Tamil Political Leaders II

by Rajan Philips

The 1956 elections brought to the forefront of Sinhala-Tamil political divide two former classmates at St. Thomas’s College, SWRD Bandaranaike and SJV Chelvanayakam. SWRD rode to power as Prime Minister, heading the ideologically motley MEP coalition, on the well-orchestrated Sinhala Only wave. SJV and his Tamil Arasu Kadchi or Federal Party swept the elections in the North and East to present a defensive phalanx in parliament supplemented by non-violent protests outside parliament.

Yet there was more in common between the two men than what appeared on the surface as Sinhala-Tamil political confrontation. Just as there is more in common between the Sinhalese and the Tamils socially and culturally than what would appear to be the case on the surface of politics.

Bandaranaike and Chelvanayakam had deep Christian roots, although SWRD became a Buddhist as he entered political life, while SJV Chelvanayakam made the political point that the Tamils did not insist that he should change his religion in order to become their leader. The two had mutual Sinhala (Sir Edward Jayatilleke QC, HV Perera QC) and Tamil (P. Navaratnarajah QC, AC Nadarajah, KC Thangarajah) friends. Through them SWRD is said to have offered financial support to the election campaign of the Federal Party as part of bolstering the anti-UNP forces in the election. The offer was promptly and politely declined. True to old-school etiquette, SJV sent a note of congratulations to SWRD on his massive electoral success and his becoming the country’s Prime Minister.

The BC Pact

More consequentially, the same mutual friends facilitated negotiations between Prime Minister Bandaranaike and the Federal Party that led to the historic Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, the BC Pact. An unpublicized story from that era is that after the signing of the Pact, Sir Edward Jayatilaka and AC Nadarajah visited Chelvanayakam at his Alfred House Gardens residence. Mr. Chelvanayakam had already requested HV Perera to come over to look through the agreement and give his legal opinion.

Browsing through the agreement, the eminent QC told SJV, himself a Queens Counsel, that the agreement was fine, and he (SJV) had given away nothing. Whereupon Sir Edward, former Chief Justice, laughingly interjected to HV Perera: “Why are you giving him (SJV) opinion that he has not given anything way? It is our fellow (SWRD) who has given away everything!” This was an instance of informal consociationalism at its best.

Although the pact was eventually “abrogated” in the face of opportunistically orchestrated opposition to it, it has stood the test of time as the touchstone for all the attempts thereafter to resolve the vexing question that the Pact would otherwise have solved for all time. As old anecdotes go, RG Senanayake told Dudley Senanayake because of the BC Pact, “the name of SWRD Bandaranaike will go down in history in letters of gold.”

JR Jayewardene who organized public protests against the Pact was honest enough to note in his diary the day SWRD rescinded the agreement, that Prime Minister should have resisted the protests and implemented the agreement. James Manor in his Bandaranaike biography notes the unfortunate confluence of two sets of political forces – the communal opposition to the BC Pact and the feudal intrigues against the Paddy Lands Act – that upset what otherwise would have been the two signature achievements of the first Bandaranaike government.

There is every reason to believe that SWRD was keen to revive the rapprochement with the Federal Party, and there were indications of it in his last major speech in Kandy, a week before his assassination, which N. Sanmugathasan described as the late leader’s greatest political speech. That was not to be, for just as in the case of the rapprochement between DS Senanayake and GG Ponnambalam, the possibility of a new rapprochement between Bandaranaike and Chelvanayakam was killed away by an assassin in robes who shot killed SWRD Bandaranaike on September 25, 1959.

And just as Prime Minister Kotelawala destroyed the Senanayake-Ponnambalam rapprochement by firing Ponnambalam from cabinet, SWRD Bandaranaike’s successors spurned his legacy on the BC Pact by simply ignoring it. The BC Pact and what it symbolized had no place in the so called “Bandaranaike policies” that became the preamble and prefix for any and all initiatives of the SLFP governments that came after 1959. They did worse and exacerbated the Sinhala-Tamil political confrontations in the first halves of the 1960s and the 1970s. The Federal Party was left to extra-parliamentary agitations that led nowhere.

There was a respite in 1965 when the Federal Party found a new rapprochement partner in the UNP with Dudley Senanayake as Prime Minister. There were similarities as well as significant differences between this rapprochement and the one involving Ponnambalam and DS Senanayake that I recounted last week. Equally, one can find similarities and differences between the BC Pact and the DC pact.

The Politics of Transition

Before that, it is appropriate to resume from where I left last week and narrate the politics of Tamil leadership transition from Ponnambalam to Chelvanayakam. The latter became the leader and literally father figure in Tamil politics from 1956 and he remained so until his death in 1977. That is also the third period in AJ Wilson’s periodization of Tamil political leaders.

Apart from the Sinhala-Tamil political dynamic, if not underpinning that dynamic, the 1956 general election has widely been considered as a watershed in post-independence Sri Lankan politics. The election saw the dethronement of the UNP as the political vehicle of island’s propertied classes and the enthronement of an SLFP-led coalition representing the under classes or the petit-bourgeoisie comprising the famous five cohorts – the monk, teacher, cultivator, native physician, and the worker. It was also a watershed for Sri Lankan Tamil politics.

The election brought to a conclusion the leadership transition that had started with the exit of GG Ponnambalam from cabinet. His replacement by SJV Chelvanayakam was complete after the election. The Federal Party won the majority of seats in the North and East, and the Tamil Congress was reduced to the solitary seat of the Jaffna City that Ponnambalam managed to retain. Jaffna would remain unattainable for the Federal Party until as late as the 1970 elections when Cyril Martin, a westernized Colombo Tamil, was parachuted to take advantage of his Catholic and caste roots in the city. Even he would fail the first time, in 1965, and managed to eke out a narrow victory by a margin of 56 votes in 1970.

As for the Ponnambalam-Chelvanayakam leadership transition, there could not have been two more diametrically different personalities than Chelvanayakam and Ponnambalam. Ponnambalam was a man of both substance and show in equally substantial measures, while Chelvanayakam, the “earnest Christian lawyer” as Howard Wriggins described him, was all substance and no show. Yet in their politics, there was both significant continuity as well as radical change. Although older in age, Chelvanayakam (1898-1977) had been persuaded by Ponnambalam (1901-1977) to enter politics and join the Tamil Congress accepting the leadership of Ponnambalam.

While Ponnambalam had started contesting elections to the State Council from 1931 and had been a State Councilor from 1934, Chelvanayakam’s foray into electoral politics began only in 1947 in Sri Lanka’s first parliamentary election. Chelvanayakam contested and won the election in Kankesanthurai, and he was one of a strong contingent of Tamil Congress MPs elected mostly from the Jaffna Peninsula and mostly defeating Tamil opponents contesting as UNP candidates. One of them was Sir Arunachalam Mahadeva (1885-1969), son of Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, and a founding member and Vice President of the UNP. Mahadeva was the last remaining legatee of the Ramanathan-Arunachalam political dynasty.

Mahadeva had been representing Jaffna in the State Council from 1934 and was Minister of Home Affairs from 1942. Ponnambalam had been representing Point Pedro in the State Council since 1934 but decided to move to Jaffna in 1947 and take on Mahadeva in what was billed as ‘the battle of Jaffna.’ It turned out to be a rout with Ponnambalam polling three times as many votes as Mahadeva who was 16 years older, and a rather sad end to the electoral politics of a highly respected gentleman. Perhaps the intensity of Ponnambalam’s campaign and the magnitude of his victory against a leading candidate of the UNP would have been factors in the internal opposition within the Tamil Congress to Ponnambalam joining the UNP government within a year of the 1947 election.

Indeed, the differences between Ponnambalam and Chelvanayakam arose out of the former’s decision to join the UNP government and its cabinet. They eventually led to Chelvanayakam leading a dissident group out of the Tamil Congress and forming a new political party – the Ilankai Thamizh Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) in Tamil and the Federal Party in English. Although the ITAK made changing the island’s unitary (Soulbury) constitution to a federal constitution the be all and end all of its politics, it was open to an incremental approach that came to be described, both positively and negatively, as the “little now, more later” approach. The high point of that approach was the BC Pact. That was also the singular achievement and failure of consociational politics between the Sinhala and Tamil political leaders.

(Next Week: The fall from Federalism to Separatism).