Features

Covid: The inside story of the government’s battle against the virus

Published

5 years ago

2021/03/21

By Laura Kuenssberg, Political Editor (BBC)

At the beginning of March 2020, I asked a senior member of the government: “Do you feel worried?” They replied: “Personally? No.” But just weeks later, Downing Street was scrambling to manage the biggest crisis since World War Two.

Since then, monumental decisions have had to be taken. And there have been many accusations of failings – the desperate shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), Covid ripping through unprepared care homes, hundreds of billions borrowed and spent to keep the economy going, to name a few.

I have asked 20 of the most senior politicians, officials and former officials, who either witnessed or were involved in the big decisions, to pick five pivotal moments from the past 12 months.

What they say tells us so much about what really happened, what our leaders were thinking, and, strikingly, how little they knew. The contributors are not being named, so they could speak freely.

On 31 January, it was reported that coronavirus had arrived in the UK, as two people were admitted to hospital. Meanwhile, more than 80 Britons evacuated from China were quarantined at a facility in the north-west of England. But for the government, Brexit had sucked up all the political energy – it was the day the country officially left the EU.

The prime minister and his team were exhausted but elated. It felt like Boris Johnson had “just really started to take flight”, one member of the team tells me.

Ministers and officials had already been meeting to discuss the virus in China – but it felt thousands of miles away. There was a “lack of concern and energy,” one source tells me. “The general view was it is just hysteria. It was just like a flu.”

The prime minister was even heard to say: “The best thing would be to ignore it.” And he repeatedly warned, several sources tell me, that an overreaction could do more harm than good.

A small group in Downing Street had started daily meetings, after, according to one of those who attended, “it became clear that there was no proper, ‘Emergency break-the-glass’ plan.”

But for many of those I’ve spoken to, the game-changer was at the end of February, when the virus took hold in northern Italy – it was closer to home, and England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had, one minister told me, warned that if it got out of China, it would become global, and be on its way to the UK.

“The biggest moment for me was when I saw those pictures of northern Italy,” one senior minister says. “I thought that will be us if we don’t move.”

Reports of the chaos there catapulted the virus, one senior minister says, “from not on the radar, to people on the floor of hospitals in Lombardy.” They say that was the moment “we knew that it was inevitable”.

Ministers and officials became locked in arguments over how to respond. The prime minister and many cabinet ministers were reluctant to consider anything as draconian as a lockdown. To many people, the very idea would have seemed fanciful.

Even stopping shaking hands seemed a step too far for the prime minister.

Before the first major coronavirus briefing on 3 March, he had, I am told, been prepared by aides to say, if asked by journalists, people should stop shaking hands with each other – as per government scientific advice.

But he said the exact opposite. “I’ve shaken hands with everybody,” he said, about visiting a hospital with Covid patients.

And it was not just a slip, one of those present at the briefing says. It demonstrated “the whole conflict for him – and his lack of understanding of the severity of what was coming”.

A Downing Street spokesperson told the BBC: “The prime minister was very clear at the time he was taking a number of precautionary steps, including frequently washing his hands. Once the social distancing advice changed, the prime minister’s approach changed.”

By this point, Mr Johnson was attending emergency committee Cobra meetings with officials and leaders from Holyrood, Belfast and Cardiff – although he had missed the first few.

But one senior politician who attended at the same time says: “The early meetings with the prime minister were dreadful.” And inside Downing Street, senior staff’s concerns about the government’s ability to cope grew.

There were huge logistical considerations about equipment, facilities and how fast the disease might move in the UK, and questions about how effective the actions taken in China to suppress the virus would be here. It was not well understood, for example, that people without symptoms could still pass it on, nor that Britons returning from half-term holidays in northern Europe were bringing the virus back home in large numbers.

“There was a genuine argument in government, which everyone has subsequently denied,” one senior figure tells me, about whether there should be a hard lockdown or a plan to protect only the most vulnerable, and even encourage what was described to me at that time as “some degree of herd immunity”.

There was even talk of “chicken pox parties”, where healthy people might be encouraged to gather to spread the disease. And while that was not considered a policy proposal, real consideration was given to whether suppressing Covid entirely could be counter productive.

On 3 March, when the prime minister set out the government’s plan, the focus was on detecting early cases and preventing the spread.

But on 12 March, with journalists crammed into the state dining room at No 10, he told the public that the country was facing its worst health crisis in a generation. Anyone with symptoms was told to stay at home for a week.

Advisers seemed confident it was not yet time to close schools or stop large crowds gathering. And the government’s scientists felt they had time to slow everything down – the peak was not expected for another 10-14 weeks.

That same week, though, nervousness was rising among others in government that the virus was outpacing everyone’s expectations, and the plans in place to smooth out the outbreak would not work.

One source tells me it felt like the “government machine was breaking in our hands”, things were “imploding”, and within 48 hours the approach outlined on the 12th would feel out of date.

There has been no shortage of controversy over whether the government was too slow to close the doors on 23 March – but many of the conversations I have had, pinpoint the moment it became urgent in No 10.

On 13 March, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) committee concluded the virus was spreading faster than thought.

But it was Downing Street “modellers in the building”, according to one current official, who pored again over the numbers, and realised the timetable that had only just been announced was likely to result in disaster.

The next morning, a small group of key staff got together. Simple graphs were drawn on a whiteboard and the prime minister was confronted with the stark prediction that the plan he had just announced would result in the NHS collapsing under the sheer number of cases.

Several of those present tell me that was the moment Mr Johnson realised the urgency – that the official assumptions about the speed of the spread of this new disease had been wrong.

To prevent the NHS “falling over”, he was warned, the government would have to impose measures as infections rose. And while they could be relaxed as cases fell, this pattern might recur across “multiple waves for 18 months”.

Several sources recall vividly the “snake like graph” they were shown that day.

Then, one official says, everything started to move at “lightning speed”. And behind closed doors – before the terrifying projections of Imperial College became public, a couple of days later – plans were accelerated.

On 16 March, the public were told to stop all unnecessary social contact and to work at home if possible.

New cabinet committees were formed. And the machine moved into a different phase, with the prime minister and the “quad” – Matt Hancock, Michael Gove, Dominic Raab and Rishi Sunak – the new decision-making form. It was, I am told, “high tension – [with] a lot of testosterone in the room”.

For many inside government, the pace of change that week was staggering – but others remain frustrated the government machine, in their view, had failed to move quickly enough.

There was tension between those who wanted to ensure systems were as ready as they could be first, and others who argued vociferously that moving fast against the virus was more important than anything else.

But those I spoke to now agree on one thing – how much they did not know about the disease.

“You can kick yourself about the things that you wish you knew,” one minister says, “but we just didn’t have anything in place.”

Another cabinet minister says: “It’s easy to say we should have locked down longer, gone harder, but there are more complex debates about where the national interests really lie.”

And it was all so strange.

One minister who made some of the public announcements when lockdown came says: “I remember when I wrote it into the script, I just couldn’t believe that I was saying this.”

And one official, struck by how huge it all felt, says he googled: “Did they shut the schools during the War?”

Another, meanwhile, admits, “We were more blind than we told the public,” and suggests that is still the case one year on.

On 18 March, we reported that a small number of members of staff in No 10 had fallen ill. One insider says: “People were dropping like flies.”

The prime minister, however, was acting as though he was impervious to the risk. He had developed a habit of banging his own chest, telling staff he was “strong as a bull”. Soon, though, this chest-banging turned into “extreme coughing fits”. Tests, in short supply everywhere, were requested for him from 25 March. And two days later, he tested positive.

He switched to the chancellor’s bigger suite of offices so that he could keep working, screened off from the rest of the building. Insiders recall how much he hated this and, in a second spell of isolation in the autumn, chairs had to be placed across the door “like a puppy gate”, so he could still communicate with the tiny number of staff allowed into the same part of the building.

Then, at the end of March, the prime minister became increasingly ill – each video call he made to reassure the public required more takes.

On 6 April, he agreed to go to St Thomas’ Hospital and, struggling for breath on a phone call, I have been told, confirmed he wanted Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to stand in for him.

Initially, Downing Street tried to give the impression that all was well. Journalists were even told that Mr Johnson was working on his red boxes. That message has been put down to a mix up, and we now know this was far from the truth.

The moment of genuine crisis came when he was moved into intensive care. No-one knew if the prime minister would make it through the night – or what the plan was if he did not.

By this point, with so many in No 10 and in government already sick, there were, I have been told, about “half a dozen people running things”.

Fears that he might need to be intubated were shared by a tiny group inside Number 10. They discussed the possibility that ministers would have to gather in the cabinet room, with the doors closed, until they chose a successor – but there was no fixed protocol, and no conclusion was reached. The Tory Party, I have been told, even started to consider how to transfer the leadership without a contest, fearing that such a competition could be seen as “venal” after the prime minister’s death.

Then cabinet ministers were summoned urgently for a conference call. “All of a sudden we were asked to join this call – not knowing if he was alive,” one tells me. Then No 10 prepared to make the news public.

The Downing Street voice on the other end of the phone cracked with fear as I was asked to get to the Foreign Office as soon possible with a camera to talk to Mr Raab, who was being sent out to try to reassure the country. We reported the news that Mr Johnson was in intensive care from the back of a taxi.

A former official tells me: “We thought we really could lose him – we had to plan for a full transition.” That night was “long and shocking”, one source says.

By the end of May, the number of coronavirus cases was falling, the prime minister was back at work full time, and the public had surprised the government by overwhelmingly sticking to the rules.

Furthermore, despite some embarrassing and prominent lockdown breaches – in April, for example, Scotland’s chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, had to quit over her visits to her holiday home – there had been what one senior minister describes as “tremendous goodwill”.

But then came the Mirror and the Guardian’s scoop – in March, the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, had travelled hundreds of miles to County Durham, after his wife fell ill with Covid. He, too, succumbed to the virus and his stay on his family’s farm to recover, before returning to London, had been kept secret – apart from among a tiny number of Downing Street staff.

And Mr Cummings was determined not to quit. After considering sacking him, the prime minister stuck by him – but first, there was what has been described to me as tense “mediation between a couple deciding whether to divorce”.

Before making that decision, he had summoned Mr Cummings to go through his version of events. Together, they planned for him to give this version publicly – despite others’ protestations. The result was the surreal press conference in the Downing Street rose garden.

Many of those I have talked to describe this episode as a terrible turning-point.

“Even for us, this is mad,” a member of the Downing Street team tells me.

Senior ministers say: “The handling was a fiasco”. “It was ridiculous”, and, at a time of national emergency, “broke the political consensus”.

Perhaps, after two months of lockdown, the public was ready to be angry with someone.

MPs’ inboxes were swamped with irate emails – mine too. “The early pandemic washed away all the bitterness of Brexit,” one senior minister tells me. “That all came flooding back, all that bile, all that pent up frustration.”

Some ministers tweeted their support for Mr Cummings. One of those who refused says: “He should have resigned straight away. You lead by example. I was busy chopping logs with my chainsaw to get the frustration out.”

Some polling suggests the Barnard Castle episode really did dent the public’s trust in the government. “It gave people who wanted to break the rules an excuse,” one source says.

But inside government, there was a belief that an extraordinary period of unity had already started to fade, and the public had started to tire of the rules once the government had moved towards its plans to lift them.

There is no question, though, the whole misadventure made the politics of the pandemic more scratchy and less consensual.

Mr Cummings was not the only one to be caught up. In June, Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, provoked anger by attending a huge Republican funeral.

But it was after Barnard Castle that it felt like the mood in the country had changed.

“People wanted to portray the PM as a clown,” one minister tells me, “or not up to the level of events.”

Britain in the summer did not feel like a country still gripped by a pandemic.

“There was loads of over optimistic messaging,” one politician says.

For example, the time when a Labour MP asked for advice at the end of June for his constituency, which was home to a popular beach and he was worried about huge numbers heading for the sea. “Show some guts,” the prime minister told him.

In July, a grinning chancellor delivered plates of Japanese curry to unsuspecting customers at a London restaurant, to promote his “eat out to help out” scheme. Then the prime minister started to encourage people back to the office.

But behind closed doors, there were significant doubts about the wisdom of this new mood. “We knew there was going to be a second wave,” one cabinet minister tells me, “and there was a row about whether people should work from home or not – it was totally ridiculous.”

The summer optimism and opening was “the biggest mistake – a rush of blood to the head”, another senior figure says. “The PM has to carry the can”.

The prime minister believed that another lockdown would be a disaster and wanted to avoid it at all costs – but for many of those involved in making the decisions, his hostility to tightening the rules again was frustrating, dangerous and political.

“The policy objective in the summer and the autumn was – do the minimum possible,” one tells me.

But by the end of August, with Britons packing beaches, the warnings of what might come were already flickering in Number 10.

Some days, sources suggest, the prime minister would express concern about the virus coming back. Others, he would be in “let-it-rip mode”. And senior officials expressed deep concern about what seemed to be changes of heart on a daily basis.

The disease would not be contained by indecision, and by the start of September, with schools and universities having returned, “you could clearly see a steady increase,” a senior figure says.

The testing system had not been able to keep pace with demand, and too few people were willing to, or could afford, to self-isolate if they tested positive. “The idea that you could liberalise in the summer was based on the idea that you could whackamole with test and trace,” the source says. “But if you didn’t whack the right moles then it doesn’t work.”

By the middle of September, “the data was already screaming out”, one insider says. On the 17th, I was told by one source: “If you do nothing now, by the end of October you will get something worse than the first wave.”

The possibility of a short “circuit breaker” lockdown was already being discussed in Downing Street that week. Prof Whitty, the UK’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, and Mr Cummings and others were arguing hard for action to be taken – but the prime minister was unpersuaded.

Others wanted to push again – one current official recalls a “concerted effort” – and on Sunday 20th, the No 10 team gathered a range of scientists. But the prime minister remained reluctant.

Another current official describes his attitude as, “if there is a way not to act, why do it?”.

Over the next 36 hours, I have been told, a small group inside Downing Street repeatedly tried to change Mr Johnson’s mind – but by then, he was operating in a very different atmosphere.

“A swampiness had risen because of ideological pressure on this government at every turn to do less – and to do it more slowly,” a senior figure says. And it is understood Mr Johnson had privately assured groups of MPs there would be no more restrictions.

The Treasury was pointing out the damage any further restrictions would do to the economy, many of the traditional Tory-backing newspapers were hungry for restrictions to be relaxed, the party was restless, and I remember cabinet ministers who had hardly any cases of the virus in their constituencies at that point, suggesting they saw no evidence for further action.

So when Mr Johnson made changes to the coronavirus restrictions on 22 September, they were tweaks, rather than a real tightening up. I remember talking to Tory backbenchers that day who felt they had won.

The importance of the missed September moment is cited by many senior figures – and some now concede it was a mistake.

“We strained at the leash to get things going,” one cabinet minister admits. “I was aggressively for that – but I have learned that it is better to go slow.”

Another senior minister, one of those who pushed for more radical action at the time, now says: “We should have locked down more severely, earlier in the autumn – the whole point was, the earlier you act the more you buy yourself time for a strategy that can get out.”

You can still hear the frustration in the voices of those who lost the argument.

“The PM was saying the Tory Party won’t swallow it,” one tells me. “Everyone else felt, we know we are going to have to do a lockdown.”

And there is no question that the tier system that was introduced over the autumn, which portioned England into different levels of restrictions, was soon tied up in confusion and regional spats.

“It was completely unintelligible to any normal human being,” one senior official says. “It was too slow, and too Byzantine, and that resulted in more cases.”

Another says now: “We ended up tying ourselves into ever tighter knots,” as the system became more and more particular to each part of the country.

It is impossible to know what would have happened if the brakes had been slammed on in September – but some ministers pin the terrible scale of the second wave, at least in part, on the apparent reluctance to act.

The circuit-breaker that was imposed later in Wales did not make the problem go away, however. Case numbers weren’t the only concern – the economy had been shuttered, and shattered. Political demands had changed.

In defence of Mr Johnson, one senior minister says: “He’s not to blame if he was trying to reflect the aspiration for the country back in the summer”. Another tells me the plans, and the billions spent on “test-and-trace and tiering meant it was reasonable to do the unlock”.

They reject the idea that a circuit breaker was the obvious option – “There wasn’t a slam dunk recommendation.”

Regarding the potential introduction of national restrictions in September, Downing Street referred us back to comments made by the prime minister to parliament in early November.

“No-one wants to impose measures unless absolutely essential,” Mr Johnson told the Commons. “So it made sense to focus initially on the areas where the disease was surging and not to shut businesses, pubs and restaurants in parts of the country where incidence was low.”

But while there is no question mistakes were made in the first phase of the pandemic, when so much about the virus was a mystery, those involved in the decisions are already less forgiving of their own mistakes the second time around.

“A miracle,” is how one minister describes the vaccine gamble to me. A government so often lambasted by critics for busting convention did it again – but this time, so far, with a stunning outcome.

Vaccines had been discussed in January, as the government machine began to contemplate, slowly, what might be ahead. Early on the chancellor, holding the cheque book, indicated a willingness to spend at speed, without asking for guarantees.

No 10 decided to “chuck everything at it”, at a meeting in April. With Sir Patrick’s crucial experience and deputy chief medical officer for England Prof Jonathan Van-Tam’s emphasis on the practicalities of delivering the vaccine, politicians were persuaded to take what was then a huge risk.

There was an early decision to “pay high, pay early, and ensure it works,” one senior official tells me.

And it seems their decision was informed by everything that had gone wrong with trying to secure PPE – the collapse of the NHS’s normal procurement process, which is controlled by the Department of Health.

The UK decided early not to participate in the EU’s joint plan to buy vaccines. While publicly this decision may have been politically controversial, behind closed doors it was “easy” and “straightforward”, ministers and officials say. “No-one wanted any of the Brexit baggage anywhere near it.” And, more importantly, the EU had made it clear any participating country would be unable to make its own deals with manufacturers the EU had an agreement with – or control its own supply.

The vaccines team had warned ministers at the start of May that nothing was certain – and developing a vaccine as quickly as the prime minister, who “wanted it yesterday”, required would be an uphill struggle. But, as one minister says, it was “the one thing we would wish that we had done in a year’s time”.

Another, a senior minister, says: “The PM strategically saw immediately that the combination of testing, drugs and vaccine was the way out.” And when it came to vaccines, the UK was ready to take an expensive gamble.

The Treasury was spending speculatively in ways it had not since the War – and vaccine spending has already reached nearly £13.5bn. “Imagine if it hadn’t come off and we had spent all of that taxpayers’ money,” one senior official says to me.

There was intense secrecy, throughout, with the various vaccines given secret code names to ensure commercial confidentiality. All were named after submarines – the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine “Ambush”, I can now reveal, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca “Triumph”.

After 12 months of grappling with endless calculations about balancing risks to life, wider health and how the country makes a living, decision-makers are exhausted. They have to accept it is perfectly possible to be wrong, one senior minister tells me. And those who made the decisions are all too aware mistakes they made in these past 12 months may have had such a terrible cost.

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Features

Nepal’s Himalayan Tragedy and new Warnings of Surging El Niño

Published

13 hours ago

2026/09/6

Thilina Walpola

by Rajan Philips

Nepal was bracing for Super El Niño. Then it got hit by a two thousand feet wide glacier collapse way up in the Himalayas that sent torrents of water, mud and rocks down valleys and rivers, devastating communities, tourists and physical assets in the mountainous terrains of Nepal and Tibet in China. The disaster struck along the China-Nepal border wreaking havoc on both sides, but a lot more on the side of Nepal than Tibet. More than a thousand people have died, and thousands more are missing in Nepal; about 20 are dead and over 500 missing in Tibet. Hundreds of tourists are also missing on both sides. Many of the missing tourists are South Asian pilgrims from western countries visiting Hindu sacred sites in the Himalayas.

Terrifying videos of the devastation have been going viral. Especially breathtaking is the one showing a monstrous tide of mud sweeping way the Chinese border station building in the Gyirong gorge, a historic crossing point between Nepal and Tibet. Humankind has no defense against the fury of nature whenever and wherever it happens. The force of water in full turbulence is unstoppable. Werner Heisenberg, the great Quantum Physicist, is said to have remarked that on his deathbed he would like to ask God two questions: why relativity? why turbulence? And he suggested that God may have something to say about relativity, implying that there is little we can know about turbulence.

“El Niño Warnings

With global warming water becomes a problem both in its abundance and in its scarcity. Even as Nepal is struggling to recover from its hydro tragedy, the World Meteorological Organization (WOM) is warning that exceptionally warm Pacific waters are aggravating the “El Niño climate troubles and raising the risk of extreme heat, floods and drought around the globe, over the next several months and until February 2027. The South Asian countries have been earmarked for special treatment by El Niño. Already this year, Europe has experienced unusual heat waves and floods, while forest fires from British Columbia in Canada to Indonesia in the far east.

To climate modellers, “El Niño and La Niña are the yin and yang of a phenomenon known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a years-long cycle of warming and cooling of surface waters in the central to eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.” The former is associated with warming waters, and the latter with cooling waters. Either of them can alter weather patterns and surcharge the extreme effects of climate change.

Also, different continents experience the effects of heat and rain differently. Even within countries, there can be floods in some parts while drought and fires affect others. This year’s El Niño is expected to be unusually stronger and the carryover effects next year are expected to be greater. The baseline comparison is to the year 2024 which was the warmest year in the planet’s history. 2027 may break that record.

The UN and the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) are doing their parts, but the leaders of states and governments everywhere have other pre-occupations. Donald Trump is being his usual silly busy renaming Lake Ontario, one of five Great Lakes of North America, Lake America! That is his way of spiting his country’s northern neighbour, Canada. Every country is spending more money to defend itself against other countries. Among western countries, defense spending has become the new economic growth pole. More submarines, more jets and yes, more drones, but very little to deal with climate change – to reduce global warming, to increase weather preparedness and to be ready for disaster mitigation.

A few days before the August 26 glacier collapse in Nepal, I was browsing through Sri Lankan news reports about the level of preparation in Sri Lanka to deal with the anticipated effects of El Niño. Per usual the government was under fire for apparent tardiness in preparing for El Niño. The Department of Agriculture (DOA) was advising farmers to conserve rainwaters from the Maha season to cope with the likely drought for the Yala season next year. I have a problem understanding where and how can farmers, on their own, build water reserves for paddy fields between seasons? I suppose any advice is better than no advice.

And droughts are already occurring in many cultivating areas even as the Castlereagh and Maussakelle reservoirs are reportedly reaching overflow conditions. In some places people had taken to freshwater fish farming, but now they are reportedly walking miles in search of drinking water. Sri Lankan Navy personnel have been photographed feeding water to the wild ponies in Delft. A Peradeniya academic has chimed in about the climate physics of El Niño and the disruptions it is going to cause. What was once limited to climate wonks is now daily bread for everyday commentators.

The Nepal Tragedy

Online El Niño browsing took me to papers in Nepal and some informed popular articles by the country’s climate experts and activists. The articles were about getting prepared for the drought and rains of El Niño. But what hit Nepal and Tibet a few days later on August 26, had nothing to do with El Niño, but had everything to do with global warming, rising temperatures and melting ice in massive quantities and at high altitudes. A week after the disaster a clear assessment of what triggered it is emerging, thanks to satellite images and concurrent analyses by climate experts around the world.

The initial attribution to an earthquake in the area and the later causal correction to a glacier side have now been supplemented by the identification of a bedrock failure underneath the glacier and it is the ensuing avalanche that registered a 5.2 seismic event. As two New York Times reporters (Raj Saha and Jeremy White) have graphically illustrated, the avalanche released “more than seven billion cubic feet of rock and ice,” enough to “fill around 100 football stadiums” in the US. Further, “the debris traveled downstream with a flow rate at least 30 times that of Niagara Falls, … reached a peak speed of over 100 miles per hour … and traveled more than 60 miles, destroying towns and bridges and killing more than 1,000 people.”

For more context, the Trishuli River (named after Shiva’s trident -trishula), which flows between Gyriong in Tibet and Rasuwagadhi in Nepal, dropping 2,000 metres over a distance of 30 kilometres from its glacier origins to the valley below, became the main conduit of carnage. Overall, 32 concrete bridges were washed away and 12 hydropower projects (accounting for 431 MW) were damaged, with many of their tunnels inundated with over 900 workers stuck in them still unaccounted for.

The disaster is generally attributable to growing glacier instability in the Himalayan area that includes some of the largest glacial systems outside the polar regions. The mountainous area extends over 2,400 km and nearly 600,000 sq. km in five countries (India, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet (China) and Pakistan), and feeds the hugely populated basins of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra rivers. Climate change and air pollution have led to the glacier system retreating and melting at alarming rates. A dozen mountainous catastrophes have occurred over the last 20 years, and new satellite images are showing old warning signs that would appear to have been missed.

Astha Guragain, a Nepali climate researcher and activist, has raised the very pertinent question of climate justice in assigning cause for the glacial instability in the Himalayan region within Nepal. His argument is that “Nepal contributes less than 0.01% of global carbon emissions yet is exposed to disproportionate vulnerability from its consequences.” The government of Nepal has estimated the cost of disaster to be $5 billion, a huge amount for a country of 31 million people and $44 billion GDP.

The Nepali government has formally requested funding support from the special UN climate fund. The problem is that the fund has little money because of American indifference and non contribution by others. The current fund balance is a disgraceful $820 million in pledges! Already, there are applications from 119 countries for a total amount of $2.8 billion. The US pledged a paltry $17.5 million under President Biden, but it is nothing under Trump after his decision to pull out of the Paris Accord and the Green Climate Fund, even though the US is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

The tragedy poses a huge challenge to Nepal’s new Rastriya Swatantra Party government and its 36 year old Prime Minister Balendra Shah. They were elected only in March this year, winning 182 out of 275 seats. The March elections came after massive youth protests and the ouster of the previous government in September 2025. Shah is a Structural Engineer and rapper artist who forayed into national politics when he was elected as Mayor of Kathmandu in 2022. The still fledgling government is also young of age with 17 its 18 ministers, including the Prime Minister, under the age of 40.

Yet the young Engineer Prime Minister is striking the right notes in asking for international help without diminishing Nepal’s sovereignty. Attributing the current disaster to climate change, Mr. Shah has said that “climate change is a global contribution and its response is also a global responsibility.” While asking for legitimate funds, the government has also turned down instant offers of foreign organizations to undertake search-and-rescue operations.

The refusal is based on the country’s experience after the 2015 earthquake, when the arrival of 76 international teams and over 2,200 personnel overwhelmed Kathmandu’s single-runway airport. And the national memory is that while 53 foreign teams pulled 19 people from the rubble, local forces moved much faster and saved many more lives.

Nepal’s tragedy is also a test to the international community, especially to western governments and leaders, to respond to this Himalayan manifestation of the world’s climate crisis in a formal and substantive way through UN agencies and not use it as another charity moment to be handled by the Red Crosses of the world.

Features

MARCO POLO

Published

13 hours ago

2026/09/6

Thilina Walpola

Epoch maker, role model for our readers and especially for our youth

A translator’s view
Book: ‘Deshataka Marco Polo’
(A translation of Marco Polo by Manuel Komroff
Translator: K. A. I. Kalyanaratne
Publisher: Sarasavi
By K. A. I.Kalyanaratne

We are currently experiencing a book market characterised by a disproportionate number of publications, particularly in genres such as romantasy, a blend of romance and fantasy.

Hence, the current status, more importantly with regard to reading, would raise the issue as to how far Francis Bacon’s quote, “Reading maketh a full man” continues to be valid in the prevailing circumstances.

Bacon, in fact, emphasised the truth of the transformative power of reading in moulding an individual’s personality through expanding the skill of understanding, empathy as well as emotional intelligence. Reading also helps one to become wise, witty as well as expanding the capability of making precise judgments. In short, Bacon’s perspective on reading as a means of intellectual growth would remain relevant if the reader has the vision and wisdom to pick what to read and shed what to be left .

It is, therefore, amidst these challenges that I decided to launch into this highly risky task of translating Marco Polo into Sinhala. Hence, the tasks of translating a book, the theme of which is quite off the popular track, as well as undertaking such a risky job by the publisher are indeed challenging.

Nevertheless, both the translator and the publisher have won the battle, as the end-product appears to attract the attention of all levels and types of readership and entice especially our youth. Youth should be our target group. The credit for overcoming this tremendous battle should also be given to the author of the original book, Marco Polo, American writer Manuel Komroff, whose style of writing has given life, action and spirit to an otherwise ‘boring / dry subject’, which belongs to a ‘bygone era’. Further, Marco Polo evokes memories of distinctive qualities and events, which continue to bring value that compels us to remember and reflect upon.

Manuel Komroff’s exceptional ability to bring history to life

A normal writer would commence by saying that as Marco Polo had grown and also become strong, he could join his father and uncle on their next expedition. But Manuel Komroff dramatised the event and made the unfolding of the story lively by creating a dialogue between the father (Niccolo Polo) and the son (Marco Polo). This approach enticed and captivated the reader from the very beginning of the narration. It also shows indirectly how fit the son was in undertaking a highly risky and geographically unknown journey, venturing into uncharted waters fraught with storms, shipwrecks, and starvation. These were only a few, out of the numerous hazards they had to overcome. Every step was a step towards uncertainty. This is how the author raises the curtain:

Now, Nicolo Polo, Marco’s father, invited his son to accompany them on their next expedition.

Nicolo looked at his son and smiled.

‘You have grown, you are strong’ he said.

‘Yes, this time you shall go with us to the court of Kublai Khan.’

It had been a wonderful day. Such a wonderful day. But now Marco’s joy knew no bounds.

That night when young Marco closed his eyes, he dreamed of far-off lands and strange races. He dreamed of oriental wonders, marvels and splendors.

He awoke early the following morning. From his bed he could see the rim of the sun mount the eastern horizon across the bay. How far east was Cathay?

Soon, very soon, he could be journeying eastward to that magical land of Cathay. This was the first place of his heart’s desire.

Manuel Komroff’s exceptional descriptive ability to drive life into dry historical facts

Hats off to Manuel Komroff for enabling the Sinhala reader, through this translation, to see how a collection of historical data could be infused into a colourful and dramatic description. Although it is true that words provide the medium for conveying ideas, using them to create the desired liveliness is a different art that needs to be consciously and conscientiously developed. The Sinhala translation provides the opportunity for our readers to experience that vitality in writing.

A further specific instance of Komroff’s exceptional descriptive ability is his narration of the Emperor Kublai Khan’s arrangements in Xanadu (Shangdu) to spend the hot summer months in the cool Manchurian Hills. (Chapter 13). In short, what Manuel Komroff has performed is to bring history to life using the technique of storytelling and making historical events, people and periods engaging and memorable. In fact, this special feature would have been the reason that lured me initially to procure the book, 48 years ago.

Marco Polo – Character study / Character exploration

Anyone and more importantly our youth who need guidance in choosing a ‘Role-Model’ I would unhesitantly recommend studying Marco Polo. A man of character is not measured only by his achievements, prosperity or status, but by the values and principles he constantly upholds. In short one’s character reflects the totality of a person’s disposition, intentions, thoughts and actions, forming a ‘moral-compass’ that directs decisions and behaviour in all instances.

Apart from the tough journey he undertook with his father and uncle, a journey fraught with unpleasant circumstances, to the court of emperor Kublai Khan, winning the emperor’s trust and confidence were not easy tasks. Only a man of deep foresight could move with an emperor whose leadership style demonstrated both the administrative sophistication he had developed, and his ability to coordinate diverse forces towards a unified military objective.

Marco Polo’s deep foresight enabled him to look far ahead of the immediate future, and to adapt to the new environment in which he had to discharge his duties. His acquisition of skills to undertake the long journey, with his father and uncle, and mastering the skills needed to undertake both sea and land expeditions, even before his father gave the consent to accompany them in their second journey to the east, displayed how futuristic Marco Polo’s strategic thinking was.

Once entrusted with honourable and onerous tasks by emperor Kublai Khan, he mastered four languages demanded by the tasks (including Persian, Mongolian, Turkic and Cantonese) and also studied the administrative structures of the empire. It was due to these rare virtues that Kublai Khan once entrusted Marco to undertake a long journey up to Burma, and collect all information needed to plan the country’s economy and restructure taxation within the empire. These tasks, in fact, demanded extraordinary skills as well as extreme integrity and also exceptional leadership.

Marco Polo’s extraordinary foresight

Coupled with the aforesaid virtues / qualities Marco Polo was a visionary who possessed an extraordinary foresight, our youth need to consider developing them. While foresight carries a weight of expectation, people possessing this quality also acquire the ability to look beyond the immediate future, and make near accurate predictions. This ability, in short, involves critical thinking, creativity, strategic planning and fathoming of the forces that shape both the immediate vicinity as well as the rapidly changing outer world / peripheries. These are musts for any person who wishes to lead and reach his / her vision, rather than getting led by the forces and succumbing to them.

What Hendrik Willem says about Marco Polo in The Story of Mankind

“The crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of travelling. But very few people had ever ventured beyond the well-known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaffa. In the thirteenth century the Polo brothers, merchants of Venice, had wandered across the great Mongolian desert, and after climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty emperor of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name of Marco, had written a book about their adventures, which covered a period of more than twenty years. The astonished world had gaped at his descriptions of the gold towers of the strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go to the east, so that they might find this gold-land and grow rich. But the trip was too far and dangerous, and so they stayed at home.”

Final thoughts: Why Marco Polo still matters

Many readers would cast Marco Polo in the category of explorers like most others who engaged in explorations. This is far from the truth. He wasn’t a mere explorer. He was a bridge-builder, a cultural translator, as well as a visionary who taught that the world was far more integrated than Europeans at the time imagined. Unlike most others his tasks were not confined to just mapping of lands. As some historians expressed, his gritty journeys “rewired global trade” and became a global connector, triggered technological curiosity, and prepared the stage for centuries of more and more explorations, which ultimately resulted in reshaping the earth to its true form. Christopher Columbus, if not inspired by Marco Polo’s ‘Il milione’ (The Travels of Marco Polo), wouldn’t have, for certain, sailed west. Similarly the Portuguese might not have brought the seas and lands under their domination. In short, Europe’s economic growth and expansion might have been delayed by many a century. Marco Polo was thus an epoch maker, who changed history forever.

Features

Martin Wickremasinghe and the Catholic Church: An Uneasy Encounter

Published

13 hours ago

2026/09/6

Thilina Walpola

By Avishka Mario Senewiratne
Editor-in-Chief Ceylon Journal

By now, with the renewed interest and discussions on Martin Wickramasinghe in which you may have taken part before today, let alone the fascinating accounts by my three esteemed colleagues who have spoken would have given you a clear indication that Wickramasinghe was an ‘ideas’ man, who had an opinion and criticism for any subject his eyes or senses laid on. My focus is on a lesser known, hardly discussed perspective, which you will possibly consider as controversial. And that is Martin Wickramasinghe and the Catholic Church.

After Mrs. Sirima Bandaranaike’s SLFP government won the elections of July 1960 there was a period of considerable political and social change. Among its most controversial measures was the state takeover of assisted and denominational schools. The controversy soon went beyond education. It raised larger questions about religion, democracy, and where the authority of the Church should end and that of the State begin.

It was also a lively period in Sri Lanka’s intellectual life. Christianity, democracy and education were debated by formidable minds: Martin Wickremasinghe; Fr. W. L. A. Don Peter, historian and later Rector of St. Joseph’s College; and Bishop Edmund Peiris OMI, the first Sinhalese Catholic bishop and himself a distinguished historian and Sinhala scholar. It is against this background that I approach Martin Wickremasinghe and the Catholic Church.

The first part of my discussion are some thoughts on a series of articles Wickremasinghe wrote to the Silumina in 1960. In his first article, “ආගම, සසුන හ ජනසම්මතවාදය”—Religion, the Church and Democracy—he argues that religion should not merely consist of theories and dogmas but must be practiced by its followers. Surprisingly, on this aspect, Britain interested him because it retained a monarchy while political power had become democratic and religion no longer commanded the machinery of government. From here, Wickremasinghe turns his guns on the Catholic Church.

He attacks the Catholic Church’s history of censoring books from the ancient to recent times. To him, an institution which prohibits ideas sits rather uncomfortably beside democracy. There is also some wit in his observation that censorship rarely works as scholars and serious readers will somehow find the forbidden books and probably become even more determined to read them. One might also note his severe criticism of the Catholic Church in his work Evolution and Revolution (1971) for censoring Fr. Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1955). Wickramasinghe was known to be an admirer of Chardin.

However, his deeper quarrel was with the hierarchical structure of the Church. Catholic priests administering schools, he argues, did not necessarily represent ordinary Catholics but an ecclesiastical establishment answering to bishops and ultimately Rome. He questions Church authority over marriage and birth control and objects to religious intervention in science. Papal infallibility particularly troubled him: how can unquestionable authority, he asks in effect, coexist with a society founded upon questioning?

Yet Catholics are not Wickremasinghe’s only targets. Buddhist monks receive their share of the fire. He criticizes the temperance movement, arguing that prohibition would hardly make people sober. The working classes might simply turn to illicit arrack, damaging their health while depriving the government of revenue. To sum up, Wickramasinghe states that public policy should follow social realities rather than religious morality.

In a subsequent article he argues that religious education fares little better. Both Buddhist Dhamma schools and Catholic Sunday schools come under scrutiny. Religion, Wickremasinghe argues, cannot simply be learnt from books; it must be lived. Despite the multiplication of religious schools, he saw no corresponding decline in crime among Buddhist or Christian youth. More religion classes, therefore, did not necessarily produce more virtuous—or better—people.

However, four years earlier, in his book Bana Katha Sahithya, he credited S. Thomas’ distinctive artistic tradition to English clergymen formed by Greek and English literature and inspired by religious ideals. He could therefore admire Christianity’s contribution to culture and education while remaining deeply critical of the authority, censorship and institutional power of the Church itself.

His criticism of Catholicism must also be understood against his view of the colonial missionary legacy. He regarded parts of the Christian establishment as elitist and closely associated with educational and institutional power. Accordingly it must be understood that his criticism against the Church was not for its theology but for its impact on privilege, censorship, authority and bureaucracy.

This is what makes his position more interesting. The larger question Wickramasinghe asks and one that is still relevant was – where should religion end and democracy begin?

Wickremasinghe also observes that elite schools such as S. Thomas’, Royal and Wesley may produce decent and civilised young men, but questions whether their virtue necessarily comes from religious instruction. Good manners and discipline, he warns, should not automatically be mistaken for religious virtue.

But some of his criticisms are problematic. His treatment of papal infallibility appears to make it a broad claim to unquestionable authority, whereas Catholic doctrine confines it to particular circumstances concerning faith and morals. His larger question about authority remains legitimate, but his treatment of the doctrine of papal infallibility is incomplete.

He also accuses the Church of discouraging Catholics from participating in activities initiated by Buddhists and non-Catholics yet provides no evidence from Ceylon for such a sweeping conclusion. Similarly, he suggests that Catholic schools did more than educate children— and that through religious education they exercised control over parents and families. Catholic schools certainly preserved religious identity, but control is a considerably stronger accusation and requires considerably stronger evidence.

The conclusion of the essay is revealing. Writing amid the growing Sinhalaisation of Ceylon, Wickremasinghe argues that a free Buddhist society required two things: a strong socialist government and a strong Sasana.

There is an intriguing tension here. He subjects ecclesiastical authority to severe criticism while placing considerable faith in a powerful socialist State. He even goes on to say that socialism could resolve both social and economic anxieties of society. He could not, of course, have foreseen the later record of Sri Lanka’s socialist experiments.

Wickremasinghe soon received an answer from Bishop Edmund Peiris. Peiris corrected what he regarded as Wickremasinghe’s errors concerning Catholic history, doctrine and the functioning of the Church. This was not a quarrel between strangers. Their association went back at least to 1932. Peiris admired Wickremasinghe’s novels and criticism, while Wickremasinghe respected the Bishop’s scholarship. In replying, Wickremasinghe called Peiris an “old friend,” who wishes “not to quarrel,” and clarified an important distinction: his criticism was principally against the institutional Church and the Vatican, not Christianity as an ethical and social teaching.

To support his argument that the Church historically opposed rationalism, democracy and science, Wickremasinghe relied heavily upon J. B. Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought (1913). He dismissed Hilaire Belloc’s criticism of Bury as largely corrections of dates, statistics and details rather than a refutation of Bury’s central argument.

Here, Wickremasinghe was perhaps too willing to accept an interpretation congenial to his own rationalism. Bury wrote from a strongly rationalist and anti-clerical standpoint; Belloc was a committed Catholic controversialist. Wickremasinghe failed to note that neither gentleman arrived at the argument without luggage.

Nor could modern Catholicism simply be characterized as an opponent of democracy and social progress: by Wickremasinghe’s lifetime, Catholic social teaching had developed considerably on labour, social justice, human dignity and the responsibilities of the State.

With that exchange coming to a close, I would focus on the second aspect of my argument: Martin Wickramasinghe and Fr. Don Peter.

In June 1960, amid the controversy over the school takeover, Archbishop Thomas Benjamin Cooray publicly defended the democratic right of Catholic schools which had played a pivotal role in the freedom struggle to remain under Church ownership while strongly attacking Marxist statism. Ven. Madihe Pannasiha Thera responded in the Dinamina, accusing Catholic education of undermining the Buddha Sasana and provocatively comparing Catholicism with Marxism.

Defending the stance of the Church, Fr. Don Peter replied to the Dinamina. He dismissed the comparison between Catholicism and Marxism as nonsensical and challenged the foundations of Pannasiha Thera’s argument. It was in this milieu that Martin Wickramsinghe, then aged 70, entered the argument as a response to Fr. Don Peter’s article. This response didn’t end up in one article but a series of four others each by Fr. Don Peter and Martin Wickramsinghe.

Martin Wickramasinghe’s first response titled “Is the Catholic Church Democratic?”, starts his argument by saying “මඩිහේ පඥ්ඥසීහ මහහිමියගේ එක් චෝදනාවක් වත් අසාධාරණ නොවේ යයි හැ(ගේ)” Wickramasinghe argued that the political outlook of the medieval Roman Catholic Church was closely associated with a hierarchical and authoritarian conception of the state. He connects this tradition with the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and contrasts it with modern democracy, which he sees as developing largely from the ideas of English thinkers such as John Locke and David Hume. However, Wickramasinghe does not claim that Catholic doctrine explicitly demands an anti-democratic state; he acknowledges that the evidence from Pope Leo XIII does not necessarily prove such a position.

Nevertheless, he stated that the Church’s historical conduct gives some justification to accusations of authoritarianism. He particularly points to the Catholic Church’s support for Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and cites Pope Pius XI who called the Fascist Dictator Mussolini, “a man sent by Providence,” after the Vatican Treaty of 1929. Wickramasinghe distinguishes the teachings of Jesus and early Christianity from the political character later acquired by the institutional Church. Drawing upon the Marxist scholar Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity, he suggests that primitive Christianity possessed egalitarian, even communistic or socialist, characteristics. Although Kautsky was a Marxist, Wickramasinghe argues that his historical criticism cannot simply be dismissed. Overall, he presents Christianity as an evolving historical institution whose later authoritarian tendencies should not automatically be attributed to Jesus’s original teachings.

In his response to Wickramasinghe, Fr. Don Peter’s article is titled “කතෝලික පවුලේ පාලනයට ප්‍රජාතන්‍ත්‍රවාදය උවමනා නැත.” He laments stating that he thought Wickramasinghe was a moderate and not an extremist for the first line in the latter’s response “මඩිහේ පඥ්ඥසීහ මහහිමියගේ එක් චෝදනාවක් වත් අසාධාරණ නොවේ.” Here, his strongest contention to Wickremasinghe rests upon a simple distinction: the Catholic Church is not democratic in its internal government, but this does not make it anti-democratic. He argues that the Church does not claim that every legitimate political system must imitate its own hierarchical structure. Nor, he maintains, should the actions of Catholics in a particular country or period be taken as proof that the Church itself is opposed to democracy.

To explain this, Fr. Don Peter compares the Church to a family. A family is not governed democratically: children do not elect their parents or vote upon every decision. They obey their father because they trust his love, judgement and concern for their welfare. In the same manner, Catholics regard the Pope as a spiritual father and accept his authority as the representative of Christ. This obedience, Fr. Don Peter stresses, concerns principally religious and spiritual matters and applies to Catholics, not to society as a whole.

The distinction is important and exposes a weakness in Wickremasinghe’s argument. A hierarchical institution is not necessarily hostile to a democratic State. Universities, armies and even political parties may contain hierarchies while functioning within democracies.

Yet Fr. Don Peter’s family analogy is not totally convincing. Children possess limited autonomy because they are minors; adult Catholics are morally and intellectually responsible individuals. Comparing ecclesiastical obedience to a child’s obedience to his father risks becoming paternalistic and may actually strengthen Wickremasinghe’s concern about unquestioned authority. Don Peter successfully demonstrates that non-democratic and anti-democratic are not synonymous, but his argument does not entirely answer the larger question Wickremasinghe raises: how should a hierarchical religious authority operate within a society increasingly committed to individual judgement, intellectual freedom and democratic values? Though Wickramasinghe’s criticism is about the Catholic Church’s lack of democracy, he fails to mention how or how not Buddhism or any other main religion functions in a democratic hegemony.

In his next response, titled “ජනසම්මතවාදය හා රෝමානු පල්ලිය,” Wickremasinghe began by apologising to Fr. Don Peter and clarifying that he had actually written, “මඩිහේ පඥ්ඥසීහ හිමියගේ එක් චෝදනාවක් අසාධාරණ නොවේයැයි මට හැගේ,” rather than “එක් චෝදනාවක් වත් අසාධාරණ නොවේ.” The editor of the Dinamina also apologised to readers for the erroneous addition of “වත්,” which had significantly altered the meaning and perhaps contributed to Fr. Don Peter escalating the debate.

From this point, however, the exchange became increasingly polemical. Wickremasinghe revealed some confusion regarding the distinction between the Roman Catholic Church and the local Church in Sri Lanka, an issue Fr. Don Peter readily seized upon. He also invoked an earlier criticism by Panditha Vimalawansha Thero, who had claimed that Wickremasinghe lacked sufficient knowledge of Buddhism and the history of its propagation. Don Peter therefore questioned how someone accused of misunderstanding his own religious tradition could confidently pronounce upon the Catholic Church.

The debate consequently drifted further from its original argument about Catholicism and democracy. The Gnanartha Pradeepaya joined the controversy, attacking Wickremasinghe with the cutting remark, “වික්‍රමසිංහ මහතා පණ්ඩිතකම කට ගාගත්තෙකැයි.” Thereafter, the exchange gradually petered out without a proper resolution, leaving behind considerable disagreement and evidently some resentment among those involved.

Two years after this exchange, in 1962, Wickremasinghe published Sinhala Sakaskada, a collection of essays on culture, anthropology, democracy and religion, including his articles on the Catholic Church, the school takeover and his responses to Fr. Don Peter. On 14 July 1962, Don Peter wrote to Wickremasinghe questioning why his replies had been omitted, arguing that Catholic readers had thereby been denied the other side of the debate. Wickremasinghe replied that the book was essentially a collection of his own writings but encouraged Fr. Don Peter to publish the entire exchange himself. Fr. Don Peter accepted the suggestion and subsequently published his own Sakaskädé.

In 1964 Fr. Don Peter made a surprising gesture. He invited Wickremasinghe, then nearly 75, to be Chief Speaker at the Sinhala Day of St. Joseph’s College. Wickremasinghe accepted the invitation. Fr. Don Peter later recalled that the two had a long conversation near the College swimming pool and finally resolved the differences arising from their 1960 controversy. Their friendship continued until Wickremasinghe’s death. At St. Joseph’s College, Wickramasinghe who spoke for nearly an hour urged English-educated Sinhalese to value their mother tongue, literature and culture, arguing that without such knowledge they could not understand or live harmoniously with their fellow countrymen. Afterwards, the Literary Association staged Amal Biso, written by Fr. Marcelline Jayakody OMI and produced by Fr. Joe Neththasinghe.

His friendship with Bishop Edmund Peiris likewise endured. More importantly, Wickremasinghe was closely observing the remarkable transformation occurring within Catholicism through the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. He welcomed its liturgical and ecumenical reforms, greater openness towards other Christian traditions and the growing indigenization of the Church, regarding these as important steps in making Catholicism relevant to the modern world. For the Century Jubilee of the Gnanartha Pradeepaya in 1966, Martin Wickrasinghe wrote the following: “I cannot help but say that I have always had a great fondness for the paper, because of the taste and skill with which it is produced, and because, although its articles are religious in character, they are written in a manner that appeals to anyone. I believe that the editor deserves the highest praise for bringing out a publication of this kind.” (Translated by the writer)

When Edmund Bishop Peiris retired as Bishop of Chilaw in 1972, Wickremasinghe even contributed an article to the Gnanartha Pradeepaya, ironically, the same Catholic newspaper which had attacked him during the earlier controversy, praising Peiris as an important scholar and historian. Bishop Edmund Peiris later wrote perhaps one of the finest assessments of Wickremasinghe’s vast literary output, “The Sage of Koggala,” for his 85th birthday in 1975. More recently, Fr. Ivan Perera recalled to me that, as a seminarian in 1960, he typed Fr. Don Peter’s correspondence with Wickremasinghe for the Dinamina and years later when the controversy mellowed down accompanied Wickremasinghe to the Ampitiya National Seminary, where he addressed the seminarians and even spent the night in Ampitiya. All these are indications of how relations had changed as Wickremasinghe observed the evolution of the Church.

The reconciliation went further. Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, then Rector of Aquinas College, invited Wickremasinghe as Chief Guest at its convocation. Addressing the gathering Wickremasinghe spoke admiringly of Teilhard de Chardin and encouraged the students in their pursuit of learning and embedding an indigenous, original culture and religion.

Thus, the story did not end with the polemics of 1960. Wickremasinghe’s judgement became more nuanced, while the Catholic Church itself was undergoing significant change. Perhaps the lasting value of this episode lies not in deciding who won the argument, but in what followed it. Wickremasinghe and Fr. Don Peter disagreed sharply, yet dialogue eventually gave way to mutual respect and friendship. Their story reminds us that a civil exchange of opposing views need not deepen divisions. At its best, intellectual disagreement can correct misunderstandings, refine convictions and, ultimately, bring both sides towards a better understanding of one another.

Although Wickremasinghe’s relations with the Church improved, many of the questions he raised in the 1960s remain relevant. Less than 20 years after his death, Fr. Tissa Balasuriya’s Mary and Human Liberation came under severe ecclesiastical scrutiny, eventually leading to his temporary excommunication and controversy over the censorship of his work. Once again, Fr. Don Peter firmly defended the position of the Church.

The episode almost brings the story full circle. Questions of censorship, intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical authority, the very issues that had troubled Wickremasinghe decades earlier, had returned in a different generation and circumstance. One can only wonder: had Martin Wickremasinghe lived to witness it, what would he have said?