, Mervyn, and Lakshman Kadirgamar had been students together at university and Law College. When Dr. Gamani Corea and Mervyn de Silva commenced the Foreign Affairs Study Group to review and restructure Sri Lanka’s foreign relations after the battle of the late 1980s, the airdrop and so on and so forth, the Foreign Affairs Study Group was then approached by President Premadasa who appointed Bradman Weerakoon, his Advisor on Foreign Affairs, to be a member of that group and to liaise with it. Mervyn invited his old friend, Lakshman Kadirgamar, who had come back to Sri Lanka after his stint at WIPO and inducted him into the FASG. That was his transition from international law to international relations and international politics. So after my father died, it was in 1999, Mr. Kadirgamar used to invite me. I don’t know whether his wife Sugandhi is in the audience, but if she were, she would confirm that he would send the car for me at 8 pm. The car brought me to his place and took me back at 3 am. He used to have this bottle of rum from the Caribbean, not Cuban, which he used to share with me and we used to discuss the problems of Sri Lankan politics at the time, in wartime. Very complex, the Norwegian negotiations, the ceasefire agreement of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe, the knock-on effects on our security in India. There were many, many complex problems, and he thought that somehow inviting me over for those long one-on-one chats was of some use.

Now, to move from the personal to Lakshman Kadirgamar’s thinking, which is what he leaves us, I think I was privy to that, not only through my conversations, but in the sense that all of us are, because he was a public person, and there’s nothing that he said in private that was at variance with his publicly held positions. I would go so far as to say that whenever we fret about the absence of Lakshman Kadirgamar, we should remember what he thought and did, and try to extract from that the principles concerned, which we may then apply and fight for in the political and intellectual arena today. Lakshman Kadirgamar did what was very difficult to do. He balanced antinomies, managed contradictions, reconciled and synthesized opposites, which is very, very difficult to do. He was a principled man who took principled positions on difficult matters, but did so while remaining perhaps the most civilized, cultured, cultivated, and charming personality in public life that we have seen for a very long time. His affability and his wit in no way were at the expense of principle.

Now, what are these issues, and of what relevance are they? I would say that the problems with which Lakshman Kadirgamar grappled are in one way or the other the same problems that we face today, and which will intensify in the new period in international affairs we have stepped into with, if I may say so, the second Trump administration. Now, Lakshman Kadirgamar reconciled the need for an autonomy-based or devolution-based political solution to what was known as the Tamil question or the question of the coexistence of the constituent communities of Sri Lanka, the one side of the equation, with the need for safeguarding national sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. Now, this was very difficult to do, because in Sri Lanka at that time, during wartime, you had a schism between the narrow nationalists who were opposed to devolution, just as they were opposed to peace; you had those who were for devolution, but were willing to engage in negotiations leading to policies which Kadirgamar considered to be those of appeasement, and which he opposed.

So, he proposed devolution; he made a brilliant speech when President Kumaratunga presented her August 2000 constitutional reform package, the draft constitution, a very impassioned plea to Parliament that it be supported. I was at his place, he had wanted me to come over, and when he came back from Parliament, he was crestfallen because Mr. Sambandan and the TULF, which had promised to support him, had let him down on the occasion. So he was very much for devolution, he never stopped being for an autonomy-based solution, but he was also very strongly, very firmly, opposed to the LTTE, and he was opposed to excessive unilateral concessions which he thought were being made by the Norwegian facilitators. He and President Kumaratunga tried to manage that by bringing in Vidar Helgesen and talking to the Norwegians and trying to change the mix at that end. So this is one issue, how one reconciles the need for autonomy with the need to safeguard the Sri Lankan state, and to resist any kind of secession.

Lakshman Kadirgamar was a very, very strong votary of national sovereignty, and he went to sort of a war of ideas on the matter. When Prime Minister Wickremasinghe signed the ceasefire agreement, Mr. Kadirgamar made a landmark speech in Parliament, and then sought its publication, and obtained it in the Sunday Times. The Foreign Ministry itself was not quite sure as to whether he should be more muted, so he brought, I think, either Mr. Sinha Ratnatunga or Iqbal Athas home, he told me he brought them home and said: this is the speech; here is my transcript. And it was published as a full page in the Sunday Times, making the point that the ceasefire agreement bore the danger of a division, of recognizing two territories in the country which could become a hard border.