The 1962 coup: Political background

SWRD: Jungle, if only you were a Buddhist, then I could make you IGP

By Jayantha Somasundaram

On 28 January, 1962, Sri Lanka awoke to the startling news that a coup d’état by key police and military officers had been foiled. In retrospect, the coup was a crucial turning point in Sri Lanka’s contemporary history. There was a new two-year-old family-centred government viewed by many as inept. Political commentator K. K. S. Perera’s description of January 1962 (The Nation 4/11/12) was that “strikes had crippled the economy; it was going downhill, resulting in increasing cost of living and unemployment.”

Sri Lanka experienced one of the longest unbroken periods of colonial control. When dominion status was granted in 1948, the maritime areas had undergone 450 years of European rule and influence. One consequence was the emergence, in Colombo, of a Westernised, English-speaking non-sectarian elite – largely low-country Sinhalese, peninsular Tamil and Dutch Burgher. A dominant class that was welded into a cohesive group through education and socialisation in public schools, they also shared a modern secular liberal outlook, regardless of racial or religious background. “A select English-educated elitist group … conceives of national integration in terms of a political ideal of constitutional government and unity in diversity ….” explains Prof Jeyaratnam Wilson in Politics of Sri Lanka. “But it has failed to penetrate the layers beneath – the fragmented competitive sub-societies of the real Sri Lanka in the countryside, with its rural elites and peasant economy … associated with mass mobilisation of pre-commercial, pre-industrial peasant people … who emphasise the crucial and critical stigmata of nationalism – the language, culture, traditions and heroes of the dominant nationality – the Sinhala Buddhists.”

In all European colonies, there emerged an elite that adopted the culture, values and lifestyle of the coloniser. In British India Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah were steeped in British ways and mores. But the high caste aristocratic Indian elite did not change their religion; they retained their religious identity, at most only going as far as to become secular Hindu or Muslim. But in Sri Lanka a significant segment of the Sinhala Goigama elite like the Bandaranaike- Obeyesekere-de Saram families converted to Christianity, as did some of the Tamil Vellalar elite.

The Divide

Donald L. Horowitz points out in Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives that there was “a great gap between English-educated Ceylonese who were able to pursue careers in the bureaucracy, professions and commercial houses, and Sinhala- or Tamil-educated Ceylonese whose social opportunities and cultural associations were more limited. The gulf was perhaps the greatest in the Sinhalese community. Unlike the Tamils, the Sinhalese were served by a number of elite schools that taught entirely in English. English thus became the language of the home of a significant number of Sinhalese in elite positions. This was not the case with very many Tamils, for the schools in the North were more successful in blending education in English with education in Tamil.

Accordingly, the Sinhala community harboured a certain resentment toward those Sinhalese who had abandoned their language, culture and in many cases, religion for those of the colonisers, and who had reaped the resulting rewards. In a sample of students entering the University of Ceylon in 1950, one-fourth of all students indicated that English was the language of their home.” For example, when at the age of 26, S.W.R.D Bandaranaike returned from Oxford in 1925, he could not speak Sinhala.

“After independence,” continues Horowitz, “there was a movement among Buddhists to gain state patronage for Buddhism, to secure symbolic recognition of the ‘rightful place’ of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and to end the advantages enjoyed by Christian denominational schools. In 1961, nearly all the denominational schools were nationalised by the SLFP government, over the bitter protests of the Christian communities.”

The electoral victory of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (the Peoples’ United Front) in 1956 under the leadership of Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was seen as a social revolution heralding the dethroning of the Westernised elite and their replacement by a Sinhala-speaking leadership. Although the new government in 1956 could make Sinhala the official language overnight, its benefits for the broader Sinhala Buddhist community were going to take time to manifest themselves. This was because English-language elite Christian public schools had a century’s head start on the Buddhist schools, which would now have to provide the senior civil servants, professionals, military officers and mercantile executives for the new dispensation.

To the incumbent liberal Ceylonese establishment practically every step post-1956 seemed to undermine the stability of the world they knew; and this process seemed to accentuate with Mrs. Bandaranaike’s election as Prime Minister in July 1960. This was evident in the growing Sinhala-Buddhist militancy and the political role of monks. The Westernised middle class feared the eclipse of a plural multi-racial state and the emergence of a Buddhist theocracy in its place.

Three critical events

Against this political background, three critical events triggered a section of the military to plan and attempt a coup.

First, anti-Tamil violence. Bandaranaike’s electoral success in 1956 by championing the cause of the Sinhala Buddhists was not lost on other parties. He however had stood for Sinhala as the official language tempered by the reasonable use of Tamil and upon taking office entered into an agreement with the Federal Party (the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact) to accommodate Tamil concerns. The United National Party (UNP) under Dudley Senanayake and J.R. Jayewardene responded with a policy of Sinhala Only and opposed the BC Pact.

In the south, only the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party took a principled stand for parity of status: that is Sinhala and Tamil as official languages.

Thwarted by the clerical right wing of the SLFP led by Health Minister Vimala Wijewardene, Bandaranaike was however compelled to unilaterally tear up the BC Pact in May 1958. This was immediately followed by Tamils becoming the target of organised mobs. Howard Wriggins recorded the events in Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation.

“The outbreak of violence began when a train, presumably carrying Tamil delegates (to the Federal Party Convention in Vavuniya) was derailed and its passengers beaten up by ruffians … Arson and beatings spread to Colombo … Tamils were attacked, humiliated and beaten. Many were subjected to torture and some killed outright.”

Now, a prisoner of its right wing, the Bandaranaike government did nothing.

Finally, the Governor-General Sir Oliver Goonetilleke declared a State of Emergency and called out the armed forces. Tarzie Vittachi records in Emergency ’58 how Lieutenant Colonel F.C. ‘Derek’ de Saram had to deal with CTB gangs in Ratmalana while Major M.O. Gooneratne had to fight off Irrigation Department employees and colonists at Padaviya. In Polonnaruwa Government Agent Derrick Aluwihare had to shelter Tamils fleeing from colonists and was finally compelled to authorise the Army to open fire. For days mobs roamed, challenging people and attacking them if they were Tamil. Vittachi recounts how in Kurunegala a young man was stopped and asked to recite Buddhist gathas to prove he was a Sinhalese. Mendis, a Methodist, was unable to comply; the mob thereupon killed him.

The GA Colombo reported that “passing vehicles were stopped and their occupants mercilessly assaulted. Moving trains were halted at several places and the passengers ruthlessly attacked. There were many instances of arson and such brutal scenes as men being burned alive. Looting was rampant.”

Wriggins concludes: “The toll during the days of disorder included an estimated 300-400 killed: over 2,000 incidents of arson, looting and assault and 12,000 Ceylonese transformed into homeless refugees. The violence spread to the plantation areas where Tamils of Indian origin were attacked resulting in the Indian High Commissioner journeying upcountry to ascertain their welfare.”

Separation of State and Church

After interviewing the coup participants, Donald Horowitz reported that “a number of officers traced their first thoughts of a coup to the anti-Tamil riots of 1958 … a sign as one officer said, that things were falling apart … (they blamed) Bandaranaike’s yielding to crude communal feeling … one officer had arrived fifteen minutes too late to prevent the burning alive of two Hindu priests by a gang of Sinhalese at Panadura.” The incident convinced him that “sooner or later something would have to be done ….” Another officer recalled how they had been cautioned about handling Buddhist monks leading such mobs. His response was that there should be separation of church and state!

Sixteen months later Bandaranaike would be assassinated in a conspiracy led by the SLFP monk-Vice President Mapitigama Buddharakkitha.

The anti-Tamil riots were the first indication of the gap that was emerging between the uniformed officers and a partisan regime. Bandaranaike himself acknowledged this when he turned to the ranking Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) C. C. (‘Jungle’) Dissanayake MVO and said: Oh Jungle Jungle, if only you were a Buddhist, then I could make you IGP. The people want a Sinhalese Goyigama Buddhist for IGP.

To be continued tomorrow