Sat Mag
Notes on a scholarly class
By Uditha Devapriya
Note: Names of students have been changed to protect their identity
Nethum, 20, loves the guitar. He plays it well and, moreover, plays the clarinet well too. In 2018 he bought a Yamaha GL1 Guitalele – secretly, without telling his father. Back then he had dreams of starting a band, doing some gigs, earning some cash. So he started a group with some of his batch-mates, and began practices at a prominent studio on the outskirts of Colombo city. They got a couple of events – two birthday parties, of a friend and of another friend’s sister – not too long afterwards.
He had other dreams also. When I met him two weeks before he decided to buy the guitar, he divulged some of them. “I want to buy a big patch of land, a big house, in my village, and get away from Colombo,” he told me, the faintest of smiles flickering through a pained face. Why not Colombo, I asked. “Because I’m fed up of living in this city,” he replied.
Since he’d spent much, much more time here than there, in his hometown, I pressed him on. He said he wanted to take care of his brother, sister, mother, and ageing father. “I can’t do that over here.” Since he was studying Biology for his A Levels, I asked him whether he wanted to do all this while pursuing medicine. “No,” he said, a little hesitantly. “I want to be a guitarist, a musician.” His father, he hastened to add, wouldn’t like the idea. That is why those dreams had to be indulged from a distance. “I’ll tell him later.”
Dinindu, 18, loves to act and to write scripts. A member of the Drama Society at his school, he dreams of authoring his own Netflix series, the first in Sri Lanka. He is a fervent lover of superhero movies, though he tends to discriminate: Batman, yes, but not the Christopher Nolan trilogy; Justice League, yes, but preferably the upcoming Zack Snyder cut. He dislikes big budget epics, cheap comedies, and melodramatic romances. These, he explains to me, are not worth it. People want entertainment. They don’t really want to see life as it is lived, and lived through, onscreen. Thus he wants to try something new, different. Having chosen Commerce for his A Levels after realising Maths wasn’t his cup of tea, however, he finds it hard to balance his dreams with his family’s expectations.
Both Nethum and Dinindu came to Colombo after they turned 10. Having sat for the Grade Five Scholarship Exam, arguably the most touted and celebrated such exam in a student’s life (after the O Levels and A Levels), they had passed with flying colours, surpassing the cut off point by a considerable margin and securing a placement at a popular school. By dint of their results, they had gained admission to the most popular such institution in Colombo. It had been much cause for celebration.
Nethum, from Walasmulla, and Dinindu, from Matugama, had never seen the city before, except in textbooks and newspapers and on television. Since it was not practical to transit from Colombo to their hometown after school every day, they were both boarded at the school hostel. They are hence what most refer to as “Hostellers.” Except for the occasional visit home during holidays, they remain in Colombo, partly because of schoolwork but more importantly because of extra classes; in Sri Lanka, not even Poya days are taken as days of rest from private tuition. For these boys, then, Colombo has become home.
Introduced in 1948, the Scholarship Exam today strives to achieve two objectives. The first is the admission of students to popular, elite schools. The second, an often overlooked aim, is the provision of bursaries to bright but disadvantaged students. The brainchild of C. W. W. Kannangara, as well as of the Left, at its inception it also sought to add prestige to the newly established Central Colleges, which boasted of teachers, infrastructure, and facilities that exceed anything even elite schools possess today. Some of our most renowned intellectuals emerged from the Central College system. Its contribution to the post-1956 socio-political landscape, thus, cannot be denied. Neither can that of the Scholarship Exam.
The quality and content of the Exam has, to be sure, changed considerably since then. In 1969, it was rebranded as the Jathika Navodya Scholarship. Prior to 1995, it consisted of two papers: First Language (Sinhala or Tamil) and Mathematics. After officials restructured it in 1995, it tested students beyond just linguistic or mathematical proficiency, delving into such abilities as observation, prediction, translation, and perception. In its present form, it is seen as a stepping stone to popular elite schools, a point underscored by the state of degradation many Central Colleges have succumbed to. The Exam has thus turned into a competition, for which students are prepared from an early age.
Those who emerge at the top invariably get the best schools, and invariably, these happen to be far, far away, in the big cities: Galle, Kandy, Jaffna, and Colombo. Not surprisingly, the highest cut-off marks are for Colombo schools. No matter how far away you may be, if you get through, you try to go there. This is underscored by the fact that in Sri Lanka, where you study is seen as more important than what you study.
Surveying the public school in an earlier essay (“Pavilions, Grounds, and Gyms”), I quoted a keen observer of Sri Lanka’s social landscape and contended that such institutions are no longer the preserve of the elite: they have, effectively, been taken over by a new political class, and a lower middle class aspiring to join the ranks of an old order. A considerable part of this lower middle class hails, as I pointed out, from the Scholarship crowd. That, I should add here, has led us to an inexorable contradiction: a program designed to benefit the poor has ended up benefitting a more intermediate class.
Ashani Abayasekara, in an impressive but sketchy research conducted three years ago, concluded as much. While national schools “account for the largest share of scholarship exam candidates, at 95%”, she noted that “only 79% of Grade 5 students in underprivileged provincial schools” write it. Meanwhile, only 36% of those who passed the cut-off mark qualified for the bursary (for students whose families earn an annual income of less than Rs 50,000), a paltry Rs 500 per month; “as a share of all Grade 5 students,” Abayasekara observed, “this amounts to a mere 3.6%.”
These findings are eye-opening, but certainly not surprising. I say that because, more often than not, positive discrimination programmes have a habit of benefitting those who do not really need such programmes; this is as relevant in Colombo as it is in Chicago. Conceived for the poor to bypass the handicap of poverty, the Scholarship Exam has therefore come to be associated with a more privileged lower middle class.
The eminent historian Arno Mayer once enumerated the characteristics of the lower middle class: they earn their living by work “that is not pre-eminently manual labour”; by objective criteria of income, wealth, and education, they fit into neither the lower nor the upper class; they are conscious of being neither the one nor the other, “but aspire upward”; they tend to be individualistic in their pursuit of upward mobility; they can be easily co-opted by/into the upper class; they do their utmost to improve the lot of their children; they are fearful of falling down to lower class status; and they get together as a group to agitate for political reforms only when they face the threat of collective impoverishment.
The Sri Lankan lower middle class, of which I am a member, bears out these characteristics well. But that is beside my point. The vast majority of the Grade Five Scholarship holders hail from this milieu. In terms of their origins and their aspirations, they are part and parcel of, and also opposed to, that crowd. And no other section of this group displays this paradoxical attitude, to their own social conditioning, better than the Hostellers.
Ostensibly distanced from their roots, yet not cut off from them, the Hostellers live in a world of their own. Popular schools in Sri Lanka are invariably associated with traditions, habits, and beliefs; the Hostellers, a subset within the larger student body, are viewed as laying claim to their own traditions, habits, and beliefs. The stereotype almost always is of them being more intelligent, athletic, enduring. “The result,” said one boy as I questioned him, “is that compared with other students, we’re more likely to be taken into co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.” From Literary Societies to Debating Clubs, from Cadetting to Scouting, they hence figure in quite prominently.
That explains Nethum’s love for music and Dinidu’s love for drama. It also explains their intense desire to get into these fields once they leave school. Largely because their parents don’t loom over them like those of non-Hostellers, they consider themselves free to follow their aspirations, and just dream on. Yet the pressure to conform to elderly expectations becomes all the more stronger because of, and not despite, that: freed temporarily from parental supervision, many of them tend to neglect their studies – ironically what got them into these schools in the first place – as they climb up the ladder. “We procrastinate, almost always,” Mithila, 20, explained to me.
“We think, ‘We’re the Scholars, we got in because we are thought of as special’, and walk the hard yards slowly.”
By the time they realise they’ve walked a little too slowly, of course, it’s too late. “The pressure comes on gradually,” Mithila added. “We occupy ourselves so much with club and society work that at times we have to lie to our mothers and fathers.” At this point, parents get worried: in the worst case, “they take us out of the Hostel and board us in a room or an annexe in Colombo, so that we can concentrate better on studies.”
Of course, the clash isn’t just between their aspirations and the aspirations of their elders. It’s also between their culture and the culture they now find themselves in.
Born in Kurunegala, Chathuja, 22, used to be the butt end of his friends’ jokes. “When I first came here,” he told me, grinning, “I had to get rid of my regional dialect. It’s not that they looked down on me. It’s just that even those from other villages, and especially those from Colombo, thought the way I spoke strange and peculiar.” While he managed to lose his dialect, to the extent that he can’t recall it now, not all students abandon such quirks: Himal, 20, hails from Ambalangoda, and he relapses to village argot whenever he phones home. “I just take care not to use it here,” he grinned at me.
This does not mean these boys surrender themselves completely to the world they move to. Far from it: they both accept and reject the new urban world and its culture. Most of them, for instance, admit to their biggest handicap, lack of fluency in English, but many of them, as Dinindu told me, feel that English isn’t everything. “We speak it only when it is needed.” This is unlike the anglicised crowd AND the urban middle class Sinhala crowd, to most of whom proficiency in the language has become a must have cosmetic.
Dinindu remembered one time when he and other Grade Five Scholars (Hostellers as well as non-Hostellers) were put into a class with English medium students. He remembered the tastes that set them apart from the latter. “They were always poring over Goosebumps, Enid Blyton, and Tintin. In terms of what we were reading, in our language, they seemed rather infantile to me.” What did his set read at that point? Translations of Russian novels and Guy de Maupassant short stories, plus the entire repertory of prabuddha (profound) Sinhala literature: not just Martin Wickramasinghe, but also more recent writers, including Mahinda Prasad Masimbula. “I’m not saying we were superior to the English speaking kids. It’s just that they seemed below the level, in English, that we were in, in Sinhala.”
The most vivid contrast between their lower middle class “subaltern” backgrounds and the backgrounds of the elite crowd that used to, and still, attend elite institutions, came to me the other day from Mithila. An Old Boy had attended an event as the Chief Guest, and had given a speech. The speech had centred on that evergreen concern of the anglicised elite: the deterioration of norms, values, and principles (of the anglicised elite, that is). Students shout too much; they have turned ruffians; they don’t wear Western attire as well as they used to. To cut a long story short, Mithila listened in, and had a laugh with his friends. “That speech,” he described it to me, “was the most antiquated tripe I’d ever heard.”
Somehow, somewhere, I feel that sentiment has gained ground among Mithila’s friends. Paraphrasing Tennyson, the old order here has indeed changed. And how.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
Sat Mag
October 13 at the Women’s T20 World Cup: Injury concerns for Australia ahead of blockbuster game vs India
Australia vs India
Sharjah, 6pm local time
Australia have major injury concerns heading into the crucial clash. Just four balls into the match against Pakistan, Tayla Vlaeminck was out with a right shoulder dislocation. To make things worse, captain Alyssa Healy suffered an acute right foot injury while batting on 37 as she hobbled off the field with Australia needing 14 runs to win. Both players went for scans on Saturday.
India captain Harmanpreet Kaur who had hurt her neck in the match against Pakistan, turned up with a pain-relief patch on the right side of her neck during the Sri Lanka match. She also didn’t take the field during the chase. Fast bowler Pooja Vastrakar bowled full-tilt before the Sri Lanka game but didn’t play.
India will want a big win against Australia. If they win by more than 61 runs, they will move ahead of Australia, thereby automatically qualifying for the semi-final. In a case where India win by fewer than 60 runs, they will hope New Zealand win by a very small margin against Pakistan on Monday. For instance, if India make 150 against Australia and win by exactly 10 runs, New Zealand need to beat Pakistan by 28 runs defending 150 to go ahead of India’s NRR. If India lose to Australia by more than 17 runs while chasing a target of 151, then New Zealand’s NRR will be ahead of India, even if Pakistan beat New Zealand by just 1 run while defending 150.
Overall, India have won just eight out of 34 T20Is they’ve played against Australia. Two of those wins came in the group-stage games of previous T20 World Cups, in 2018 and 2020.
Australia squad:
Alyssa Healy (capt & wk), Darcie Brown, Ashleigh Gardner, Kim Garth, Grace Harris, Alana King, Phoebe Litchfield, Tahlia McGrath, Sophie Molineux, Beth Mooney, Ellyse Perry, Megan Schutt, Annabel Sutherland, Tayla Vlaeminck, Georgia Wareham
India squad:
Harmanpreet Kaur (capt), Smriti Mandhana (vice-capt), Yastika Bhatia (wk), Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma, Jemimah Rodrigues, Richa Ghosh (wk), Pooja Vastrakar, Arundhati Reddy, Renuka Singh, D Hemalatha, Asha Sobhana, Radha Yadav, Shreyanka Patil, S Sajana
Tournament form guide:
Australia have three wins in three matches and are coming into this contest having comprehensively beaten Pakistan. With that win, they also all but sealed a semi-final spot thanks to their net run rate of 2.786. India have two wins in three games. In their previous match, they posted the highest total of the tournament so far – 172 for 3 and in return bundled Sri Lanka out for 90 to post their biggest win by runs at the T20 World Cup.
Players to watch:
Two of their best batters finding their form bodes well for India heading into the big game. Harmanpreet and Mandhana’s collaborative effort against Pakistan boosted India’s NRR with the semi-final race heating up. Mandhana, after a cautious start to her innings, changed gears and took on Sri Lanka’s spinners to make 50 off 38 balls. Harmanpreet, continuing from where she’d left against Pakistan, played a classic, hitting eight fours and a six on her way to a 27-ball 52. It was just what India needed to reinvigorate their T20 World Cup campaign.
[Cricinfo]
Sat Mag
Living building challenge
By Eng. Thushara Dissanayake
The primitive man lived in caves to get shelter from the weather. With the progression of human civilization, people wanted more sophisticated buildings to fulfill many other needs and were able to accomplish them with the help of advanced technologies. Security, privacy, storage, and living with comfort are the common requirements people expect today from residential buildings. In addition, different types of buildings are designed and constructed as public, commercial, industrial, and even cultural or religious with many advanced features and facilities to suit different requirements.
We are facing many environmental challenges today. The most severe of those is global warming which results in many negative impacts, like floods, droughts, strong winds, heatwaves, and sea level rise due to the melting of glaciers. We are experiencing many of those in addition to some local issues like environmental pollution. According to estimates buildings account for nearly 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In light of these issues, we have two options; we change or wait till the change comes to us. Waiting till the change come to us means that we do not care about our environment and as a result we would have to face disastrous consequences. Then how can we change in terms of building construction?
Before the green concept and green building practices come into play majority of buildings in Sri Lanka were designed and constructed just focusing on their intended functional requirements. Hence, it was much likely that the whole process of design, construction, and operation could have gone against nature unless done following specific regulations that would minimize negative environmental effects.
We can no longer proceed with the way we design our buildings which consumes a huge amount of material and non-renewable energy. We are very concerned about the food we eat and the things we consume. But we are not worrying about what is a building made of. If buildings are to become a part of our environment we have to design, build and operate them based on the same principles that govern the natural world. Eventually, it is not about the existence of the buildings, it is about us. In other words, our buildings should be a part of our natural environment.
The living building challenge is a remarkable design philosophy developed by American architect Jason F. McLennan the founder of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The International Living Future Institute is an environmental NGO committed to catalyzing the transformation toward communities that are socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. Accordingly, a living building must meet seven strict requirements, rather certifications, which are called the seven “petals” of the living building. They are Place, Water, Energy, Equity, Materials, Beauty, and Health & Happiness. Presently there are about 390 projects around the world that are being implemented according to Living Building certification guidelines. Let us see what these seven petals are.
Place
This is mainly about using the location wisely. Ample space is allocated to grow food. The location is easily accessible for pedestrians and those who use bicycles. The building maintains a healthy relationship with nature. The objective is to move away from commercial developments to eco-friendly developments where people can interact with nature.
Water
It is recommended to use potable water wisely, and manage stormwater and drainage. Hence, all the water needs are captured from precipitation or within the same system, where grey and black waters are purified on-site and reused.
Energy
Living buildings are energy efficient and produce renewable energy. They operate in a pollution-free manner without carbon emissions. They rely only on solar energy or any other renewable energy and hence there will be no energy bills.
Equity
What if a building can adhere to social values like equity and inclusiveness benefiting a wider community? Yes indeed, living buildings serve that end as well. The property blocks neither fresh air nor sunlight to other adjacent properties. In addition, the building does not block any natural water path and emits nothing harmful to its neighbors. On the human scale, the equity petal recognizes that developments should foster an equitable community regardless of an individual’s background, age, class, race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Materials
Materials are used without harming their sustainability. They are non-toxic and waste is minimized during the construction process. The hazardous materials traditionally used in building components like asbestos, PVC, cadmium, lead, mercury, and many others are avoided. In general, the living buildings will not consist of materials that could negatively impact human or ecological health.
Beauty
Our physical environments are not that friendly to us and sometimes seem to be inhumane. In contrast, a living building is biophilic (inspired by nature) with aesthetical designs that beautify the surrounding neighborhood. The beauty of nature is used to motivate people to protect and care for our environment by connecting people and nature.
Health & Happiness
The building has a good indoor and outdoor connection. It promotes the occupants’ physical and psychological health while causing no harm to the health issues of its neighbors. It consists of inviting stairways and is equipped with operable windows that provide ample natural daylight and ventilation. Indoor air quality is maintained at a satisfactory level and kitchen, bathrooms, and janitorial areas are provided with exhaust systems. Further, mechanisms placed in entrances prevent any materials carried inside from shoes.
The Bullitt Center building
Bullitt Center located in the middle of Seattle in the USA, is renowned as the world’s greenest commercial building and the first office building to earn Living Building certification. It is a six-story building with an area of 50,000 square feet. The area existed as a forest before the city was built. Hence, the Bullitt Center building has been designed to mimic the functions of a forest.
The energy needs of the building are purely powered by the solar system on the rooftop. Even though Seattle is relatively a cloudy city the Bullitt Center has been able to produce more energy than it needed becoming one of the “net positive” solar energy buildings in the world. The important point is that if a building is energy efficient only the area of the roof is sufficient to generate solar power to meet its energy requirement.
It is equipped with an automated window system that is able to control the inside temperature according to external weather conditions. In addition, a geothermal heat exchange system is available as the source of heating and cooling for the building. Heat pumps convey heat stored in the ground to warm the building in the winter. Similarly, heat from the building is conveyed into the ground during the summer.
The potable water needs of the building are achieved by treating rainwater. The grey water produced from the building is treated and re-used to feed rooftop gardens on the third floor. The black water doesn’t need a sewer connection as it is treated to a desirable level and sent to a nearby wetland while human biosolid is diverted to a composting system. Further, nearly two third of the rainwater collected from the roof is fed into the groundwater and the process resembles the hydrologic function of a forest.
It is encouraging to see that most of our large-scale buildings are designed and constructed incorporating green building concepts, which are mainly based on environmental sustainability. The living building challenge can be considered an extension of the green building concept. Amanda Sturgeon, the former CEO of the ILFI, has this to say in this regard. “Before we start a project trying to cram in every sustainable solution, why not take a step outside and just ask the question; what would nature do”?
Sat Mag
Something of a revolution: The LSSP’s “Great Betrayal” in retrospect
By Uditha Devapriya
On June 7, 1964, the Central Committee of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party convened a special conference at which three resolutions were presented. The first, moved by N. M. Perera, called for a coalition with the SLFP, inclusive of any ministerial portfolios. The second, led by the likes of Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardena, and Bernard Soysa, advocated a line of critical support for the SLFP, but without entering into a coalition. The third, supported by the likes of Edmund Samarakkody and Bala Tampoe, rejected any form of compromise with the SLFP and argued that the LSSP should remain an independent party.
The conference was held a year after three parties – the LSSP, the Communist Party, and Philip Gunawardena’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna – had founded a United Left Front. The ULF’s formation came in the wake of a spate of strikes against the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government. The previous year, the Ceylon Transport Board had waged a 17-day strike, and the harbour unions a 60-day strike. In 1963 a group of working-class organisations, calling itself the Joint Committee of Trade Unions, began mobilising itself. It soon came up with a common programme, and presented a list of 21 radical demands.
In response to these demands, Bandaranaike eventually supported a coalition arrangement with the left. In this she was opposed, not merely by the right-wing of her party, led by C. P. de Silva, but also those in left parties opposed to such an agreement, including Bala Tampoe and Edmund Samarakkody. Until then these parties had never seen the SLFP as a force to reckon with: Leslie Goonewardena, for instance, had characterised it as “a Centre Party with a programme of moderate reforms”, while Colvin R. de Silva had described it as “capitalist”, no different to the UNP and by default as bourgeois as the latter.
The LSSP’s decision to partner with the government had a great deal to do with its changing opinions about the SLFP. This, in turn, was influenced by developments abroad. In 1944, the Fourth International, which the LSSP had affiliated itself with in 1940 following its split with the Stalinist faction, appointed Michel Pablo as its International Secretary. After the end of the war, Pablo oversaw a shift in the Fourth International’s attitude to the Soviet states in Eastern Europe. More controversially, he began advocating a strategy of cooperation with mass organisations, regardless of their working-class or radical credentials.
Pablo argued that from an objective perspective, tensions between the US and the Soviet Union would lead to a “global civil war”, in which the Soviet Union would serve as a midwife for world socialist revolution. In such a situation the Fourth International would have to take sides. Here he advocated a strategy of entryism vis-à-vis Stalinist parties: since the conflict was between Stalinist and capitalist regimes, he reasoned, it made sense to see the former as allies. Such a strategy would, in his opinion, lead to “integration” into a mass movement, enabling the latter to rise to the level of a revolutionary movement.
Though controversial, Pablo’s line is best seen in the context of his times. The resurgence of capitalism after the war, and the boom in commodity prices, had a profound impact on the course of socialist politics in the Third World. The stunted nature of the bourgeoisie in these societies had forced left parties to look for alternatives. For a while, Trotsky had been their guide: in colonial and semi-colonial societies, he had noted, only the working class could be expected to see through a revolution. This entailed the establishment of workers’ states, but only those arising from a proletarian revolution: a proposition which, logically, excluded any compromise with non-radical “alternatives” to the bourgeoisie.
To be sure, the Pabloites did not waver in their support for workers’ states. However, they questioned whether such states could arise only from a proletarian revolution. For obvious reasons, their reasoning had great relevance for Trotskyite parties in the Third World. The LSSP’s response to them showed this well: while rejecting any alliance with Stalinist parties, the LSSP sympathised with the Pabloites’ advocacy of entryism, which involved a strategic orientation towards “reformist politics.” For the world’s oldest Trotskyite party, then going through a series of convulsions, ruptures, and splits, the prospect of entering the reformist path without abandoning its radical roots proved to be welcoming.
Writing in the left-wing journal Community in 1962, Hector Abhayavardhana noted some of the key concerns that the party had tried to resolve upon its formation. Abhayavardhana traced the LSSP’s origins to three developments: international communism, the freedom struggle in India, and local imperatives. The latter had dictated the LSSP’s manifesto in 1936, which included such demands as free school books and the use of Sinhala and Tamil in the law courts. Abhayavardhana suggested, correctly, that once these imperatives changed, so would the party’s focus, though within a revolutionary framework. These changes would be contingent on two important factors: the establishment of universal franchise in 1931, and the transfer of power to the local bourgeoisie in 1948.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the LSSP had entered the arena of radical politics through the ballot box. While leading the struggle outside parliament, it waged a struggle inside it also. This dual strategy collapsed when the colonial government proscribed the party and the D. S. Senanayake government disenfranchised plantation Tamils. Suffering two defeats in a row, the LSSP was forced to think of alternatives. That meant rethinking categories such as class, and grounding them in the concrete realities of the country.
This was more or less informed by the irrelevance of classical and orthodox Marxian analysis to the situation in Sri Lanka, specifically to its rural society: with a “vast amorphous mass of village inhabitants”, Abhayavardhana observed, there was no real basis in the country for a struggle “between rich owners and the rural poor.” To complicate matters further, reforms like the franchise and free education, which had aimed at the emancipation of the poor, had in fact driven them away from “revolutionary inclinations.” The result was the flowering of a powerful rural middle-class, which the LSSP, to its discomfort, found it could not mobilise as much as it had the urban workers and plantation Tamils.
Where else could the left turn to? The obvious answer was the rural peasantry. But the rural peasantry was in itself incapable of revolution, as Hector Abhayavardhana has noted only too clearly. While opposing the UNP’s Westernised veneer, it did not necessarily oppose the UNP’s overtures to Sinhalese nationalism. As historians like K. M. de Silva have observed, the leaders of the UNP did not see their Westernised ethos as an impediment to obtaining support from the rural masses. That, in part at least, was what motivated the Senanayake government to deprive Indian estate workers of their most fundamental rights, despite the existence of pro-minority legal safeguards in the Soulbury Constitution.
To say this is not to overlook the unique character of the Sri Lankan rural peasantry and petty bourgeoisie. Orthodox Marxists, not unjustifiably, characterise the latter as socially and politically conservative, tilting more often than not to the right. In Sri Lanka, this has frequently been the case: they voted for the UNP in 1948 and 1952, and voted en masse against the SLFP in 1977. Yet during these years they also tilted to the left, if not the centre-left: it was the petty bourgeoisie, after all, which rallied around the SLFP, and supported its more important reforms, such as the nationalisation of transport services.
One must, of course, be wary of pasting the radical tag on these measures and the classes that ostensibly stood for them. But if the Trotskyite critique of the bourgeoisie – that they were incapable of reform, even less revolution – holds valid, which it does, then the left in the former colonies of the Third World had no alternative but to look elsewhere and to be, as Abhayavardhana noted, “practical men” with regard to electoral politics. The limits within which they had to work in Sri Lanka meant that, in the face of changing dynamics, especially among the country’s middle-classes, they had to change their tactics too.
Meanwhile, in 1953, the Trotskyite critique of Pabloism culminated with the publication of an Open Letter by James Cannon, of the US Socialist Workers’ Party. Cannon criticised the Pabloite line, arguing that it advocated a policy of “complete submission.” The publication of the letter led to the withdrawal of the International Committee of the Fourth International from the International Secretariat. The latter, led by Pablo, continued to influence socialist parties in the Third World, advocating temporary alliances with petty bourgeois and centrist formations in the guise of opposing capitalist governments.
For the LSSP, this was a much-needed opening. Even as late as 1954, three years after S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike formed the SLFP, the LSSP continued to characterise the latter as the alternative bourgeois party in Ceylon. Yet this did not deter it from striking up no contest pacts with Bandaranaike at the 1956 election, a strategy that went back to November 1951, when the party requested the SLFP to hold a discussion about the possibility of eliminating contests in the following year’s elections. Though it extended critical support to the MEP government in 1956, the LSSP opposed the latter once it enacted emergency measures in 1957, mobilising trade union action for a period of three years.
At the 1960 election the LSSP contested separately, with the slogan “N. M. for P.M.” Though Sinhala nationalism no longer held sway as it had in 1956, the LSSP found itself reduced to a paltry 10 seats. It was against this backdrop that it began rethinking its strategy vis-à-vis the ruling party. At the throne speech in April 1960, Perera openly declared that his party would not stabilise the SLFP. But a month later, in May, he called a special conference, where he moved a resolution for a coalition with the party. As T. Perera has noted in his biography of Edmund Samarakkody, the response to the resolution unearthed two tendencies within the oppositionist camp: the “hardliners” who opposed any compromise with the SLFP, including Samarakkody, and the “waverers”, including Leslie Goonewardena.
These tendencies expressed themselves more clearly at the 1964 conference. While the first resolution by Perera called for a complete coalition, inclusive of Ministries, and the second rejected a coalition while extending critical support, the third rejected both tactics. The outcome of the conference showed which way these tendencies had blown since they first manifested four years earlier: Perera’s resolution obtained more than 500 votes, the second 75 votes, the third 25. What the anti-coalitionists saw as the “Great Betrayal” of the LSSP began here: in a volte-face from its earlier position, the LSSP now held the SLFP as a party of a radical petty bourgeoisie, capable of reform.
History has not been kind to the LSSP’s decision. From 1970 to 1977, a period of less than a decade, these strategies enabled it, as well as the Communist Party, to obtain a number of Ministries, as partners of a petty bourgeois establishment. This arrangement collapsed the moment the SLFP turned to the right and expelled the left from its ranks in 1975, in a move which culminated with the SLFP’s own dissolution two years later.
As the likes of Samarakkody and Meryl Fernando have noted, the SLFP needed the LSSP and Communist Party, rather than the other way around. In the face of mass protests and strikes in 1962, the SLFP had been on the verge of complete collapse. The anti-coalitionists in the LSSP, having established themselves as the LSSP-R, contended later on that the LSSP could have made use of this opportunity to topple the government.
Whether or not the LSSP could have done this, one can’t really tell. However, regardless of what the LSSP chose to do, it must be pointed out that these decades saw the formation of several regimes in the Third World which posed as alternatives to Stalinism and capitalism. Moreover, the LSSP’s decision enabled it to see through certain important reforms. These included Workers’ Councils. Critics of these measures can point out, as they have, that they could have been implemented by any other regime. But they weren’t. And therein lies the rub: for all its failings, and for a brief period at least, the LSSP-CP-SLFP coalition which won elections in 1970 saw through something of a revolution in the country.
The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist based in Sri Lanka who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
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