by Gamini Seneviratne
The monument to Dr. N. M. Perera at the intersection of the old Cotta Road which now bears his name and the new road to Sri Jayawardenapura (Kotte) which leads towards the present Parliament building was unveiled recently by the Speaker, Mr. K. B. Ratnayake, who is among the last survivors of his colleagues in what used to be our legislature.

The location of this monument and the nature of the ceremony attending its unveiling would have pleased N. M. Designed by Gunasena Kurulugama, the monument itself in its elegance and fidelity to the subject, a great improvement on the vulgar representations of national leaders that have been the norm.

The occasion was uncluttered by ‘security’, everybody who had at some time been associated with N.M. himself as also with what is nowadays referred to as the Old Left, presumably to distinguish it from the ‘New Left’ which is usually funded by and typically fronts for the ‘New Right’, was there. (Among those present was Mrs. Lolita Subasinghe, sister of the unforgettable Senator Reggie Perera, who’s father had been one of N.M.’s earliest sponsors.

Seeing her there, it struck me that the role of the ‘independent’ politician, the best-known among whom were T. B. Subasinghe and I. M. R. A. Iriyagolla, a breed long since buried and their contribution to the development of our political culture swept under the carpet, is yet to be written. Perhaps Dr. Viswa Warnapala would take it on?).

The ceremony reflected N. M’s multi-faceted character. It was marked by the Speaker’s parliamentary presence and tribute, by the salute associated with the International as delivered by the leader of the LSSP, Batty Weerakoon and by representatives of the Youth League and of Trade Unions, and by Dr. Gamani Corea’s sketch of N. M’s outstanding performance in fiscal management and his reflections on what N. M’s response would have been to what is sought to be slipped past the people behind the facade of ‘globa-lisation’.

In the (inaugural?) N. M. Perera Memorial Lecture, Dr. Corea said that he had been surprised at how conservative N. M. was in budget management.

That was a period that straddled ‘the oil crisis’, and N. M’s austerity measures were coupled with inducements to save; he flushed out ‘black money’, and offered structural encouragement for investment and production. The profligacy and the unmaking of budgetary systems that we witness today are a far cry from all that.

N. M. trained his officials to design macro-management measures without casting avoidable burdens on the family budget. He was the only Minister who imposed his judgement in framing policies designed to ensure the desired macro as well as micro level outcomes through his budgets.

Constrained

I should add that Mr. Ronnie de Mel was constrained by the relative political clout of the big capital spenders - Messrs. Jayewardene, Premadasa, Dissa-nayake, and Mohamed.

The pressures exerted on the national budget, as well as on the life chances of Sinhala villagers not only in the central highlands but also in the Mahaweli and Kelani basins, by Mr. Thondaman, continue to be shielded from public view.

N. M. had been a school-mate of my father, whom he remembered as ‘the boy who used big words’, My own acquaintance with him began in the late ‘fifties when as an undergraduate I was secretary of the LSSP youth league when it was revived at Peradeniya in the aftermath of the riots of 1958. .

Calm, cool

What impressed us all was his imperturbability, and the patience with which he gave everybody a hearing: some students had their own ‘theoretical perception’ of current events to be pressed upon the party, some had pet gripes, mostly on trivial matters, to air.

The following extracts from my contribution to ‘Peradeniya: Memories of a University’, written six years ago and published recently by the ICES, would give some flavour of the politics of those times.

"The late ‘fifties, which saw the beginning of a social change, one of apocalyptic proportions for those familiar with that notion, have, under the pressure of the backlash of the privileged whom it undermined, come to be represented largely in negative terms. The changes of 1956 heralded a radical shift towards an open democracy. The dominant minorities of the time, since restored to their positions of privilege with unprecedented force, have continued to identify those changes with the Official Language Act.

"And that, indeed, was the cause celebre for the university community in the late fifties, as the hartal had been in the early part of that decade. Language, as a statutory limitation on communication with the State and within its agencies, was perceived as an instrument employed by the privileged to divide the majority - the disprivileged- along communal lines. Running along that track, the Left, dominated by the LSSP, won the vote: revoke the Act, provide for parity of status for Sinhala and Tamil.

The debate, if such it may be called, was conducted in the Arts Theatre, the scene of many a virtuoso performance by the elite leaders of the left in English Only. Had a hand in the matter myself. Some would say I started it; technically, that was so.

"The glamour boys on the Faculty were members of the Left intelligentsia. It has been said that ‘intelligentsia’ stands in relation to ‘intelligent’ as ‘gent’ stands to ‘gentleman’. It was not so at that time. People could say what they thought without being punished for it. Or, indeed, rewarded for mouthing a dominant view.

Student Council

"The political life of the campus centred on the elections to the Student Council each term. The dominant group were the Trotskyites (‘Trots’). Arraigned against them (‘anti-Trots’) was a melange of Communists (‘Stalinists’ in Trot language), ‘Dem Socs’ (a cover name for UNPers), FP/TC folk (mostly Jaffna vellala), and ‘right-wingers’ from St. Thomas’ and Trinity (very few, naturally). The Student Christian Movement (SCM) was largely Trot, the Newman Soc, ‘right’. There were a few who were overtly MEP, but, to the best of my recollection nobody confessed to being SLFP.

The hall elections were fought under this ‘party’ facade but the nomination of candidates usually took into account the broad kultur-O Fac divide and the relative strength of school ‘clusters’ or regional groupings some of which had religious/communal/caste associations as well.

"These goings on were supported by study classes especially for the Trots and the Stalinists: ‘socialism in one country’ and ‘the permanent revolution’ were locked in a grudge match with no holds barred.

For the Communist Party, as for the Roman Catholic Church, ‘heretics’ were more to be despised, and feared, than those of other, distinct, persuasions. The theologians, led by that most eloquent of speakers, Pieter Keuneman, made regular visits to help keep the faith intact among the faithful; he was supported by the soft, almost melancholy ruminations of Dr. S. A. Wickremasinghe and by the flamboyant stage performers, N. Sanmugathasan S. Karthigesu and Tissa Wijeratne. The heretics were loaded with talent: N. M., Colvin, Robert, Bernard, Edmund and Bala Tampoe brought oratory of a high order to bear on the critical issues of the day. (Though Leslie’s elucidation of the ‘theoretical’ underpinning of real, contemporary issues on which the party, as an active interventionist in them, had to address, was highly regarded, everybody accepted that he was not an ‘orator’).

In power

In their years in power, while N. M. both managed the national budget with a prudence not seen before or since and used it as an instrument towards giving direction to economic development, and Colvin began the long haul of rehabilitating, modernising and diversifying the plantation industries that had been run down under private sector management, Leslie introduced the principle of ‘democratic centralism’, on which the LSSP managed itself, to the management of the transport sector through worker participation. (Anil’s contribution to the development of the road transport system will continue to be remembered with gratitude by commuters throughout the island).

Pieter instituted macro-level interventions in the building construction sector in particular. The provision of building materials at low cost stimulated own-house building, but the protection afforded to tenants and the ceiling on housing property had negative impacts, respectively, on town planning and on the growth of domestic fixed capital. The skills that were developed through that period in the construction of tall buildings subsequently fell into disuse (it being more profitable to employ foreign contractors). Some of the SLFP Ministers of that government, notably T. B. Ilangaratne and Hector Kobbekaduwa, attempted a restructuring of the economy on lines that were even more radical than those proposed by their colleagues of the established Left."

Not long after I left university and was serving in the General Treasury, N M took over as Minister of Finance in 1964. He moved to strengthen and formalise the most liberal interpretation of official language circulars which T. B. Ilangaratne had already directed be applied with the maximum latitude available in the context of the relevant Cabinet decisions.

The Secretary to the Treasury was, at that time, the effective head of the public service, and NM was scrupulously fair in his treatment of public servants. An example that has stayed in my mind relates to a request made by a Cabinet colleague to have the Government Agent of the district in which his electorate was located removed. NM called for a report from the officer, satisfied himself that he had acted correctly in the matter complained of, and instructed me to inform his colleague that he saw no reason to transfer that officer, and that he had no objection to his colleague taking the matter up with the Prime Minister. The officer was not transferred.

Proper

NM was very proper in dealing with his Cabinet colleagues. In his capacity as Minister of Finance, he declined to respond to requests for guidance from senior officers of line ministries on proposals that had financial implications even at macro level. His most usual reply was, ‘Explain all that to your Minister’. This helped ensure that the line Minister did his homework, and, above all, that the proper ‘lines of communication’ were maintained.

When the LSSP voluntarily conceded the position of Leader of the Opposition to S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in 1952, although N M had occupied that position in the previous parliament and the LSSP had an equal number of MPs as the SLFP in 1952, some LSSP theoreticians tended to see Bandaranaike as ‘Kerensky’, a figurehead who would soon be displaced by itself through the true revolution that would follow.

The Bandaranaike charisma, coupled with his long association with local government bodies and his ‘left’ image, led to his electoral victory in 1956. Theoreticians came up with the ex-post-facto rationalisation that the MEP had merely appropriated the LSSP agenda and added Sinhala and Buddhism to it. Such arguments did not help the party address the problem of filling the gaps in marxian theory in relation to the so-called ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’. There are welcome signs of change, manifested, e.g., in its appreciation of the widespread ecological and economic disasters that would result from exposing the phosphate deposits at Eppawala to what may only be described as vandalism.

Following the Bandaranaike assassination, and, indeed while he was in power, the Lake House press, UNP, did its best to present the LSSP as the coming power and N M as the coming man. in an effort to splinter the opposition to the UNP. That it succeeded in March 1960 is history.

So we had, for the election scheduled for Nineteenth March the vision of a New Man. Among the casualties of that expression of explosive confidence were Visvanathan, who reputedly produced a text-book on Civics and Government far superior to that by A. J. Wilson, whose principal claim to fame would seem to be that he was son-in-law to S. J. V. Chelvanayakam whose communalist election machine ground down Karalasingham, lucid expositor of marxian dialectics and author of ‘The way out for the Tamil people’.

Thurairajasingham, leader of the beedi workers, Dharma-ratnam, President of the Transport Workers Union, and (Senator) Nagalingam were swept away by a vote that was as caste-based as it was anti-left and infected by that parochialism on which separatist politics are founded.

Mr. Sivasitham-param, President of the TULF, in his message for the souvenir published to mark the present occasion, says that ‘NM was the first politician to advocate parity of status for Sinhala and Tamil. Even Tamil politicians took up the demand only later.’ The reason for that apparent aberration should be obvious to everybody.

I last met Dr. N. M. Perera after he had returned from the projected surgery (which was aborted). He knew that little time was left him, and yet he spoke with me for an hour or more, inquiring not so much about the general state of the economy as about specific facets that he wanted more information about.

When he was satisfied that I had answered his queries as well as I could, and his courtesy was about to be overtaken by the state of his health, he simply said, ‘I must have my dinner now’, and proceeded to close and bolt the windows. Although I knew that he was terminally ill, I allowed myself to be mislead by his demeanour in which I neither saw nor felt anxieties of any kind. This note has been written also to explain to myself why I did not make obeisance to him then.