Events leading to the schools takeover by the Sirimavo government

(Excerpted from Memoirs of a Cabinet Secretary by BP Peiris)

In many of her public speeches, the Prime Minister used to emphasize the fact that she was following the policies of her late husband. S.W.R.D., in his first Queen’s Speech, had said “My Government wishes to assure minorities, religious, racial and otherwise, that they need have no fear of injustice or discrimination in the carrying out of its policies and pogrammes”. And now, following those policies, Madam’s Government introduced the Objects and Places of Worship Bill.

This was a Bill to control the indiscriminate establishment of places of worship. It purported to restrict the establishment of places of worship in order to ensure the peaceful pursuit of their faith by the people of the country.

A place of worship could not be established unless there were at least 250 adherents of that particular faith within a radius of half a mile of the proposed location of such place of worship. A licence from the Minister was a prerequisite for such erection, and a power to the Minister to grant a licence implied, in law, a power to refuse such licence.

The proposed law would have prevented me from putting up a tent in my garden for the purposes of meditation and prayer but, as a Buddhist, I would have had no difficulty in obtaining the requisite number of signatures. Persons of other faiths might have experienced some difficulty. On reading the Bill before issuing it to the Ministers, it struck me that the Bill was void under our Constitution.

Section 29 gave Parliament the widest legislative powers in the fewest words “to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Island”, but went on to enact “No such law shall prohibit or restrict the free exercise of any religion”.

I had, as Secretary, no power to stop the circulation of the Bill as a Cabinet paper but I felt uneasy about the Government introducing in Parliament a Bill which I knew would be contested in the courts, particularly by the Roman Catholic community, as soon as it received the Royal Assent. I asked Attorney-General Jansze on the telephone of his opinion and he said the Bill was void. I telephoned the Legal Draftsman, Percy de Silva and inquired how he came to draft a void Bill. “Under strong protest,” he said “I told them the bloody thing was void.”

When the item came on the Agenda, I felt it to be my duty to point out to the Ministers that they were going to present in Parliament a Bill which was void under the Constitution. As Secretary to the Cabinet, I have never considered myself to be a mere quill-driver. There was no point in raising with the Prime Minister a legal matter because she understood no law. I therefore addressed Felix Dias. I told him that I had spoken to the Attorney-General and the Draftsman and that they were both agreed with me that the Bill was void.

I received a sharp return from Felix “Mr Peiris, we are not bothered about the legality of things”. I gave no further advice on the matter. The Bill was presented in Parliament but lapsed on prorogation. It was presented again during the next Session and lapsed for the second time (1962). Strong protests against the Bill were made by the Roman Catholics but these went unheeded. The Bill was introduced because some Roman Catholics had, overnight, erected in some village a prefabricated chapel within half a mile of a Buddhist temple.

From temples and churches, hymns and chants, the Cabinet got down to reconsider the National Anthem. Wise old pundits had said that all the country’s ills were due to he fact that the anthem was wrong according to ‘gana’, a term in oriental music which I do not understand. Apparently it refers to meter.

The pundit, a long haired old boy in national dress whose head of hair reminded me of Einstein, Bertrand Russell and our own Professor Karunaratne of revered memory, pointed out that our anthem began on a descending scale, that is, from middle C down to B, then to A and to G, whereas they should be ascending notes as in “God Save the King”, or the Marseillaise.

Madam Prime Minister minister told me, that there might be something in the suggestion as no Government since 1947 had gone its full term. It was agreed that leading scholars and musicians should be consulted regarding the alteration of the anthem without radically altering its sentiment or music. There are difficulties about tinkering with National Anthems and National Flags. Gramophone records of the Anthem had been made, the melody had been set to music and distributed to foreign bands to be played on ceremonial occasions in their countries.

Only one sensible suggestion was made, and that by the long-haired pundit, namely, drop the first eight bars and carry on with the rest without alteration. I thought this was an eminently suitable suggestion but, at that time, it was not accepted.

There were, to my mind, three classes of persons who were generally non grata, and distasteful to the Government. The first was the Tamils, the second the Roman Catholics and the third was sui generic – Hema Henry Basnayake, Chief Justice.

The Tamils were giving the Government a great deal of trouble by not cooperating in our language policy. Every Tamil was expected loyally to submit to the Sinhala Only policy and those who showed some love and loyalty to their own ancient language had naturally no love or loyalty towards the Government.

The Roman Catholics appeared to set the Government a problem for reasons unknown to me. There were numbers of monks and nuns in the island. There were also some Burmese and German Buddhist priests, all respected men and women who had been resident here for long years on temporary residence permits There were Roman Catholic priests and nuns who had been resident here so long that ‘they did not require any permits, but their numbers were few.

The Government wished to be rid of the Roman Catholic priests and nuns but there were practical difficulties about getting every foreign priest and nun out of the Island. It was well known that our people were not willing to work in the Leprosy Hospitals where the Catholic nuns gave devoted service to the patients.

Even in the general hospitals some of the patients who could afford to pay preferred to enter the non-paying wards, which were in charge of the nuns, because they received infinitely better treatment there. Their kindness and readiness to come to the service and assistance of a patient were well known and deeply appreciated by all but that appreciation was never acclaimed by politicians and public officials in public.

In the end, the Government succeeded in getting them out; but what exactly did the country gain? As late as 1967, His Lordship the Bishop of Colombo, the Rt Rev. Harold de Soysa, after a visit to the Hendala Leprosy Hospital, wrote in the Ceylon Churchman: “It was indeed a cause for much praise to God that although our previous Government callously deprived those suffering patients of the loving ministrations of the nursing nuns who cared for them and ministered to them, on this day of their treat, there were at least twenty Roman Catholic nuns who had come from a nearby convent to be with them and three or four priests as well as our own clergy from the Cathedral parish who minister to the Anglicans there and take regular service in the Chapel.”

Except in very special cases, no visa was to be extended when the person to whom the visa had been granted could be replaced by a Ceylonese, and where any such decision is taken to extend any such visa, it should be submitted for the approval of the Prime Minister. There were 210 non-Ceylonese Roman Catholic priests of whom 178 were on visas, and 997 with 556 on visas. These visas were not to be approved without the approval of the Prime Minister.

It was also decided that a member of the priesthood of any religious denomination should not be employed in the public service in any post which could be filled by a layman. This was aimed principally at the priests teaching in the Roman Catholic schools but had to be so worded as not to make the point obvious. In the result, Buddhist priests teaching in the pirivenas and other educational institutions were also caught up, and there was a howl in the country from the Buddhist public. What compromise there must have been because it was only the Catholics that went out.

There was also the other side of the medal. One day, a clerk from the Ministry of External Affairs, of which Mr N. Q. Dias was Permanent Secretary, walked into my room and said that Mr Dias had suggested that I should take steps to form a Buddhist Association in the Cabinet Office. I was not under N. Q. in any way and I asked the clerk to tell Mr Dias that, so long as I was in the Cabinet Office, there were two things I would not tolerate – politics and religion – the first was barred by rules, while the second was entirely a matter between a man and his Maker.

I have dealt with the Tamils and the Roman Catholics. I come to the third class I mentioned – Chief Justice Basnayake standing by himself. He was an upstanding man of sturdy independence and integrity. On the Bench, he was only concerned with the legal argument placed before him. The fact that counsel for the appellant was a senior silk and counsel for the respondent was a raw junior did not weigh with the Chief. He listened to both with equal attention and respect.

This attitude was resented by some of the seniors who expected a little deferential treatment at the hand of the Chief who was not concerned with the personalities at the Bar. Basnayake was, therefore, among the higher-ups of the legal circle, not a very popular judge. In fact, he was an ideal and independent judge who did not care whether he was popular or not. His unpopularity, if any, went beyond the members of the Bar; it extended to the members of the Government.

It was well known that Sirimavo and her Ministers did not like him because he was too independent and not of ‘our way of thinking’. What was ‘our way of thinking?’ Every public servant, every head of department, was expected to ‘toe the line’ and anyone who did not do so was not of ‘our way of thinking’. When the coup trial, to which reference will be made later, was impending, the law was specially amended to divest the Chief Justice of his statutory power of nominating the Bench to sit at Bar and that power was vested in the Minister of Justice.