Bala Tampoe’s resistance lives on

By Devana Senanayake

Bala Tampoe may have died in 2014, but his commitment to the social transformation of society and his need to combat the exploitation the proletariat faced, can be felt even ten years later. His contributions are particularly important because the “means of social (re)production” have been upended and reoriented by the pandemic and the economic crisis.

Social reproduction is the labor needed to maintain a labor force and includes intimate labor such as mental and emotional labor. Women’s lives, in the household or in their field, be it formal or informal, have been impacted. But it is in the existence of individuals, collectives and unions—forces of quiet resistance—in this realm that Bala’s spirit lives on in.

Born into an aristocratic Tamil family, Bala’s family had a deep impact on his life choices. His father, a coconut planter and civil servant for the colonial government, used to ride both horses and cars. Bala in a profile recalled his father’s tendency to lash out with his whip at people and bullocks who blocked his path on the road.

His mother, the child of a former Chief Post Master, was a fan of the Indian Nationalist movement and admired leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru. Familial tensions plagued his household and his father used to beat his mother which inspired his desire to defend the oppressed.

Bala studied in Royal College and started his activism early as he joined the Suriya Mal Movement and then the LSSP’s anti-imperialist movement in the early 1940s. Once he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Peradeniya, he lectured students about botany and horticulture, before his dismissal for participation in the Public Workers Strike in 1947.

Nevertheless, Bala’s passion for education did not stop there. Workers, students and children learned about history, philosophy, economics and even feminism, as he touched on texts such as Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, in his lectures.

In 1948, Bala became General Secretary of the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) and held his post for 67 years until his death. He participated in the Hartal in 1953—an iconic moment in the country’s history as trade unions and the proletariat opposed the removal of the rice subsidy by the Prime Minister, Dudley Senanayake.

Workers took to the streets, smashed buses, uprooted rail-lines and stopped public transport. Their militancy paralyzed the state apparatus and this resulted in the reduction of the price of rice and the prime minister’s resignation. Bala also led numerous other strikes such as the Lake House strike 1959 and the SLBC strike 1966.

Women’s concerns also received his support, primarily the 600 day strike at Lucky Industries and Polytex strike 1981-1982. Kumudini Samuels, for instance, remembers her participation in the strikes in the 1970s as an employee at Carsons.

Bala also advocated for labor reform such as a bill to limit the unfair termination of employees. He met Dudley Senanayake, proposed state intervention to combat unfair dismissal and laid the foundations for the Termination of Employment Act in 1971. He helped draft a National Workers’ Charter which successive governments have failed to initiate and recommended the ratification of ILO Convention 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize) and 98 (Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining Convention).

The CMU moved from a union which represented white collar members of the mercantile sector to those at the factory-floor level. It has promptly been re-named the Ceylon Mercantile Industrial and General Workers Union.

“Today, our union is only one-fifth our original size. We have some 7,000-8,000 members today, but at one point we had 35,000 workers. We could paralyze the Colombo Port,” Bala told Meera Srinivasan in 2013. One such example is the strike in Colombo Port in 1963. At present, the CMU has a membership of only 3,000.

Bala also ran for Parliament in 1960 and 1965 but lost in both instances. He opposed the LSSP, CP and SLFP formation of the United Left Front (ULF) coalition in 1964 and left the party to form the LSSP-R, the ‘R’ standing for revolutionary. He led the LSSP-R, entered it into the Fourth International and renamed it as the Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP).

Under Upali Cooray, the RMP mobilized women, published a women’s manifesto, and tried to kickstart a women’s liberation movement.

As a lawyer, he defended the young men of the JVP insurrection in 1971. He defended their right to political expression in the Criminal Justice Commission in 1972. The CMU protested the detention of nearly 4,000 comrades, many of them tortured under police custody. They also opposed the State of Emergency which permitted the disposal of dead bodies without the need for a post-mortem examination.

“In 1971 and 1972, comrade Bala’s brilliant knowledge and understanding of Marxism and law brought another dimension to the whole Criminal Justice Commission trial in that a holistic class perspective of the April 1971 insurrection could be presented to the world,” Lionel Bopage said in his article about Bala in 2014.

Women were also unfairly snared in the violence of the counter-insurrection in 1971-72. Former beauty queen in Kataragama, Premavathi Manamperi was arrested, tortured and paraded naked in the Holy City for suspicions of JVP sympathies. She was then shot and buried alive. She had only attended some Marxist classes, but reports later revealed the incident to be an act of revenge by a rejected military officer. Bala mobilized people to protest about her unjust death.

He also advocated a political solution to the National Question as an active member of the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE), founded by Fr. Paul Caspersz. Of Bala’s romantic partners, unionists and activists fondly recall May Wickramasuriya. May joined the CMU in 1951 and their Executive Committee in 1953.

She played a vital role in the CMU and Employers Federation of Ceylon’s Collective Bargaining Agreement to provide administrators, clerks and executives in British-led companies benefits such as 42 days of leave, a dispute resolution mechanism and retirement at 60. She also helped the CMU secure its premises in Kollupitiya and it is one of the only trade unions in the country to have a property in its name.

May became Assistant-General Secretary of the CMU in 1957 and stayed on until 1998. “May was an institution at CMU. She held the CMU together. She was very supportive of us, women. Bala would listen to May. At that time, none of the trade unions were pro-women. They had no notion of women’s demands and rights in the labor movement and were very male-centric,” Kumudini told me. May experienced a stroke in November 1995 and died three years later in 1998.

After Bala’s demise in 2014, the CMU’s membership and relevance has also disappeared. When I contacted the CMU, they declined to comment and a former member at the last minute refused the publication of his responses. This behavior is indicative of the present state of trade unions, which are primarily male-dominated.

Many of them, led by fossilized men, are embroiled in interpersonal tensions and battles of succession. The tendency to familiarize relationships and political movements means that the consensus and solidarity needed to respond to the moment is lost.

In the meantime, the economic crisis has completely upended the country. Welfare and social services, such as universal healthcare and free education, are underfunded and in-decline. Women and children have been disproportionately hit. The inflation of food has led to severe child malnutrition. Mothers subsist on one meal a day. Girls have dropped out of school as the prices of stationery, uniforms and transport have risen. A number of houses have had their electricity disconnected and are in voluntary blackout. Families in the North, East and Central provinces are in-debt for basic essentials such as food and medicine.

Workers in feminized and invisible roles in the formal and informal sector are burdened by their material realities, exploitation in their realms of labor and inside their households. Women in the plantation sector, apparel sector and domestic labor have set up unions in the past couple of years.

Collectives in the LGBTQIA+ community have distributed mutual aid and resources in times of crisis. Activists continue to bail out LGBTQIA+ folks and sex workers arbitrarily arrested under the Vagrants Ordinance. Women in the Muslim community have protested the institution of marriage under the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act which impacts poor and rural-based women and children in particular.

These are just a handful of responses to the crisis of “social (re)production” in place.

At present, a dual response which considers formal and informal labor and the intricacies of intimate life, an invisible realm of labor, is the playground for resistance.

While he did not directly champion these causes, the essence of Bala’s spirit can be seen in these quiet but consistent acts of resistance, as the men he inspired are consumed by their personal vices, paper-thin egos and abject mediocrity.