Sirisena Cooray: The Image and the Man

First death anniversary

by Tisaranee Gunasekara
“Here I must write, without prearrangement, details.”
Andre Gide (Journal)

“I’m unpacking my library.” So begins Walter Benjamin’s short essay on book collecting, Unpacking my library.

Moving house was something Sirisena Cooray did often, almost a pastime. In the last three decades, he moved back and forth between Colombo, Nawala, Malabe, Katana, and Biyagama. A bed, unassembled and assembled too many times, collapsed as he sat on it, a story his wife, Srimathi Cooray would relate with a twinkle in her eyes.

Every time Sirisena Cooray shifted house, his collection of a few hundred books had to be packed and unpacked, the only aspect of house moving he personally became involved in. They were his books, the mementos of a reading life. The collection varied, from old hardcover books with yellowed crinkly pages and dust jackets mottled with time to new paperbacks he got as birthday gifts. On the wooden shelves of his serial homes Alessandro Manzoni’s classic historiographical novel The Betrothed rubbed sides with Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library, KPS Menon’s Delhi-Chungking: A travel diary with biographies of Gandhi, Mao and Putin. An eclectic collection, like the owner, fascinating, mystifying, and, ultimately, endearing.

With any public figure, there is a gap, large or small, between the image and the person. In the case of Sirisena Cooray, the gap was a chasm, an endless dark space birthed by prejudice and nourished with lies. That growth happened in tandem with the political rise of the Premadasa-Cooray combine. To hate one was to hate the other. Those who considered Ranasinghe Premadasa murderer-extraordinaire regarded Sirisena Cooray as the enforcer who took care of the nitty-gritty of killing.

To see past that chasm of disinformation, one had to know the man. But all too often, the chasm overshadowed the man, until, for many the public image, a construct of rumours and fears, became the whole, the everything. Books had no place in that creation, only guns; there, the neat handwritten notes Sirisena Cooray made about something he read (either for himself as a future reference or for a few friends) would have been transformed into hit-lists, or secret places where the bodies were buried.

Prejudice could be harder and more dazzling than even diamonds.

What we lose to lies

A secret group of Satanic, paedophilic sex traffickers control the US government and state, finance and media: thus goes the basic tenet of the Q Anon movement, that nebulous American construct of conspiracy maniacs. According to the composite of four recent polls, 16 percent of all Americans, that is 44million people, double the population of Sri Lanka, consider this to be the truth and nothing but the truth.

Humans have a predilection for conspiracy theories. The more extreme the lie, the more convincing it is to some. Think of that 1903 fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This supposed plan by Jews for global domination was exposed in 1921 as a fraud created by the Tsarist police. Yet it formed a toxic current that fed into the sea of mass murder that was the Holocaust.

Sirisena Cooray in his book, President Premadasa and I: Our Story, talks about the first murder attributed to him and Ranasinghe Premadasa. When Upali Wijewardene disappeared, it was claimed that his plane crash was engineered by Prime Minister Premadasa. Sirisena Cooray, then high commissioner in Malaysia, was said to have hired a submarine to take the debris away. In a biographical piece on President Premadasa, senior lawyer Jehan Cassim mentioned an even more extreme version of the story; that Sirisena Cooray not just hired that submarine but went in it to ensure that the job was done properly!

The Q Anon movement came into being in a historical time characterised by two tectonic changes, one actual, the other potential, the election of America’s first biracial president and the likely election of America’s first woman president. Until Ranasinghe Premadasa became the prime minister, this upstart from the wrong side of the tracks could be dismissed with a wink and a laugh. Once he became the second citizen and the possibility of a Premadasa Presidency turned real, mockery and sarcasm didn’t suffice.

So the murder tales began. They would reach a fever pitch when Ranasinghe Premadasa broke the glass ceiling of caste to become the second executive president, culminating in one final flight of imagination: that the Premadasa-Cooray combine planned a fake assassination attempt for Ranasinghe Premadasa which Sirisena Cooray turned into reality.

For conspiracy theorists, nothing crazy is alien. In the mid 1990’s the government of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga would appoint three presidential commissions with the obvious intent of finding the Premadasa-Cooray combine guilty of the deaths of Vijaya Kumaratunga, Lalith Athulathmudali, and General Denzil Kobbekaduwa. The findings of the Athulathmudali Commission would eventually be dismissed by a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court and the entire enterprise end in farce when a star witness told one too many lies and two judges serving on the Kobbekaduwa Commission resigned.

Yet the stories persist. While searching for another article, I came across a reddit page with a question, What Sri Lanka related conspiracy theory do you believe in? The top three mentioned were the deaths Upali Wijewardene, Denzil Kobbekaduwa, Lalith Athulathmudali, and Vijaya Kumaratunga, with Ranasinghe Premadasa being fingered as the mastermind.

Those who believe in absurdities can commit atrocious stupidities, to paraphrase Voltaire. The silly stories about the Premadasa-Cooray murder machine and the tale of the Kelani Cobra both belong in the same spectrum of idiotic irrationality. The willing departure from the world of facts is the reason we are living in a stolen, broken country today.

In the aftermath of Ranasinghe Premadasa’s assassination, defending him was costly, politically and societally. Without Sirisena Cooray, and the Premadasa Centre he founded, the clearing of the Premadasa name would have never happened. Unfortunately, the participatory development model which characterised both the Janasaviya poverty alleviation programme and the second and third phases of the housing programme fared less well. Sirisena Cooray tried to resurrect at least parts of that model by various means, including getting a group of experts in diverse fields to come up with a comprehensive national plan in 1999. His efforts failed. The participatory model was forgotten; handouts became coterminous with progressivism cementing the dependency syndrome, thereby making both a short and a long term contribution of the current crisis.

In a birth anniversary tribute to Sirisena Cooray, career civil servant WD Ailapperuma explained how in 1992, a pilot programme implemented by the Ministry of Housing (with World Bank funds) in Badulla, Ratnapura, and Matara districts used the participatory model to build community water supply and sanitation projects. He also wrote how during Sirisena Cooray’s tenure as housing minister, a solar village was established as a pilot project in Pansiyagama in Kurunegala with Australian assistance. This provided “a simple photovoltaic solar home lighting system to 500 families, supplying a village family’s minimum power requirements – 4-6 lamps, a radio and a small television. With the experience of the pilot project, the Housing Ministry under Sirisena Cooray, embarked in 1991, on a follow-up solar power project…in the lower Uva region, one of the poorest, least developed areas in Sri Lanka. Solar power was provided to rural hospitals and maternity clinics, doctors’ quarters in rural hospitals, rural schools and school laboratories, teachers’ quarters, vocational training centres and most importantly for community water pumping. In addition, midwives were provided with portable solar lanterns to help in their night rounds and deliveries…” This long before Green Energy became a thing.

Post-1994 general election, Janasaviya could have continued with the inherent and operational weaknesses in the investment component addressed, the housing programme, sans Gam Udawa. If the solar pilot project was generalised, instead of increasing reliance on fossil fuel, the petrol-diesel queues of April-August 2022 could have been avoided. Had the development model combining private-public partnership in business with state-people partnership in the provision of basic services survived in an improved version, Sri Lanka would not have fallen behind Bangladesh. Instead, politicians of all stripes got into the habit of distributing roofing sheets and sewing machines. Unreason triumphed, cresting in 2019. The rest we are living through.

Political and Personal

Ranasinghe Premadasa was an original, incapable of being imitated or copied. So too was Sirisena Cooray. One was the visionary leader, the other the pragmatic second-in-command who charted a path from idea to reality. Dreaming was not Sirisena Cooray’s forte; work was. He didn’t like publicity for himself, was not a natural in front of a camera, a non-orator. But being around him when he slowly, painstakingly turned an idea into reality could and did inspire. It was a learning experience in how to get things done, from the mundane to the very big, on time. Always on time.

The Premadasa-Cooray partnership which changed Lankan history would not have survived without their deep personal bond. For Sirisena Cooray, a shared political vision would not have sufficed. An emotional bond was an equal, perhaps a greater, necessity. On two occasions, once at a public meeting in the Sucharitha Hall and again at an organisational discussion in the Premadasa Centre, I heard, with incredulity and bewilderment, Sirisena Cooray telling participants, “Support me only if you love me” (a literal translation). Colombo Central old hands responded to my incomprehension and shock with amused resignation. Nothing new there, I was told, that was the man. It had taken a direct order from President Premadasa to compel candidate Cooray to campaign for himself at the 1989 general election, even then reluctantly and with scant enthusiasm.

The mantle of strongman fitted Sirisena Cooray well so long as Ranasinghe Premadasa was alive. Post-Premadasa, he only played at playing the role, that too occasionally. For his leader-friend, he would move mountains. For himself, a sand castle sufficed. He was committed to the task of clearing Ranasinghe Premadasa’s name. Once that challenge was won to a large degree, political involvement lost its spice. He dabbled in politics because it was a habit and as a way of keeping the connection to Premadasa loyalists alive. He knew he was their last link with their lost leader, and that was a responsibility he never shirked.

Manik de Silva recently recalled how he sent a text to Sirisena Cooray around 2.30 in the morning and got a call back immediately. You couldn’t be the man at Ranasinghe Premadasa’s side without being a very early riser. The habit never left Sirisena Cooray. He once said that those early morning hours were the hardest, when he was up with just memories for company. As he stated at the end of his book, “Today he is gone, and I am alone with my memories. The problem is there are too many memories.”

Sirisena Cooray was neither visionary nor leader. His organisational genius worked only with and for Ranasinghe Premadasa. Yet he reached close to the impossible heights of perfection in two areas. One was as second-in-command to a leader he loved. Second was as a friend, caring and dependable in matters large and small. A kind hearted man, a decent human being.He lost many friends to death, a few to vagaries of life. To those who remained, he too left a weight of memories behind.

In pandemic times, when visits had to be infrequent, I developed the habit of calling Sirisena Cooray every other day. The time was unvarying, between 6 and 6.10 in the evening. Even a minute’s delay was noted and remarked on, a cheery You are late, followed by a chuckle.One year on, some days, as six in the evening nears, I find myself glancing at the clock, until memory returns.