(Excerpted from Render Unto Caesar by Bradman Weerakoon, Secretary to the Prime Minister)

Yet, as was to happen over and over again in the country’s politics, the vocal minority, in this case the hardliners finally won the day (in getting SWRD to abrogate the B-C Pact). In October 1957 the UNP under the leadership of J R Jayewardene set out on a march from Colombo to Kandy to protest against the pact. On the first day they covered 11 miles amidst some obstruction and skirmishes with government sponsored elements.

On the second day after going three miles they were met at Imbulgoda by a blockade of the road led by the local MP for Gampaha, S D Bandaranayake. The MP, a distant relative of the prime minister, was well-known as an eccentric and was referred to as an ‘unguided missile’. Many of us did not believe that Mr Bandaranaike had any responsibility for this. It was regarded as a purely local endeavour in showing opposition to the pact and the police behaved impartially in keeping the marchers and the obstructors apart.

Altogether it was somewhat of an embarrassment to the prime minister who felt that the march would have lost steam on its own as it proceeded up country. J R Jayewardene had no hesitation in calling off the march but went on four days later to the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy to worship the Sacred Tooth relic of the Buddha and offer puja to the gods of the four devales “to stop the pact.”

The attempt of the UNP to undermine the prime minister by mobilizing people with the march to Kandy, palpably failed and the tension over the BC Pact subsided; but not for long. By February 1958, the FP put pressure on the prime minister to move the agreement into legislation which would guarantee regional councils and their powers.

Mr Bandaranaike, whose authority in the Cabinet was being challenged by minister Philip Gunewardene over his proposed reform of the Paddy Lands legislation, now found himself increasingly besieged. Those who were against concessions to the Tamils began to assert themselves and asked not only for details of the regional councils draft legislation but the abrogation of the pact itself. Foremost among Mr Bandaranaike’s critics were the self-same bhikkus who had helped to ensure his victory in 1956.

In March of 1958, the ministry of transport made a decision – in hindsight a major blunder given the fragile situation – to send some nationalized buses to the North with the Sinhala letter `Sri’ on the licence plates. The northern militants began to deface the licence plates and the southern extremists retaliated with a widespread campaign of smearing tar over Tamil name boards wherever they occurred.

I recall that the Tamil lettering of the name board in the prime minister’s office in Senate Square itself and even the Tamil lettering on the prime minister’s official gold-coloured Cadillac, which read ‘left hand drive’, were not spared in this virulent tar-brush campaign. There was much confusion in the city at the time but after police shooting, things were brought under control in a few days.

The Tamil leaders, especially Chelvanayakam, who was always for non-violent protest to win rights, did what they could to restrain the militants but the die had been cast. At the Cabinet meeting held on April 9, 1958, some ministers urged that the pact be scrapped but the prime minister managed to hold them off. What finally undid Mr Bandaranaike’s genuine bid for accommodating with the Tamils was the action of around 150 bhikkus who attempted to march to 65, Rosmead Place and compel the prime minister to withdraw from the pact.

The police had stopped the procession about 100 yards away on McCarthy Road but the group refused to move until they had won their demand. Mr Bandaranaike went down to meet them and tried to explain, but the monks would have none of it. Finally, at noon that day he drove to Radio Ceylon and announced that given the militant behaviour of the Tamils and the popular opposition this had caused, he was unilaterally abrogating the pact. Some political commentators have called this the most ‘grievous blunder of his career’.

The Tamil leaders responded immediately by calling for a civil disobedience mass campaign and planned for a conference on May 23 in Vavuniya to organize the protest. While this was going on serious violence was breaking out between groups of Sinhalese and Tamils in several parts of the country. Reports began to come in to the PM’s office first from Polonnaruwa where G A Derek Aluvihare had to give orders to the police to fire and stop lorry loads of Land Development Department labour from raiding Tamil settlements.

On the 24 May, a former mayor of Nuwara Eliya, Seneviratne, and two friends were waylaid and killed in Eravur. As news of this spread, vehicles and trains were halted and Tamils were searched for, in Polonnaruwa and other towns in the North Central Province. The violence quickly spread to Colombo and the larger towns were fanned by the most fantastic rumours. In Mount Lavinia on Hotel Road, where my mother lived, a Tamil man had petrol thrown on him and was being burnt to death. He was saved only by the most courageous exertions of the Warden of St. Thomas’ College who fought off the miscreants. This, some of my family members personally witnessed.

It became clear that the only way to quell the widespread rioting was to bring in the Emergency and after some consultation with the Governor-General Sir Oliver Goonetilleke Emergency was declared at mid day on May 27, 1958. This meant that the press was censored, night and day curfews imposed; and public meetings, processions and strikes in essential services prohibited.
However, as the news was taken to the north and east by persons fleeing from the violence in the capital, rioting against the small temporary settlements of migrant Sinhalese fishermen from Dondra and Negombo and business establishments in the towns followed. One of the worst incidents was the attack on the Buddhist Naga vihare in Jaffna town sparked by the news of the burning alive of the pusaries in the Panadura kovil.

On May 30 news came in to the small coordinating unit set-up in the prime minister’s office of the destruction of the temple on the island of Nagadipa. This piece of information of the sacking of an important place of Budddhist pilgrimage — by tradition believed to be a site hallowed by a visit of the Buddha to settle a conflict between the Nagas and the original inhabitants of the land — could have led to a massacre of Tamils in the south. The news was deliberately withheld from the public.

Emergency ’58 was undoubtedly the most serious communal outbreak the country had suffered in modern times. I was at the centre of things conveying information to the prime minister as the news came in from the police desk. Having served for a year in Jaffna four years earlier, I was particularly stricken by the turn of the events took. I recalled how on Independence Day in 1955, as the Civil Service Cadet in office, I was chosen by the government agent, the pious and gentle M Sri Kantha, to represent the government and hoist the national flag at the ceremonies on the island of Delft.

It was a small but impressive function with the school children in their starched white uniforms singing the national anthem with great gusto, of course in Tamil. It was a two-hour journey by Navy boat to the island, which boasts a population of 8,000 people and hundreds of wild ponies, introduced by a Dutch governor in the 17th century when the protectorate of Jaffna was under Dutch rule. In British times a Lieutenant Nolan and his men were rumoured to have sown some ‘wild oats’ as well. This was still evident in the fair complexion, blonde hair and blue eyes of some of the village lasses.

It was a full day of pony races, singing and dancing and a tearful farewell procession back to the jetty late in the evening. The journey back to Kayts remains etched in my memory; of the luminescence of the spray as the boat cut through the water, the soft moonlight that bathed the serene night and the quiet chatter of the seamen seated on the gunwale.

Sir Oliver, who was a very able and persuasive administrator with a long track record of crisis management, was given the job of handling the emergency by the prime minister and soon brought things under control.

Tarzie Vittachi who described Emergency ‘58 with minute attention to detail and great perspicacity relates a story of the bluff and bluster with which Sir Oliver managed his difficult role. Sir Oliver apparently invited the press to meet him soon after taking charge. As the pressmen moved into his room at Queens House, now converted into some kind of Command Headquarters, they saw Sir Oliver seated before a battery of telephones.

The phones would ring very often during the press briefing and lifting one phone after the other and without a moment of hesitation Sir Oliver would intone – he always had a slight stammer – “shoot, shoot” and replace the instrument. It was dramatic and very telling and there was no doubt after that as to who was in charge.
There was much for us to do and to think about in the prime minister’s office those days. It was difficult to discern any specific pattern in what had taken place. There were elements of both ethnic rivalry and hate and plain criminality. Most of the looting was indiscriminate with the looters plundering whatever they could lay their hands on. Boutiques and little food outlets – those selling plantains and the Jaffna cigars, seemed to be especially attractive to local thugs who made merry while `law and order’ was busy elsewhere.

In great measure, the police and the army when called out later, acted promptly and equitably. The police in the main did not take sides, as has unfortunately happened in later communal clashes, and sometimes to the great surprise of some militant organizations, shot at Sinhalese looters as well. Perhaps Sir Oliver’s command helped and the more multi-racial make-up of the law enforcers, especially at the higher levels, would have made a difference.

It was different in 1983 when I was directly concerned as commissioner-general of essential services. In 1958, the police and armed forces generally won the respect of the people for their broadly impartial behaviour and there were virtually no attacks on service personnel directly. An unfortunate trend was the incursions into the estate line-rooms, where the Indian Tamil population on estates close to the up-country towns were subject to pillage and harassment. Things on the estates had got particularly bad around the towns of Matale and Badulla.
While Sir Oliver appeared to be the man in charge of the Emergency – a role he was glad to take on at the prime minister’s bidding – there was no doubt that Mr Bandaranaike was always very much in the picture. The Emergency continued to be in force for several months and the Federal Party members were detained, albeit in some comfort, at the Galle Face Hotel. Mr Bandaranaike took a firm stand against the Sinhalese rioters and kept them in jail for as long as possible. This caused resentment among some government supporters.

As the tension subsided, Bandaranaike thought it time to present to the Parliament the legislation which provided for the `reasonable use of Tamil’. This was passed but neither the FP nor the UNP participated in the debate. However, the Act which was intended to permit a wide official use of Tamil in the Northern and Eastern provinces was not implementable without the regulations which the Act provided for being brought into law. It took almost 10 more years before the operative regulations were brought into effect. By this time the FP had become, for the first time, a part of the national government.

Towards the third quarter of 1958, things began to become very difficult for Mr Bandaranaike and there were frequent convulsions in the Cabinet. In addition there erupted a series of strikes especially in the nationalized port and transport sectors, including the post and telecommunication services and the plantations. Organized labour, very much controlled by the LSSP and CP, and on the estates by the CWC and DWC, had been brought into powerful federations.

The Unions were restive, not having yet received the fruits of the ‘socialist’ peoples’ revolution, which they, the workers had brought into being in 1956. Some of the trade union leaders like D A Piyadasa of the All Ceylon Harbour and Dock workers union, D G William of the State Employees Federation and Bala Tampoe were then important and powerful people. Tension between the unions, flexing their muscles, and the bureaucracy were not uncommon.

One morning, Vernon Peiries, a civil service colleague, a few years senior to me who was deputy port commissioner, came rushing into my room holding his jaw and asking for a hot-water compress. Apparently he had been having a heated discussion with D A Piyadasa, whose union was on strike on why a salary increase could not be given. Piyadasa had suddenly jumped up and slapped him across the face. Vernon whose office was also in Senate Square had come to me for treatment, solace and recompense for the indignity, more than to complain of the pain, he had suffered.

The civil service bush telephones began to hum and Shirley Amerasinghe, then a rising star as director of establishments called a confab for the afternoon and the CCS association decided that it was time to take a stand. They would take-up the issue with the prime minister on a non-negotiable condition, that Piyadasa must be both, criminally charged in the courts and suspended from entering the Port. The problem was a complex one for the prime minister since the higher echelons of the bureaucracy had now decided to dig their heels in while the political union leadership including Philip Gunawardene, his minister of agriculture and food, who had connections with Piyadasa, were for settling the matter with an apology or similar face-saving device.

I will never forget a particular high-level meeting called by the prime minister in his Senate Square office when he pleaded and tried to cajole the permanent secretary to the ministry of transport and works, the diminutive and implacable M F de S Jayaratne, under whom the Port then functioned, to step down from the high position that he was taking and agree to some compromise so that the deadlock could be broken.

To emphasize his point Bandaranaike got up and walked round the table, to Jayaratne but the permanent secretary who remained sitting throughout, would not budge. `Not on my life’ was all he did not say. Bandaranaike’s pleas were of no avail and the case against Piyadasa was filed. In this particular contest the prime minister had lost.

Actually, the prime minister and M F de S Jayaratne were good friends and often played billiards against each other at the Orient Club in Colombo 7 where they were both members, but this relationship had nothing to do with the performance of duty. Jayaratne was one of the best officials I have ever seen in that respect.

There were other points of contention developing in the coalition, which Mr Bandaranaike had, with ingenuity and persuasive skill, put together. The fundamental contradictions between right and left, which he had managed with such resourcefulness, were emerging and they burst out into the open with Mr Philip Gunawardene’s Paddy Lands draft legislation.