JRJ in action and events leading to the July 1983 disaster

Excerpted from volume two of Sarath Amunugama’s autobiography

Another innovation of the JRJ regime was the introduction of lotteries to supplement national budgetary allocations. The pioneer of this scheme was Wickreme Weerasooria who was the Secretary of the Ministry of Planning. I got associated with this project because printing was a subject assigned to the Ministry of State of which I was the Secretary.

The idea of a lottery was first mooted by Ingrid McAlpine nee Wijeratne, who lived in UK for a long time and returned after the UNP victory to be inducted as a close friend of the President and a member of Madam Elina’s inner circle. She was the niece of Philip Gunawardena, her mother being Philip’s elder sister. But the Wijeratnes were UNP supporters and had been strong backers of JRJ when he contested the Kelaniya electorate.

As President, JRJ went out of his way to help those families whose parents and grandparents had backed him when he was a young, and perhaps lesser known, candidate. Among them were the Gunasekere and Wijeratne families whose progeny were promoted in the Mahara, Gampaha and Kelaniya areas. Ingrid’s project proposal was accepted by JRJ and Wickreme with his usual gusto launched the National lottery which was at that time the only lottery permitted.

The funds so collected were available to the President as discretionary funds which were not permitted earlier under the National Budget. Other senior ministers in his cabinet quickly saw the advantages of these discretionary funds, as well as printing contracts and began to lobby the President to set up their own lotteries. Predictably the first to lobby the President and set up the Sevana Fund and lottery was the Prime Minister.

He did not use the good offices of Ingrid but chose his favourite Ajantha Wijesena, who used his marketing skills to develop the Sevana Fund for subsidizing his minister’s housing development program. Lalith followed with his request for a Mahapola lottery to be managed by Ingrid. By this time the Finance Ministry was getting alarmed at the proliferation of discretionary funds of individual ministers and the setting up of extra-budgetary mechanisms which diluted Treasury control of state finances.

Wickreme also pointed out the wasteful duplication of publicity and marketing agencies and even more urgently the decline of income of the National Lottery which was under the charge of the President. Other Ministers were also lining up after being promoted by printers and advertising agencies who saw a golden opportunity. Finally the President had to put his foot down and refuse new requests.

However he directed that a substantial portion of the income from the National Lottery be diverted to Mahapola. Lalith was satisfied but it created a bad precedent because successive trade ministers started playing politics with those funds. They saw a god given opportunity to divert funds to their electorates outside the country’s budget.

Lalith won the hearts of the undergraduates of his time with his initiative. I can testify to the fact that many of the Mahapola recipients flocked to pay homage at his funeral and lined the roads as a tribute to a man with a vision who made their lives better. The role of Lalith, Gamini and Ronnie clearly showed the value of literate and dynamic ministers. Unfortunately that tendency was nipped in the bud by political leaders who had to pay their dues to loyalist party hacks and financiers who had helped them in times of adversity.

Chambers of Commerce

Lalith was the ideal choice for establishing commercial links with our partner countries as the Minister of Trade. With his wide range of contacts, superlative knowledge of the law and the English language and his well-known habit of hard work and diligent preparation he made ministerial missions abroad most fruitful for the country. He also had excellent contacts with our private sector which at that time happened to be dominated by old Royalists.

Among them were Ken Balendra, Ratna Sivaratnam, Chari de Silva, Wijemanne, Ranjan Gooneratne and several others. The plantation sector was dominated by old Royalists and Old Trinitians. They were all close to the young minister and could interact with him on a friendly basis. Many successive Presidents tended to appoint second raters as ministers who could not reach out to the important capitalists in the country. They had to depend on cronies as intermediaries who were usually corrupt and were rent seekers. This parasitic class came to the fore with Chandrika and especially Mahinda Rajapakse.

I was directed by the President to join Lalith’s pathbreaking mission to set up the first Japan-Sri Lanka Trade chamber in JRJ in action and events leading to the July 1983 disasterTokyo. This high level delegation

included Chandi Chanmugam from the Treasury, Paul Perera of BOI, Raju Coomaraswamy, Chari de Silva, Wettasinghe, Cornel Perera, H.R. Fernando and a few others. I represented the tourism sector. The Japanese side included Yasoao Fukuda who was later to be Prime Minister of Japan and all the leaders of the ‘Daibatsu’ or the major business houses of the country.

It included Mitsui, Mitsubishi, C. Itoh, Sumitomo and many other companies who wanted to do business under the JRJ dispensation. This meeting contributed to making Japan one of our major economic partners and a long term friend. Over 40 years later when on an official visit to Japan I was able to participate in another meeting of the chamber. I referred to the fact that the Chamber had met continuously from that inaugural meeting and Mr. Fukuda and I were probably the only living survivors of the original meeting held in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo under the leadership of Lalith.

Lalith’s expertise was also sought in Geneva by Gamini Corea for UNCTAD and Lakshman Kadirgamar for negotiations on `intellectual property’. These invitations led to a milestone in Lalith’s life when he began to date Srimani de Saram who was working in the secretariat of UNCTAD, on the staff of Gamini Corea its Secretary-General. He married her in Geneva and she became his standard bearer after his death. Tragically Srimani herself was afflicted with a cancer and died not long after her husband.

Ethnic Conflict

If there was one issue which spelt the eventual doom of the UNP it was JRJ’s inept handling of the ethnic issue. Like Hitler’s ‘Thousand year Reich’ the euphoric UNP hoped to remain in power for a long period of time. JRJ’s models of Singapore and Malaysia were, in effect, one party states. Unlike in the UNP, in those nations leaders who obtained freedom remained to guide their destinies with near dictatorial powers.

JRJ too wanted to ‘roll up the electoral map’. This was a euphemism for the untrammeled perpetuation of UNP rule. The JRJ constitution, with its new electoral system, was tailormade to accommodate the UNP which was the largest party in the country. There was no hope for the SLFP except through coalition politics. With no prospect of regaining office, the usually indisciplined SLFP leaders, who had earlier paid homage to the Bandaranaike ‘family show’, now began to cut loose, criticize their leader and even enter into a dialogue with JRJ. But all these plans went awry due to the prolonged ethnic conflict.

The President was beleaguered, abandoned by his erstwhile comrades, and had to literally fight for his life. Walls in Colombo were plastered with JVP slogans calling for “Death to the Old Man”. How did this happen? What were the series of blunders that bedeviled JRJ’s second term of office? The main factor was his inability to contain the ethnic conflict. This led to his alienation from India which at that time, opportunistically or otherwise, espoused the Tamil cause.

Later when he attempted to compromise with India he was reviled by the majority of the Sinhalese who followed the virulent anti-Indian line of the JVP, supported by the SLFP. By making Cyril Mathew and some of his backbenchers to join that bandwagon he further alienated India and Sri Lanka was put on a slippery slope to disaster.

At the beginning of his tenure JRJ had an opportunity of solving the Tamil question. Though his rival Kobbekaduwa did well in the North and East at the 1982 Presidential election, largely because the SLFP closed the door to foreign agricultural products which Jaffna farmers grew in abundance, many Tamils believed that JRJ will remove restrictive communal provisions like the language laws, University quotas and offer better opportunities to them for trade.

In addition the Tamil elite in Colombo were mostly supporters of the UNP. It is ironical that the most pro-devolution politician in the State Council days was Bandaranaike. When he entered politics as a young man Bandaranaike was an advocate of federalism. In contrast JRJ was from the beginning a supporter of a strong unitary nation based on his historical readings about Sinhala kings.

The Senanayakes and following them JRJ, had a streak of Sinhala nationalism. In my personal experience when talking to JRJ about the ethnic question he usually referred to the Tamils as ‘Damilas’; a terminology used in ancient Sinhala inscriptions. The problem was that instead of addressing the real concerns of the Tamils, the youth in particular, he spent time in attempting to ‘strike a deal’ with the Tamil leadership.

Though this seemed a viable option at the start, the entry of militant Tamil youth swung the pendulum towards the confrontation. The communal riots that followed the UNP victory reduced JRJs options because he did not want to antagonize the Sinhala extremists at the very beginning of his regime. In allying himself firmly with the US he did not watch his flank which was Indira Gandhi’s India.

Under normal conditions, for instance with Nehru, Shastri or Morarji Desai, JRJ would have had room to maneuver. But at this stage Indira was taking India on a different path which asserted India’s primacy in foreign relations in the subcontinent. She wanted India to be a regional super power as demonstrated in her invasion of East Pakistan and the creation of a pro-India new nation called Bangladesh.

In this scenario both JRJ and his policies appeared to be irritants to Indira’s left leaning advisors who were jubilant that their military interventions against their main enemy Pakistan was successful. At this juncture with the Indian Congress being challenged electorally for the first time, Indira was also persuaded that the Tamil ‘card’ would benefit her in the forthcoming elections. In the face of her defeat in the Nehru stronghold of Rae Bareilly, she had moved to the Chikmagalur seat in South India signaling the growing strength of the ‘southern cow belt’.

During the SLFP coalition regime of 1970-1977, Tamil disquiet was rapidly increasing. The educational policies of Minister Badiuddin Mahmud, which was dominated by two nationalist extremists – Udugama and Sumathipala as its top bureaucrats brought in policies designed to build up education in Sinhala rural areas which had been badly neglected by successive governments. This attempt at re-balancing education was at the expense of Tamils who had earlier benefited from widespread education.

During the Colonial period Christian Missionaries, particularly from the US, had introduced a system of education which was not bettered anywhere else in the island. Education had been the lifeline of the Tamils; their passport to employment and relief from the harsh, dry climate and water shortage which marked the peninsula.

The worst of these Udugama-Sumathipala fiats, as far as Tamil youth were concerned, was the introduction of ‘standardization of marks’ in determining entry to higher education provided by the state. Since due to socialist policies the state had a monopoly of education this decision appeared to be discriminatory of the minorities and the urban poor.

As Director of Combined Services during this time I sat on several committees to examine the effects of these policy shifts on the public service. At these meetings Parliamentarians representing urban electorates like Pieter Keuneman and Bernard Soysa opposed district wise quotas for higher education saying that urban poor children were no better off than the rural poor child and were unfairly discriminated against by the new educational laws.

But the rural based SLFP was in favour of ‘positive discrimination’. They argued not very convincingly that this policy would help rural Tamil students as well. But the stakes were too high to win over the Jaffna based students. They were now anyway skirmishing with the police who were mostly disaffected Sinhala lower orders sent on punishment transfer far away from their homes. The situation in Jaffna was a tinder box about to explode and the Tamil Parliamentarians were too scared to reach out to Sinhala leaders for a solution now that seniors like Chelvanayagam and Ponnambalam were no more.

The progressive alienation and radicalization of Tamil youth led to a stiffening of the attitudes of the Tamil Parliamentarians. This led to the landmark Vadukkodai declaration of the Tamil United Liberation Front of 1975. This declaration emphasized the concept of the North and East as the ‘homelands’ of the ‘Tamil speaking people’. Merging the North and East for the first time to make it a viable geographical entity necessitated the inclusion of the Muslims as part of the ‘Tamil speaking entity’ since the Muslims were in a majority in the East and together with the Sinhalese in the Eastern province formed a clear numerical majority over the Tamils.

It was the Vadukoddai ideology which was gaining ground when JRJ entered the scene. The stinging defeat of the SLFP in reality complicated the situation. If the SLFP had a greater number of MPs in Parliament after the 1977 election they would have constituted the main opposition. But with their abysmal defeat the Tamil United Liberation Front had a bigger member of MPs and JRJ, with great delight, helped in making the TULF leader Amirthalingam the leader of the Opposition.

But this fateful decision had many long term consequences. -Amirthalingam was known as a firebrand orator and an extremist. With the weight of office as the Leader of the Opposition his fire was doused. Though he tried to play the role of a national leader in his impassioned defence of Mrs. B, he naturally used his powers as Opposition leader to highlight the grievances of the Tamil people further polarizing the two main ethnic groups. Whereas, on the other hand, the SLFP deprived even of the consolation prize of Opposition leadership, had no hesitation in promoting Sinhala extremism in order to embarrass the UNP.

JRJ’s solution to this unhealthy state of affairs was worse than the disease. He unleashed Cyril Mathew as the UNP’s own Sinhala extremist. Mathew with the resources of the state behind him not only attacked Tamils he disliked but also attacked other opponents of the UNP like Madoluwawe ‘Sobhita and Ediriweera Sarathchandra which alienated a swathe of the Sinhala intelligentsia.

Mathew consolidated his position as a Sinhala hero by promoting goon squads drawn from Corporations under his care as the Minister of Industries. These goons were unleashed on the urban Tamils in August 1983 leading to an unprecedented communal holocaust which marked a point of no return. After 1983 JRJ downgraded Mathew but it was much too late. The UNP government was held up as being a promoter of state violence against Tamils.