By Vishwamithra –

“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience” ~ George Bernard Shaw

The ‘Common Man’ was hiding on his own ‘free’ will; Independence of the country may have brought its celebratory social delectables to the pukka sahibs in Colombo; yet its profound sense and soul-stirring message may have evaded the ordinary minds of the rural folks. Their lives have not been touched by the nuanced shades of sophisticated definitions of freedom, independence and liberty. For them, after being a subject people of a King for nearly two thousand years, without being called equals of the then elite classes of Kings, Adigars, Disawes and Rate Mahattayas, real freedom of expression and unrestricted articulation of their inner feelings and cravings had been framed within their rustic boundaries. Theirs was a noise in the wilderness.

The Mercantilist class that dominated the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’  economy in Ceylon had created a supra-rich layer in our socioeconomic structure. Statistical and other measurements of a growing economy for the upper classes in the country did not have any relatability to the poor peasants in the country side. They were the perennial downtrodden of a stagnant stratum of the socioeconomic architecture of an ill-designed social growth; an emerging subject people of the ‘brave new world’ yet accepted the status quo as their cruel fate.

Their ambitions crushed and deprived of a real ‘place in the sun’, this segment of our population, the non-elite class, chose to accept the brutal realities of colonial powers without any question. They did not have any formal education which was available to the rich and those who were close to power, and who resided in the big cities and their immediate environs. The gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ or elites and non-elites got widened with the Senanayakes and Kotelawalas taking over the reins of administration of the country’s power machine. The gulf became visible as D S Senanayake’s tour around the country’s agricultural lands became more frequent and regular.

Nevertheless, UNP government Ministers had a wealth of experience as most of them were already associated with the old State Council machinery. With all that experience, they failed to plan for the next twenty five years. Instead their preoccupation with the Estate Tamil issue took them away from such long-term planning for the economy and the political instability came to light with the Hartal and Dudley’s resignation from Premiership.

Bandaranaike saw this coming: the blatant arrogance and lamentable oblivion on the part of the UNP administration, its political shortsightedness to deal with the onset of the technological takeover of the twenty first century and their incompetence to navigate in unsettling economic conditions prepared the ground conditions, basically of cultural genre rather than exclusively economic, for the initial stirrings of a ‘Common Man’s revolution. While the left leaders were enmeshed in theoretical Trotskyism and intra-ideological warfare, Bandaranaike engaged with the five pillars of Sinhalese Society: Sanga, Weda, Guru, Govi, Kamkaru.

But Bandaranaike made one fundamentally false move: his ‘Common Man’ happened to hail only from the Sinhalese Buddhist community. He never ever appealed to the ‘Common Man’ who originated from the North and the East. That ‘Sinhalese ‘Buddhist Common Man’ embraced the Bandaranaike doctrine lock, stock and barrel and coated it with a  Sinhalese Buddhist veneer. Draped in this Neo-patriotic garb, the push in the rural hamlets for a nationalist movement gained ground with each passing day. With Buddharakkhita, Chief Monk of the Kelaniya Temple, at the helm of the movement, Bandaranaike and his cohorts never looked back until they reached the halls of power, the House of Representatives, Ceylon Parliament, with fifty one seats. ‘Sinhalese Buddhist Common’ Man won the day, they thought.

However, it’s in place record a comparison of the results of the two elections, 1947 and 1956:

In the eyes of the average voter, the UNP suffered a humiliating defeat. A mere 8 seats in Parliament. Amongst the losers was JR Jayewardene, the second-in-command of the Grand Old Party of Ceylon. Yet when one examines the numbers, despite the UNP failed to secure more than eight (8) seats in the House, it lost no more than 10% of the votes it received in the ’47 elections. The winning party, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna scored minutely less than what the UNP got in the ’47 elections. The UNP in 1947 got 39.81% while the MEP got 39.52% in 1956. Something is smelling bad and it’s not in Denmark. In Ceylon, numbers chose to tell a different tale. Numbers don’t lie and they don’t smell. They are objective and colorblind and without any odor.

The voter had made a sweeping statement on the makeup of the two parties respectively. When Members of Parliaments are elected on the basis of ‘first-past-the-post’ system, at the micro level of the electorate, the candidate matters. While the macro issues were the entreaty to the ‘Common Man’ and ‘Sinhala Only’ appeal, the micro issues too were well organized and payed extreme diligence into by Bandaranaike and his army of the Maha Sanga. As a matter of fact, the UNP won only four (4) electorates which elected single MPs. They were Hakmana, Horowpatana, Dodangaslanda and Maturata, won by CA Darmapala, ELB Hurulle, Sir John Kotelawala and M D Banda respectively. Both Hakmana and Horowpatana victories were enabled by the fact that in each of those electorates, a third candidate ate into the MEP voting block thereby enabling the UNP to win. The only real victories belonged to Sir John and M D Banda who won the Dodangaslanda and Maturate electorates respectively. The other four came form multi-member seats, namely, Colombo Central, Badulla, Thalawakelle and Kadugannawa.

The ‘Common Man’, more precisely the ‘Sinhalese Buddhist Common Man’ was secured a place in the sun. The floodgates were open for undiluted discrimination against the Northern and Eastern Tamils and Muslims scattered al over the country. The paradigm shift, that defined and shaped the events and episodes of a nation’s journey, did occur in the 1956 and those who were engaged in that shift may not have seen it, perceived it or even forecasted it when it happened. Sixty five years later we see it as a watershed of the country’s evolution as an emerging sovereign land. And that evolution produced more disasters than a resolution of burning issues.

The country’s political culture changed and it was irrevocably different and nauseatingly unpalatable. The old Civil Service is gone and the newcomers to our Administrative Service may have retained the design and architecture of that system, but the architects, designers and the engineers have changed and they are communicating in their mother tongue. Something called ‘Apé’ (ours)  has come to stay and it will never go back. The ’56 Revolution has not only produced its positive and negative effects that have altered the country’s march towards a modern era, it has produced its children whose aspirations and hopes have been augmented beyond regular boundaries of belief.

By confining the concept of the ‘Common Man’ within the religious and ethnic parameters of ‘Sinhalese Buddhistness’, a change of paradigm of the ’56 nature would subsequently alter the nation’s demands, her definitions of culture and politics and her fundamental character as a decent and civilized member of the global community. Seeds of the Aragalaya-22 were planted before, during and post ’56 Revolution.

S W R D Bandaranaike, Father of the ’56 Revolution, chose to send his own children abroad for education while preaching localization of everything including education for the indigenous population.   Political power was mistakenly assumed as power to do every mundane endeavor for the electorate and the country. Accountability on the part of the government and the governing party was thrown out the door. When Wimala Wijeywardene, Cabinet Minister of Health, was openly marauding the dark corridors of lust and pleasure with Buddharakkhita, Bandaranaike’s Chief Campaigner, a Buddhist Monk, Bandaranaike opted to disregard and ignore it as a matter of adult consensual conduct. Bandaranaike’s hypocrisy was exposed and he didn’t seem to care. The ‘Sinhalese Buddhist Common Man’ may have talked about it as a matter of mere gossip, but such collective conduct may have been due to the lack of understanding of the concept of the real ‘Common Man’.

But the poisonous seeds that were buried under the soil of an emerging land, could not be held suppressed for long. Bandaranaike’s creation itself, the powers that he unleashed prior to the ’56 elections  and a brand new generation that was educated in the vernacular would never have been anticipated by the Bandaranaikes and the Ilangaratnes and other cohorts of the ‘Common Man’s party. A political culture that was given birth and nurtured and nursed by them assumed a totally new character, nowhere near the Utopian man or woman of that delusional society that was promised by the Bandaranaike. ‘Apéness’ (ours), a magical word that was the product of the evil genius of those who began this severely misguided ‘revolution’ began its destructive path right on to the twenty first century with the advent of the Rajapaksas onto the helm of the country.

To be continued…

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com