“What Independence For Whom?”

By Emil van der Poorten –February 7, 2016

Emil van der Poorten

I expect that today, February 4th, when I write this, is as good a time as any to hark back to the year, 1948, when this first became a day of significance in the Sri Lankan calendar.

As a tyke as I subsequently identified as being in the development phase of a contrarian, strongly influenced by my two almost-adult Trotskyist siblings much older than myself, I tended to take the popular leftist slogans of the time as being close to some kind of political gospel proclamation.

As I recall, while there were not as many lion flags in evidence as there seem to be in a time of “Sinha-Le”, there were more of these symbols of newly-emerging national pride than were usually displayed up to then.

Perhaps, the lack of foofaraw on the first independence days was because, unlike our neighbours in the giant subcontinent to our north we had not really had to struggle for our new-found political independence or what passed for that status. Ours had been a relatively sedate series of steps behind what became India and Pakistan, with the occasional hiccup such as the first communal riots in the early years of the 20th century. Mind you, it is not by accident that I do not give the Anagarika Dharmapala’s agitation a place in any such “struggle” for political independence because it has proved, if proof be needed, that it simply laid the foundation for something more insidious by far: “Sinhala Buddhist” chauvinism and the attendant bigotry and violence.

No, the “struggle” for political independence was driven more by the need of the local English-educated bourgeoisie to attain what they thought was their rightful place in the scheme of local things, piggy-backing on the struggles of those fighting the British raj in the earlier-mentioned sub-continent, many of whom paid with their lives for having the temerity to stand up to the Empire on which “the sun never set.”

The title of this column dates back to a booklet authored by, I believe, that pioneer firebrand Trotskyist, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, in which, if memory serves me right, he proceeded to dissect the brainchild of Ivor Jennings in the matter of constitution-making, claiming that it was little but window-dressing for the continuing imperial control that Clement Attlee’s Labour Governnment in Whitehall chose to practice in the outer reaches of the British empire. That control was epitomized by the fact that something like 90%+ of our foreign exchange earnings came out of the tea auctions conducted entirely in Mincing Lane in, (surprise! surprise!) London, England. A little story attached to that fact is that, when that most brash of Sri Lankan Prime Ministers, Sir John Lionel Kotelawala, was on one of his jaunts to the country in which he ultimately spent his retirement years, he expressed loud surprise at how very little Ceylon was being paid for a pound of tea and how much the British consumer was being charged for a cup of that brew that contained, at best, a teaspoon of that very product! The next day there was a significant expression of the displeasure of the British business community at such temerity on the part of a “colonial:” the price of Ceylon tea at the auctions in Mincing Lane took a precipitous dive without precedent! Lesson delivered, lesson learnt it seemed when, after some backroom “clarifications” things returned to normal and brash Prime Ministers ceased to make brash statements about the conduct of their Imperial “superiors!”Read More