Antecedents Of July 1983 & The Foundations Of Impunity

By Rajan Hoole –April 30, 2016

Dr. Rajan Hoole

“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” – W.B. Yeats, from the Second Coming

Humiliation and Rebellion

In the last chapter we referred to the authoritarian impulse of Southern leaders and the ruling class in general. The party in power could handle the Southern opposition by using agents or party toughs. But the North- East was not amenable to such methods of control. As Southern leaders proceeded to exacerbate the ethnic problem from 1956, they became more nervous about the North-East slipping out of their control. In these circumstances, there was a strong temptation to suspend the Law and send in the hoodlums, in the futile hope that it would work. Such methods have been used by nearly all governments against trade union action in the South. The Sinhalese working class could of course hope for redress from a future government it would help to elect. But with a minority which was beginning to feel that the whole system was against them, these methods set off a reaction that was in its turn totalitarian and intolerant.

Take the incident early in S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s government of 1956 where thugs of the ruling party set upon Tamil leaders protesting on Galle Face Green near the Parliament, assaulted them and subjected some of them to grievous humiliation. In the process the assailants stripped Dr. E.M.V. Naganathan, one of the three founding leaders of the Federal

Party, forcing him to run into Galle Face Hotel. The Police stayed away under instructions or were too demoralised to intervene. If this had been done to strikers or to the opposition in a rural Sinhalese area, the harm would have been minimal. But when done to the leaders of an electoral minority, it amounted to a collective insult. This in turn led to a closing of ranks among Tamil nationalists and, among the Tamils, violent sentiments and intolerance of dissent, with the ready evocation of the term ‘Traitor’. A potent element in the collective experience of Tamils is a deep sense of humiliation proceeding from the culture of the State. Those who have felt its cutting edge opine that it has played a greater role in the course of Tamil politics than the demand for rights.

Even a man of such mild temperament as the Federal Party leader, Mr. S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, was moved to say privately, “A handful of cow dung thrown on Bandaranaike’s back would do far more good than volumes of reasoned argument”. That was a good 20 years before Tamil militant violence came to be seen as a problem.

Tarzie Vittachi’s book Emergency ‘58 traces the violence of 1956 and ’58 to be the work of political gangs, often zealots charged by the rhetoric of the ruling party. In the Preface he refers to Gandhi:

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