Minds and Memories picturing 65 years of Sri Lankan Politics and Society

Last week I made mention of a gathering in Colombo to remember Kumar David, who passed away last October, as Comrade, Professor and Friend. The event was held on Saturday, April 5th, a day of double significance, first as the anniversary of the JVP insurrection on 5th April 1971, and now the occasion of the official welcome extended to visiting Indian Prime Narendra Modi by the still new JVP-NPP government. The venue was the Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue (EISD) on Havelock Road, which has long been a forum for dialogues and discussions of topics ranging from religious ecumenism, Liberation Theology and Marxist politics. Those who gathered to remember Kumar were also drawn from many overlapping social, academic, professional and political circles that intersected Kumar’s life and work at multiple points. Temporally and collectively, the gathering spanned over six decades in the evolution of post-independence Sri Lanka – its politics, society and the economy.

Several spoke and recalled memories, and their contributions covered from what many of us have experienced as Sri Lankans from the early 1960s to the first two and a half decades of the 21st century. The task of moderating the discussion fell to Prof. Vijaya Kumar, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Peradeniya, who was a longtime friend of Kumar David at the university and a political comrade in the LSSP – especially in the Party’s educational and publication activities.

Vijaya Kumar recalled Kumar David’s contributions not only to Marxist politics but also to the popularization of Science that became a feature in several of KD’s weekly contributions to the Sunday Island and the Colombo Telegraph. Marshal Fernando, former and longtime Director of the EISD welcomed the participants and spoke of Kumar David’s many interactions with the Institute and his unflinching offer of support and advice to its activities. EISD’s current Director, Fr. Jayanath Panditharatne and his staff were extremely helpful.

Rohini David, Kumar’s wife of over 50 years, flew in specially for the occasion from Los Angeles and spoke glowingly of Kumar’s personal life as a husband and a father, and of his generosity for causes that he was committed to, not only political, but also, and more importantly, educational. An interesting nugget revealed by Rohini is the little known fact that Kumar David was actually baptized twice – possibly as a Roman Catholic on his father’s side, and as an Anglican on his mother’s side. Yet he grew to see an altogether different light in all of his adult life. Kumar’s father was Magistrate BGS David, and his maternal grandfather was a District Judge, James Joseph.

Kumar had an early introduction to politics as a result of his exposure to some of the political preparations for the Great Hartal of 1953. Kumar was 12 years old then, and the conduit was his step-father, Lloyd de Silva an LSSPer who was close to the Party’s frontline leaders. From a very young age, Kumar became familiar with all the leaders and intellectuals of the LSSP. Lloyd was known for his sharp wit and cutting polemics. One of my favourite lines is his characterization of Bala Tampoe as a “Lone Ranger in the Mass Movement.” Lloyd’s polemics may have rubbed on Kumar’s impressionable mind, but the more enduring effect came from Lloyd’s good collection of Marxist books that Kumar self-admittedly devoured as much as he could as a teenager and an undergraduate.

Electric Power and Politics

Early accounts of Kumar’s public persona came from Chris Ratnayake, Prof. Sivasegaram and Dr. K. Vigneswaran, all Kumar’s contemporaries at the Engineering Faculty that was then located in Colombo. From their university days in the early 1960s, until now, they have witnessed, been a part of and made their own contributions to politics and society in Sri Lanka. Chris, a former CEB and World Bank Electrical Engineer, was part of the Trotskyite LSSP nucleus in the Engineering Faculty, along with Bernard Wijedoru, Kumar David, Sivaguru Ganesan, MWW Dharmawardana, Wickramabahu Karunaratne and Chris Rodrigo. Of that group only Chris and MWW are alive now.

Chris gave an accurate outline of their political involvement as students, Kumar’s academic brilliance and his later roles as a Lecturer and Director of the CEB under the United Front Government. Chris also described Kumar’s later academic interest and professional expertise in the unbundling of power systems and opening them to the market. Even though he was a Marxist, or may be because of it, Kumar had a good understanding of the operation of the market forces in the electricity sector.

Chris also dealt at length on Sri Lanka’s divergent economic trajectories before and after 1977, and the current aftermath of the recent economic crisis. As someone who has worked with the World Bank in 81 countries and has had the experience of IMF bailout programs, Chris had both warning and advice in light of Sri Lanka’s current situation. No country, he said, has embarked on an economic growth trajectory by following standard IMF prescriptions, and he pointed out that countries like the Asian Tigers have prospered not by following the IMF programs but by charting their own pathways.

Prof. S. Sivasegaram and Dr. K. Vigneswaran graduated in 1964, one year after Kumar David, with first classes in Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering, respectively. Sivasegaram joined the academia like Kumar David, while Vigneswaran joined the Irrigation Department but was later drawn into the vortex of Tamil politics where he has been a voice of reason and a source for constructive alternatives. As Engineering students, they were both Federal Party supporters and were not aligned with Kumar’s left politics.

It was later at London Imperial College, Sivasegaram said, he got interested in Marxism and he credited Kumar as one of the people who introduced him to Marxism and to anti-Vietnam protests. But Kumar could not persuade Sivasegaram to be a Trotskyite. Sivasegaram has been a Maoist in politics and apart from his Engineering, he is also an accomplished poet in Tamil. Vigneswaran recalled Kumar’s political involvement as a Marxist in support of the right of self-determination of the Tamils and his accessibility to Tamil groups who were looking for support from the political left.

K. Ramathas and Lal Chandranath were students of Kumar David at Peradeniya, and both went on to become established professionals in the IT sector. Ramathas passionately recalled Kumar’s effectiveness as a teacher and described his personal debt of gratitude for helping him to get a lasting understanding of the concept and application of power system stability. This understanding has helped him deal with other systems, said Ramathas, even as he bemoaned the lack of understanding of system stability among young Engineers and their failure to properly explain and address recurrent power failures in Sri Lanka.

Left Politics without Power

The transition from Engineering to politics in the discussion was seamlessly handled by veterans of left politics, viz., Siritunga Jayasuriya, Piyal Rajakaruna and Dishan Dharmasena, and by Prof. Nirmal Dewasiri of the History Department at the University of Colombo. Siritunga, Piyal and Dishan spoke to the personal, intellectual and organizational aspects of Kumar David in the development of left politics after Kumar David, Vasudeva Nanayakkara and Bahu were no longer associated with the LSSP. Dewasiri reflected on the role of the intellectuals in left political parties and the lost to the left movement as a whole arising from the resignation or expulsion of intellectuals from left political organizations.

While Kumar David’s academic and professional pre-occupation was electric power, pursuing power for the sake of power was not the essence of his politics. That has been the case with Bahu and Sivasegaram as well. They naturally had a teaching or educational role in politics, but they shared another dimension that is universally common to Left politics. Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish Marxist who later became the most celebrated Marxist renegade, has opined that insofar as leftists are generally ahead of their times in advocating fundamental social change and promoting ideas that do not resonate with much of the population, they are unlikely to win power through electoral means.

Yet opposition politics predicated on exposing and decrying everything that is wrong with the system and projecting to change the system is fundamentally the most moral position that one can take in politics. So much so it is worth pursuing even without the prospect of power, as Hector Abhayavardhana wrote in his obituaries for LSSP leaders like NM Perera and Colvin R de Silva. By that token, the coalition politics of the 1960s could be seen as privileging a shared parliamentary path to power while dismissing as doctrinaire the insistence on a sole revolutionary path to power.

The two perspectives clashed head on and splintered the LSSP at its historic 1964 Conference. Kumar David and Lal Wijenayake were the youngest members at that conference, and the political genesis of Kumar David and others at the Engineering faculty that Chris Ratnayake outlined was essentially post-coalition politics. In later years, Vasudeva Nanayakkara, Bahu and Kumar David set about creating a left-opposition (Vama) tendency within the LSSP.

This was considered a superior alternative to breaking away from the Party that had been the experience of 1964. Kumar David may have instinctively appreciated the primacy of the overall system stability even if individual components were getting to be unstable! But their internal efforts were stalled, and they were systematically expelled from the Party one by one. Kumar David recounted these developments in the obituary he wrote for Bahu.

As I wrote last week, after 1977 and with the presidential system in place, the hitherto left political parties and organizations generally allied themselves with one or the other of the three main political alliances led by the SLFP, the SLPP and even the UNP. A cluster of them gravitated to the NPP that has been set up by the JVP under the leadership of Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Kumar David supported the new JVP/NPP initiative and was optimistic about its prospects. He wrote positively about them in his weekly columns in the Sunday Island and the Colombo Telegraph.

The Social Circles of Politics

Sometime in late 2006, Rohan Edrisinha introduced Kumar and me to Rajpal Abeynayake, who was then the Editor of the Sunday Observer, for the purpose of writing weekly columns for the Paper. Bahu was already writing for the Sunday Observer and for almost an year, Bahu, Kumar and I were Sunday Island columnists, courtesy of Rajpal Abeynayake. In 2007, Prof. Vijaya Kumar introduced us to Manik de Silva, already the doyen of Sri Lanka’s English medium editors, and Kumar and I started writing for the Sunday Island edited by Manik. It has been non-stop weekly writing a full 18 years. For a number of years, we have also been publishing modified versions of our articles in the Colombo Telegraph, the online journal edited by the inimitable Uvindu Kurukulasuriya.

Writing mainstream rekindled old friendships and created new ones. It was gratifying to see many of them show up at the celebration of life for Kumar. That included Rajpal Abeynayake, Bunchy Rahuman, Gamini Kulatunga, Ranjith Galappatti, Tissa Jayatilaka, NG (Tanky) Wickremeratne, and Manik de Silva. Vijaya Chandrasoma, who unfortunately could not attend the meeting, was particularly supportive of the event along with Tanky and Ramathas. Tissa and Manik spoke at the event and shared their memories of Kumar.

Dr. Santhushya Fernando of the Colombo Medical Faculty provided organizational support and created two superb video montages of Kumar’s life in pictures to background theme songs by Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Manoj Rathnayake produced a Video Recording of the event.

In a quirky coincidence, five of those who attended the event, viz. Manik de Silva, Vijaya Kumar, Chris Ratnayake, S. Sivasegaram and K. Vigneswaran were all classmates at Royal College. On a personal note, I have been associated with every one of them in one way or another. Chris and I were also Engineers at the Hantana Housing Development in the early 1980s, for which the late Suren Wickremesinghe and his wife Tanya were the Architects. And Suren was in the same Royal College class as the other five mentioned here.

In the last article he wrote before his passing, Kumar David congratulated Anura Kumara Dissanayake for his magnificent political achievement and expressed cautious optimism for the prospects under an NPP government. Many in the new government followed Kumar David’s articles and opinions and were keen to participate in the celebration of life that was organized for him. That was not going to be possible anyway with the visit of Prime Minister Modi falling on the same day. Even so, Prof. Sunil Servi, Minister of Buddha Sasana, and Religious and Cultural Affairs, was graciously present at the event and expressed his appreciation of Kumar David’s contributions to Sri Lankan politics and society.

by Rajan Philips