Wishing Lalith A on his birthday and being woken up by a 4.30 am phone call by the president

President Premadasa, continued to be Minister until his tragic assassination on May 1, 1993. The hallmark of his tenure as Minister of Education and Higher Education was his strict non-interference in the day to day running of the Ministry. Very early on, he told me “Dharmasiri, you are a senior and experienced Secretary. You run the Ministry. Get the other Ministers also involved. I will hold a “Mini Cabinet” meeting once a month. In the meantime, if there is anything of a political nature you are not sure about, and about which you want some clarification, don’t bother to come and see me. Just give me a call anytime.” This is exactly how we functioned. He never disturbed and rarely did I have to disturb him either. Nor did I meet him except at the monthly meeting.

The President also did not interfere or bring any pressure to bear on the eternal question of school admissions. On just a couple of occasions when he felt constrained to send a small list, it was with specific instructions that it was to be done only if possible. The officer who brought the list emphasized this point. However, occasionally he checked you out on matters. He told me one day that he wanted to visit the National Institute of Education at Maharagama. He had never been there before. A date and time were fixed.

The visit was to take place at 9 a.m. and I was to meet him there, along with other relevant officials. But early in the morning of the appointed day, I received a telephone call from his private residence “Sucharitha” requesting me to come there at 8 a.m. and join him in his car, because he wanted to discuss some matters with me. When I went there I got the thoughtful but standard treatment of being served with a variety of short-eats followed by tea or coffee. This comes quickly, like a drill, a few minutes after you go in and sit in the waiting room.

After sometime, the security officers asked me to go and be beside the official Mercedes Benz car he was using since the President was about to come. He came out, but turned back, evidently because he had forgotten something. By that time he had seen me and he immediately turned and said “Why are you standing? Please get into the car. I will come in a moment.” That was a demonstration of great politeness on his part. But I for my part did not think it polite to get into the back seat and sit before the President got in. Therefore, I kept on standing which was only for a few moments.

Again, when he came out, he asked me “Why didn’t you sit?” Thereafter, we got in, and on the way to Maharagama he asked me a number of questions pertaining to education, especially on teacher training, curriculum development and examinations. By now, I was pretty thorough with the policies, practices and projections. and was able to answer all his questions. He was very satisfied. He thought we were on the right track. He then said something that still showed his frustration with his Ministers. He aid “I have told my Ministers several times to go out into the field and see things for themselves, and not depend on reports. But I still can’t get them to do it.”

With Senior Minister Mr. Sirisena Cooray and Minister of Education Services Mrs. Sunethra Ranasinghe

It was clear that the President thought that his Ministers were not working in the manner and at the pressure he wanted them to. With him, if you worked hard and was up to date there was no problem at all. He was courteous, polite and not difficult to work with. After all, he had the right to expect competence and performance from his Ministers and officials.

Very soon, I was faced with a difficult problem in the prevailing context. Mr. Athulathmudali’s birthday was due shortly and in some of the previous years, on his invitation, I had dropped in at his residence in order to wish him. Now, he was out of the system, in the process of forming a new party and the relations between the President and himself indescribably bad. I however felt personally sensitive to the fact that if I did not go and wish him so soon after his leaving, although I knew that he would understand, it was something that was morally reprehensible to me. It appeared to me like cowardice. I also did not like to sneak into his house in some clandestine fashion. I therefore had to tell the President. Given the existing circumstances this certainly required great courage. To my advantage was the frank nature I possessed and a complete lack of fear of authority born out of an inner confidence that I, to the best of my understanding, knowledge and experience always attempted to do the right thing.

Therefore, when a few days before Mr. Athulathmudali’s birthday, I happened to meet the President in his office on an official matter, I took the opportunity to speak with him after the meeting. I told him that Mr. Athulathmudali was my Minister in two Ministries, explained how I happened to drop in on his birthday on his invitation on previous occasions and expressed that I would be extremely unhappy if I couldn’t do it this time, particularly when he had left us only a short while earlier. I concluded by saying that I did not want to go without informing him.

The President, I could see was taken utterly by surprise. His initial reaction was “Alright.” Then when he apparently recovered his wits he said, “But can’t you telephone and wish him?” I told him to please permit me to personally go at least this time. “Thereafter I will telephone,” I said. He nodded. My friends were amazed that I had “the guts” or “the stupidity” to speak to the President on such a sensitive and to him such an unpalatable matter. In my view what stood me in good stead was the recognition on of my track record that I did everything openly. That is why he signed 11 Cabinet papers and two Supplementary Estimates blindly on the first day he came to office as Minister of Education and Higher Education. He knew that I had nothing to do with politics and that my request to visit Mr. Athulathmudali had a valid context.

As I have enumerated, my relations with President Premadasa were based on certain proprieties, such as non interference and a disciplined impersonal approach by both sides. There were times however when the relationship was not so smooth. The first blip so to speak on a clear screen came when one day I was woken up at 4.30 in the morning. It was well known that the President who got up very early started telephoning various public servants and sometimes even Ministers from about 4.30 a.m. onward. I had so far escaped this attention.

On the other hand, to me this was a fundamental issue. I always had particularly long days getting to bed only after midnight. Invariably the first telephone call to disturb the peace at home came by about 6.30 a.m., sometimes by about 6 a.m. It was clear that I desperately needed to get at least six hours of continuous sleep. If this was not possible, my health or possibly even my life could be endangered. I was also now in a situation where certain meetings, discussions and negotiations which would have been conducted by a Minister, if we had a full-time one, devolved on me, the President himself referring various matters and various groups to me.

I had discussed this whole issue with my wife and we had both agreed that minimum sleep was an absolutely bottom line. I had made up my mind that if I could not even get six hours of sleep, it would be unwise for me to continue in the public service. Matters were at this when I heard the parallel telephone line beside my bed ringing one day distantly as if in a dream. This naturally woke up my wife as well, and when I answered the phone. It was the President’s valet Mohideen, who asked me to hold on because the President wished to speak to me.

Mr. Premadasa then came on the line, and breezily wished me “good morning.” I was both still sleepy and not pleased and mumbled something which must have sounded as an unethusiastic greeting. “Did I wake you?” inquired the President knowing very well that he had indeed done so. “Yes.” I promptly replied adding “I am a late sleeper.” By this what I meant was that I sleep late and therefore get up late. He may or may not have caught the full meaning and might have thought that what I said was that I get up late. For a moment there was something like a surprised silence, followed by some nervous laughter, and then he got to the point and gave me the instructions that he wanted to give. There were nothing in them that should have warranted waking someone at 4.30 a.m. as I found out when I checked on the time after the conversation.

On the other hand I had evidently made my position clear. I concluded from the President’s tone and manner that nobody else seemed to have said what I said and certainly not in the forthright manner in which I said it. This was the last straw and I was not prepared to let it break this camel’s back. After the episode, he never rang me till after 6 a.m. and that too most infrequently. One particular day only he rang me earlier at around 5.30 a.m. ending his conversation by saying “I am going out of Colombo now.” By saying this, he was kind enough to indicate to me that that was the reason for telephoning me early.

There were occasions I argued strenuously with him although his face looked very grim when I did so. One such occasion was when he wanted to setup school boards in every school consisting of representatives of parents, teachers, past pupils and certain selected representatives of the local community. As a concept it was excellent. It would have been the beginning of involving the schools with the community instead of being totally subject to a bureaucracy. The problem was that the President wanted to set up these Boards immediately using the emergency regulations. That was his nature.

When he thought that an idea was good, he wanted it implemented from day before yesterday. I argued with him that this would be self defeating; that it would attract serious opposition; that people would see some hidden agenda in the move when in reality there was none; and that we needed a month or two of careful preparation and if possible trying it out as a pilot project in a few areas first, before going all island. The President did not agree. He did not specifically say so, but it was evident from his demeanour that he considered all these arguments as typical of a bureaucratic system’s inherent propensity for delay.

Therefore, he went ahead. Emergency regulations were gazetted. Then the flak started with a vengeance, with educationists, influential individuals, trade unions, the opposition parties, all attacking the proposal. The valuable concept of the school board was completely drowned out by the sustained attack on the emergency regulations aspect. The President was made out to be a dictator with a hidden agenda of curtailing free education in the country. Many interpreted this action as being due to coercion exercised on the government by the World Bank, which of course was a favourite whipping boy of dissidents of all hues and colours.

More the President tried to stubbornly persist in the scheme the greater the opposition grew. In the end a good scheme had at least temporarily to be abandoned. After this rather stormy episode, I found that he listened more carefully. When therefore, I telephoned and strongly advised him not to proceed with distributing some literature with a political content to the Ven. monks and lay persons who were due to gather in the main hall of the BM ICH for the 90th anniversary celebration of the oriental studies society of Sri Lanka, he somewhat reluctantly listened.

I regularly chaired the executive committee meetings of this society. In the committee too, there were scholar monks who were strongly identified with the two main political parties. We did not permit anything of apolitical nature to interfere with the scholarly work of the society. The committee functioned in great harmony. Had the President gone ahead with his scheme, I was convinced that several monks and laymen would have got up and challenged the President publicly, as to the relevance of the distributed literature to the important occasion that evening. The meeting would then have ended in disorder, with large sections shouting and walking out. In the end we had a most peaceful and harmonious meeting, with the President being so gracious as to refer to my grandfather as a founder member of the society, and my own role in carrying the work of the society forward.

(Excerpted from In Pursuit of Governance, autobiography of MDD Pieris)