Bernard, Doric, MD Banda Centenaries And Wigneswaran’s Commemoration Speech

By Rajan Philips -April 6, 2014 

Rajan Philips

The best manifestation of Sri Lankan progressivism these days is limited to the occasions of memorial lectures and birth centenary commemorations of the leaders of the old Left Parties who dominated the island’s politics during the middle two quarters of the twentieth century.  There have been two centenary celebrations so far this year, first for Doric de Souza and more recently forBernard Soysa. We must also add to the list the birth centenary of the UNP stalwart, M.D. Banda, for reason that will soon become clear.

There were in fact two Commemoration Lectures for Bernard. The first was in Sinhala by Prof. Sarath Wijesuria on “Not Sharing Power for the Sake of Power,” and the second in English by Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran on “Brother Bernard and the National Question.” I have not seen the text of or any report on Prof. Wijesuriya’s speech, but Wigneswaran’s speech, which he delivered in English obviously to reach a broader non-Tamil audience even though he was invited to speak in Tamil, has been widely reported and commented upon. I would like to offer a few comments of my own on his speech, but, first, a few homages to the ‘centenarians’. For “now is the time to praise great men” (Arma Virumque Cano), as Fr. Paul Caspersz said, quoting Virgil, while inaugurating the Heector (Abhayavardhana) felicitation symposium fifteen years ago.

The Centenarians

Doric de Souza, like Pieter Keuneman, epitomized the finest era in Sri Lankan politics – when someone who did not belong to any of the island’s primordial ethnic or religious groups could become and be accepted as a frontline political leader. But the era eventually ended when the irrepressible Doric, whom Hector Abhayavardhana considered “the most rounded example of a Marxist intellectual in our country”, had to finally put himself in his place and out of the many political forums he once dominated because, as Hector ruefully noted, “he (Doric) suffered from one major political disadvantage – he did not belong to the Sinhala community.”

The “full dimensions of this disadvantage”, Hector went on to say, were not apparent while the British rule lasted, when Doric was the underground hero of the LSSP’s heroic years (1935-47), but they became a “genuine obstacle” after independence. Not just Doric, even the LSSP and the Left as a whole suffered from this political disadvantage – in that their politics was not communal politics. But despite that ‘disadvantage’ the Left leaders who belonged to the Sinhala community strove unto the last to make Sri Lanka belong to all Sri Lankans.  And Bernard was the last of the old Left parliamentarians and the only one to return to parliament, and to Kotte, after the 1977 electoral debacle.

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