Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

N. Sanmugathasan

A Marxist Looks at the History of Ceylon


Chapter III: The First World War and After

The years following the first world war brought many changes to the world, and in particular to Asia, which had been under foreign imperialist domination during the previous two centuries or more. The salvoes of the Great October Revolution found their echo in many countries of Asia. The flames of revolution were lit in that great country of China, the seat of one of the oldest civilisations in the world, and the most populous country in the world. Indonesia rose in abortive revolt against Dutch domination. The movement for “poorna swaraj” or full independence, gained impetus in India. Ceylon was not left unaffected. Men and organisations rose up to champion the cause of labour. Ponnamplam Arunachalam, C. H. Z. Fernando and Martinus Perera had formed the Workers’ Welfare League in 1919. The Ceylon Workers’ Federation was founded in 1920. But their influence was restricted. Among the pioneers of the labour movement of this time, the best known are A. E. Goonasinghe and Natesa Iyer. The former championed the cause of the urban workers, while the latter took up the cause of the plantation workers. The two worked together for a time. A. E. Goonasinghe, Victor Corea and others had formed the Ceylon Labour Union in September, 1922. The first general strike, in which 20,000 workers were involved in Ceylon, took place in 1923. It was this strike that catapulated Goonasinghe into position as a Labour Leader.

A. E. Goonasinghe, a former school teacher, faithfully imitating British institutions, formed his All Ceylon Trade Union Congress and its correlary, the Labour Party, on the lines of the British Trades Union Congress and the British Labour Party, whose sessions he attended, dressed in a top hat and tails. It was the case of a slave imitating his master to perfection. Despite the reformism and the bourgeois limits of his movement (he was to end up in the lap of the U. N. P. and as the greatest friend of the employers) Goonasinghe in his day was considered by the British as a dangerous Bolshevik!

The excesses of the British bureaucracy in Ceylon during the 1915 riots had spurred the reforms movement on, although it continued to keep strictly within the bourgeois reformist limits. This movement also did not enjoy popular support, or evoke mass participation as in India, where mass civil disobedience movements ensured popular backing to the demand for independence. The reason for this difference is to be found in the fact that, unlike in India, in Ceylon a national bourgeoisie wanting to replace imperialism had not yet been born.

In 1927, the British Government appointed the Donoughmore Commission to report on the reforms needed in Ceylon. The importance of the Donoughmore Constitution is the fact that it granted adult franchise to Ceylon at a time when the women of some of the advanced European countries, like France and Switzerland, did not even have the vote. Nor had the Ceylonese asked for it, with the exception of A. E. Goonesinghe and his Labour Party.

Why did the British grant adult franchise to Ceylon at this stage–at a time when it was a British colony? To suggest altruistic motives to the British imperialists (Labour or Conservative) is to beg the question. Some people suggest that this grant of adult franchise was a progressive step and paved the way for the other reforms that followed. This is a doubtful claim.

Elections and adult franchise had already been used by the British bourgeoisie to subvert the British working class movement and to deflect it from the path of revolution in which direction it once seemed to be developing during the days of the famous Chartist movement. This weapon was now used in Ceylon to divide and distract the unity of the growing and potentially powerful anti-imperialist movement, to blunt the fighting spirit of the masses, to spread the illusion about the possibility of peaceful transition through parliament, and to distract the attention of the people from the real seats of power, which were the armed forces. It was an attempt to substitute the struggle by words for the struggle by arms.

When one looks back over the past forty years, when elections in Ceylon were based on adult franchise, one must concede that the British succeeded beyond their hopes. It is not an accident that it is with the Donoughmore era that communal politics begins to rear its ugly head. Even the “venerable knight” Ponnambalam Ramanathan, who had risked the perils of the torpedo-infested seas in an attempt to plead before the British authorities in London on behalf of the Sinhalese leaders jailed during the 1915 Martial Law, and who had twice, with the support of the Sinhalese, defeated Sir Marcus Fernando and S. W. Jayawardene respectively in the elections to the Ceylonese Educated seat in the Legislative Council, which had a majority of Sinhalese voters, now resigned from the National Congress, which he and his brother Arunachalam had helped to found. The Sinhalese and Tamil leaders could not agree about how to divide the spoils of office that was being granted to them by a cunning imperialist power. The British government had thrown an apple of discord among the Ceylonese leaders.

The precise dispute arose over the request of the Ceylon Tamil leaders for a separate Tamil seat in the Western Province. The Sinhalese leaders rejected this on the ground that it was a communal demand. They themselves put forward the demand for territorial representation, which they claimed was non-communal. In fact, both approaches were communal in different degrees. For the majority, territorial representation would result in a larger number of members of their race being returned. To the minorities, communal representation would result in more members of their race being elected. It is impossible to judge the respective merits of these two standpoints. The only thing that one can say is that it was in the interests of both the majority and the minority to have come to terms and present a united front against their common enemy and oppressor. This elementary wisdom, however, was lacking. It was the British imperialist who therefore triumphed. Ceylonese fought Ceylonese on the basis of caste, race and religion, while the foreign imperialist lorded it over all. All the while, imperialist control over Ceylon’s economy continued in one form or another–direct or indirect.

But the Donoughmore Constitution was not accepted without a protest. Perhaps influenced by the more revolutionary national movement that was sweeping the neighbouring sub-continent, a movement arose, which criticised the Donoughmore Constitution as falling far short of real freedom. An organisation called the Youth Congress came into being, and called for the boycott of the elections scheduled under the New Constitution. Although support had been promised from the South also, the movement was successful only in the Northern Province. Elections to all the four seats for the Northern Province were boycotted, and the Northern Province Tamils remained unrepresented in the first State Council for four years. Some people have suggested that the measure of success achieved by the Youth Congress in organising the boycott of the elections in the North was due to the support it received from the more conservative elements for an entirely different reason, namely the rejection by the Donoughmore Commission of the demand for communal representation for the Tamils. There could be a measure of truth in this.

For this time, the Youth Congress was a progressive, anti-imperialist and non-communal organisation, although it had support only in one part of the country. But it was soon to be submerged in the Communal politics let loose in the North by G. G. Ponnampalam and his All Ceylon Tamil Congress. The emergence of communalism in Ceylon’s politics was due, as was already pointed out, to the inability of the Sinhalese and Tamil leaders to agree among themselves about how to share the illusion of power that the British were willing to transfer to them. The British skillfully used this situation by supporting one side on one occasion, and the other at another, and managed to keep the Ceylonese divided to the end.

The Donoughmore Constitution had provided for a State Council and an executive committee system, under which members had more say in matters of legislation and the Ministers were untrammelled by inhibitions such as Cabinet collective responsibility. The leader of the Board of Ministers did not enjoy the almost autocratic powers of a Prime Minister with a Cabinet. But the constitution was careful to safeguard British interests by including in the Board of Ministers three non-elected Officers of State–the Financial Secretary, the Legal Secretary and the Chief Secretary – who were promptly dubbed by E. W. Perera as the Three Policemen in Plain Clothes. They were irremovable, and responsible only to the Governor who appointed them. The inevitable conflict ensued between the nominated Officers of State and the elected Ministers.

The British had made it clear that any consideration of further reforms would be conditional on the Board of Ministers reaching unanimity about the proposed reforms. Thus, the British put a premium on communal unity and thereby worsened the situation. D. S. Senanayake, the most astute as well as the most reactionary of the Sinhalese bourgeois leaders, sought to achieve unanimity not on the basis of unity between the leaders of the Sinhalese and the Tamils, but by producing an All-Sinhala Board of Ministers. Ironically, the man who helped him by producing a formula to ensure the election of an All-Sinhala Board of Ministers after the elections to the second State Council in 1936, was a Tamil, the Mathematics Professor at the University College, Colombo – the controversial C. Suntheralingam, then a friend and adviser to Senanayake!

The setting up of an All-Sinhala Board of Ministers only further sharpened communal differences. The formation of the Tamil Congress under G. G. Ponnambalam and his strident campaign for fifty-fifty or balanced representation, as he called it, was paralleled by the formation in the South of the Sinhalese Mahasabha under S. W. R. D. Bandaranayake.

Sinhala communalism fed on Tamil communalism and vice-versa. The plea of Bandaranayake was that the unity of the Sinhalese must first be achieved, before the unity of all the races could be brought about. This plea was repeated by R. G. Senanayake later on. But the question that must be answered is: Unity for what purpose? If it was to oust the foreign conqueror, then it must be the unity of all the conquered races–not just one! If it was to be directed against the Tamils, then the formation of the Sinhala Maha Sabha was justified. But if it were the latter then it was a communal move, which detracted from the common anti-imperialist objective. This tendency to identify the Sinhalese with the Ceylonese nation and to be unmindful of the legitimate rights of racial and linguistic minorities has been a common weakness of all bourgeois Sinhalese political leaders. In fact, the only non-communal parties were the left parties. But even the L. S. S. P. and the Keuneman revisionist clique ceased to be non-communal after 1964, and more particularly from 1970. The possibility of any of these parties – U.N.P., S.L.F.P., L.S.S.P., M.E.P., or the Keuneman revisionist clique ever winning a seat in the Tamil areas is as remote as a Ceylonese setting foot on the moon. There can be no question but that the communal direction taken by Ceylon politics was tragic in the extreme. Each of the warring factions placed more faith in the imperialist master than on each other. It was again a question of the success of the imperialist policy of divide and rule. It is significant that the British-owned ’Times of Ceylon’ at that time fully backed G. G. Ponnampalam and his cry of fifty-fifty. Reduced to simple terms, this demand meant that electorates should be so delimited that in a Council of 100 members, 5O members would be Sinhalese while the balance 50 should be distributed between the minorities (25 to the Ceylon Tamils, and the balance to the other minorities). The Tamil minority was to emerge as losers in this tragic conflict. Having held out all sorts of promises to the Tamil minority, ultimately – under a changed set of circumstances prevailing at the end of the second world war–the British imperialists decided to come to terms with the Sinhalese majority–leaving the Tamils out in the cold. How much better would it have been for the Tamil leaders to have joined forces with their Sinhalese brethren in a common demand to the imperialist master! But that would have been statesmanship of a stature to which the bourgeois leadership of neither community was equal. The names of G. G. Ponnampalam and his later day disciple S. J. V. Chelvanayagam would go down in history as two men who misled the Tamils into political wilderness, where they are still groping. This is not to absolve the communal leaders among the Sinhalese. But being a minority, and having more to lose, the Tamil leadership should have been more responsible and far-seeing.

Meanwhile, another communal factor had entered the scene. The world economic crisis of 1929-31 had its repercussion in Ceylon, too. Rubber prices slumped to their lowest. Many fortunes were lost. And for the first time, unemployment among the Sinhalese became a serious problem. The unemployed Sinhalese looked with envy at the Indian workers in the plantations, who were guaranteed full employment. A. E. Goonesinghe was the first man who saw the explosive potentialities of exploiting this situation. He set on foot a wave of anti-Indian agitation, which was to assume tidal proportions. He demanded the repatriation of Indian workers. What was to become known as the Ceylon-Indian problem had arrived. The Second State Council debated and passed a resolution, calling for the repatriation of a section of the Indian workers employed in Ceylon. It is interesting to note that the Samasamajist twins in the State Council at that time, N. M. Perera and Philip Gunawardene, voted for this resolution despite their Party’s official position that the working class had no national boundaries. Anti-Indianism had become an important factor in Ceylon’s politics. It was to be fashioned by D. S. Senanayake in the post-war period into a convenient stick to beat the left movement.

When the Indian National Congress agreed to form a government on the eve of the second world war, Pandit Nehru came to Ceylon in 1940 to try to settle the Ceylon-Indian question. But he failed. Before leaving Ceylon, Nehru advised the Indian community in Ceylon to organise themselves into the Ceylon-Indian Congress – a retrograde and most deplorable piece of advice. Had the workers of Indian origin not thus been misled into forming separate organisations of their own, and thus cutting themselves away from the main stream of the left and progressive movement of Ceylon, they would not have played into Senanayake’s hands and his attempts to divide and isolate them from the Sinhalese workers and peasants. It was a tragedy of whose extent and magnitude no proper assessment has been made.

The importance of the Ceylon-Indian problem does not spring from the fact that it involves over a million people of Indian origin, but from the fact that the overwhelming number of these people constitute the bulk of Ceylon’s working class, and moreover, those working in the industry that has been responsible for the prosperity of modern Ceylon. Even though the left movement did not, D. S. Senanayake correctly saw this as a class question, and not as a national question. He understood that these plantation workers of Indian origin were a potentially revolutionary force, and, therefore, his enemies.

His understanding was confirmed when, at the 1947 parliamentary elections, these workers, through their organisation, the Ceylon Indian Congress, returned seven members of their own, who stayed anti-U.N.P. and also helped to victory a large number of anti-U.N.P. candidates, especially left candidates, in other constituencies. The die was cast when, during the by-election at Kandy, which took place immediately after the 1947 general elections, the marginal Indian vote brought about the defeat of the U.N. P. candidate, and the victory of Mr. T. B. Illangaratne. D. S. Senanayake swore that it should never happen again.

In 1948, he introduced the Citizenship Acts, which prescribed rigorous tests for all those people of Indian and Pakistani origin, who wanted to become Ceylon citizens. The tests were so designed that only a few could pass. At the same time, it was decreed that only citizens shall have the right to vote. At one fell blow, the workers of Indian origin lost both their citizenship and their right to vote, and were relegated to the category of stateless. They were citizens neither of India nor of Ceylon. The Ceylon Indian Congress was incapable of organising any effective protest beyond a token satyagraha. To their eternal shame, the left movement stood paralysed. D. S. Senanayake had scored a bloodless victory for reaction.

To go back a little. The period between the two wars saw the spread of Marxist ideas in Ceylon. These were brought to Ceylon by students, who had studied in British Universities, and had there come into contact with Marxism following the impetus given to it as a result of the October Revolution in Russia. Under the impetus of these ideas was started the Suriya Mai movement in 1934. This brought together a loose conglomeration of nationalists, anti-imperialists, socialists and communists. The sale of poppies on Armistice Day, November llth, was an open pro-imperialist activity. Therefore, those associated with the Suriya Mal movement organised a campaign to counter this by selling siriya mals on the same day. These sales continued yearly right up to the first years of the second world war.

In the meanwhile, the year 1935 saw the formation of the Lanka Samasamaja Party (LSSP), the first left party to be organised in Ceylon. Most of the leaders were men who had returned from abroad after their university education. All of them held advanced radical views. Many claimed to have embraced Marxism while abroad. Some of them were hidden Trotskyites. There seems to be no doubt that there was a hidden hard core of Trotskyists inside the leadership. This probably accounts for the fact that they did not form themselves into a communist party.

However, at the beginning, the LSSP worked closely with the Communist Parties of Great Britain and that of India. The latter Party lent some of its Tamil cadres for work among the Tamil Plantation workers in Ceylon. The LSSP also supported the Soviet Union and the speeches of its first lawyer-President, Colvin R. de Silva, during the first few years were full of admiration for the U. S. S. R. During this time, the L.S.S.P. carried on mass propaganda for anti-imperialist and socialist ideas. Two of its leaders, N. M. Perera and Philip Gunawardene, had got themselves elected to the 2nd State Council. But their sectarianism was exhibited in their call, even while under the British yoke, for a workers’ and peasants’ government and in their condemnation of all trade union work as reformist. In fact, most of these gentlemen were not revolutionaries at all, as they claimed, but petty-bourgeois radicals. Their sectarian and ultra left slogans were in reality a reaction to the slavish and absolutely pro-imperialist mentality exhibited by the Ceylonese bourgeois politicians at that time under the leadership of D. B. Jayatileke and D. S. Senanayake. They filled the vacuum caused in Ceylon by the absence of an anti-imperialist section of the bourgeoisie. They were the Nehrus aid Boses of Ceylon. They were in tune with the left wing of the Indian National Congress. Kamaladevi Chattopatoyaya, one of the firebrands of the left wing of the Indian National Congress, toured Ceylon as a guest of the LSSP. Even Nehru was hosted by the LSSP at a public meeting at the Galle Face, when he came to Ceylon in 1940. Today, in retrospect, when the LSSP has exposed itself, it is easy to understand the role of the LSSP leaders. They were not Marxist revolutionaries. They were petty bourgeois radicals masquerading as revolutionaries. But, at the same time, they succeeded in fooling a lot of people. The first split in the LSSP occurred in 1939-40 at the time of the Soviet-Finnish war. The anti-Soviet hysteria unleashed by the imperialists and reactionaries at that time brought out the hidden Trotskyism of the LSSP leadership. They rail-roaded through the Central Committee a resolution condemning the Third Communist International and the Soviet Union. All those who opposed this move were expelled from the party on various pretexts.

It is necessary to point out that this split was foisted on artificial grounds, and had nothing to do with policies or tactics concerning the movement in Ceylon. From this time, the LSSP openly announced its allegiance to the counter-revolutionary philosophy of Trotskyism. It is necessary to put on record here that all groups of Trotskyists that appeared in Ceylon had a counter-revolutionary end. The so-called father of Trotskyism in Ceylon, Philip Gunawardene, ended his political life in the lap of the U.N.P. The main body of Trotskyites, under the leadership of N. M. Perera, surrendered to the national bourgeoisie, and became open traitors to the working class and turned their backs on everything revolutionary. The two M. P.s from the group that split from the LSSP in 1964–Samarakoddy and Merryl Fernando–voted with the U. N. P. in December 1964, to bring down the coalition government, and thus paved the way for the return of the UNP in 1965. The present accredited representative of the Fourth International, Bala Tampoe, accepted an American Embassy-sponsored Asia Foundation Scholarship to visit the U.S.A., while simultaneously his wife went on an Ebert Foundation scholarship to West Germany.

The expelled communists first formed themselves into the United Socialist Party, which in 1943 became the Ceylon Communist Party. Although differing in class origin from the leadership of the LSSP, who were mostly wealthy men from upper middle classes, the leadership of the CP was no more revolutionary. Its top leadership had come to Marxism through the Communist Party of Great Britain, which they had joined during their university days in England. The Communist Party of Great Britain was revisionist even before Khrushchov. The result was that these communists brought over to Ceylon the revisionist policies and styles of work, which they had learned from the British “comrades”.

The C.P. reacted to the left sectarian Trotskyism of the LSSP by taking up right-wing reformist positions that landed them in many ridiculous positions. But, before long, both the LSSP and the CP had degenerated into parliamentary appendages of the S. L. F. P. It is true that, when the LSSP first contested the elections to the State Council, it proclaimed its intention to use the Council as a platform to popularise their policies. But these good intentions were relegated to cold storage as a result of the corruption engendered by several decades of bourgeois parliamentary politics by the leaders of these two parties. The 1956 landslide parliamentary victory of Mr. Bandaranayake put paid to whatever revolutionary potential that might have remained. The transformation of both parties into tame parliamentary parties was complete. Both parties also degenerated to the level of endorsing and taking over the communal slogans (e.g. the masaia vadai line of 1965 of the right wing of the SLFP). In an attempt to fool both god and man, the leaders of these parties now started taking part in religious observances and delighted in being photographed while offering flowers to statues of Lord Buddha.

It is not the intention of this booklet to detail the various splits as well as the twists and turns of policies that occurs inside these parties. That deserves separate attention. But it is necessary to note here that in 1964, the revolutionary elements inside the CP re-formed themselves as the Ceylon Communist Party based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, while the Keuneman clique of revisionists joined the LSSP in surrendering to the SLFP and forming a United Front of these three parties.

The Second World War, unlike the first one, had more direct consequences for Ceylon. In the first place, with the entry of Japan into the war, Ceylon moved right into the theatre of war operations. Although it was lucky to escape with only a single Japanese air attack, it became the headquarters for Mountbatten’s South East Asian Command, which was located in Kandy. The stationing of Commonwealth troops in Ceylon, and the vast imperial military expenditure in connection with the war effort directed from the island, produced an artificial prosperity. Unemployment disappeared. Most people found themselves a job – mostly connected with the war. Tea and rubber fetched good prices, particularly the latter. So much so that rubber was slaughter-tapped in the interests of the war and immediate profits. But Ceylon did not gain the real value for the rubber it produced. Britain bought most of it at a fixed price, which was credited to our account in London against future payment. This was to be known as the Sterling balances, which D. S. Senanayake was to foolishly run down in a short time against import of food items.

The Board of Ministers co-operated loyally with the British government. The LSSP and the United Socialist Party (predecessor to the CP.) were banned, and their leaders detained or prosecuted in 1941. The LSSP leaders broke jail in 1942, and escaped to India–presumably to lead the revolution there. They dissolved the LSSP, and with some Trotskyite elements in India, formed the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Burma and Ceylon–a highly ambitious title, no doubt, but one which displays their divorce from reality. They were arrested in India, and were brought back to Ceylon and released after the end of the war, when they resurrected the LSSP. While the LSSP was resurrected under the leadership of Philip Gunawardene and N. M. Perera, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party continued to function under the leadership of Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Gunawardene. A re-union was effected in 1951, but Philip Gunawardene once again split to form the VLSSP. In the meantime, the communists used the favourable situation created by the entry of the Soviet Union into the war and its successes against Hitler Germany to emerge as the communist Party in 1943.

The war years also saw the emergence of a strong trade union movement in Ceylon. This was, on the one hand, due to the advantageous position in which labour found itself as a result of a labour shortage experienced during these years, and, on the other, because of the leadership given by the left parties. The leading position, which A. E. Goonesinghe held in the trade union field, was effectively challenged and overthrown and Goonesinghe himself was exposed as a class collaborator of the worst kind.

The communists organised the Ceylon Trade Union Federation in 1940. It was the main force among the urban workers during the war years. The LSSP leaders, after their release at the end of the war, took over the Ceylon Federation of Labour, and developed it as their trade union centre in opposition to the CTUF. In doing so, they turned their backs on the original Samasamajist theory about the role of the trade unions.

In the plantations, the action of the Madras Government on the advice of Nehru, following his abortive attempt to settle the Ceylon-Indian problem during 1939-40, in banning all emigration of Indian labour to Ceylon, gave a filip to the organisation of plantation labour into trade unions, as the planters could not now repatriate recalcitrant labour to India, and bring fresh labour at their will, as of old. The Indian Federation of Labour of Natesa Iyer, and the Ceylon Indian Congress Labour Union were the main contestants. The latter, which later became the Ceylon Workers Congress, won the day. But it, too, suffered a split, and a section broke off to form the Democratic Workers’ Congress. The divisions were on the basis of personalities, and not because of any recognisable policy differences. The leadership of both groups were bourgeois, and had no solutions to the problems affecting the plantation workers, both as a class, and as. a national group.