A.T. Ariyaratne: Death of a colossus

The death last week of Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who founded and led the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka after a long life of 92 years, has robbed the country of a colossus of his generation. His own name, as well as that of the organization he created is very well known to everybody in all homes across the length and breadth of the country. A small made, soft spoken personality with a shock of white hair and an ever present smile, he had a face that could best be described by the Sinhala word seedevi with all its many connotations. It reflected his inner calm, non-violent disposition and Gandhian values. The origin of the name Sarvodaya can be traced to Sanskrit roots – sarva (all) and udaya (uplift). Mahatma Gandhi, whose footsteps Ariyaratne sought to follow, saw it as “uplift for all.”

Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne was a teacher at Nalanda College, Colombo, when he founded Sarvodaya in 1958. He had taken a group of 40 schoolboys and 12 teachers from Nalanda to Kathaluwa, a Rodiya village of outcasts and beggars to help uplift conditions of people living there. From that small acorn, a mighty oak grew. By 1972, the growing demands of the fledgling organization compelled his retirement from the teaching profession and devote himself full time to the Sarvodaya Shramadana, a self-governance movement which among other things provides comprehensive development and conflict resolution programs to villages.The Internet says that as of 2006, “Sarvodaya staff people were active in 15,000 of 38,000 villages in Sri Lanka.” The organization estimated 11 million individual beneficiaries and financial reserves ran at Rs. 1.6 billion in that year.

Although well funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like the Ceylon School for the Deaf and Blind and the Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) Red Cross have been around longer than Sarvodaya, the latter arguably became one of the best funded, if not the best funded NGO in the country. Ariyaratne’s commitment and simplicity impressed the donor community which staunchly supported his movement that grew exponentially from its grassroot begining. Obviously, the organization necessarily had to present professionally produced project proposals to donors and satisfy them that their money was well spent.

During the course of time, the needed skills and capacity to run an organization as big as Sarvodaya had become was acquired. The consciousness that donor support will not continue to flow forever necessitated the setting up income generating ventures, recruiting needed personnel and adequately remunerating them within a framework of relatively modestly paid grassroots workers. Balancing an equation such as this would have been no easy task but the organization appears to have succeeded in achieving its objective.

Sarvodaya’s presence in villages countrywide and the work it was doing made it a formidable political force. Rightly or wrongly it was rumoured at one time that Ariyaratne planned to run for the presidency. President Premadasa in 1990 set up a seven-member Commission of Inquiry (COI) including two retired Supreme Court judges (one of them headed the commission) and five other eminent persons to investigate NGOs and a variety of connected matters. This COI was assisted by counsel from the Attorney General’s Department and included a police investigation unit. It was widely perceived that Sarvodaya was specially targeted and the organization was compelled to pour resources and energy to defend itself. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) commented adversely on the methods adopted at the COI. Nothing eventually came out of the investigation.

Ariyaratne was awarded the country’s highest national award of Sri Lanka Abhimana by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2007. This award can be held by only five living persons at any time. Since he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 1969, awards and accolades have been poured on him from all corners of the globe. He was also nominated for a Nobel Prize. The esteem in which he is held was demonstrated by the state funeral accorded to him at Independence Square.

Letters to the Editor

We publish today two letters to the editor casting a light on the state of our nation. One of them written by an occasional contributor to our columns, pays a rare tribute to a public official. The writer lost a son at far away Buttala in what he has described as “unknown circumstances.” This resulted in a “somewhat complicated procedure entailing an exhumation, cremation and deposition of ashes.” Since the postmortem could not definitely establish the cause of death except for some extraneous substance found in his stomach, the coroner ordered that he be buried for at least three years and if necessary cremated thereafter.

The burial was in the Anglican section of Kanatte. The family being Buddhist wished a cremation at the end of the three years and the deposition of the ashes in the family vault in the Buddhist section. The letter writer has highly commended the Cemetery Manager for the assistance rendered. In a country where the norm is dissatisfaction about shoddy services from public and local government employees, it is heartening that there are exceptions to the ‘can’t care less’ attitude of many public servants and there are people who are willing to go public with commendations for exceptional services received.

The second letter was from a young Lankan who with her Dutch partner was on what she has called a safari to Yala. Their vehicle had hit a stray dog on the road and the driver wanted to proceed on their way as this was not an unusual occurrence. His passengers would have none of it and made him turn back to the dog lying with a broken pelvis on the roadside. They sought and obtained veterinary assistance and plan to take the animal back with them to the Netherlands where they have two other rescued dogs. The compassion demonstrated to an injured animal was truly heartwarming.