How Old Am I?

Mr Ivor Samarasinghe has made many comments in a letter to the editor,“Vickramabahu’s pretensions,” published last Sunday. I do not want to counter his opinions but to clear errors and put the record straight.

I joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) when I was a student in the Engineering Faculty in 1962. After the coalition of 1964, although I was opposed to the politics of the leadership, I did not leave the party. I took the lead to invite both Ernest Mandel and Tony Banda to the Peradeniya campus to talk on coalition politics.

In the years that followed I was unable to get involved in politics here, as I left for Cambridge in 1967. Though my research was in electromagnetic theory, I devoted a large part of my time to read Marxism and to be involved in campus politics. After coming back, I was elected to the central committee of the LSSP in the year 1972, but I was thrown out of the party a few months later, accused of founding a faction against the leadership.

Since then I have been a leader of the Nava Sama Samaja tendency and became the general secretary of the Nava Sama Samaja Party and president of the Left Front. As far as I know there is no organisation named the New Left Front. As a leader of the Sama Samaja movement for the last 36 years, I led many a trade union action.

I was one of the leaders of the 1980 general strike. I was arrested with Moulana, Vasu and others, and in the court case that followed I was an accused. In 1987 when the United Socialist Alliance was formed I became a member of the secretariat with Bernard Soyza, K P Silva, Y P de Silva and Raja Collure and we met regularly for nearly three years. In fact I gave the speech on behalf of the Nava Sama Samaja Party at the funeral ceremony of the late Vijaya Kumaratunga.

Radical ideas - only for the young and inexperenced?

It is a peculiar but common tendency everywhere, to assume one is young and inexperienced if one comes out with radical ideas.

Last week Dr S P Wicks who lives in London dropped in at our office. For a long time, as far as I could remember, he was politically in agreement with us. Generally he is very concerned about my health and this time too he directed his usual set of questions. He became worried when I said that I was taking medication for high blood pressure in addition to treatment for asthma. He shook his head as if something was radically wrong and asked me, “How old are you?” I said, “S P surely you know my age. I am 65.” Then he started laughing and said, “what a fool I am. How did I assume you to be much younger? For that age you look alright. You are doing fine.”

I did not want to tell him that he was also suffering from the general sickness of assuming all radical politicians to be young and hasty. Sometimes it is very embarrassing when somebody relatively unknown to me assumes that he is much older and wiser, and starts lecturing me on the ABC of politics. What I usually do is just what I did above - relate what I’ve been doing during the past few decades. Usually it works and the fellow gets into the general frame of reference to become aware of the time scale!

Angulimala dictatorship?

All bourgeois states are based on nationality. The weapon of the ruling class against social unrest of the working masses is nationalism. In Sri Lanka too, the state has to depend on majority nationalism.

However, the tragedy of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism was that it could not compromise and incorporate Hindu Tamil nationalism within a parliamentary democracy. Muslims, Christians and other national or religious groups caused no real problem before the emergence of the Tamil national problem.

SWRD, Dudley, JR, Chandrika and Ranil, all these bourgeois leaders, tried one way or the other to come to a compromise based on devolution. But local capitalism was neither progressive nor strong enough to back them. Mahinda has emerged as the leader who wants to divide the country and separate the Sinhala Buddhist state from the rest of the people. I doubt very much whether he could be successful. If he ever becomes successful, most certainly it will not be a socialist Buddhist republic, but a brutal Angulimala dictatorship.