By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

“Nature builds no machines,” wrote Marx in a famous passage in the Grundrisse. They are “products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature.” Fundamentally, Marxism is the (socialist) theory and practice of industrial societies. Marx’s insights on the logic of automation is now drawing the attention of technology watchers who are both excited and concerned by the current phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the complex environment of human labour, labour-created, labour-saving and labour-replacing machinery and automation, and the mostly uneven industrial society at large, engineering education and research are a critical medium providing training to human resources and technical mastery over material resources.

Wickramabahu Karunaratne (1943-2024) who passed away on 25 July, and Chris Rodrigo (1942-2024) who passed away on 08 March 2024, were two contemporaries, who belonged to the medium of engineering education and research in Sri Lanka, first as students and later as teachers at Peradeniya. They were also political comrades attracted to Marxism, first as young members of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and later as pioneers of the New Sama Samaja Party.

I first came to know them as a student in the 1970s at the Peradeniya Engineering Faculty. Both Bahu and Chris returned with PhDs from England while we were students. Bahu, who was known for his creative solutions in his Math tutorials (in addition to creative palm reading) as a student joined the Engineering Mathematics Department. Chris became a lecturer in Electrical Engineering joining Kumar David who was senior to them. Another prominent leftist in the Faculty at that time was Sivanandam Sivasegaram, in Mechanical Engineering; he was identified with Maoism and not Trotskyism like Bahu, Chris and Kumar.

All of them were part of a contingent of left leaning Engineering students in the 1960s who went on to make their mark as professionals in Sri Lanka and abroad. The familiar names that come to mind include Bernard Wijedoru, Sivaguru Ganesan, Wijitha Dharmawardena, and Chris Ratnayake. Coincidentally or not, the political awakening of the student days proved to be most lasting among those who joined the academia as opposed to those who joined the industry.

They were also part of a galaxy of university lecturers in other disciplines who were attracted to Marxism and Left politics in post-independence Sri Lanka. The names are well-known – Doric de Souza, Bala Tampoe, IDS Weerawardena, HA de S Gunasekara, Kumari Jayawardena, Osmund Jayaratne, Senaka Bibile, Carlo Fonseka, Tissa Vitharana, Vijaya Kumar, Shantha de Alwis, Leslie Gunawardena, Silan Kadirgamar, Wiswa Warnapala, Ranjith Amarasinghe, Laksiri Fernando, Sumanasiri Liyanage, Jayadeva Uyangoda – among others. Not to mention some illustrious fellow travelers like Ian Goonetilleke and AJ Wilson.     

My political association with Kumar David, Bahu, Chris Rodrigo and Shantha de Alwis, who was at the Science Faculty in Colombo, began after I left the university and was working as an Engineer and dabbling in freelance, pro bono, political journalism. I was a participant observer straddling the growing political divide between the intellectuals of the old LSSP and the young Turks of the new. Kumar David would characteristically describe my politics as being limited to committing fortnightly intellectual adultery with Hector Abhayavardhana, the theoretician of the old LSSP.

We were all more formally united in the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE) that was entirely the brainchild of a Marxist of a different kind – a Jesuit man of the cloth, Paul Caspersz. MIRJE arose as a response to the communal violence of 1977 and the toll it took on the Tamil people of the tea plantations. The violence came soon after JR Jayewardene and the UNP won a massive victory in the parliamentary elections that saw the Left Parties decimated and shut out of parliament altogether.

Fragments of the left were regrouping to pause and protest against the sweeping changes that the new Jayewardene government was unleashing on the country. The biggest of them, besides the open economy which had become unavoidable, was the wholly unnecessary constitutional metamorphosis from a parliamentary system of government to a presidential system.

Bahu & Chris

Enter Bahu carrying black flags and protesting in Kandy against the ceremonial swearing in of Prime Minister JR Jayewardene as Sri Lanka’s first Executive President by way of a constitutional amendment. The effrontery was too much for someone in the government and Bahu was fired from the university. The government may have been encouraged by the fact that he had been earlier expelled from the LSSP and the government may have also wanted to send a message to other potential protesters in public institutions. Bahu was forced into fulltime politics, perhaps gladly so.

Chris Rodrigo left the academia for the industry briefly joining the National Institute of Management. He then moved to the US and started an entirely new academic career in the field of economics, adding a PhD in Economics at Cornell to his PhD in Electrical Engineering in London. Chris was a recognized expert in international development and undertook many assignments in developing countries for the World Bank, IMF and UNIDO. His base was in George Mason University, Virginia, near Washington DC, where he shared the departmental corridor with the likes of Seymour Martin Lipset and Francis Fukuyama.

Bahu and Chris came from Sinhala Buddhist and Sinhala Catholic families and had their education at Ananda College and St. Thomas’s College, respectively. I do not know what inspired them to progressive politics, but I do remember Bahu talking about the influence of teachers at Ananada College who were supporters of left wing political parties. And he would throw in the spice that the politically inclined students who got to the A’ Level and entered the university joined the LSSP while others went with Philip Gunawardena.

I used to meet Bahu frequently when he was at Peradeniya, and I was working on the Mahaweli hydropower projects in Ukuwela and Bowatenna. We met occasionally in Colombo and have attended MIRJE meetings in Jaffna. Over the years I lost contact with him except for shared email communications. For several months in 2006/2007, Bahu, Kumar and I wrote concurrently for the Sunday Observer when Rajpal Abeynayake was the editor, courtesy of introductions by Rohan Edrisinha. But I did not meet Bahu in person during that time or after.

It was a different story with Chris and his wife Milan Lin. Milan is a Chinese-Indian Sri Lankan, with a Chinese father and an Indian Tamil mother. Chris first met Milan when she was a Lecturer in the Sinhala Department at Peradeniya. She later joined the National Savings Bank and the two married during the July 1978 Bank Strike. Milan was on the picket line when Chris came with two witnesses, one of whom was Vasudeva Nanayakkara, and accompanied her to a registrar’s office nearby.

After registration, the wedding party returned to the picket line and true to form, Vasudeva, with the newly married behind him, proceeded to give a rousing speech to the striking bank employees. They were still heady days for the young and new Sama Samajists. To paraphrase Wordsworth, the English poet of the French Revolution, bliss it may have been to be on the picket line, but to marry therefrom would have been very heaven!   

My wife Amali and I often met them in Colombo and exchanged visits after we moved to Canada and Chris and Milan to the US. It was Chris who introduced me to Upali Cooray at the MIRJE inaugural meeting. A brilliant labour lawyer (who appeared only at Labour Tribunals without the black coat) and trade union activist both in Sri Lanka and in London, Upali would become a stalwart of the MIRJE organization.

For all the years I have known Chris, I was always struck by his rich and sonorous voice, but never thought of asking him if he was a singer; I should have, given my Catholic family background and familiarity with the Gregorian chant. So, it was a pleasant surprise to read in Kumar David’s obituary that Chris Rodrigo was a trained tenor who loved to sing. He would have been in good company in the LSSP. Doric de Souza was known for musically whistling a whole Beethoven Symphony; Osmund Jayaratne was a theatre persona; and a very young NM Perera, later an accomplished ballroom dancer, was the lead actor in the first (silent) movie filmed in Sri Lanka.

Bahu was differently talented – in painting and in sculpture. Two of his creations, I believe, are still around at the Faculty at Peradeniya. In an email after Bahu’s death, Dr. Sivasegaram mentioned that Bahu also took to designing shirts and trained a tailor in Penideniya to produce them! A good student of Hegel, Bahu published a paper on Buddhist dialectics. Bahu and Sivasegaram, the latter well known for his poems in Tamil and work on the Tamil script, jointly wrote a paper in the 1970s on a cursive script for Sinhala.

All of this, in summary and to paraphrase Hector Abhyavardhana, attest to the necessary role of leftists and left organizations in providing the meeting place between the forces of social change and the highest attributes of human culture. Even as the writings of Marx provide continuing relevance “to understanding the troubled state of contemporary capitalism,” regardless of the checkered outcomes of the political projects launched in the name of Marxism to overthrow capitalism.

Bahu’s Politics

For all his academic brilliance, talents and versatility, Bahu was quintessentially a political man. He joined the LSSP in 1962 as a student at the age of 19, was elected to the Central Committee of the Party in 1972 when he was a university lecturer, and three years later was expelled from the Party. In three more years, in 1978, he was dismissed from the university. Bahu was 35 years old when he lost his job.

There is a parallel between Bahu and Bala Tampoe, who was a young lecturer in Agriculture and an LSSP member and was fired from his job for taking part in the 1947 general strike. Tampoe was 25, took to law and trade union work, and became a noted criminal lawyer, powerful trade union stalwart, and a frontline LSSP leader. Tampoe was the LSSP candidate for the Borella seat in 1960.

At the 1964 LSSP Conference Tampoe rather unexpectedly led the walkout of those who were opposed to the LSSP joining a coalition government with the SLFP. According to Bahu, NM was in tears pleading with the dissidents not to leave the Party. In contrast, Bahu and others who were associated with the Vama tendency within the LSSP did not want to leave to LSSP but were expelled from the Party.

Almost fifty to sixty years later, relitigating who was right and who was wrong would be an inconclusive exercise at best. The stark reality is that none of the political positions or paths taken by the different actors on the Left turned out to be durably viable or successful. In fact, many of them turned out to be disastrously unsuccessful. The sharp differences that had caused sectarian strives started looking insignificant as the open economy and the presidential system wore on.

Specific to Bahu, the context and the circumstances in which he was constrained to organize and cultivate his politics were wholly different from the early decades of the left movement, or the post-independence years that Bala Tampoe had to navigate through. At the organizational level, the space and opportunities for building a new political movement or party were seriously limited in the 1980s and after, unlike in the earlier times. The 1930s and 1940s had their own challenges, but someone like Bahu would have thrived in facing them in the context of that time. But the methods of the 1930s and 1940s were not appropriate for the millennium years.

The political challenges were also different. The state had grown more repressive than during the colonial rule, both as a result of and as a provoker of the emergence of the JVP and the LTTE forces. The Tamil question had escalated to the point of fighting over a separate state. Historically, 1956 and 1977 were watershed years but for different reasons. 1956 unleashed the nationalistic and cultural forces but more with their negative rather than positive implications. 1977, on the other hand, kickstarted a long degeneration of norms and values, and the normalization of avarice, corruption and charlatanism in a climate of political violence.

All that Bahu could do was to strike a difference in an otherwise corrosive political environment. He demonstrated that it is possible to be in politics without being corrupt, without taking bribes, and without settling political scores by shooting people. Even though he was a victim of political shooting. He was inflexible in his support of the Tamils’ right of self-determination while committing himself to making Sri Lanka equally inclusive of all its citizens which would obviate the need for separation.

To that end, Bahu rejoined the old Left in supporting the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and the 13^th Amendment to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the Sri Lankan state. He was a strong champion of the People’s Alliance spearheaded by Chandrika Kumaratunga and the Yahapalanaya project masterminded by Ranil Wickremesinghe. They both failed but not because Bahu’s teaching was not good. The one political alliance that he steadfastly rejected was having any truck with the Rajapaksas. While others saw shades of nationalism and socialism in the Rajapaksas, Bahu was sharp enough to detect their fakeness and their incompetence, not to mention their political regressivism.