Politics
Hope and Harmony

by Chandi Civa
The Pandemic is devastating the whole world. It seems there is light, after all, at the end of this darkest tunnel. Thanks to a team of Oxford Scientists who have found vaccinations, which will save millions of lives. Those who caught the virus died – only a few escaped its grip, some of course, with long-term side effects.
Covid 19 has taught the human kind that we are all equal. The virus did not discriminate, no matter one’s creed, race, position in life, etc., etc.
In Sri Lanka and in certain parts of the world nature also revealed its ferocious destruction.
There are those with a religious bent have tried to come up with illogical answers to these calamities. God’s judgement is often the common theme. On balance such idiocies are worthless, mindless bonkers.
There is however a loud and clear lesson in all of this. Humans ought to live in harmony with one another and with nature. Politicians can cunningly play the racial card and spread animosity among communities. That is how they preserve their positions and power. They strive for absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. In Sri Lanka corruption is a plague. From top to bottom accountability is problematic. Nepotism is rampant.
There is so much talk about development. Now, the Chinese Debt Trap cannot be considered as development. The future generations will be enslaved and chained to these unpayable loans and its interest etc. Wherever the Chinese went in the guise of development, the story is similar. This is a form of modern slavery!
Covid-19 Pandemic, nature’s rampage, so-called developments, sowing seeds of disharmony among communities. These will have detrimental impact on society.
If the leaders of Sri Lanka can overcome such petty differences, and provide a wholesome vision, then, and only then there will be radical change among the masses. Leaders must lead by example.
Let unity and peace thrive. To that end we shall fervently hope.
Features
Independence and its Detractors: The Coming of Age after 77 Years

by Rajan Philips
Political Coming of Age
Both the observance of Independence Day and its erstwhile detractors would seem to have come of age at last, after 77 years. Tongue in cheek commentators have been harping too much on the irony of a JVP-led government celebrating independence. But the JVP was not the first political organization to question the authenticity of the island’s independence in 1948. That honour goes to the LSSP, rather the BLPI, the LSSP’s more doctrinaire variant at that time and led by a formidable triumvirate of theoreticians – Colvin R de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene and Doric de Souza. They memorably called the 1948 independence “fake independence.” It became a part of the political rhetoric of the Left and the JVP gave it a new life among the younger generations of Sri Lankans.
But over time the ‘fake independence’ characterization faded away and after 1970 when the LSSP was part of the United Front government, Leslie Goonewardene formally acknowledged that the old characterization had not been wholly correct. Sri Lanka, he conceded, was able to exercise complete independence in spite of imperial checks in the areas of defense and external affairs, and constitutional limitations. Sri Lanka was able to do whatever its parliament and government wanted to do – the good, the bad and the ugly – all in equal measures. Finally, in 1972, Sri Lanka was able to discard its dominion status, adopt a whole new autochthonous constitution, and declare itself a republic.
Challenging Times
Now after 77 years of independence and 53 years as a republic, Sri Lanka has come a full circle with a JVP President presiding over independence day celebrations last February 4. The political coming of age, so to speak, after 77 years has come at a challenging time for the country. This year’s ceremonies have been described as modest with more cultural and less militaristic emphases. The once controversial Tamil version of the National Anthem was sung to mark the end of the ceremonies. A week earlier the President had visited Jaffna and by all accounts he endeared himself to the people and was well received by them.
In his Independence Day address, President AKD spoke about the many cleavages that are tearing Sri Lanka: “Not only … the ethnic, religious, and caste divisions, … (but also) the entrenched prejudices that exist between political representatives and the populace, between institutional leaders and their staff, between passengers and public transportation operators, between government employees and the citizens they serve, between educators and students, and so forth.”
Critics will cavil that the JVP itself in its earlier incarnations had contributed to aggravating some of these cleavages. But give the man plenty of credit, we have not had a recent president who could provide such an organic assessment of our sociopolitical problems and sincerely commit himself to addressing them. But the tasks on the President and his government are tall and unrelenting. The still new JVP President and the NPP government have been in office for a little over 77 days – following the November parliamentary election. Yet there are those who seem to insist that the new government should be held responsible for solving all the accumulated problems of 77 years in just 77 days.
For the sake of argument, the NPP itself may have contributed to this notion by its own insistent campaigning that nothing has been done right ever since independence, and that only a new NPP government that will put everything right for Sri Lanka. This premise was incorrect however attractive it may have been for polemical posturing. All that said, there is no question that there are pundits who are holding the current fledgling government to a far more stringent standard of accountability than they have held governments that have come and gone in recent past. With only 77 days on, a balanced accounting of the new government should look at not only what it has done or started doing, but also what it has not been able to do as well as what it has steadfastly refused to do. Let us take the last point first.
This government has distinguished itself from its many predecessors from choosing not to do a number of things. For starters, and this is a unique start for Sri Lankan politics (save for the 1956 SWRD government), there is no family in government. There is no nepotism in government appointments. There is no interference in police matters or in government procurement. There is nothing corrupt about this government, and the main criticism appears to be that the government is not moving fast enough, or it is being selective, or even revengeful, in taking action against past corruption and corrupters.
The Rajapaksa Princely State
Corruption comes in many forms. It is corrupt not only to take bribes but also to insist on entitlements that are inappropriate even if they are interpretively legal. Former presidents are entitled to their pensions and reasonable benefits. Should every one of them be given a rent-free mansion at prime locations in Colombo, with a long retinue of security and staffers, is a legitimate question to ask even if there is self-servingly passed legislation to support such post-presidential prodigality.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi famously terminated the payment of privy purses to the ruling families of India’s erstwhile princely states and passed a constitutional amendment in 1971 to implement it. The courts approved it with the exception of some individual cases involving those who had held ruling powers before independence in 1947. It would seem that in the reckoning of at least one former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the whole island has once been his princely state. Hence, his claim to palatial entitlements in retirement.
President Dissanayake and the government should handle this matter not politically; but let government officials send a formal letter to the former president explaining why it is inappropriate for him to insist on this palatial entitlement but leave the matter of either vacating the property or claiming squatter rights entirely to Mr. Rajapaksa’s discretion. Leave it to him and his family to do the explaining to the people why he thinks he is entitled to this facility whereas every other retiring person has to make ends meet within the pension or EPF. And there is no assurance that people will get their pension or EPF after what he, his brothers and their economic whiz kids had done to the economy.
If at the time of independence, Sri Lanka had the Uncle Nephew Party (UNP), 77 years later there is a Sri Lanka Privy-Purse Party (SLPP). The positive difference is that the UNP was in power in 1948, but in 2025 the SLPP is out of power and the UNP is on life support. If the SLPP thinks it can claw back to power by making a public fight over the retirement mansion of its former president, so be it. And if the SJB thinks its fortunes will swell if it throws its support behind the Rajapaksa mansion-grab, so be it too!
The 1977 Legacies
In looking at what this government has done, has been doing, and has not done or not been able to do what needs to be done, we can invoke the year 1977 as a frame of reference. 1977 is a significant watershed year that marked the displacement of parliamentary democracy with executive presidency, created the so called open economy, and expanded irrigation and agriculture that led to self-sufficiency in rice production but subject to the vagaries of weather.
Year 1977 also saw the start of the riotous deterioration of ethno-communal relations and their rapid descent into open warfare. In foreign policy, the long (1977-1994) UNP government began with a sharp turn to the west, rebuffing India and abandoning non-alignment, but ended with the controversial Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and the 13th Amendment that came appended to it.
The 1977 watermarks are significant in themselves, but they are doubly significant now because the NPP government has set itself up to be measured by what it may or may not do with the principal legacies of 1977. For instance, the government is committed to restoring parliamentary democracy and reforming the executive presidency. These changes are now expected to be implemented within three years, but there is no indication of how the political relationship between communities will be addressed in a new constitution even though the government should be commended for its sociopolitical approach in envisaging a ‘post-racial’ Sri Lanka. For now, let us give the government kudos for its intentions and time for their implementation.
The government will ultimately succeed or fail by how and what it does about the economy. So far, it has been steady in its start and going by the old wisdom the government must be getting it right inasmuch as it is being criticized by those who fancy themselves to be to the Left of the government and others who know that they are to its Right.
The President has set a target of achieving USD 36 billion from export earnings by 2030. While there is no way out of settling our foreign debt without export expansion, the government should be mindful that the USD 36 billion target needs to be supported by a detailed and feasible plan based on an identified export product mix and importing countries. Otherwise, it will turn out to be another tall talk like what Ranil Wickremesinghe did – promising one million jobs but doing nothing to create even one thousand identifiable jobs.
Within the economy, the rice situation has already become the pinch point. If it is not rice, it is coconuts, and even if they are imported they cannot be distributed immediately, because someone is not making customs official happy enough to do the work that they are paid for. The government seems duly concerned about these problems, but it is still trying to find a way out of the cycles of surpluses and shortages, let alone resolving them.
Notably, the government and especially President AKD are now realizing the huge data gap in the supply and distribution of rice, that some of us have been harping on recently. That is a good start, but there is not too much time for the government to assemble data and make decisions. The PMB, as some of us have argued could and should be used as a regulatory and data mining agency guiding the market rather than as a direct market actor competing with private rice millers. The PMB cannot be a regulator and competitor at the same time.
In foreign policy, the government would do well to use to its advantage the chaos that the new Trump administration is unleashing on the world, by staying below the radar and dealing with reliable partner countries to steer Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange economy to stability and reasonable success. The President has proved himself to be ambidextrous between India and China, and the challenge for the government is to leverage the competing geopolitical interests of the two Asian giants to advance Sri Lanka’s economic interests without being submerged by them.
One obvious challenge facing President AKD is about making clear that the NPP is a lot more than its executive president. People are yet to see the full cabinet in full flow. President AKD is easily one of the better, if not the best, executive presidents the country has had as measured by the attributes of comportment, collegiality, and being consultative. But even he needs to possess and project a team of equals who are similarly capable. One can only wish that the restoration of cabinet government will be achieved and matched by other positive advancements as the government completes one year in office before the 78th independence anniversary.
Features
JRJ on Gandhi’s methods of winning freedom for India

(Excerpted from Men and Memories by JR Jayewardene)
(Continued from last week)
It was at this time that the British also committed a number of mistakes. The War was over, but the government decided that India should be governed by the same rigorous laws that prevailed during the War. In 1919, they passed an act called the Rowlatt Act and imposed all the Emergency Regulations that they had used during the War. Gandhi resisted this. He said we must start a campaign against this.
We will first burn all the foreign cloth, we will boycott all foreign goods. We have to find some issues. For instance, we will wear clothes which are only woven in India. So he started a tremendous movement throughout India, throughout the 700,000 villages, to boycott all foreign goods and use local things instead. It was so effective that it created a tremendous stir all over India.
During this period, at a place called Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar, a British official called Dyer had prohibited meetings being held. People gathered at a small place surrounded all round by buildings with only one door to enter, and had a meeting. Dyer ordered his soldiers to surround the crowd and fire at all the people. Hundreds were killed and hundreds were injured. This happened on April 17, 1919. He (Dyer) was later summoned before a Commission in London, called the Hunter Commission. There he said, “My intention was not to arrest the people but to kill them.” The British Government gave him a large sum of money and commended him. This incident gave Gandhi enough reason to decide to start a civil disobedience ‘Satyagraha’ campaign. The Amritsar incident gave a tremendous momentum to his ‘Satyagraha’ movement.
During that campaign, at a place called Chauri Chaura, in February 1921, hundreds had gathered and were demonstrating peacefully. Some people behind the rally were attacked by the police. They all turned back and attacked the police, set fire to a police station and killed some policemen. The non-violent campaign turned into violence. When Gandhi heard this, he called off his movement. He was asked by his colleagues like Jawaharlal Nehru why he did it when they were on the verge of success.
He said, “I don’t want to achieve freedom by violence. Our people are still not ready for a-non-violent movement and I am calling off my movement.” It shows how sincere he was.
Soon after that he was charged before a Judge in 1922. The Judge himself was a man of repute and he said, “I am proud to see a prisoner of your stature, would you tell me whether you are guilty or not guilty?” He said, “Your Honour, I am guilty and I am not asking for any mercy. You can impose the highest penalty on me.” The Judge himself did not know what to do and said, “Since you are pleading guilty, I sentence you to prison.” That was the type of man Gandhi was.
Now we come to the 1928 period, when the British thought something must be done about India. The talks between Indian leaders and the Governors and Viceroys were not sufficient. The British Government sent Sir John Simon in February 1928. They did not say that the Simon Commission was to discuss freedom, for no such thing had been even mentioned in the terms of reference of the Commission. Gandhi decided to boycott the Simon Commission all over India. The Simon Commission had to go back empty-handed.
The Prince of Wales came on a tour to India. He was met with black flags, `satyagraha’ campaigns and protest rallies. It became quite clear that India was preparing for a long struggle for freedom, violent or non-violent. One of the leaders in this freedom movement, Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Bombay, who was senior to Gandhi, was the first man to say “Swaraj is my birth-right and I will have it.” He was banished to the Andaman Islands for life. One of the young leaders was Jawaharlal Nehru. There were the Patel brothers, Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad, Motilal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, and so many others who were now working with Gandhi. They all said, let us now work for complete Independence and separation from the British Empire.
In January 1930, for the first time, Jawaharlal Nehru raised the Indian flag and said, “We are for Complete Independence, Poorna Swaraj.” That was January 26, 1930, at the Lahore Congress. That day is still remembered as the Independence Day of India (now celebrated as the Republic Day).
The British were then led by a Labour Leader, Ramsay Macdonald, as Prime Minister. He thought being Labour, he should do something and summoned a Round Table Conference in London in 1931. Gandhi was sent as the sole representative. He was invited to Buckingham Palace and was asked what he would wear.
This story was related to me by a Sri Lankan, Bernard Aluvihare, who was there and one of the young Sri Lankans who joined the Indian movement. Gandhi had looked at himself and said, “I can wash these clothes and wear them,” meaning his dhoti. When at the Palace, he was told, “Mr. Gandhi, you don’t seem to have many clothes on your body,” he had replied, “His Majesty, is wearing enough clothes for both of us.” Another official had said, “Mr. Gandhi, you are not wearing enough clothes.” Gandhi had replied, “You British wear Plus-Fours while playing golf. I am wearing Minus-Fours.” He was a man with a sense of humour. He knew what to say and when to say it.
Nothing happened at the Round Table Conference and Gandhi came back to India. In 1930, he planned a 200 mile walk from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi Beach, to make salt which was a government monopoly. Nobody was allowed to pick or make salt. Gandhi thought this was a most appropriate law to break, as millions were using salt. The whole of India rose as a man. Gandhi’s salt march made it very clear that India was ready for a complete revolution and that they would consider nothing less than freedom. Gandhi’s ‘salt march’ proved that all the political parties and masses were behind him in the struggle for complete freedom.
We, in Ceylon, were much affected by this movement in the 1930s. When Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru came here, I know how our young people felt. I myself was a law student at the Law Faculty. We decided to unveil a photograph of Gandhi in the Law College in the year 1932. We got the famous painter, David Paynter, to do the portrait for us. We law students collected money and the President of the Law Society, a distinguished lawyer, gave us a big sum of money, but when he found that Gandhi was not very popular with he British businessmen here, he withdrew his contribution. So we told him, “You go to hell”, collected the money, and unveiled the portrait which is still hanging in the Law College premises.
Sri Lanka was very much affected by this movement, especially the youth of our period, myself, Dudley Senanayake, the Gunawardena brothers, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the ce Zoysas and many others. The older people like D.S. Senanayake looked a bit differently at Gandhi and the events of the period, but that did not matter to us and we carried on.
Gandhi had not yet come to the stage where he said, “I am bringing a movement for the freedom of India.” He took the Bihar indigo incident; the Rowlett Act and the laws of that time; the salt march, to break the salt law of the British; to begin his campaign. He thought he must make the final decision to tell the British to “Quit India”. He took that step at the Indian National Congress Committee Meeting in 1942.
In 1942, 1 had the privilege of attending that meeting with the help of Jawaharlal Nehru. We were seated behind Gandhi in a huge hall on the sea beach at Bombay. There were more than 100,000 people listening to him. He came in and made a long speech. He said, ‘”This is a movement we have started with one objective and we will not stop till that objective is realized that is “Quit India.” He ended up his speech by saying: “Karenge Ya Marenge”, that is, “Do or Die”. The leaders were arrested and locked up in prison the next day.
The British found that the freedom movement was gathering strength all over India, in all the villages despite their attempts to stop it. They said, “India is already free, we cannot keep her down anymore.” They finally thought that they would give freedom and sent Sir Stafford Cripps to discuss with the Indian people how India should be given freedom. At that time, they also decided that the division of India should be considered. I do not know whether Gandhi completely approved of that, but he would never have resisted a movement for the Muslims to safeguard their own interests.
I think that is why he was murdered in 1948. He was sympathetic to the Muslims; he was sympathetic to the Hindus; he was sympathetic to all lovers of freedom. It did not matter to him whether a person was a Hindu, Buddhist or a Muslim, what mattered was the principles of Freedom, Truth, Righteousness and all these principles are essentials of all religions. That was Mahatma Gandhi.
He was a politician who never deviated from these principles. As a religious man he followed the principles which were enunciated by the Hindu avatars, by the Buddha, by Christ and Mohammed.
This combination made him in the words of Rabindranath Tagore the “Maha Atma” the `Great-Soul’.
When I was invited to deliver the Inaugural Lecture of the Commonwealth Series, there seemed no better place to do so on “Ahimsa” other than in London, the Chief City of the Greatest Empire the World had seen, and now of the Commonwealth of Nations which had taken its place. What better forum could there be for me to express my views than this, and to an audience which was attentive, democratic and intelligent; and possessing other qualities the people of the United Kingdom, through three and a half centuries of Parliamentary Democracy, had inherited and developed.
(To be continued)
Features
The Aftermath of the Parliamentary Elections of 1970

Lessons from my Career; synthesising management theory with practice – Part 2
by Sunil G Wijesinha
The Kamkaru Anduwa
I was in the last year of my training and stationed at the State Engineering Pre-cast Yard at Narahenpita. I was on a unique project experimenting with a concrete boat modelled on a popular FAO wooden fishing boat design. The election fever was at its peak. The workers had high hopes for a “Workers Government” (Kamkaru Anduwa). They were expecting a “dictatorship of the proletariat, ” hoping to end all their woes. They were promised the establishment of “Janatha Committees”, which would oversee the work of the officers and engineers. The spirits were high because the UNP government was no longer popular, and the United Front coalition led by the SLFP was tipped to win in a landslide.
I was very careful and avoided any semblance of affiliation or partiality to any ideology. One of my colleagues was a diehard Samasamajist who would forward compelling arguments as to why socialism and a state-run economy would be the best for the country.
The Aftermath
Election Day was, as usual, a holiday. By the early hours of the next morning, it was clear that the United Front of Mrs Bandaranaike, along with the Trotskyites (Samasamajists) and the Communist Party had won convincingly. When I arrived at my worksite that morning, what I witnessed was shocking. The Works Manager was pulled out of his office by the workers and kicked out of the site. It was celebrations and rejoicing and hooting and jeering. No one was working. No one was in charge. It was anarchy.
My boss, who was stationed at the Head Office, decided to make a site visit. He obviously chose the wrong day. As he arrived, he was greeted by the workshop union leader with lit crackers thrown at his body. There was nothing I could do against a massive hostile crowd. Being a burly man, he charged at them, and they all retreated but quickly returned with even more crackers. Finally, my boss decided to exit and beat a hasty retreat. The workers were jeering and hooting until he was out of sight. He had done no wrong, but unfortunately, he was a part of the “bourgeois” who the workers despised.
One of the foremen who often participated in our arguments during tea and lunch breaks remarked, “Mr Wijesinha, we have still not figured out which party you supported.” I was thankful for my neutrality. If not, I would have been one of those who were driven out with crackers.
A little while later that day, a gang of red-shirted supporters arrived, led by a well-known Samasamajist. He addressed the cheering workers about the wonders that would soon unfold and demanded that all stop work and come to a celebratory meeting near the Regal cinema.
We, too, left the site in the early afternoon because we had to attend a scheduled monthly lecture by a senior engineer at the Head Office. The subject was “Labour Management”. After arriving at the Head Office, we learned of the horrors that morning. The General Manager had been forced to kneel and worship a photograph of Mrs Bandaranaike. We noticed many professionals in groups discussing the future for them while many at lower levels were celebrating. Some of the engineers left the country a couple of months later. We got the news that there was no celebratory meeting near the Regal cinema, but it was a ruse to collect people to attack Lake House, which was believed to have supported the defeated UNP.
When our lecturer didn’t turn up for the lecture, I went to his office to remind him that we were waiting for him and that it was well past time. He responded that having observed the new environment unfolding, he could no longer lecture on “Labour Management.” We were happy to go home early that day.
The next morning, the situation at the site was very different. The workers were discussing and boasting about how many Lake House typewriters they smashed, how many bundles of newspapers they set on fire, and so on. It took a couple of days to restore some order at the site.
In a few months, the Euphoria was over. The workers who would telephone their political masters and address them as Comrade (Sahodaraya) began to drop this salutation and addressed them as Sir, much to the amusement of the officers. The workers realised very soon that a Kamkaru Anduwa was, in reality, not what they imagined and that it was not going to be. However, perhaps in frustration or anger, the Golf Links Housing site experienced a riot. The workers set upon the management for no apparent reason. It took months for peace to return to the pre-election level.
Learning Lessons
Labour management was never the same again, and this was a major turning point. Gone were the days when officers could shout at, could throw their shoes at, punish, and penalise workers at their whims and fancies. While the carnival was over for the workers, the management also learned many lessons.
I did some reflection in the following months, having learnt in theory how labour management had evolved historically. First, it was the KITA style (meaning “kick in the arse”) type management, then came the Frederick Taylor movement, where engineers designed the best way and only the “hands” of the workers were used. Thereafter came the Human Relations School of Management with a more humanistic approach to management. In other words, they proposed treating the worker not merely as a pair of hands but as a human being with a “heart” and feelings. Finally, the Japanese proposed that the in addition to hands and a heart the worker has a significant unused potential: the brain.
At one of the lectures by a senior engineer, we were guided on a more humanistic approach to management. His advice was never call a worker by his number (which we would often do), help him in difficult times, never financially penalise a worker (badata gahanna epa), give small inexpensive gifts to their children. I followed this good advice. It was bolstered and became more systematic after learning the Japanese concepts with similar philosophies in later years. I have been successful in managing labour and unions. The paradigm shift in thinking has been beneficial to the country, although I have often been accused of being a Marxist or a person who spoils the workers. Nevertheless, I will vouch for my approach to labour management using 1970 as a turning point where we all learnt lessons.
(Consultant on Productivity and Japanese Management Techniques
Retired Chairman/Director of several Listed and Unlisted companies.
Awardee of the APO Regional Award for promoting Productivity in the Asia and Pacific Region
Recipient of the “Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays” from the Government of Japan.
He can be contacted through email at: bizex.seminarsandconsulting@gmail.com)
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