Premadasa’s love of the arts drew him to resuscitate the old cultural theatre of Sri Lanka. The centre was the Tower Hall at Maradana. He rescued, too, the old and now feeble artistes, who had sung and danced their way into the hearts of the people since the 1920s. He gave many of them, like Lakshmi Bhai, Romulus Master and Mohideen Baig, a new lease of life. He brought them back on to center stage and into the limelight, after many years spent in the shadows. He enabled the ‘stars’ to come out again after many years, stiff but erect, to centre stage where they belted out their patriotic songs. Several of them still sang full of verve and true to tone and melody.

Premadasa clearly understood that music and dance appealed to people. He gave the Tower Hall ‘stars’ an important place in the Gam Udawa ceremonies.

Premadasa played a leading role in the 1977 election which J R Jayewardene won with a record five-sixth majority. He canvassed throughout the country, spending many days and night on the campaign trail. His deadly invective against the misdeeds of the United Front (Sirimavo’s Administration) drew vast crowds. Seven years in the opposition had been an exacting crucible. He had always been deeply aware of the inner dynamics of mass audiences. With his earthly anecdotes and devastating wit, he derided his opponents and rallied enthusiastic crowds around the UNP.

J R Jayewardene chose Premadasa for the post of prime minister. The choice provided J R with the ‘balance’ which the UNP needed to change the conventional view of the party as one representing the elites, the mercantile interests and the Western-educated. With his popular acceptance as a ‘man of the masses’ with his national dress and his simple lifestyle, his totally indigenous background, and his rapport with the Sangha, the Sinhala literati and the man in the street, Premadasa was the perfect counterpoise to J R.

Although now the post of prime minister had become only nominal and constitutionally powerless, this did not deter Premadasa from assuming all of the roles and status that the post had earlier possessed. A lesser man would have been inhibited with a post shorn of the customary powers. But to Premadasa, it was a further challenge to be addressed. He followed a simple strategy. It was to utilize all the space he perceived he had, until he touched the boundaries of someone else’s territory. It was a bold and imaginative approach to carving out a role and function for a new position. After all, there were no accepted norms for what a prime minister did in an executive presidential set-up.

There were two important factors that helped him in establishing his new role. The first was clearly the implicit trust that J R Jayewardene had in him. J R provided him with a great deal of flexibility of movement. This faith and trust was fully reciprocated by Premadasa. He was the perfect second-in-command; the deputy who would take infinite pains to give the head of state all the respect and regard that that position deserved. He was exemplary in doing this freely and enthusiastically.

J R fully appreciated this, and the bond between the two men was always close. Only towards the end of J R’s term as president, after the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, while Premadasa was out of the country, did the relationship show signs of strain.

The second factor that assisted Premadasa to expand his role of prime minister was that the position of prime minister still had attached to it many of the perquisites of office of the former holder. This included the prime minister’s official residence, the graceful Temple Trees in Kollupitiya, which the family now moved into, and the ‘The Lodge’ in Nuwara Eliya. Premadasa also established an imposing new prime ministerial office at ‘Sirimathipaya’, No 58 on Sir Ernest de Silva Mawatha (Road), one of the stately homes of Colombo 7, which had been acquired by the previous government under the Ceiling on Houses Law and given to the department of education. With Eardley Goonewardene, his then secretary, Premadasa spent much time and effort in transforming this building into an impressive and efficient secretariat. He had always believed that the work environment must be conducive for successful results.

For Premadasa, cost was not to be a constraint in this area. His offices were not only to be functionally efficient. He had a keen eye for harmony and balance. And over time, these offices like the presidential secretariat today, acquired a special grace and lustre. If at all he could be faulted in this area it was for over elaboration and a ceaseless drive for further ‘improvement’ which sometimes resulted in grotesque decoration, as in his Flower Road office.

He would often act quite contrarily to the views of the new breed of architects he consulted, who, influenced by their mentor Geoffrey Bawa, would stress authenticity and simplicity. For Temple Trees and for Sirimathipaya, Premadasa personally chose the furniture, so that it blended with the character of the buildings. He looked for an indigenous, and if possible, antique style. He took great pains to recover from the ‘estate’ bungalows in the up-country several beautiful pieces in ebony and tamarind, which had once graced the drawing rooms of the white ‘periya dorais’. (big bosses)

This furniture had moved over time to the backs of the estate bungalows. Premadasa had these often broken pieces reconditioned, and placed in the official residences. Unfortunately many of these pieces went missing with the movement of the original occupant and appeared to be replaced by less expensive ‘fake antiques’ as in the present state Guest House Visumpaya, the former ‘Acland House’ of the Colombo Commercial Company.

Premadasa was attracted by the people’s need for housing. He had experienced at close hand the squalor of the urban slums. But the situation in the village was no different and a far cry from the conventional picture of the idyllic village in the mind of the urban rich. The need was acute. Literally, millions of people were living in sub-standard housing.

Premadasa began by building a powerful organization for conceptualizing, articulating and implementing a massive house-building program. Initially, it was fully supported by the state but with lessons learnt along the way, he introduced several innovations which brought in greater people’s participation, some private sector involvement and less state expenditure.

He realized that to capture the nation’s imagination, he had to dramatize what was hitherto a mundane and peripheral subject. He had to transform the job of constructing houses of brick and stone, into something primary and compelling. So Premadasa adopted the word ‘shelter’ and invested it with an almost spiritual quality. The home, the family, the awakened village (Gam Udawa), were all to be integral parts of the new, better-housed society he saw being created.

He got together a team of first-class planners and administrators – Dustan Jayawardena, R Paskaralingam, Susil Sirivardana, and W D Ailapperuma – and motivated the team to deliver the goods. His targets were always high, almost unachievable to begin with – 100,000 houses in the first five years, and a million houses in the second five-year term. He broke it down into so much per year and so many per electorate and set about it with a vengeance involving the local politicians in a socially productive adventure.

Premadasa never took ‘no’ for an answer. His personal involvement in the effort was immense. He looked at every aspect of the process. From articulating his vision, to research in low-cost techniques, supplies management – he created the Building Materials Corporation and brought in private sector dynamism by recruiting Ajantha Wijesena – to fund-raising for the Sevana (Shelter) Fund, and to monitoring very regularly progress on the ambitious targets he set, at the operations room in the department of housing.

He travelled incessantly by car across the length and breadth of the country. Hundreds of Udagam (reawakened villages) were born with lyrical new names. Arunodagama (the first light of dawn); Yovungama (village for youth); Ekamuthugama (village of unity) and so on. He brought the entire population of the area together for the formal opening ceremony and the personal, very often, handing-over of houses and keys. His Gam Udawa ‘openings’ became regular, monthly affair. The ceremonies were elaborate. The members of parliament of the district, the Sangha in large numbers, and the Tower Hall artistes from Colombo, all joined in the celebrations.

Premadasa knew that ceremonies were an important aspect of village life. The Gam Udawa function provided entertainment and spice in the normally uneventful village scene. It also provided a splendid opportunity of communicating government policies and plans to the people. He made use of these functions for reflecting on a wide variety of national issues. As prime minister, and later, as president, he made use of these many opportunities of public speaking to make important policy announcements.

The most dramatic of these was perhaps his call to the former and late prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, to recall the IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force) from Sri Lanka, made at a temple ceremony in Battaramulla, outside Colombo, in June 1989.

The Udagama (Reawakened Village) was a fully functional, integrated community, complete with houses, a school, pipe-borne water, home gardens, a post office, health facilities, and a temple, kovil or church.

Each year in June, for one week beginning with his birthday which fell on the 24th Premadasa organized a national Gam Udawa, which brought in literally a million people for a celebration staged in some distant part of the country. It had the effect of bringing the world to the doorstep of the village, and the rural people responded by coming in large numbers. Premadasa gave these annual Gam Udawa’s an attention which was extraordinary.

Planning for the next year would start 12 months ahead. Many ministries and departments would be co-opted mostly by more than gentle persuasion. I was Chairman and CEO of Air Lanka Ltd after I came back from London in 1989, and he was then the president of Sri Lanka but his interest in the Gam Udawa that year was so great that he wanted me to do an Air Lanka stall in Mahiyangana where the Gam Udawa was being held.

It meant a lot of work. Building a model of a life-size Lockheed Tristar aircraft and cutting it in half so that passengers could mount the stairway and be strapped to their seats by a pretty Air Lanka stewardess. It was all make believe but Premadasa surmised that it would give the villager an idea of what it was like once you were up in the air. Up to then all that they had seen was a speck in the sky moving at great speed towards the east in the morning and back in the evening.

All government agencies with work to do performed at peak efficiency during the period. So, roads would be repaired, bridges and culverts strengthened, government buildings painted, and everything for miles around, spruced up. It was as if the beam of a searchlight had been focused for a while on some dark corner. The private sector would also be brought in and persuaded to open up new industrial units like the garment factories in the hinterland.

By 1988, since Premadasa continued as prime minister after the Referendum of 1982 which substituted for the general elections, he had conducted 10 such great national Gam Udawas. The national show was inaugurated by the president and different ministerial colleagues were chief guests on other days. The opening ceremony itself was akin to a religious experience with a collective recital of the Gam Udawa oath. Premadasa himself usually spent the entire week in the village. His purpose in holding this annual festival, was as he put it, to empower the poor and the weak.

He was undeterred by the criticisms of those who said that the expenditure was wasteful. In his view the work that was done, repairing roads, bridges, and so on, was anyway the duty of departments and ministries. Moreover, what was built for the Gam Udawa remained as permanent assets to be used by the local community. Overall, it was an occasion for national togetherness, where the great rubbed shoulders with the masses which generated an esprit de corps between different arms of the government
In 1980, with the housing program in full steam and with his concept of shelter fully fleshed out, Premadasa took his idea of ‘Homes for the Homeless of the World’ to the international stage.

It was a propitious beginning for an idea that became a world issue with the acceptance by the United Nations of an International Year of Shelter (IYS) in 1987. It began with Premadasa’s address that year to the 35th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. It was his first appearance on the foremost international stage, and he wanted it to be something which would remembered and leave a lasting mark.

As usual, his preparation for the task was thorough and exacting. There was the content of the address to being with. It had to deal with both global and national issues; it had to reflect his own special concerns — the gap between the rich and the poor, globally and nationally — his holistic view of development (not only material goods, but more values as well), and his particular experience in housing. There should be also something distinctly Eastern and Sri Lankan — a Pali stanza, a blessing to the entire world.

I began work on the speech at least three months before the scheduled date. I opened a special file which I named `Anatomy of a Speech’ to record the tremendous amount of work which went into the 20-minutes event in New York late in September that year. There was also the question of the timing of the speaking slot. To be most effective and to achieve maximum coverage, it had to be delivered at mid-rooming. Not too early, after 10 am when the General Assembly began and the chamber was still filling up. Not too close to the lunch break, when members were moving out to the lounges, Ben Fonseka, who was our permanent representative at the time, managed to secure the best slot.

The speech was to be on Monday morning. We arrived in New York on Saturday and on the day before the speech, Premadasa went down to look over the arrangements in the Chamber. He even tested the rostrum for height. It was not quite right and a little too high for the short man he was. He thought about a little fabricated stool which would give him the required height but where in this first city of the world would you find a carpenter who would work on a Sunday.

The speech itself was a great success, strongly delivered, full of resonance and rich in substance. It ended as he had wished with a powerful and moving Pali benediction so familiar to Sri Lankans and Buddhists the world over.

Devo vassatu Kalena
Sasse sampatthhi he to cha
Pito bhavatu lo ko cha
Raja bhavatu Dhammiko

(May the rains fall in due season; may the good earth be bounteous; may all being in this world be blessed; and may the rulers be just.)

The distinguished Shirley Amerasinghe, veteran of many, usually boring General Assembly interventions, and at the time chairing the Law of the Sea Conference, came up to Premadasa in the Delegates Lounge where we gathered later and complimented him on the speech in his home-spun Sinhala, “Bohoma shoke kattawak ,Sir (A very fine speech, Sir).”

(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar, by Bradman Weerakoon)