A personal and political entry into democratization – partial and critical

by Sivamohan Sumathy

When I joined the University of Peradeniya as a probationary lecturer in 1990, the university was slowly reactivating itself after the period of terror in the south—of course the war remerged and continued to hold sway on our political imagination for two decades to come. In these still early days for me as a university lecturer, I became the assistant secretary to the newly formed trade union of the Arts Faculty, PAFTA, somewhere in 1991/92. The President of the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) was then Prof. Nalin de Silva and he led the negotiations with A. C. S. Hameed, the then Higher Education Minister over trade union action initiated by the university teachers. Prof. de Silva was a controversial figure, and in turn was targeted by the then UNP regime for harassment and intimidation. The political climate was fractious and tense. But the teachers came together to form a common front to fight their issues. Around the same time, three of us, women, at Peradeniya, who were probationary and temporary lecturers, banded together in a loose formation, and went around from Faculty to Faculty holding lectures on gender. The group was made up of Maithree Wickramasinghe, Keshini Soysa and I; we were sometimes joined by Rani Saverimutthu, Rita Liyanage and others. As new recruits, we were not fully incorporated in university hierarchies, were full of verve, were brave and rebellious without knowing it. We were also supported by some powerful factions of the male domain, Sumanasiri Liyanage in Arts, Ranjit Wijekoon, in the English Language Training Unit (ELTU), V. Kumar at the Faculty of Science, and intermittently a few others at the various faculties.

We begged, cajoled, bullied and used loop holes to hold our sessions and gate-crashed events, to have our say. Ranjit Wijekoon in particular, as a part of the ELTU, organized sessions for us through the English language programme. A couple of times, I was pulled up by the Head of our department for not following protocol, which left me bewildered but not defeated. Prof. Bandula Karunatilleke of the Dept. of History organized an entire seminar on women’s issues as a part of the now defunct but prestigious Ceylon Studies Seminar, in which we spoke, chaired by Dr. L. Kobbekaduwa from the Dept. of Education, both senior academics. It might have been our temerity, it might have been the fact that we were curiosities, whatever the reason, it has to be said that such an enabling should also be attributed to a leftist discourse that still prevailed in the universities, and the leisurely pace of study; the lesser compartmentalization of disciplines, and the lesser bureaucratization of university spaces than we find ourselves in today.

Today, it would be an uphill task to get a senior academic to chair a seminar of probationary and temporary lecturers, unless it is in some audited programme related to “performance indicators”, a box that has to be ticked. A programme, carefully monitored, power pointed, and utterly useless. We did not think of democracy at that time, nor about activism, not even about claiming spaces. We were not familiar with that terminology, but our action was all that and more. It is what we had to do. It was a tiny, not too important, yet significant moment of democratizing the university space.

Taking a leap into the 2010s, FUTA’s historic trade union action of 2011 and 2012 is what I see as a huge step in the history of democratization of university spaces, tasking us to reevaluate our role as intellectuals, academics, teachers and others. The mass mobilization and build up of energy and activism brought on by the member unions of FUTA challenged the then government; and in the post war period, became a signpost for a mass national level struggle that could unite multiple forces. FUTA’s struggle and the aftermath of its activism, nationally, was a forging of a historic bloc in the struggle for change. One of its outcomes was the space it created for the change of government, the invincible Rajapakse regime of the post war years. It expanded the space, created a momentum, and made it national. FUTA’s trade union action was truly national in that sense, for a fleeting moment.

However, unlike in the early years, when I as a probationary lecturer, with no political backing or ambition, could attend a meeting with professors and senior members of the staff, with the Minister, ACS Hameed, over negotiations, FUTA’s action in the 2010s, drew on the massive support of the academic rank and file, but did not shake its hierarchical structure. This is not to say that the previous struggle was non-hierarchical – far from it, but that the avowedly democratizing and social justice programme of FUTA in 2012 fell way too short of its goals in practice. This is the oxymoronic nature of FUTA’s 2011-2012 historic 100-day trade union action. It promised a lot to the people and to its own community and in the end, could neither fulfill it nor keep the dream alive. The political goal of democratization was overridden by the exigencies of the moment, for one. The goals of an academic leadership, FUTA’s Leadership, became conflated with and overrode the aims of democratization, the demand to save state education, and the demand for a 6% of the GDP -llocation for education. Of course, there is no neat binary here and one has to understand that all of this happened during a period of uncertainty, intense debate, angst, and heightened activity.

The 100 day-trade union action was preceded by a flurry of activism that was variously undertaken by different smaller groups, the informal and adhoc University Teachers for Dialogue and Democracy (UT4DD) being one. UT4DD was the first to undertake a series of seminars on the Quality assurance bill that was being ushered into the system surreptiouslyin 2012; the first seminar was held at Colombo University; the President of FUTA was in the audience of roughly 20-25 persons, and Student union reps swere also present. Subsequently, members of UT4DD organized sessions with other trade union reps, including teachers’ unions. As FUTA’s struggle burgeoned into the 100-day Trade union action it created space for academics to engage in grounded research and activism. One of the historic moments of the action was the million signature campaign. Somebody at one of the FUTA broader Ex-Co meetings said “Why don’t we do a public campaign of signatures, a million signatures?” It was almost an incidental remark, but a magical one. It caught the imagination of the crowd there. The million-signature campaign, in the Gramscian sense, signifies the action of a vanguard party, not socialist, but not bourgeois either. It represents the action of a collective, underscoring the democratizing principle

These two instances outlined above, one infinitesimal, carried out in the spirit of adventure, and the other calculated, mobilizational, inter university and even national, are both historical moments. The first is just a moment of activism and the second, a historical conjuncture, a gathering of forces. However, autobiographically speaking, the second was animated by the visionary, daring spirit of the first. They both make their different impact on my own political development as a worker, teacher, scholar and activist in the university space and outside of it. The forces of the historical conjuncture are held together and animated by these small acts of individuals who think non hierarchically and collectively.

In thinking about the days to come, and our difficult future, I have pondered these issues of history, my own and others’, in order to carve out a politics of pedagogy, and political activism. FUTA’s 2012 action had a tremendous impact on my own sense of place in the university. But my own involvement in it was not linear, without struggle or contradictions. We were not always together, and the movement was fractious. But we came together to demand increased expenditure on education – the slogan of 6% GDP – in unison, and in doing so, made ourselves commit to free education in the country. But as we act big, we also need to pay heed to the margins, the small acts of challenge to hierarchy and for justice waged in the corners of the institutional and social spaces, at the university and beyond.

Sivamohan Sumathy is attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya.

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.