Changing of the guard: I had to answer a letter I myself had written!

(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar by Bradman Weerakoon)

Gopallawa met Dudley around noon and on his being satisfied that Dudley had the support of the Federal Party, asked him to get ready for the swearing in of his Cabinet. For one more time a peaceful regime change had been effected.

Sirimavo was readying herself for moving out. But there was one final official act to be done before she left Temple Trees. Reports were coming in on the telephone and through personal emissaries of attacks against supporters of the SLFP in all parts of the country. In the towns and villages people were giving vent to their rage at some injustice or other done to them, or presumed to have been done by a minister or supporter of the party that had now lost the elections.

This was a familiar pattern and people who had had their houses stoned, vehicles set on fire or suffered injury by assault four to five years ago were now taking their revenge. It was a sad but familiar occurrence in the political culture that Sri Lanka had developed. Sirimavo wanted a strong letter drafted to be sent to the incoming prime minister. I was very unhappy myself at the prevailing tendency to settle old scores at election time and dictated forceful a letters to the secretary defence and the prime minister in that order. Sirimavo signed the letter and I had it delivered immediately to Woodlands where Dudley was assembling his team.

A day later among the papers that Dudley passed to me as we sat across the table of the prime minister’s office, was Sirimavo’s letter. He handed it to me and said there was a serious matter to be attended to. “Please look into this and give the necessary instructions to the secretary-defence and the IGP and draft a suitable reply to be sent to Mrs Bandaranaike,” he said. So I found myself in the strange position of having to reply to a letter which I had literally written to myself!

Sirimavo’s work had hardly begun with her first innings at the wicket. But it was my last chance at working with her. She was in opposition between 1965 to 1970 and came back as PM with a United Front government in 1970 after an incredible electoral victory. Seven years later, in 1977, she was to suffer a devastating defeat losing to J R by a huge margin. Once again, the ‘first past the post’ electoral system had produced an overwhelming swing to the party in opposition.

J R lost no time in appointing a Commission of Inquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court Judge — Justice Weeraratne, to examine a number of allegations against the misuse of power by Sirimavo during her tenure between 1970 and 1977. The allegations were of two sorts. Firstly that she had knowingly denied the exchequer of the proceeds of the stamp duty by not reporting or under-valuing some private land that she had sold-during the prohibited period pertaining to privately owned land which came within the purview of the Land Reform Act of 1972.

Under the Act, the maximum holding that an individual could possess was 50 acres. This measure introduced by the United Front government of 1970 was a severe blow also for Sirimavo who was the owner of thousands of acres of productive land. While, much of her landholdings were those taken over by the state, there were some few parcels of land which she had sold apparently in contravention of the law, prior to it coming into existence. The `prohibited period’ during which land sales were forbidden was that between the time that the Cabinet had taken its decision to go forward with the law and the date on which the law became effective with the speaker’s assent.

The Weeraratne Commission was not able to have an explanation from Sirimavo on this point because she decided not to appear before the Commission. The Commission went ahead with its inquiry `ex-parse’ and came to the conclusion that while some of the allegations were established, they did not constitute any misuse or abuse of power, corruption or fraudulent act.

As regards the second set of allegations they concerned the suppression of certain legitimate political actions and an interference with the rights and liberties of people, through the continuance of a state of emergency for over five years. The allegation was that the conditions in the country did not warrant such extension and the continuance of the emergency was for the purpose of suppressing genuine oppositional activity.

Sirimavo decided not to appear before the Commisssion which she considered was a political venture with the avowed objective of finding her guilty and ensuring her forfeiture of civic rights for a long period. In a spirited defence of her position her team of lawyers, which included HL de Silva the well known constitutional expert, made a number of cogent points which were presented to the Commission at the commencement of the proceedings. They covered the following legal as well as political observations:

Mrs Bandaranaike’s statement:

“She states that she was now confronted by a conspiracy of a different kind – of that which her husband Mr Bandaranaike had to face while engaged in the liberation of the downtrodden masses. This time the conspiracy cunningly wears an external cloak which is unrealistic, undemocratic, unlawful and unconstitutional reflecting the very negation of fairness and justice.

She made it clear that the decision she was taking not to subject herself to the masses mandate was a carefully considered response manoeuvred by the UNP to force her into a period of political exile. She was prepared to face the consequences of the act of the government in seeking her disenfranchisement and deprivation of other civil rights and denial of right to participate in the political life of the country as president.

She contested the legality of the action on the grounds that the Commissioners were chosen by the president himself and averred that the deprivation of her rights was to ensure that the president’s strongest political opponent is eliminated in advance from the contest.”

The Weeraratne Commission found that the allegations were established and that they constituted misuse or abuse of power. They recommended to the president that the respondent, Sirimavo, be made subject to civic disability.

The Commission was only a fact-finding inquiry. Finally, it was the Parliament that had to impose the punishment. JR, utilizing the massive mandate he had in Parliament – went through to impose the severest punishment possible, namely – deprivation of her civic rights for seven years. So, Sirimavo stripped of all her powers including her membership of Parliament spent the next few years bereft of all political powers and privilege.

Personal joy in a time of political turbulence

On February 20, 1978, Chandrika, her younger daughter married Vijaya Kumaratunga and came into residence at Rosmead Place. Vijaya was the son of a village headman in Katana, a town some 20 kilometres north of Colombo. His first employment was as a sub-inspector of police. But he soon moved into film acting and with a body proportioned like Adonis of Greek mythology became a film idol with a span of nearly 20 years in acting. He was already into politics when he married, having joined the Communist Party as a youth. Vijaya Kumaratunga’s aspirations were very much with the emancipation of the large mass of people who could be termed the ‘have-nots’.

At the presidential election held on October 20, 1982 Sirimavo could not contest as she was subject to civic disability and Hector Kobbekaduwa, who had been a minister of agriculture in the 1970-1977 period, was put forward as the presidential nominee for the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. Vijaya took on the role of being a leading supporter of Kobbekaduwa and addressed meetings all round the country.

After the presidential election, there were divisions in the SLFP and Sirimavo found that she could not agree with some of the positions taken up by Vijaya and Chandrika. They left the SLFP and formed the Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya on January 22, 1984. T B Illangaratne, one of Mrs Bandaranaike’s staunch supporters and long-time minister, was elected president of the new party, while Chandrika was elected vice-president and Vijaya, the general secretary. Ossie Abeygunasekera was the second vice-president of the party from its inception.

Vijaya and Chandrika took a firm stand on the ethnic problem and made many public statements that it could be resolved only by peaceful means and not by war. They followed up their stand in discussions with the LTTE, which also took them to Madras (now Chennai), where the Tamil militants were in refuge at that time. Vijaya in opposition to the SLFP’s stand on the matter, supported the Indo-Lanka Accord entered into in July 1987 between J R Jayewardene and Rajiv Gandhi.

Vijaya who showed promise of a great future in politics was brutally gunned down by an assassin riding a motorcycle outside his home in Colombo on 16 February 16, 1988. The murder occurred literally before Chandrika’s eyes and made a tremendous impression on her. She had now lost both her father and her husband to the assassin’s bullet.

Since the killing occurred at the time of JVP militancy the popular surmise was that Vijaya’s assassination was an act of the JVP’s for the reason that he supported the agreement with India on the resolution of the ethnic issue. However, Chandrika always had doubts about the evidence pointing to the JVP. In 1996, after assuming the presidentship of the country, she appointed a presidential commission comprising Justices Sharvanda and Sarath Silva, who later became the chief justice, to inquire into the assassination of Vijaya. It came to the conclusion that the assassination was not, as claimed by the police, by the assassin Navaratne alias Gamini, directed by the JVP, but was something done by sources connected with Prime Minister Premadasa! The charge and counter-charge, so much a part of the political culture of the country, continues even today.

Sirimavo who had experienced all these turnarounds was finally given a remission of the civic disability by J R in 1986. She had been excluded from politics for virtually five years. She was thus enabled to contest the 1988 presidential elections which was won, narrowly, by Premadasa. She won her seat at Attanagalla in the 1989 general elections easily and functioned as leader of the opposition until the Parliament’s dissolution in 1994.

She was again elected into Parliament in August 1994 general elections which saw her daughter Chandrika becoming prime minister in a co-habitional arrangement with D B Wijetunga, who had succeeded Premadasa on his assassination on May 1, 1993 as president. But there was still another mile or two to go. Frail with age and not too well to handle all her assignments she was appointed prime minister – now for the third time – by her daughter Chandrika when she won the presidential contest over Srima Dissanayake – the wife of the assassinated Gamini Dissanayake (the finger clearly pointed to the LTTE on this occasion), who was hastily put up as the UNP candidate in the presidential polls of November 1994.

Suffering from diabetes and the recurrence of the old knee problem that eventually put her in a wheelchair, Sirimavo reduced her political activities and finally called it quits, retiring from politics in 2001. But the old soldier who just could not fade away literally died with her boots on. Anura, her son, whom she dearly loved was contesting this time from the UNP, having crossed-over after a tiff with his sister Chandrika, who was now the president of Sri Lanka. Some of the more uncharitable of her critics were to say that Sirimavo’s love for her son outweighed her love for the party which her husband had created in the early fifties and which she had led with such distinction for decades.

Srimavo Bandaranaike died of a heart attack on the 10th of October 2000, on the Kandy road, a few hours after voting at Attanagalle on her way back to Colombo from her country home, Horagolla.