Midweek Review

The rise of the Bonapartists: A political history of post-1977 Sri Lanka – II

Published

4 years ago

2020/12/9

By Uditha Devapriya

There were three Bonapartist revolutions in post-independence Sri Lanka. The first was Ranasinghe Premadasa’s election in 1989, the second Mahinda Rajapaksa’s election in 2005 and his re-election in 2010, and the third Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election in 2019. I consider Premadasa, Mahinda, and Gotabaya to be more Bonapartist than fascist, contrary to most accounts of them by the liberal intelligentsia. There is an important distinction to be made, as important as the distinction between the Old Right and the New Right.

A crucial difference between Bonapartism and fascism, with which Bonapartism is often conflated, is that the one responds to the public and the other regiments it. Bonapartism can deteriorate into fascism and it not infrequently does, yet its inherently populist-pluralist character deters it from doing so unless its co-option by a rightwing fringe group makes such a transformation inevitable. The latter point is important.

Here one must consider the first Bonapartist revolution, along with its impact on the Right. Mervyn de Silva called the 1988 election an event of sociological significance on account of who won it. Ranasinghe Premadasa has been called many things by many people. At the end of the day, regardless of whatever epithets or insults, he was, and remained until his passing away, a Bonapartist tied despite his populist trappings to the Right.

Yet, under Premadasa the J. R. model altered considerably. Development theorists of the Left, including Samir Amin, were by then propounding a paradigm of delinking in response to IMF enforced dependence on MNCs. This was the position taken up by the Left as well, and it was in keeping with the Soviet Union’s policy of disengagement. Regarding the latter, it must be mentioned that the intelligentsia of the Third World put forward a different strategy at the height of their influence: a bourgeois modernisation scheme, with emphasis on industrialisation. This is what Sirimavo Bandaranaike tried to adhere to.

As I have noted in my essays on the NAM to The Island, such an approach fell victim to its own contradictions, top among them the inability of bourgeois nationalist elites to take modernisation forward to its logical conclusion. Out of fashion then and out of fashion now, the bourgeoisie opted out of BOTH disengagement AND delinking.

In Premadasa they found the champion of their model: an open economy minus what the latter decried as “old style capitalism” vis-à-vis his predecessor. This, then, would be how the Bonapartist was to shed off the Old Right’s embracement of neoliberalism.

Foreign policy wise, Premadasa differed from Jayewardene’s pro-Western posturing. In 1977 Jayewardene stated that his policy of nonalignment would be “more genuine” that what it had been under his predecessor. Two years later, however, the New York Times reported his famous quote about nonalignment, the US, and the Soviet Union. With the establishment of the Greater Colombo Economic Commission (GCEC), the government tilted definitively to not just the US but also Britain and ASEAN: Motorola and Harris Corporation began building plants “with an initial employment capacity of 1,850 workers.”

Goh Chok Tong’s and Lee Kuan Yew’s visits to Sri Lanka reinforced the belief that Sri Lanka would regain its interrupted journey to becoming the Singapore of South Asia, a prospect promised by the Mahaweli Development Scheme.

This put the country at the backbenches of the pro-Western bloc in the Non-Aligned Movement: while Jayewardene courted Western European and American help, he was careful not to alienate the non-Western bloc. His warm rapport with Fidel Castro, for all the theatrics of Third World unity at the 1979 NAM Conference in Havana, belied his pro-US sympathies, as did his appointment of A. C. S. Hameed as Foreign Minister.

Less well apparent was his selection of Premadasa as an emissary of sorts to multilateral institutions. At the 1980 UN General Assembly, Premadasa called upon developed countries to shoulder their share of responsibility for underdeveloped countries. He was firm on this point: responding to a remark by Michael Littlejohns (of Reuters) that OPEC’s intransigence prevented the First World from aiding the Third, he politely but firmly contended, “You can keep on saying that, but it will do no one any good.”

It hardly need be added that after he became President, Premadasa took positions on foreign policy which contradicted some of Jayewardene’s, such as his expulsion of David Gladstone and his closure of the Israeli Special interests Section at the US Embassy; the latter act went as far as to provoke a confrontation with Stephen Solarz.

At a fundamental level, however, Premadasa’s vision remained bogged down in the IMF paradigm: Janasaviya, after all, was, despite its pro-poor leanings, funded by the World Bank. In other words, it continued to alienate the section of the middle-class – Sinhala Buddhist – which had evolved a cultural critique of neoliberalism.

In the absence of, on the one hand, a strong trade union driven Left movement, and on the other hand an equally strong radical youth movement – both decimated by Premadasa and Jayewardene – the Oppositional space gravitated to a nationalist-populist vacuum. What remained of the amorphous Mahajana Pakshaya (SLMP) gravitated either to the UNP (Ossie Abeygunasekera) or to the People’s Alliance (Chandrika Kumaratunga).

Premadasa courted considerable support among sections of the middle-class as well as the petty bourgeoisie, including artists and the clergy (as seen in the latter’s act of siding with his government after Gamini and Lalith launched their campaign against him). Yet in one respect he remained a part Bonapartist and not a total one: his inability to respond to the cultural critique of his politico-economic paradigm.

This widened a vacuum, filled by the Jathika Chintanaya; the latter’s evolution from an intellectual to a political movement, from Nalin de Silva and Gunadasa Amarasekara to S. L. Gunasekara and Champika Ranawaka, has been charted many times before by several commentators. All that needs to be noted here is that in the absence of a political critique of neoliberalism, especially in the face of neoliberalism’s consolidation by the People’s Alliance under Chandrika Kumaratunga, the cultural critique gained ground.

What helped that critique gain even more ground was the capitulation of the Left to the neoliberal line of the SLFP, as well as the dismantling of the state by the first Kumaratunga government. The latter point is significant, for unlike J.R. and Premadasa Kumaratunga set about rolling back the state while opening up the economy.

As Dayan Jayatilleka has suggested, the cooption of the Kumaratunga regime by NGOs and the new “civil society” did much to provoke the Sinhala nationalist lobby. Incensed, the latter sought a third force. In the absence of a viable Left alternative – for Kumaratunga’s first term was marked by the deterioration of the Left within the People’s Alliance – the critique of neoliberalism soon became a monopoly of cultural revivalists.

It must be noted that the SLFP-PA’s rightward shift did not transpire in a vacuum. After a decade of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, the Democrats in the US and the Labourites in Britain embraced what they euphemistically called “Third Way Centrism”, discarding their Marxist roots while embracing a neoliberal line. In Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the new SLFP thus had its Western archetypes to look up to, and to emulate.

Jayatilleka has argued that the SLFP-PA’s turn to the right was pragmatist. I disagree: it ended up decimating the Left, something not even three UNP administrations could do and something which paved the way for the nationalist lobby to gain in strength and numbers despite its convoluted, contradictory positions on the economy.

Indeed, the contents of the latter’s economic programme revealed its contradictions: the Sihala Urumaya Manifesto of 2000, to give a sampling, rejected a closed economy while rejecting neoliberalism, acknowledging that while “going back to a closed economy” was “unthinkable” it would, in stark contrast to its opposition to neoliberalism, avail itself “of the opportunities thrown up by globalisation.” Viewed this way, even Nalin de Silva’s campaign against Coca-Cola at the Kelaniya University in the 1990s seems to me more of a cultural rather than a political attack on globalisation; Sinhala nationalism of the petty bourgeois sort, after all, decries neoliberalism and, paradoxically, critiques Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s economic policies for having destroyed the “Sinhala businessman.”

In addition to strengthening the Sinhala nationalist lobby, by axing or relegating to the background the Left faction of the SLFP Kumaratunga not only moved her party to the neoliberal Right, she compelled the UNP to do the same as well.

Surprising as it may seem now, the UNP under Ranil Wickremesinghe originally opposed Kumaratunga over several sensitive issues, such as the proposed Federal Package. In the second CBK presidency, however, the UNP did a volte-face on those same issues. Ironically that time around it was left to Kumaratunga to rein in Wickremesinghe over his overtures to the peace lobby: at the very moment he landed in Washington after “brokering” a peace deal with the LTTE, she took over three Ministries and sacked him. That did not, however, incline her government automatically to oppose the peace lobby, as her experiment with P-TOMS (despite the opposition of the JVP) later showed.

The first Bonapartist revolt had taken place against the backdrop of an extreme Left uprising and widening discontent with an authoritarian rightwing presidency. A considerable section of the middle-class had voted for Premadasa despite their scepticism, but another section – Sinhala Buddhist nationalist – remained alienated from him.

The second Bonapartist revolt, on the other hand, took place against the backdrop of deepening neoliberalism, a rollback of the state unparalleled even by J. R. Jayewardene’s standards, and the internationalisation of a conflict the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist middle-class wanted a military, not a political, solution to. Since the Left could not, owing to the bottlenecks imposed on it, come up with a proper critique of these issues, it was left to the Jathika Chintanaya and its offshoots to so do from a cultural vantage point.

In 2000, Dinesh Gunawardena’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna joined the People’s Alliance. At the 2000 parliamentary election Gunawardena contested and retained his seat; he would do the same at the 2001 parliamentary election, becoming Minister for Transport and rescuing the SLTB from the moribund state to which it had deteriorated by then.

Gunawardena’s ideology – an impeccable blend of socialism and popular nationalism, not unlike his father’s – provided an impetus to a revolt within the SLFP. That revolt culminated in 2004 when an overwhelming majority of the party stood behind Mahinda Rajapaksa’s bid as party candidate for the presidential election. Mahinda revived Bonapartism in Sri Lankan politics thereafter, becoming an heir of sorts to Premadasa; not for no reason, after all, does Dayan Jayatilleka often compare the two with one another.

Where Rajapaksa differed from Premadasa was the acceptance he won among the Jathika Chintanaya ideologues and the Hela Urumaya MPs, as well as the Left (the Old Trotskyite-Communist and the JVP). Not that their tactics and objectives converged totally; the Hela Urumaya for instance sought a wider post-war political agenda than the Jathika Chintanaya. Champika Ranawaka thus campaigned for Rajapaksa in 2005 and 2010 on the understanding that once they achieved their primary aim, the ending of the war, they would enact reforms that would free the public sector from the inefficiencies and the culture of corruption which two and a half decades of untrammelled privatisation had pushed it to.

When he and Rajapaksa disagreed over the direction the latter took towards the end of his second presidency, Ranawaka not only had to leave the government, he had to leave it while being forced to shed his nationalist credentials. In a big way, that says a lot about how Rajapaksa stole the nationalist light from its original torchbearers.

Today, Ranawaka is caught adrift: on the one hand the Sinhala nationalist crowd attacks him as a renegade, while on the other ethnic minorities distrust him over his past. This was summed up at the recent parliamentary polls: despite being given the No 1 preferential vote for the Samagi Jana Balavegaya in Colombo, Ranawaka came second from last to Mano Ganesan; the Sinhala middle-class vote which he coveted went to the Pohottuwa, while the SJB vote trifurcated between the Premadasa Central Colombo bloc, Harsha de Silva’s suburban middle-class bloc, and the Rahuman-Ganesan minority bloc.

In other words, Rajapaksa has become not just a Bonapartist but a total Bonapartist, unlike his predecessor from the UNP. He remained so long after the JVP and the Hela Urumaya left his coalition, and one can argue he remains so even now. As for Gotabaya Rajapaksa and whether he has become a more right-leaning Bonapartist than his brother: well, it’s been a year, and a lot can happen in four years. No assessment of the Gotabaya presidency can be undertaken until it reaches its end. On the face of it, it hasn’t even begun to climb up to its peak. On the legacy it leaves behind will historians be able to record what is, to me at least, the third Bonapartist revolution in Sri Lanka. Until then, we will have to wait.

(The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)

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Midweek Review

A look back at now mostly forgotten Eelam war in the aftermath of Kashmir massacre

Published

15 hours ago

2025/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

LTTE directed two claymore mines at an overcrowded SLTB bus, at Kebithigollewa, on June 15, 2006. The blasts claimed the lives of 68 civilians. Seventeen years after the war, some interested parties sought to muddy the waters by falsely claiming the Karuna faction triggered the Kebithigollewa blasts at the behest of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, Pakistan offered to cooperate in what it called a neutral investigation. But India never regretted the
catastrophic results of its intervention in Sri Lanka that led to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, over a year after India pulled out its Army
from NE, Sri Lanka

In a telephone call to Indian Premier Narendra Modi, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake condemned the massacre of 26 civilians – 25 Indians and one Nepali – at Pahalgam, in the Indian controlled Kashmir, on April 22.

President Dissanayake expressed his condolences and reaffirmed, what the President’s Media Division (PMD) called, Sri Lanka’s unwavering solidarity and brotherhood with the people of India.

Having described the massacre as a terrorist attack, New Delhi found fault with Pakistan for the incident. Pakistan was accused of backing a previously unknown group, identified as Kashmir Resistance.

The Indian media have quoted Indian security agencies as having said that Kashmir Resistance is a front for Pakistan-based terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. Pakistan says it only provides moral and diplomatic support.

Pakistan has denied its involvement in the Pahalgam attack. A section of the Indian media, and some experts, have compared the Pahalgam attack with the coordinated raids carried out by Hamas on southern Israel, in early October 2023.

President Dissanayake called Premier Modi on the afternoon of April 25, three days after the Pahalgam attack. The PMD quoted Dissanayake as having reiterated Sri Lanka’s firm stance against terrorism in all its forms, regardless of where it occurred in the world, in a 15-minute call.

Modi cut short his visit to Saudi Arabia as India took a series of measures against Pakistan. Indian actions included suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) governing water sharing of six rivers in the Indus basin between the two countries. The agreement that had been finalised way back in 1960 survived three major wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999.

One-time Pentagon official Michael Rubin, having likened the Pahalgam attack to a targeted strike on civilians, has urged India to adopt an Israel-style retaliation, targeting Pakistan, but not realising that both are nuclear armed.

Soon after the Hamas raid some interested parties compared Sri Lanka’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the ongoing Israel war on Gaza.

The latest incident in Indian-controlled Kashmir, and Gaza genocide, cannot be compared under any circumstances. Therefore, suggestions that India adopt Israel-style retaliation against Pakistan do not hold water. Also, Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE that was brought to a successful conclusion in May 2009 cannot be compared with the conflict Israel is involved in.

Sri Lanka can easily relate to the victims of the Pahalgam attack as a victim of separatist terrorism that bled the country for nearly 30 years. India, however, never bothered to express regret over causing terrorism here.

Indian-sponsored terror projects brought Sri Lanka to its knees before President JRJ made an attempt to eradicate the LTTE in May-June 1987. JRJ resorted to ‘Operation Liberation’ after Indian mediated talks failed to end the conflict. Having forced Sri Lanka to call off the largest-ever ground offensive undertaken at that time with the hope of routing the LTTE in Vadamarachchi, the home turf of Velupillai Prabhakaran, followed by India deploying its Mi 17s on July 24, 1987, to rescue the Tiger Supremo, his wife, two children and several of his close associates – just five days before the signing of the so-called Indo-Lanka peace accord, virtually at Indian gun point.

First phase of Eelam war

During the onset of the conflict here, the LTTE routinely carried out raids on predominantly Sinhala villages where civilians were butchered. That had been part of its strategy approved by ‘controllers’ based across the Palk Straits. That had been a volatile period in the run-up to the July 29, 1987, accord. Although India established half a dozen terrorist groups here, the LTTE had been unquestionably the most violent and the dominant group. To New Delhi’s humiliation all such groups supported by it were wiped out by the marauding Tigers.

Those who compared the LTTE with Hamas, or any other group, conveniently forget that the Sri Lankan group caused significant losses to its creator. India lost over 1,300 officers and men, while nearly 3,000 others suffered injuries during the Indian deployment here (July 1987-March 1990).

The world turned a blind eye to what was going on in Sri Lanka in the ’80s. The war launched by India in the early ’80s against Sri Lanka lasted till the signing of the peace accord. That can be broadly identified as phase one of the conflict (1983 July – 1987 July). That first phase can be safely described as an Indian proxy war aimed at creating an environment conducive for the deployment of the Indian Army.

Having compelled President JRJ to accept deployment of the Indian Army in the northern and eastern regions in terms of the “peace accord”, New Delhi sought to consolidate its hold here by disarming all groups, except the one it had handpicked to run the North-East Provincial Council. The Indian Army oversaw the first Provincial Council election held on Nov. 19, 1988, to elect members to the NE council. The whole exercise was meant to ensure the installation of the Varatharaja Perumal led-EPRLF (Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Forint) administration therein.

The second phase (1987 July – 1990 March) saw a war between the Indian Army and the LTTE. During this period, the Indian Army supervised two national elections – presidential on Dec. 19, 1988, and parliamentary on Feb. 15, 1989, that were won by Ranasinghe Premadasa and the UNP.

During that period, the UNP battled the JVP terror campaign and the South bled. The JVP that resorted to unbridled violence against the Indo-Lanka accord, at that time, has ended-up signing several agreements, including one on defence cooperation, recently, and the country is yet to get details of these secret agreements.

Raid on the Maldives

The second phase of the Eelam conflict ended when India pulled out its Army from NE Sri Lanka in March 1990. The sea-borne raid that had been carried out by Indian-trained PLOTE (People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam) targeting Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, in Nov. 1988, is perhaps a significant development during the second phase of the conflict, though it was never examined in the right context.

No one – not even the Maldives – found fault with India for exporting terrorism to the island nation. India received accolades for swift air borne intervention to neutralise the PLOTE group. The Indian Navy sank a vessel commandeered by a section of the PLOTE raiders in a bid to escape back to Sri Lanka. The truth is that PLOTE, that had been trained by India to destabilise Sri Lanka, ended-up taking up a lucrative private assignment to overthrow President Gayoom’s administration.

India never regretted the Maldivian incident. It would be pertinent to mention that two boat loads of PLOTE cadres had quietly left Sri Lanka at a time the Indian Navy was responsible for monitoring in and out sea movements.

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, Pakistan offered to cooperate in what it called a neutral investigation. But India never regretted the catastrophic results of its intervention in Sri Lanka that led to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, over a year after India pulled out its Army from NE, Sri Lanka.

Resumption of hostilities by the LTTE in June 1990 can be considered as the beginning of the third phase of the conflict. Having battled the Indian Army and gained valuable battle experience, the LTTE, following a 14-month honeymoon with President Ranasinghe Premadasa, resumed hostilities. Within weeks the LTTE gained the upper hand in the northern theatre of operations.

In spite of India banning the LTTE, after the May 1991 assassination of Gandhi, the group continued to grow with the funds pouring in from the West over the years. Regardless of losing Jaffna in 1995, the LTTE consolidated its position, both in the Vanni and the East, to such an extent their victory seemed inevitable.

But resolute political leadership given by Mahinda Rajapaksa ensured that Sri Lanka turned the tables on the LTTE within weeks after the LTTE appeared to be making significant progress at the beginning. Within two years and 10 months (2006 August – 2009 May) the armed forces brought the LTTE to its knees, and the rest is history. As we have said in our earlier columns that victory was soon soured. Spearheaded by Sarath Fonseka, the type of General that a country gets in about once in a thousand years, ended in enmity within, for the simple reason this super hero wanted to collect all the trophies won by many braves.

Post-war developments

Sri Lanka’s war has been mentioned on many occasions in relation to various conflicts/situations. We have observed many distorted/inaccurate attempts to compare Sri Lanka’s war against LTTE with other conflicts/situations.

Unparalleled Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, triggered a spate of comments on Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE. Respected expert on terrorism experienced in Sri Lanka, M.R. Narayan Swamy, discussed the similarities of Sri Lanka’s conflict and the ongoing Israel-Gaza war. New Delhi-based Swamy, who had served UNI and AFP during his decades’ long career, discussed the issues at hand while acknowledging no two situations were absolutely comparable. Swamy currently serves as the Executive Director of IANS (Indo-Asian News Service).

‘How’s Hamas’ attack similar to that of LTTE?’ and ‘Hamas’ offensive on Israel may bring it closer to LTTE’s fate,’ dealt with the issues involved. Let me reproduce Swamy’s comment: “Oct. 7 could be a turning point for Hamas similar to what happened to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka in 2006. Let me explain. Similar to Hamas, the LTTE grew significantly over time eventually gaining control of a significant portion of Sri Lanka’s land and coast. The LTTE was even more formidable than Hamas. It had a strong army, growing air force and a deadly naval presence. Unlike Hamas, the LTTE successfully assassinated high ranking political figures in Sri Lanka and India. Notably, the LTTE achieved this without direct support from any country while Hamas received military and financial backing from Iran and some other states. The LTTE became too sure of their victories overtime. They thought they could never be beaten and that starting a war would always make them stronger. But in 2006 when they began Eelam War 1V their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran couldn’t have foreseen that within three years he and his prominent group would be defeated. Prabhakaran believed gathering tens of thousands of Tamils during the last stages of war would protect them and Sri Lanka wouldn’t unleash missiles and rockets. Colombo proved him wrong. They were hit. By asking the people not to flee Gaza, despite Israeli warnings, Hamas is taking a similar line. Punishing all Palestinians for Hamas’ actions is unjust, just like punishing all Tamils for LTTE’s actions was wrong. The LTTE claimed to fight for Tamils without consulting them and Hamas claimed to represent Palestinians without seeking the approval for the Oct.7 strike. Well, two situations are not absolutely comparable. We can be clear that Hamas is facing a situation similar to what the LTTE faced, shortly before its end. Will Hamas meet a similar fate as the LTTE? Only time will answer that question.” The above was said soon after the Oct. 2023 Hamas attack.

Swamy quite conveniently refrained from mentioning India’s direct role in setting up one of the deadliest terror projects in the world here in the ’80s.

Former Editor of The Hindu, Malini Parthasarathy, who also had served as Chairperson of The Hindu Group, released a list of politicians assassinated by the LTTE, as she hit back hard at those who raged against the comparison of the Hamas to the LTTE. The list included two Jaffna District MPs, Arumugam Murugesu Alalasundaram and Visvanathan Dharmalingam, assassinated in early Sept. 1985. Slain Visvanathan Dharmalingam’s son, Dharmalingam Siddharthan, who represents the Vanni electoral district on the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK), is on record as having said that the two MPs were abducted and killed by TELO (Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation.) gunmen. The list posted by Parthasarathy included PLOTE leader Uma Maheswaran, assassinated in Colombo in July 1989. The LTTE hadn’t been involved in that killing either. Maheswaran is believed to have been killed by his onetime associates, perhaps over the abortive PLOTE raid on the Maldives in Nov, 1988. India never bothered at least to acknowledge that the Maldives raid was carried out by men trained by India to destabilise Sri Lanka. There is no doubt that Maheswasran’s killers, too, were known to the Indian intelligence at that time.

Before rushing into conclusions regarding Hamas and the LTTE, perhaps a proper examination of the circumstances they emerged is necessary. The two situations – fourth phase of the Eelam conflict and the latest Hamas strike on Israel and the devastating counter attack – cannot be compared under any circumstances. Efforts to compare the two issues is more like comparing apples and oranges, though mutually Tamils and Sinhalese have so many commonalities having intermingled throughout history like the Arabs and Jews.

It is no doubt Jews are a people that suffered persecution throughout known history under Assyrians, Babylonians to Romans and so forth. Such persecution includes expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and from Spain 1492. So what Hitler and the Germans did was to take the historic process to another extreme.

Yet to blame the Palestinians and treat them like animals and to simply butcher them for the latest uprising by Hamas for all the humiliations and suffering they have been going through non-stop since Naqba in1948, from the time of the creation of Israel is to allow the creators of the problem, including the UK, the USA and United Nations to wash all their sins on the true other victims of this conflict, the Palestinians.

It would be pertinent to mention that Israel, in spite of having one of the world’s best fighting armed forces with 100 percent backing from the West, cannot totally eradicate Hamas the way Sri Lanka dealt with the LTTE. Mind you we did not drop 2000 pound bombs supplied by the US on hapless Tamil civilians to commit genocide as is happening in Palestine in the hands of the Israelis.

The circumstances under which the LTTE launched a large-scale offensive in Aug. 2006 and its objectives had been very much different from that of Hamas. The LTTE really believed that it could have defeated the Sri Lankan military in the North by cutting off the sea supply route from Trincomalee to Kankesanthurai and simultaneously overrunning the Kilali-Muhamalai-Nagarkovil forward defence line (FDL). The total collapse of the FDL could have allowed the LTTE to eradicate isolated fighting formations trapped north of the FDL. But, in the case of the Gaza war, the Hamas strike was meant to provoke Israel to unleash a massive unbridled counter attack that caused maximum losses on the civilians. As Hamas expected the Israeli counter attack has triggered massive protests in the West against their leaders. They have been accused of encouraging violence against Palestine. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other US allies are under heavy pressure from Muslims and other horrified communities’ world over to take a stand against the US.

But in spite of growing protests, Israel has sustained the offensive action not only against Gaza but Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.

Instead of being grateful to those who risked their lives to bring the LTTE terror to an end, various interested parties are still on an agenda to harm the armed forces reputation.

The treacherous Yahapalana government went to the extent of sponsoring an accountability resolution against its own armed forces at the Geneva-based UNHRC in Oct. 2015. That was the level of their treachery.

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Midweek Review

The Broken Promise of the Lankan Cinema:

Published

15 hours ago

2025/04/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

Asoka & Swarna’s Thrilling-Melodrama – Part III

“‘Dr. Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Nice to see you again.’

The woman in the white sari places a thumb in her ledger book, adjusts her spectacles and smiles up at you. ‘You may call me Ranee. Helping you is what I am assigned to do,’ she says. ‘You have seven moons. And you have already waisted one.’”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

by Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022. p84)

(Continued from yesterday)

Rukmani’s Stardom & Acting Opportunity

Rukmani Devi is still remembered for her incomparable singing voice and her studio photograph by Ralex Ranasinghe with its hint of Film Noir mystery and seduction, and for the role of Blanch Dubois she played in Dhamma Jagoda’s Vesmuhunu, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. This is a role she shared on alternate nights with Irangani Serasinghe in the late 60s or early 70s. (See my Island Essays, 2024, p114) She was immensely happy to be able to act in a modern western classic directed by a visionary theatre director like Dhamma Jagoda and it was to his credit that he chose to give her that role when all acting roles had dried up for her. I observed those rehearsals held at Harrold Peiris’ open garage.

I, too, am happy that Swarna has had a chance to perform again in her 70s. The question is, how exactly has she used that very rare opportunity to act in a film that has doubled its production cost within two months, and now showing in private screenings in multiplexes in Australia with English subtitles, with ambitions to be shown on Netflix and Amazon Prime. These outlets also now fund films and make challenging mini-series. Rani has clearly been produced and marketed with this global distribution in mind. How does this important fact affect Swarna’s style of acting and the aesthetics of Asoka’s script, are the questions I wish to explore in the final section of this piece.

A Sensational-Thrilling Political & Family Melodrama

‘Melodrama’ is a popular genre with a history that goes back to 19th century theatre in the west and with the advent of film, Hollywood took it up as it offered a key set of thrilling devices known as ‘Attractions’, for structuring and developing a popular genre cinema. The word ‘Melodrama’ is a compound of the Greek word for music ‘melos’ and drama as an action, with the connotation of a highly orchestrated set of actions. The orchestration (not only with sound but also the speed and rhythm of editing, dramatic expressive lighting, ‘histrionic’ acting, etc.,) always reaches toward thrilling climaxes and at times exaggerated display of emotions. The plots are sensational, propelled by coincidences and written to reach climaxes and dramatic reversals of fortune, and sudden revelations. Hollywood was famous for its happy endings with resolution of the dramatised conflicts, while Hindi melodramas and Lankan copies often ended sadly.

In the history of cinema there are highly sophisticated melodramas within Hollywood, classical Hindi cinema and also in European art cinema. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the German directors who developed a modern ‘Brechtian-Melodrama’ of extraordinary political and aesthetic power in the 70s. And of course, there are very poorly conceived melodramas too like many of the Sinhala films which were copies of Indian prototypes. Melodramatic devices inflect the different genres of Hollywood, for example the Gangster Film, the Western and created durable genre types in character, e.g. the Gangster, the Lonesome Cowboy and Indians; all national stereotypes, one embodying the underbelly of American capitalism, an anti-hero and the other the American hero actualising The American Dream. ‘The Indian,’ merely the collateral damage of this phantasy!

When the stories were centred on women the genre classification was ‘Women’s Melodrama’ as it dealt with interpersonal relations, conflicts, and sadness centred on the home primarily. Feminist film theory has developed a vast archive of scholarship on the melodramatic genre, cross-culturally, with a special focus on Hollywood and Hindi cinema decades prior to the formation we now call Bollywood, made with transnational capital and global reach. It was assumed that the audience for the family melodramas was female and that as women, we enjoy crying at the cinema, hence the condescending name ‘The Weepies’. I cut my scholarly/critical teeth studying these much-maligned melodramatic films for my doctorate, which I had enjoyed while growing up in a long-ago Ceylon.

Asoka’s Melodramatic Turn

Asoka in Alborada, but more so in Rani has made melodramatic films with his own ‘self-expressive’ variations on the structure, with an ‘Art Cinema’ gloss. He has said that Rani is more like Alborada and unlike his previous films made during the civil war. This is quite obvious. Though the advertising tag line for Alborada claimed it as a ‘Poetic film that Neruda never made’ it was a straightforward narrative film. I have argued in a long essay (‘Psycho-Sexual Violence in the Sinhala Cinema: Parasathumal & Alborada’, in Lamentation of the Dawn, ed. S. Chandrajeewa, 2022, also tr. into Sinhala, 2023), that the staging of the rape of the nameless, silent, Dalit woman is conceived in a melodramatic manner playing it for both critique and exciting thrills. This is a case of both having his cake and eating it.

Swarna’s Melodramatic Turn

The film appears to be constructed, plotted melodramatically, to demonstrate Swarna’s ability to perform dramatic scenes of high excitement in areas of taboo, the opportunity for which is unavailable to a Sinhala actress, in a Sinhala film, playing the role of a Sinhala Buddhist mother, who has lost her son to an act of terror unleashed by the Sinhala-Buddhist State terror and Sinhala-Buddhist JVP.

In short, Swarna has been given the opportunity to demonstrate how well she can perform a range of Melodramatic emotions that go from say A to, say D. She has been given the chance to move smoothly from English to Sinhala as the middle classes do; use the two most common American expletives which are part of the American vernacular; drink for pleasure but also to the point of getting drunk; offer alcohol to her baffled domestic worker; coax her son and friends to drink; dance with them in an inebriated state; pour alcohol, whisky, not arrack, like one would pour water from a bottle; chain smoke furiously; dash a full mug of tea on the floor in a rage; crumple on the floor sobbing uncontrollably; shout at her loyal aid Karu; speak with sarcasm to a police officer insisting that she is ‘Dr Manorani …’ not ‘Miss or Mrs’, like feminists did back in the day; chat intimately with a minister of the government; look angrily and scowl at President Premadasa when he comes to the funeral house to condole with her; stage Richard’s funeral in a Catholic church with a stain glass window of the Pieta; to quote a well-known Psalm of David from the Bible, ‘Oh Absalom my son, Oh my son!’; etc.

Rani is Swarna’s chance to show that she can perform in ways that no Sinhala script has allowed a Sinhala actor to do up to now, that is, behave like the Sinhala cinema’s fantasy of how the upper-class Anglophone Lankan women behave. In short not unlike, but much worse, than the ‘bad girls’ in the Sinhala melodramatic genre cinema who always ended up in a Night Club, the locus of licentiousness that tempt them. I am thinking of Pitisara Kella from the 50s and a host of other films. Sinhala cinema simply cannot convincingly present the upper-class English-speaking milieu, with any nuance and conviction, it just feels very stilted, poorly acted therefore. Saying this is not class snobbery on my part. Even Lester James Peries from this very upper class and a Roman Catholic, in Delowak Atara couldn’t do it with Irangani Serasinghe and others. The dialogue meant to be serious or just plain normal sounded stilted and even funny. But when Lester did the Walauwa as in Nidhahanaya, it was brilliant, one of our classics. Brecht it was who said (on the eve of WW2, creating a Modern Epic mode of theatre in exile, that it’s not easy to make drama about current events. It’s much easier to look back with nostalgia at a genteel aristocratic Sinhala past for sure.

In taking the opportunity to explore kinetic and emotional behaviour considered to be taboo for a Sinhala woman, a fantasy Tamil woman has been fabricated. The plot of Rani is constructed by Asoka to provide Swarna the opportunity to indulge in these very taboos. In short, the fictional Tamil Rani offers Swarna an acting opportunity to improve her career prospects in the future. In so doing she has weakened her ability, I fear, to evolve as an actress.

A Domestic Melodrama: The House Suspended in a Void

If Swarna so desired, if the script ‘allowed her’ to, she could have tried to develop a quieter, more restrained and therefore a more powerful Rani. A friend of the family, when asked, said that, “The most striking feature of Manorani was her quiet, confident dignity, before and after Richard.” To testify to such a person, Asoka and Swarna could have asked the obvious question, did she have any close friendships formed as undergraduates, who supported her during this tragedy, as there certainly were cherished friends who shared her grief. After all, she was among the elite first generations of Ceylonese women to enter University in the 1940, to medical school at that!

Asoka and Swarna have entrapped their Rani in a vacuum of a house, friendless, with a little cross on Richard’s wall to signify religion. A lot of effort has gone into the set decoration and art direction of the house, as in Alborada, to stage a fantasy/phantasy melodramatic scenario. There is no real sensory, empathetic feel and understanding of the ethos (character), of this urbane Anglophone Ceylonese-Lankan mother and son, hence the fictionalised scenarios feel synthetic, cosmetic in the best traditions of the Sinhala genre cinema’s representation of the ‘excessive and even grotesque upper-class’. Except, here the Realism of the mise-en-scene (the old-world airy house and furniture and composition of the visual components) makes claims to a realist authenticity. A little modest research would have shown that Manorani and Richard moved from one rented apartment to another in the last few years of his life and when he was abducted, lived on the upper-floor of a house, in a housing estate in Rajagiriya. Asoka said in an interview that it wasn’t possible to find in Colombo the kind of old house they required for Rani. So, they went out of town to find the ideal house suited to stage their phantasy.

I suspect that it was Swarna who called shots this time, not Asoka who was recovering from a serious illness. He said that she brought the project to him and the producer and that he had no idea of making a film on Manorani, but added that he wrote the script within 3 months. I suspect that this Rani, (this out of control, angry, scowling, bad tempered, lamenting, hysterical Rani, reaching for the alcohol and cigarettes to assuage her grief, performing one sensational, thrilling melodramatic turn after another), was Swarna’s conception, her version of Manorani that she has nursed for 28 long years. Had she resisted this temptation to display her high-intensity acting-out skills yet again, she might just have been able to tap unsuspected resources within herself which she may still have as a serious actress. Its these latent affective depths that Rukmani Devi undoubtedly tapped when she was invited to play the drunken and lost Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar Named Desire in Sinhala, as a desperate, drunken, aristocratic lady, in Dhamma Jagoda’s Vesmuhunu (1971?).

Jagoda / Irangani

It is reported that before going on stage, Rukmani Devi went on her hands and knees to pay her respects to Dhamma, not as feudal act of deference but to acknowledge his Shilpiya Nuwana, craft knowledge/intelligence’, as one very perceptive Sinhala critic put it. That gesture of Vandeema was foreign to the Tamil Christian Rukmani Devi, but nevertheless it shows her sense of immense gratitude to Dhamma for having taken her into a zone of expression (a dangerous territory emotionally for dedicated vulnerable actors), that she had never experienced before, so late in her life. But ‘late’ is relative to gender, then she was only in her 50s!

Challenge is what serious actors yearn for, strange beings who may suggest to us intensities that sustain and amplify life, all life. Swarna might usefully think about Rukmani Devi, her life and her star persona as a Tamil star in countless sarala Sinhala films, in whose shadow and echo every single Sinhala actress has entered the limelight, Swarna more so now than any other!

As for Asoka, he needs to rest and take care of himself before he commits himself to this recent track of films which are yielding less and less with each of the two films done back to back. His body of work is too important to trash it with this kind of half thought out ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, which is a precise definition of Melodrama at its best. This film, alas, is not one of those.

That young Tamil women, often silent and traumatised, appeared following Sinhala soldiers in Lankan ‘civil-war cinema’ of the modernists, all male, is a troubling phenomenon. A ‘Sinhala Orientalism’, an exoticising of Tamil and Dalith young women as Other, is at work in some of the civil war films, as in Alborada and Rani. And then this very elevation always leads to unleashing psycho/sexual and/or other forms of violence, because the elevation (Mother Goddess in Alborada) only feeds violent male psychosexual phantasies, which in the Sinhala cinema often leads to the violence of rape and other forms of violence towards women, both Tamil and Sinhala. (To be continued)

by Laleen Jayamanne