Political changes in 1977 and end to a fistful of dollars and luxurious nights in five star hotels

(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar, by Bradman Weerakoon)

I had finally got the break I was looking for in August 1976. The vacancy in the post of regional director in the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) for the Indian Ocean Region which I had sought and failed to obtain in 1972 had fallen vacant once again. I was 46 years old and it seemed to be time for a career change. I had been outstation now for seven years and it looked certain that as long as the government continued I would not be considered for an appointment in Colombo.

Although the general elections had been now rescheduled for 1977, there was yet the possibility of this being postponed. Esala was now back at the St. Thiomas’ Prep School in Kollupitiya studying for the NCGE examination with some new and innovative subjects, which needed some parental help. In fact I had begun to commute from Galle by express bus to be with him on especially important weekends. Although the official round in Galle continued to be interesting, our personal life was being made complicated with the frequent forays into Colombo. A change would be welcome.

Regional Director, IOR

The Indian Ocean Region in terms of population was the largest of the six regions of the IPPF at the time. China had not yet entered the Federation, which required a National Voluntary Family Planning Association to be in place, to qualify for membership. Whilst Sri Lanka was doing well in regulating population growth, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan were exhibiting high rates of growth. In Pakistan, the levels reached about three per cent increase per year and this was impacting badly on both resources and the environment.

My interview was at Karachi when the regional executive committee of volunteers had gathered to meet and speak with the eight candidates who had been short-listed for the job. Among the eight from the region were two Indians, two Pakistanis, a Nepalese and a Bangladeshi. Some of them were medical doctors, some communication experts, three called themselves management specialists and from Sri Lanka, two of us, V A J P Senaratne who was a few years senior to me, and myself.

What was common to the two of us was that both of us were former civil servants. Senaratne’s current position in the government was director of commerce and I was government agent, Galle. After a full day of questions and talk, during which my Ampara experience came in extremely useful (since it showed I could work with Muslim and Tamil people as well), I was selected. Senaratne who was nick-named ‘alphabet Senaratne’ while at school, because he had so many initials before his name obviously, came second.

I settled down to work in Colombo with a staff of 12 in the regional office on Flower Road almost opposite the prime minister’s office. I had a Pakistani as my assistant and a Britisher called Jim Collins (he was a favourite with the girls) as my finance manager. We enjoyed the many visits to the region. I had been in Bombay (now Mumbai), Madras (now Chennai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), Dhaka and Kathmandu on my trips abroad with the prime ministers, but this was different.

Here, one was going into the heart of the country, or the over crowded slums in the teeming cities and meeting very poor and very ordinary people. We made ‘treks’ into the foothills of the Himalayas, long jeep drives along the dusty fields of Orissa and walked in tiny villages deep inside the deserts of Rajasthan.

In the months that followed I got a view of the immense size of the population problem in the South Asian region. In comparison, the effort that governments were making to contain it seemed puny, except in India, where the position was different. The southern states, namely Tamil Nadu and Kerala, had done extremely well and growth rates were around 1.5 per cent. Kerala particularly where the demographic picture was similar to Sri Lanka, with high literacy levels also among the females, was doing as well as we were in Sri Lanka.

This was the time, the 1970s when Indira Gandhi as the prime minister, gave family planning very high priority. Her aim for a rapid decrease in the overall growth rate however backfired, due to the over-enthusiasm with which her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, who took on population control as his special concern, pursued the subject. The government programme wars being charged with insensitivity to the need and choice of the individual and to the rigid pursuit of targets regardless of the human rights concerns.

But some statistical success was recorded with a fantastic array of instant incentives being offered to all men and women who subjected themselves to sterilization. I was invited as regional director to visit some of the sterilization camps especially in the slums of Bombay and Calcutta. The camps were like carnivals, lots of people milling around, lots of loud music and lots of announcements. Men walked in through one door into the vasectomy tents, which operated on an assembly-line approach and walked out through another nervously clutching a radio set or a wad full of rupees.

But in the conservative ‘Hindi belt’ of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan the news of the arrival of a sterilization camp sent a shiver of fear among rural folk who were still for large families. The fall-out was predictable. Some political analysts averred that one of the principal reasons for Indira Gandhi’s loss in the next general elections was her attempt to force family planning on the mass of the Indian population.

The concept of ‘planned parenthood’, which my organization the IPPF was propagating throughout the world, meant something more than merely reducing or controlling the growth of population. As I soon learnt, it had a lot to do with the empowerment of men and women so that they could personally exercise the choice to have the family of the size they desired. Government programs of family planning generally focused on the numbers game.

Had the rates of growth of the population and the fertility of women, and so on, been reduced and by how much? The principal concern was economic; the correct balance between the size of the population and the availability of resources to feed, clothe and house them, among other human needs. While IPPF was cognizant of this national preoccupation – and we used to call this the ‘demographic rationale’ – we were also concerned about the human rights implications (was it a voluntary decision or were there elements of coercion and compulsion) and the health implications (did it conduce to physical and mental good health or not) of family planning.

These – the human rights and health rationales – had been the principal motivations of the early pioneers6 of this international voluntary movement. They continued to be the raison d’etre for its global work in the late seventies but the validity of the demographic imperative, since the time for national populations to double themselves was shortening, could also not be denied, especially in South Asia. Within IPPF the fascinating debate was reverberating and I was going to be part of it.

So the work was going to be intellectually stimulating, interesting and tiring. It meant lobbying with political leaders and persuading them for support to ‘grass-roots’ projects, which would be conducive with their national programs. The field inspections were legion; to see how the funds were actually spent on the ground. I was not surprised that often I would find that, either deliberately or through lack of sufficient care, there was fraud and loss.

At times we at the regional office in Colombo would find that the entire policy making body at the top of a national FPA would be involved in some corrupt activity. But unlike in government it was more difficult to ferret out information and impose sanctions since the association was autonomous. Being regional director, I found, was essentially a management job, requiring some general knowledge of the subject matter and the philosophy which drove the organization. Most of the detail could be left to the specialists the gynaecologists and communicators either paid or voluntary, and the volunteers who would be at the frontline. I perceived my role as being a combination of providing leadership, program management, and active lobbyist for the cause.

The terms, which IPPF called `compensation’ and not ‘salary’, were attractive. An annual figure of US$ 12,000, with quite a lot more to come in the way of per diems on travel and hotel stays which took up, at least, half of one’s time. There was a round of meetings for planning, programming, budgeting in the regional office, and in the national headquarters of the eight countries which comprised the IOR, and at least three times a year trips to the London headquarters.

It represented quite a change from being a government agent of a district in terms of the scale of the operation. But not too much of a difference when one considered the actual functions of management and supervision. As far as the `politics” was concerned, although the district political authority whom I had grown familiar with was not around, there was just as much or more going on in the national FPAs, than in the average district administration.

But events back at home – for I found myself abroad most of the time – were moving fast to close another fascinating chapter of experience. Sirimavo announced that there would be elections in July 1977. After the grand spectacle of the Non-aligned Summit in Colombo of Heads of State and Government between August 16-19, 1976 – perhaps the ‘greatest show on earth’ as far as Sri Lanka was concerned – at which more than 80 non-aligned member states participated, the prime minister felt justifiably confident that the country would return her to power.

But the majority of the Sri Lankan people once again, as they had done before, and would continue to do, confounded all the expectations. Sirimavo’s government suffered an overwhelming defeat at the hands of J R (as we shall read later) and I received a message from Lalith Athulathmudali – a kinsman of my wife – to see J R as early as possible. So it was going to be good bye, if only for some years, to international family planning, a fistful of dollars and luxurious nights in five-star hotels of the Indian sub-continent.