{"id":126803,"date":"2014-06-24T14:11:15","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T08:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=126803"},"modified":"2014-07-01T00:00:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-30T18:30:14","slug":"premadasa-swadeshaya-social-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/premadasa-swadeshaya-social-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Premadasa: \u2018Swadeshaya\u2019 & Social Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Dayan Jayatilleka<\/a><\/span>\u00a0–<\/strong><\/b><\/b><\/b><\/b><\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka<\/p><\/div>\n

The 90th Birth Anniversary of Ranasinghe Premadasa<\/b><\/p>\n

At the age of 18, Ranasinghe Premadasa<\/span><\/a> had launched a monthly magazine called \u2018SWADESHAYA<\/b>\u2019. He was a patriot. But that was not all he was, and his patriotism was different from that which is dominant today.<\/p>\n

As the UNP<\/span><\/a> struggles to recover as an opposition party and faces two national elections in less than a year, it is vital to understand Premadasa\u2019s role in the UNP comeback of 1970-73 and its sweeping victory in 1977. The dominant interpretation is one of concealment by condescension. The 1977 effort is seen overwhelmingly as one of J. R. Jayewardene<\/span><\/a>, assisted by \u2018the best and the brightest\u2019 – an elite of clever, well educated, tough- minded men of comfortable circumstance who endowed the masses with enlightened leadership, with Premadasa the upwardly mobile commoner, constituting a handy bit of camouflage and providing populist demagoguery. In this version, after the victory J. R. was \u2018Machiavellian\u2019 or \u2018magnanimous\u2019 in making Premadasa the Prime Minister. Upon becoming President, Premadasa is perceived to have marginalized such elements who contributed so much to the UNP–chafing as he obviously was, with envy at his social and intellectual betters! The pre-requisite for electoral success and the country\u2019s salvation and progress today is therefore said to be to bring back \u2018the educated\u2019 and \u2018the professionals\u2019, giving them the pride of place they had in the winning UNP of \u201977. This version is false in three fundamental respects. It obscures the dynamics and balance of forces within the UNP of \u201870-77, falsifies the nature of Premadasa\u2019s contribution, and distorts the character of the \u201977 victory itself.<\/p>\n

\"Late<\/a>

Late President R. Premadasa<\/p><\/div>\n

There weren\u2019t two lines – Dudley and JR – in the UNP during that period in the opposition, there were three: Dudley, JR, and Premadasa. But this cannot be conceded, because to do so would be to concede that Premadasa was capable of a distinctive perspective and programme! Yet that was the truth of it. As a Deputy Minister in the Dudley Senanayake administration of 1965-70, Premadasa had been the second Lankan politician ever, to reach out to Western Social Democracy – the first such being his erstwhile leader A. E. Goonesinghe who, as Prof K. M. de Silva documents, sought to link up with the British Labour Party. Premadasa returned from a visit to West Germany and close interaction with Willy Brandt. He sought the assistance specifically of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), the foundation officially affiliated with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), to set up the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute (SLFI) for the task of labor education. The SLFP-led coalition, in opposition and later in office, denounced Premadasa as “backed by the West Germans” – as if this were somehow a darker doing than the Anglo-American backing received by their rivals and friends, the gentlemanly UNP leaders. His intellectual and ideological orientation was in marked contrast to that of the bulk of the UNP influentials, who in that same period felt and articulated great affinity with Taiwan, Indonesia, and Israel (i.e. with the US camp East of Suez, in the Cold War) and of course with the US and UK themselves.<\/p>\n

This distinctive line of Premadasa, sharpened by the April Insurrection –he attended every single sitting of the CJC main trial of the JVP detainees– was best exemplified in an April 4th 1973 speech to a Colombo Rotary Club, a speech he was so proud of and committed to that he had it reproduced in the \u2018SAARC Summit special supplement\u2019 of the Daily News<\/i> during his Presidency, accompanied by an introduction in bold type which read:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe seeds of today\u2019s concepts were sown years ago.. President Ranasinghe Premadasa, then First Member of Parliament for Colombo Central was invited by the Colombo West Rotary Club to deliver an address on the topic \u2018A Plan for Sri Lanka\u2019 at a luncheon meeting of the Club. The speech was delivered when President Ranasinghe Premadasa was only an opposition member of Parliament and portrays the vision of a young politician of what he thought was the best for Sri Lanka.<\/i>\u201d (CDN Nov. 21, 1991).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In April 1973, there was no one who would have bothered to ghost-write a speech in English for this lone wolf (who had launched the Samastha Lanka Puravasi Peramuna in \u201972) in the enfeebled opposition – and the audience at the Rotary Club of Colombo West would hardly have indulged him.<\/p>\n

That speech, which takes as a desirable goal “Socialism without ulterior motivations and external interferences”, is the best short exposition of and platform for a social democratic Third Way \u00a0in a Third World society I have yet read, and a good quarter century before Prof Anthony Giddens! Though dating from his Puravesi Peramuna period, before he rejoined the UNP mainstream at JR Jayewardene\u2019s invitation (sometime after the latter succeeded to the leadership in late April \u201973) its reproduction under his presidency – with the word \u2018Socialism\u2019 significantly undeleted – underscores the continuity of his thinking and gives the lie to those who would cunningly dilute and distort the content of his economic philosophy. That he chose to reproduce it in the SAARC special supplement indicates that this perspective is one he wanted the outside world to know about, and which he hoped to radiate in the region. Noteworthy too is the fact that one of his last acts as Prime Minister was to pen and publish an introduction to the Sinhala translation of Gorbachev\u2019s Perestroika, a work in which Gorbachev defined his project as a \u2018reformed\u2019, democratic Socialism\u2019.<\/p>\n

A lengthy excerpt from Premadasa\u2019s crucial April \u201973 text is needed to comprehend the core of his thought and perspective:<\/p>\n

“Political power has been diffused among the people through the exercise of the franchise. In like manner the economic wealth of the country should also be diffused among the people. We should evolve a scheme under which the public sector, the co-operative sector, the private sector and a combination of all these three sectors – a joint sector – could function in competition with each other. Such competition will bring the maximum benefit to the people who need not become slaves of either a public or private monopoly. The government should ensure through its legislative and planning processes that the people participate in all aspects of development without allowing monopolies – state or individual.<\/i><\/p>\n

The people\u2019s participation should be enlisted in all matters relating to policy decisions and their implementation. The common people should be made to share the responsibility of finding solutions to their problems. That burden must not be presumed to be monopolized by a few. The common people should have a voice in making decisions and share in their implementation. It should be possible for employees and the people to own shares in any venture thus enabling them to participate in the management and even in profits. What is necessary to retrieve the economy of the country is a nationalization of this nature.<\/i><\/p>\n

If the problems of foreign exchange, development and unemployment are to be satisfactorily tackled, a massive development venture has to be launched to provide the necessary infra-structure such as a network of roads, a network of electricity, a network of irrigation and a network of domestic water supply. With the launching of such a scheme large numbers of people could be gainfully employed. Together with development of the infrastructure the country\u2019s agricultural and industrial ventures will automatically improve. As a result foreign exchange could be conserved. People will get more money into their hands thus enabling them to purchase their requirements. The question of subsidies will eventually be eliminated. We can solve our problems. Scarcity of foreign exchange is no obstacle. To earn foreign exchange we must increase production; to increase production we must develop our national resources, and if we are to develop our national resources, we must harness the human potential that we have in abundance. It is futile to go on bended knees to foreign countries begging for assistance.<\/i><\/p>\n

We must trust our people who have placed their confidence in us. Going to them for the vote alone is not sufficient. In order to formulate and implement policies from the village level to the national level we must get the active participation of our people including the new generation. The root cause of unrest among our people is that we have reduced them to mere voting machines operating once in five years. This system must change; and change completely to make the people the real masters”. <\/i>(People\u2019s Participation in Government- CDN Nov. 21, 1991. My italics-DJ)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Participatory democracy, participatory development, or, translated into the terminology of the Premadasa presidency: \u2018people-ized democracy\u2019 and \u2018people-ized development\u2019. Hardly the credo of a commoner admiringly wedded to conventional liberal democracy and a free market economy. (During his presidency he would commend a \u2018carefully regulated market economy\u2019). The speech reveals the distance between what Premadasa envisaged and that which was implemented after \u201977. By \u201977 the economy was stagnant, even sinking, but there were two projects – two possible political economies – to unleash the necessary growth of the productive forces: the path of the UNP\u2019s dominant faction, that of dependent and unequal growth – and the path of Premadasa, that of national, people- oriented and democratic development. We know which path was taken and with what results.<\/p>\n

One half of the secret of \u201977 was that it was almost as much a victory of Premadasa\u2019s as it was of JR Jayewardene\u2019s and much more a victory of Premadasa\u2019s than it was of Lalith, Gamini, Ananda Tissa de Alwis, G. V. P. Samarasinghe, N. G. P. Panditharatne, Wickrema Weerasooriya and Esmond Wickremasinghe. The other half of the secret was that the post-1977 administration and its policies were a confiscation and suppression of the promise of the people\u2019s mandate; a betrayal of the people\u2019s expectations of the \u201977 victory. The betrayal was a deliberate one, a conscious class choice, precisely because the victory was of a radical-democratic character. That character was inscribed in the reformed UNP of \u201973-\u201977 by Ranasinghe Premadasa who also imparted it to the mass mobilization that was the election campaign of \u201977. The extreme devaluation of the post of the Prime Minister and the enormous concentration of power in the Presidency, the specific form of the 1978 Presidential system– not the setting up of an Executive Presidency in and of itself (a promise contained in the manifesto and mandated by the electorate) was a conscious manoeuvre to cut down Premadasa, the social forces and mass aspirations that he represented. Premadasa would refer to his devaluation bitterly in his acceptance speech of the Presidential nomination in Oct \u201988, as having been given “the powers of a peon”.<\/p>\n

Two quotations should suffice to undergird my reconstruction of the Oppositional UNP\u2019s great victory of 1977. The first from Lalith Athulathmudali writing as a confident Minister ( of Trade and Commerce) in 1980 in the Lanka Guardian<\/i> special issue looking back at the decade of the \u201870s. He had neither the need nor the inclination to flatter Premadasa. The second, chronologically earlier, is from the cover story of the Far Eastern Economic Review of May \u201977, where Mervyn de Silva comments on what would be the last days of the UF Administration, providing a snapshot of the various May Day rallies and of the UNP campaign. Athulathmudali sums up the changes that made the UNP the electoral juggernaut it was by 1977:<\/p>\n

“… It had to change its image in theory and in practice. It had to stand on the side of the underprivileged; it had to provide answers to their problems. The one rupee membership campaign not only changed the money sources of the party but it also helped to democratize its internal politics. A new policy and programme proposed by a committee headed by R. Premadasa was adopted. Family power and privileged group power were dethroned and the fact that these very monstrosities were being strengthened in the other parties only served to consolidate the UNP. In the popular mind the UNP often thought of as being concerned with the few, came to be considered as the party of the masses. The UNP had built itself a new political base”<\/i>. (Lanka Guardian Vol. 2 No 17, 1980 p13-14).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mervyn de Silva\u2019s quote from Premadasa is the only quote from any UNP leader and from any politician other than Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike<\/span><\/a> in his story:<\/p>\n

\u201cR. Premadasa, Jayewardene\u2019s newly appointed deputy and the party\u2019s rising star, smartly spotted the mixed blessings of the vast influx into the party\u2019s ranks of jobless, disaffected and alienated youth. In an obvious reference to the 1971 insurrection which came only 11 months after Mrs. Bandaranaike\u2019s United Front Government came to power, Premadasa said: “Those young hands applauding us now may manufacture the bombs that will kill us if we, too do not change our ways of living and leadership”<\/i>. (Far Eastern Economic Review 20.5.77, pp. 17-19.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is proof of much: the prominence and significance of Premadasa\u2019s role at that turning point in history, his brilliant perspicacity and prophetic vision of genius, his far from satisfied state of mind even about the triumphantly ascendant UNP of 1977, and the course which he thought the party and the incoming administration must take after victory. For Premadasa, the \u201977 victory was an unfinished revolution. In his Feb 23rd 1978 Parliamentary speech assuming the Prime Ministership, an occasion which any other individual would have regarded with smug satisfaction and chosen not to strike a discordant note on, he spurned etiquette and rang the alarm bells:<\/p>\n

“Our people are facing untold hardships. The efforts of our youth to obtain opportunities for work, economic progress and social security have been unsuccessful. The forbearance and fortitude of our people, who are shouldering great burdens of the cost of living, must not be mistaken for weakness. This atmosphere of poverty is about to overwhelm the limits of their patience. If so, none can tell what might transpire. Policies must be formulated, implemented… bearing this in mind.\u2019\u2019<\/i> (\u2018Prabuddha Shakthiya\u2019, p170, published by B. Sirisena Cooray, June 1978, printed by MD Gunasena & Co.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was the \u2018moment of hegemony\u2019 when the UNP governed with a greater degree of popular consent than any Lankan administration had or would. Premadasa was no conformist who went with the herd instinct and the commonest denominator. He did not share the hubris of the open economy, even at the time the marketplace was working its magic the most. But the UNP administration chose to collectively ignore his warning and did exactly that which he cautioned against.<\/p>\n

By 1985, the doyenne of Lankanologists Prof Urmila Phadnis of JNU was writing in a volume on \u2018Democracy in Developing Nations\u2019 edited by the legendary Seymour Martin Lipset, of Sri Lanka\u2019s “Crises of Legitimacy and Integration”. If Premadasa marginalized anyone upon assuming the presidency, it was those responsible for those crises, partly because his administration had to distance itself from that disaster. It is these elements who with the \u201991 impeachment conspiracy opened the gates for the return of the vanquished SLFP feudals and for their restoration.<\/p>\n

In betraying the democratic and egalitarian surge of 1977, the UNP elite eventually spawned a barbaric caricature of revolution from below – the JVP<\/span><\/a>\u2019s second insurrection. In its turn, that insurrection permitted the Establishment no viable option but to turn to Premadasa to rescue it, and in doing so, permitted the halted \u201977 struggle to be resumed under him – its more authentic vanguard. Having been betrayed by the comprador elite, the democratic and social aspirations of \u201977 were revived in a far more urgent and radical form under the organic, national-popular leadership of Premadasa from Dec.\u201988\/Jan \u201989 onward. But he was never really given much of a chance.<\/p>\n

It took a total systemic crisis of the magnitude of \u201987-88 for the baton to be passed to him; yet the crisis turned the baton into what he described as “a torch ablaze at both ends which was handed over to me”. That crisis and its combined consequences parametrically constricted his capacities to carry forward to completion the twin mandates of \u201977 and \u201988. He fought and doused the raging fire in the South which would have engulfed most of us and everything here, but the flames at the Northern end of the torch, flames which he, unlike the Westernized and pro-Western UNP elite, played no part in lighting, incinerated him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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