Reflections on the SLFP

by Uditha Devapriya

The Sri Lanka Freedom Party was not the second or even third party to be formed in Sri Lanka: it came after the LSSP in 1935, the Communist Party in 1943, the UNP in 1946, and the Bolshevik Samasaja Party in 1946, among others. Yet within a mere five years of its founding it had become more popular than many of its predecessors.

1956 marked probably the first time a dominant political party had been swept away by a grassroots led movement. If there was no parallel in the other ex-colonies, it was because no one expected, even as late as 1954, that the UNP could be defeated. The SLFP’s victory was the product of circumstances that would have favoured any party that incorporated them in its programme; in that sense, the UNP failed to read the writing on the wall.

To understand how these circumstances came about, and how they contributed to the defeat of the UNP, it is imperative to understand the position Sri Lanka enjoyed prior to the 1956 elections. In 1947, foreign assets were decreasing, and the trade deficit had begun to widen thanks to a recession in the US and an earlier decision to devalue the rupee.

By 1950 economic prospects had rebounded, and rubber price increases were leading to surpluses which enabled the government to expand welfare schemes. By 1952 the Korean War boom had contributed to an unprecedented rise in foreign assets to Rs. 1,209 million. But following the end of the boom, they began to decrease at an unprecedented rate of Rs. 30 million a month; they were to reduce soon to an unremarkable Rs. 676 million.

It was against this backdrop that S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike resigned from the UNP and crossed over and J. R. Jayewardene announced a substantial cut to the rice ration. The latter decision was taken on the advice of the World Bank, but what is often forgotten was that the rice ration cut was preceded by the halving of the food subsidy vote (from Rs. 300 million to Rs. 160 million) in the 1952/1953 budget, which was still felt to be inadequate to achieve the goal of curtailing expenditures and balancing the budget.

What is also forgotten that the reason for the hartal to erupt in such intensity was that J. R. refused to minimise the magnitude of the cut. In this he was being sincere or rash, but it cost the government dearly, so much so that the subsequent power tussle between Jayewardene and John Kotelawala after Dudley Senanayake’s resignation was resolved in favour of the latter, since the outgoing Prime Minister blamed the former for his downfall.

Had J. R. succeeded Dudley, it is possible that Bandaranaike would have faced a tougher competitor in 1956. Both Bandaranaike and Kotelawala were incongruous figures (more incongruous than J. R.), but it is to Bandaranaike’s credit that he made attempts to reach out a section of the population who felt they were being ignored if not sidelined.

But with his Buddhist upbringing (unlike Bandaranaike, who renounced it long after he entered politics, J. R. renounced Anglicanism in his youth), J. R. may have made the race tougher for the SLFP. As it turned out, Kotelawala not only misread the mood of the moment but did so despite all advice to the contrary by colleagues: this was symbolised by no less a figure than Dudley withdrawing his support for any party at the 1956 election. To examine that, however, one must examine the cultural forces at play here at the time.

The cultural revival which began here in the late 19th century had, by the mid-20th century, split into two ideological strands: a neo-traditionalist and a reformist. The former aimed at restoring pre-colonial monastic privileges while maintaining a separation between the clergy and the laity, and the latter sought to make all clergymen more active in social, political, and cultural issues. The UNP had identified and then condemned the latter as political bhikkus; this was only to be expected, given that the bourgeoisie were not in favour of monks agitating for radical changes which could affect their social position.

However, the UNP did play a part in empowering the revival. In 1954 monks from Burma convened a Buddhist Council and to this end invited Buddhist leaders from Sri Lanka. Four years earlier, the World Fellowship of Buddhists had been formed at the behest of the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress. In 1953, after Kotelawala assumed power, the ACBC urged the government to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s passing away.

Surprisingly for the UNP and more surprisingly for Kotelawala, the request was complied with and a year later, at the time of the Buddhist Council, the Lanka Bauddha Mandalaya was set up. Together with the ACBC and YMBA, this organisation was to have a decisive impact on the 1956 elections. The result was the Buddhist Commission of Inquiry, the findings of which were presented to a massive audience at Ananda College in 1956.

As a critical indictment of the status quo, the Commission probably influenced the rural petty bourgeois intelligentsia to rally against the UNP, and around the SLFP, which by that time was on the cusp of entering into no contest pacts with the VLSSP.

In hindsight, and in that sense, the LSSP’s and the Communist Party’s mistake was to ignore if not relegate the issue of linguistic equality in the 1950s, especially considering that both of them and their erstwhile foe, Jayewardene, had raised it in the State Council in the 1940s. It led them to a crevice where they had no choice but join hands with the SLFP, even though splinter groups challenging these alliances would begin to break away from the mainstream. To say this, however, is not to deplore or indict any of these outfits too harshly.

What aggravated it all even more was the Commission’s critique of the government’s insensitivity to cultural grievances. That was not so much antipathy as apathy, a misunderstanding of the political forces at play whereby the government, as Judy Walter Pasqualge points out in her book on Rhoda Miller de Silva, saw the Left, rather than Sinhala nationalism, as the bogey in the room. It was a mistake that would cost them dearly.

Newton Gunasinghe among many other scholars have demolished the myth, a myth demolished first by Denzil Peiris in his account of the 1956 election, that it was the rural poor, the underclass, who rallied around these forces. That they did to some extent is beyond denial; but the classes the election ended up entrenching, far removed from peasantry though not totally cut off from it, belonged to the petty bourgeoisie, sections of which would drift back into the UNP and again revert to the SLFP not too long afterwards.

In the end the revival which had been supported by the UNP turned against the UNP. The SLFP was helped here in no small measure by Kotelawala’s increasing detachment from the world around him; when the Queen visited the country in 1954, for instance, he bent over backwards to ensure she and Prince Philip were kept amused throughout the ceremony. It cannot be said that he was deliberately hostile towards Buddhist interests, as detractors would argue later on: he was being indifferent, if not ignorant. His reading of the issue of linguistic parity, made evident at a speech in Jaffna in 1955, therefore angered Buddhists.

The SLFP did not just happen in such circumstances to absorb and vent out the frustrations of a community which, more than any group barring Indian plantation workers (who had been disenfranchised by the UNP to “ward off” the Leftist threat), had been discriminated against and deprived of opportunity in the colonial era. Yet it read the mood of the moment far better than any establishment at the time. This is a testament to the fortuity of its leader.

The 1956 election epitomised a coming together of cultural, social, and economic forces that conspired to dislodge the status quo from power. Yet if the SLFP in 1956 defeated the UNP, it did so while empowering J. R. Jayewardene, the bête noire of the UNP who was to rise in the next two decades and who, had he competed with Bandaranaike, would have given him a tighter race, though Bandaranaike may have won anyway. Two points were in J. R.’s favour: his Buddhist background, and his zealous hostility to the Left, which would have endeared him to more conservative-traditionalist Sinhala Buddhists. As fate would have it, however, a Jayewardene-Bandaranaike tussle was not, and never, to be.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com