Sirisena Cooray at 90: Still Premadasa’s Man

by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“And I think I did not disappoint him. I did not bring disrepute on him or embarrass him. Whatever I did brought credit to him. That was how I became his chief supporter. Soon I became known as Premadasa’s man.

We were friends.”

Sirisena Cooray (President Premadasa and I: Our Story)

As boy and youth, Sirisena Cooray wanted to be many things, a policeman, a journalist, a sailor and an actor, never a politician. But there was one constant which existed side-by-side with these varying dreams – a commitment to Ranasinghe Premadasa, his vision and his particular brand of politics.

Premadasa became Cooray’s hero long before they met. Premadasa was the rising star in Central Colombo, and a friend of Cooray’s older brother Nandisena. In that village-like urban centre, everyone knew and talked about Premadasa. Sirisena Cooray was barely twelve when he gathered his friends and set up an organisation modelled on Premadasa’s Sucharitha Movement. He called it Sri Sucharita Vaag Vardana Lama Samajaaya (Sri Sucharita Children’s Society for the Promotion of Speaking Arts). The same way other boys play at war and try to emulate the exploits of their favourite military heroes, Cooray and his friends played at politics, making speeches and engaging in debates.

But not politics as usual. That was what Cooray’s older brother was doing, and for young Sirisena it held no attraction. Premadasa’s brand of politics was different. He was a ‘reformer’ and it was this determination and commitment to improve things which turned into a siren song for Cooray.

In his book, President Premadasa and I: Our story, Cooray recounts how he used to listen to the discussions between his brother and Ranasinghe Premadasa. Premadasa would have known about young Sirisena’s admiration and the boyish attempts to emulate him. Premadasa would have been both touched and flattered. When he talked and argued politics with his friend, Nandisena, was he also indirectly addressing young Sirisena? Perhaps. In any case, Sirisena’s admiration for Premadasa, formed from afar, became intensified through these close encounters. “Mr. Premadasa had new ideas,” Cooray would recall; he was a ‘far more serious’ man than those around him, a man who ‘spoke sense.’ It wasn’t just the impression of a starry eyed boy. Cooray’s eminently sensible father told his young son to follow not his brother but Premadasa if he wanted to do politics. When Premadasa and Nandisena Cooray fell out, Srisiena chose not his brother, but Premadasa.

It is not only in military battlefields that trust and loyalty become the greatest virtues. It is also so in political battlefields. Premadasa, who had already planned his journey, understood that it would entail an endless struggle, no less ferocious for its non-use of physical weapons. In Cooray he found the ideal companion, a friend in whose company he could relax, a follower whose loyalty was beyond question, and a comrade who was both trustworthy and competent.

The trust was not merely political, but also personal, including life-and-death decisions. In the late 1980’s Premadasa developed a health complication and the doctors in the San Francisco hospital he was being treated at advised an immediate operation. His personal physician Dr, Nanayakkara disagreed. The argument went back and forth with no conclusion. In his book Cooray wrote about what happened next. “Finally Mr. Premadasa got up and said, ‘I leave everything to Mr. Sirisena Cooray. Whatever decision he takes I will go with it.’ Then he left the room.”

The Premadasa-Cooray partnership lasted almost four decades; in terms of longevity and intensity, it was singular in Lankan politics and rare even in the global context. It was a bond breakable only by death. And the death came sooner than either of them thought possible, when a Tiger suicide bomber killed Premadasa on the May Day of 1993.

A friendship for the books

Bromance is a Twenty First Century word for a human-relationship which is timeless. Not friendship or comradeship alone, but both together, mixed with brotherly love and something else which is indefinable and indescribable, a non-physical but intensely emotional bond between two men with shared beliefs and goals.

The first literary rendition of bromance goes back several millennia, to the great epic Gilgamesh (considered world’s first piece of literature). The bond between the poem’s eponymous hero and his friend/companion Enkidu forms the main channel along which the story flows. And in Homer’s Iliad, the relationship which drives the story to its tragic end doesn’t belong to the divinely beautiful Helen, but to ‘fleet-footed’ Achilles and ‘his own, his dear, his beloved companion’ Patroklus.

“I know I’m going to lose a part of myself,” ¹ Ranasinghe Premadasa said in 1978, about Sirisena Cooray’s imminent departure to Malaysia. Cooray had been appointed as the new High Commissioner at his own request. Premadasa made the remark at a felicitation ceremony he organised for his departing friend at Temple Trees. The separation was of very short duration, rather less than a year. Premadasa wanted Cooray to be the UNP’s mayoral candidate for Colombo. Cooray dithered at first and then agreed, even though he had sold his house in Colombo and all his household items prior to his departure.

It was a pattern which ran throughout their relationship. Cooray would go away; Premadasa would let him go, knowing that he would be back, soon. Premadasa, who was known for his unforgiving attitude towards anyone who left him in the lurch, accepted Cooray’s not infrequent departures as pro forma. He didn’t regard these leavings as abandonment. He knew Cooray would never abandon him. In an untrustworthy world, Cooray was the one man, the only man, Premadasa could trust, to tell him the unpalatable truth, to turn his ideas into reality, and to always, always return.

The departures served as preludes to renewed affirmation of the importance of the relationship. Cooray, the younger partner, needed that affirmation, and Premadasa, an impatient man in all other respects, was willing to go along. A telling example was Cooray’s sudden resignation as the Minister of Housing in September 1990. In his letter of resignation, he indicates that he wants some time away from politics. The letter, at first glance, is a formal one, from a minister to the president. But allusions to the emotional connection between the two are scattered throughout the missive, hints that Premadasa, a man of unusual intelligence, would not have missed. In the last paragraph, what is hitherto implied is made explicit: “Dear Sir, you are aware after the death of my parents, there is only one person who is everything to me.”

Premadasa, reportedly read the letter three times but refused to accept the resignation; “Tell Sirisena to come back whenever he can,” he told the bearer of that letter, T Mahalingam. And Sirisena did, within weeks. He had the affirmation he was looking for, again. “What I was trying to do was to remind him that he needed me. I knew that he wouldn’t let me go… When everyone else wanted to leave he would say go to hell. I knew I was the only exception.”

He was. But that status had to be earned, and was earned, through decades of total commitment and unswerving loyalty. Perhaps this was never more in evidence than during the presidential election of 1988. A memorandum sent by Cooray to Premadasa analysing the problems faced during the campaign reveals the titanic nature of that challenge. Problems were galore, from transport (…many persons who promised us vehicles evaded us…) and propaganda (“the grass roots organisation was paralysed and no effective poster pasting campaign was carried out in many parts) to a not very cooperative party headquarters. All this was on top of a violent boycott campaign by the JVP. As Cooray wrote, “Usually you do not have to motivate your own people; they vote for you anyway; in this election we had to try and motivate our own people to at least go out and vote. Without a candidate like Mr. Premadasa we would not have been able to pull it off.” It actually required two – a candidate of the calibre of Ranasinghe Premadasa and an organiser like Cooray with his competence and commitment. It was that dual act which pulled off the most difficult win in the history of Lankan presidential elections.

Till death and beyond

Cooray was in politics not for himself but for Premadasa and Premadasa knew that. Premadasa was the reason Cooray entered politics and stayed in it. When he wrote, “The day I lost him was the end of the story,” he was not exaggerating. It was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It was also the explanation for much of what Cooray did (or didn’t do) afterwards, starting with resigning from the post of UNP Secretary General.

President Wijetunga had asked for Cooray’s resignation and when Cooray told a newspaper that he will not resign nor can he be kicked out, it seemed as if he would dig in and fight the anti-Premadasa forces then rapidly gaining ascendance within the UNP. Many who wished the UNP well wanted him to stay on, notably President Jayewardene. But all Cooray wanted was to remain General Secretary until the unveiling of the Premasasa statue at Hulftsdorf on Premadasa’s first death anniversary. Once the ceremony was over, he came home, wrote his letter of resignation and sent it to Wijetunga.

Sirisena Cooray was not an ambitious man, a crucial factor which cemented his bond with Premadasa. The struggle belonged to Premadasa. So long as Premadasa was alive, Cooray would stay at his side. But when Premadasa died, the main reason for Cooray’s involvement in politics vanished. Post-Premadasa, it was a drama bereft of its main actor. Cooray could have stepped into that role. Objectively he had the capacity. But the subjective factors were not present; he had no desire for the job.

Ranasinghe Premadasa was as an outsider, a man from the ‘wrong side’ of Colombo and of a non-Goigama caste. He incurred the hate and fear of those who believed that political leadership should remain an upper-class/caste monopoly, the prerogative of a few families rather than the right of any Lankan-born man or woman. When Premadasa was killed, this fear and this hate were transferred onto his political other-half, Sirisena Cooray. Every crime Premadasa had been accused of was now thrown at Cooray, plus one addition – that of causing Premadasa’s death.

Some of those who levelled these preposterous charges knew enough of Cooray to know that he was a decent human being incapable of committing such crimes; others had no knowledge of him and feared what they didn’t know. A retired judge who was brought by a mutual friend for a policy discussion said at the end of the meeting that he was so nervous about meeting this ‘notorious character’ he left instructions about what to do in case he didn’t return. Most of Cooray’s first time visitors would stare at his collection of books – which ranged from Goethe to Agatha Christie – as if they believed him to be not just a killer but an illiterate one.

Cooray would try to see humour in the horrendous accusations made against him. Their political consequences he could deal with (though they included three presidential commissions against him – and the dead Premadasa – and a spell of incarceration during CBK presidency). What was harder to handle was the personal hurt. Had there been a Premadasa to fight for, he would have borne that pain and continued. But there wasn’t, and he just didn’t see the point of going on. Had he been the man his enemies feared, he wouldn’t have refused the premiership offered to him by the party in the immediate aftermath of Premadasa’s death; nor would he have given away the two great Premadasa political legacies, the Sucharitha Movement and Colombo Central. He would have used the three to get to the top, and he could have done it. He didn’t because he wasn’t the hard, driven, and power-obsessed colossus his enemies feared, but someone much softer and kinder, someone whose political motivation came not from personal ambition or greed, not from anger or hate, but from the love he had for his leader and friend, Premadasa.

In his book, Cooray wrote, “Without me, he too would have been alone.” True, had Cooray died first, there would have been a political and a personal void in Preamdasa’s life that no other could fill. But Premadasa would have gone on, because the struggle to transform Sri Lanka was his life. Cooray couldn’t, Premadasa was his political life.

Sans

Premadasa, Cooray would dabble in politics, because he didn’t want to let down those who stayed with him, especially the activists from Colombo Central. He appreciated their loyalty, understood their utter sense of loss and was loath to abandon them. But his heart was not in it. What truly motivated him was keeping Premadas’s memory alive and defending his name from the mendacious charges levelled at him (something his family failed to do, daughter Dulanjalee being the occasional exception).

Many saw the Premadasa Centre as Cooray’s vehicle for power, but for Cooray it was a platform to defend Premadasa from the calumnies and to save his memory for posterity. It was also a kind of a time bubble where members of the political tribe of Premadasa loyalists could gather and remember. Though its activities included such forward looking measures as preparing a comprehensive national plan, informed by inputs from experts from various fields, it was more epilogue than new chapter, let alone a new book.

When Sirisena Cooray was planning some event to commemorate Ranasinghe Premadasa, one could catch a glimpse of the peerless organiser who led the presidential election battle of 1988, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, the brilliant worker who headed the 1.5 Million Housing Programme, the doer who handled the reconstruction of the Mirisawetiya Chaitya and the raising of the Maligawila Buddha statue. In those moments he seemed inspired and was inspiring. In those moments he was the man Premadasa chose.