President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s national reconciliation initiative seems to be spectacularly backfiring on all cylinders. This is terribly unfortunate, not so much for Mr. Wickremesinghe’s presidential future, but for what it might entail for the immediate future of inter-community relationships. On Wednesday, before the President’s “Throne Speech”, a group of Buddhist Monks staged a protest near parliament and even set fire to a copy of the 13th Amendment in front of the media and police barricades. According to TNA MP M.A. Sumanthiran, the English version of the President’s address to parliament was titled, Throne Speech, while the ‘more official Sinhala and Tamil versions had it as Policy Statement. What’s in a name or, for that matter, what’s in an official language? That which is written in one can always be translated into another, and there can be two or more of them.
Just as his reconciliation initiative is backfiring, the President is also backpedaling the scope of his initiative. Already in his Independence Day speech and statement, the President had avoided mentioning 13A, and he continued to censor the term in his ‘Throne Speech’ on February 8. The latest Wickremesinghe speech was limited to a touch of nostalgia – that the President and the TNA leader R. Sampanthan entered parliament together as first time MPs in 1977. That now looks ages ago, and their ages do tell: the President is now 74 and the TNA leader is 90, both past the old biblical prime of threescore and ten. Beyond nostalgia, the President stuck to specifics – specific issues affecting the Tamils in the north and east.
But the TNA was in no nostalgic mood, and its leading spokesman Sumanthiran accused the President of somersaulting. A term that was last used in a Sri Lankan legislature with some frequency in the 1950s by the maverick Tamil MP C. Suntharalingam to taunt his Oxford contemporary, then Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike. President Ranil Wickremesinghe often speaks of the circumstances that Sri Lanka was in at the time of independence. He hardly mentions the state of the country a decade after independence. 1958 was different from 1948, and 2023 is different from both. What is unique to 2023 is that the national economy has never been so broken as it is today. And there is no happy ending in sight. As for the country’s other problem, and the President’s laudable but mistimed preoccupation, namely, national reconciliation, there could be little nostalgia now about mid-1950s, only forebodings.
The B-C Pact and the Paddy Lands Act
That was when Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike launched his reconciliation initiative, bold and statesmanlike, and reached a historic agreement with the leader of the Tamil Federal Party, SJV Chelvanayakam, who also happened to be the Prime Minister’s classmate St. Thomas’s College. That agreement, though abrogated within a year of its signing, has stood the test time as the celebrated B-C Pact and the lodestar for future reconciliation efforts and agreements.
1957: B-C Pact Signed
Its relevance for today’s circumstances is in the comparability, or otherwise, of the difficulties and roadblocks that President Wickremesinghe is facing today to those faced by Prime Minister Bandaranaike 65 years ago. At that time, there were two government initiatives, both unexceptionably positive but politically controversial. One was the PM’s B-C Pact initiative, and the other was the Minister of Agriculture and Food Philip Gunawardena’s Paddy Lands Act. Inadvertently, and unfortunately as it turned out, the two initiatives coincided in their timing and helped in the mutual reinforcement of the political forces opposing the two initiatives.
James Manor recounts those developments in some detail in his biography of SWRD: The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon. As it happened, the B-C Pact was accredited on 26 July 1957 and within a year, in May 1958, it was abrogated amidst the first outbreak of communal violence targeting Tamils. The Paddy Lands Act was enacted in 1958, but its sole architect, Philip Gunawardena, left the cabinet and the government the very next year, in May 1959. Four months later, on 26 September, Prime Minister Bandaranaike was assassinated. The island’s sociopolitical innocence was over.
The alignment of political forces for and against the two initiatives was remarkable. Although temperamentally poles apart, Bandaranaike and Gunawardena were each other’s best ally in their coalition government and cabinet. The majority of the cabinet ministers were dead set against Philip Gunawardena and his Paddy Lands Act (PLA). They even staged a cabinet strike, refusing to attend cabinet meetings with Philip Gunawardena. But they could not prevent the passage of the PLA because of its popularity among the Sinhalese.
The B-C Pact, on the other hand, was controversial and opposition to it was orchestrated by JR Jayewardene and the UNP in the south, and GG Ponnambalam and the Tamil Congress in the north. Compounding this was the cabinet split over the PLA, which weakened the Prime Minister’s hand and forced him to give in to the opposition against the B-C Pact. The final act of forcing was the storming of the front lawn of the Prime Minister’s Rosemead Place residence by 100 Buddhist monks.
There was another aspect to political alignments over the PLA and the B-C Pact. Besides the Prime Minister, Philip Gunawardena was the only prominent Minister to support both initiatives. The Left Opposition (the LSSP and the CP) were also in support of both the PLA and the B-C Pact. On the other hand, the Federal Party leader who signed the B-C Pact, was steadfastly opposed to the Paddy Lands Act. Chelvanayakam famously declared in parliament: “I see seeds of communism in this.”
In opposing the PLA, Mr. Chelvanayakam found common ground with GG Ponnambalam, who was stirring the pot against the B-C Pact and ridiculing – ‘Vedhakaran’ (Christian) Chelvanayakam for selling out the Tamils for a pair of guavas and a cup of tea, at Bandaranaike’s Horagolla Walauwa, on a ritually inauspicious moonless day in July. Mr. Ponnambalam was on a long leave of absence from parliament during the enactment of the PLA, but weighed in from outside with an op-ed page article in the Daily News rhetorically bemoaning the destruction of Sri Lanka’s robust peasantry as result of the new legislation. The ideological lines were clearly drawn.
Even though he abrogated the B-C Pact in April 1958, within four months, in August 1958, Prime Minister Bandaranaike introduced and secured the passage of the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act, which provided for the use of Tamil for administrative purposes and as a medium of instruction in schools and university. The very same provisions were part of the original Official Language Bill that Mr. Bandaranaike wanted to introduce in 1956, but was forced to jettison it and replace it with the infamous one-sentence Sinhala Only Bill. Let me fast forward to today.
Ranil’s Trap or Somersault?
Whatever may have been the President’s intentions and the method of execution in fast tracking national reconciliation, nothing seems to have worked. The initiative seems to have stirred sleeping dogs into loud barking and the questioning of his motives by practically everyone in parliament. While Sumanthiran has chided him of somersaulting, others from Maithripala Sirisena to Anura Kumara Dissanayake are now questioning the President’s motive behind his sudden focus on 13A. The SJB is on silent mode, except for indicating support for devolution without mentioning 13A.
Sirisena has compared Wickremesinghe’s initiative to carrying a torch that is burning at both ends. He has suggested that every President from JRJ to himself has not tried to fully implement 13A, because it is not easy task when a “majority of Sinhalese Buddhists are against it.” The Mahanayaka Theros said the same thing, but they attributed inaction by former Presidents to their alleged realization that 13A was bad for the country and worse for the Sinhalese. Sirisena is also questioning the President’s timing on 13A given the unprecedentedly “serious issues” the country is facing now.
To JVP/NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the current hullabaloo is all the result of President Wickremesinghe setting a trap for the country to “create a disturbance in society” as a diversion from the real problems the people are facing. He avoided answering media questions about the protesting monks, nor did he provide a detailed response regarding the JVP’s position on 13A. It is time Mr. Dissanayake gave a serious speech on the JVP’s position vis-à-vis the non-Sinhala members of the Sri Lankan society, which should also address devolution and the 13th Amendment.
So far this year, Dissanayake has given two significant and substantial political speeches. Early in the new year, he gave a rousing homecoming speech in Tambuttegama, a touching talk by a local boy coming home as a national leader. The English media ignored it. More recently in Colombo, he targeted the business community to win bourgeois credibility for a non-elitist party. The Colombo media lapped it up. AKD owes Sri Lankan politics a third speech – this one on the national question. His first speech addressing the minorities. Without it, his political project will not be a complete project, and Sri Lankan politics at this juncture will also be poorer without it.
That said, AKD and the JVP might be on to something when they insist that President Wickremesinghe is not going to “fully implement the 13th amendment to the constitution as repeatedly assured by him.” AKD goes further, “He won’t bring it. He plays this game every time. He wants to set fire to this country and protect his power.” Mr. Dissanayake might be speaking from his yahapalana experience with Ranil Wickremesinghe when he says that “he (RW) plays this game every time.” But AKD is stretching it when he claims that “he (RW) wants to set fire to this country and protect his power.”
On the other hand, if the country were to end up in flames once again as a result of the simmering controversies over 13A, then the President’s intentions would be irrelevant. The JVP leader is also abdicating his own responsibility when he appeals to “the people of this country not to get caught in this trap.” Anura Kumara Dissanayake owes it to the people to explain his position on devolution and on 13A even if he does not agree with the President’s timing and approach to implementing 13A. As for the President himself, he faces an uphill task in either salvaging his badly damaged initiative, or preventing the current controversy escalating into something worse.
