by Wijitha Nakkawita

Elections always drew the comical, banal, tragic and often absurd aspects of
politicking in this country as elsewhere in the world, in this era that some
people have a penchant for calling the modern age. One finds interesting
incidents from the days of the State Council, when political figures even
when not electioneering were a different class of people though they may
have been drawn from various social or class levels.
In the early stages of universal franchise in the 1940s each candidate was
given a colour to be identified by the voters. There were many ballot boxes
inside a cubicle or enclosure at a polling booth and each candidate’s ballot
box was of the colour given to the candidate. There was no marking of the
ballot paper and all a voter had to do was to put the ballot paper into the
box allocated to the candidate of his choice. (However it is not known how a
colour blind voter may have managed!)
About the candidates, I remember as a little child that the old Ruwanwella
seat was contested by Dr. N. M. Perera and others during one such election.
It was natural that Dr. N. M. was given the red colour as his party was a
Marxist-Trotskyite party and one of his opponents was Mohandas de Mel whose
colour was yellow. In those good old days there was no polythene and
advertising had not become a public nuisance and eyesore. Mohandas’s posters
said yellow is the colour of the holy robe and Mohandas will win with the
blessings the holy robe.
However the election was won by Dr. N. M. Perera who went on to retain that
seat for more than 30 more years and was only defeated in 1977 in that
unintelligent landslide electoral victory, which was also to destroy all the
old values our people had protected for centuries past.
Another election that comes to mind is the general election of 1947 for
electing representatives to the first independent parliament of this country
which the British had christened as Ceylon. In that election there were only
two major political parties, the UNP and the LSSP. Phillip Gunawardena who
was also the father of the left movement and Dr. N. M. Perera were the main
challengers to old D. S. Senanayake who was to win that election and form
the first elected government after independence from the British. Dr. N. M.
Perera who led the LSSP became the Leader of the Opposition.
At that time there was only one Sinhala daily news paper, the Dinamina and
two English dailies The Ceylon Daily News and Times of Ceylon but D. R.
Wijewardena who owned the Lake House was also a king maker who worked behind
the scene to get the people of his choice elected.
The LSSP and the CP called his newspapers `Bere gedara pacha pattara’ (the
conning newspapers of the Beira House.) His group of newspapers without
exception went on to attack the left political parties and publish news and
stories slanted towards the UNP.
Of course the left political parties had their own tabloid newspapers but
these printed in letterpress in smaller numbers could not compete with the
Lake House newspapers which carried on regardless of the noble ideals of
free press or private sector owned independent newspapers. Even among the
UNP the Wijewardenas had their own choice of press freedom. If S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike addressed any meeting or was speaking at any public event
Wijewardena’s orders to his pressmen was simply report–S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike also spoke! But of course Bandaranaike was the Leader of the
House in D. S. Senanayake’s government and Minister of Local Government and
Health.
One of the most colourful parliamentarians of the first parliament was
Somaweera Chandrasiri, the member for the then Moratuwa electorate. He was a
minor Sinhala poet, an able speaker on the public platform and he edited and
ran the pro-LSSP newspaper Nidahasa, which was a weekly tabloid. He was not
a member of the LSSP but a sympathiser who was jailed by the British during
the Second World War for being opposed to the war and the British Empire.
However much the British tried to suppress the LSSP Somaweera alone decided
to live in Sri Lanka while all the LSSP leaders Phillip Gunawadena, Dr. N.
M. Perera, and Dr. Colvin R. de Silva who were jailed jumped jail and fled
to India. There they remained with the Indian Marxist parties hiding them in
that vast subcontinent untill they returned after the war.
Now Somaweera Chandrasiri in disguise was going from place to place to hide
from the police who finally caught him and put him in jail. However, he sent
his nomination papers from jail to contest the 1947 election for the
Moratuwa electorate and won that election with a large majority of votes. He
was released after he was elected MP, and was to hold the record as “the man
who came to parliament from jail”. He was to remain a member of parliament
for decades to come and finally joined the SLFP as member for the Kesbewa
electorate, which was a part of the old Moratuwa electorate.
In the next election of 1953 Lake House was again to play its role behind
the scene. That year Lake House thought that the greatest threat to Dudley
Senanayake was the LSSP as the SLFP which was only two years old at the time
was not as strong as the LSSP which had by that time a firm hold on the
trade unions and the working class. The Lake House put up a poster with the
picture of a sthupa on fire. The words under the picture in Sinahala were
“Buddhagama Sama Samaja ginnen beraganivu” (Save Buddhism from the LSSP
Flames!)
Though Lake House and other lesser beings said that the LSSP was a political
party with a revolutionary agenda they were quite mistaken. The LSSP leaders
of the time were either sons of landlords or rich businessmen who had the
wealth to send their sons for education to the UK or USA. These young
gentlemen who revolted against the colour bar and other snobbishness of the
elites of the West were naturally attracted to the then “Third
Innternational”, the communist movement of Europe at the time. They came
back with an intellectual enchantment with Marxist theory and were known to
split hairs over such out of this world ideals like, the “Permanent
Revolution” or the “World Revolution” which were profound but totally
impractical theories propounded by such idealists as Leon Trotsky.
Some of the critics of the LSSP and CP at the time used to call these left
political leaders “Revolutionaries of the beer mug” meaning they discussed
the revolution of the proletariat only over a beer in their mansions or at
one of the high society clubs. So the fear that Lake House or any other
antagonist had of the left leaders of this country at that time was only a
figment of their imagination, not based on realities. For the left leaders
among whom were some professional lawyers, doctors and academics would have
been the last persons to have even dreamt of an armed revolution against
“The Capitalist State” of their times.
There were other interesting politicians like Wijeyananda Dahanayake the
member from Galle who first entered the then State Council from the Bibile
electorate who was better known at the time as the “The Hawk from Bibile”.
Fondly called Daha by his colleagues and admirers he used to swoop down on
corruption or blunders committed by government officials or legislators. At
the time he was the single member of the opposition and unlike today the
opposition benches were behind the government benches in the House.
Seated right in front of Daha was Francis Molamure who was later to be
knighted by the British Crown and become the first speaker of parliament.
Daha while criticising the government of the day in the State Council said
in his speech “Some donkeys seated in the backbenches of the government”.
Francis Molamure who was annoyed got up and queried, “Who are the donkeys?”.
Daha replied: “If you take a mirror you could see who the donkey is.”
Francis Molamure was not to be put off with Daha’s rejoinder. He said “I
need not take a mirror but I could see the donkey if I turn back,” he said
referring to the single member Opposition who was Daha. But Daha’s repartee
stunned the whole House when he said, “Unfortunately Sir, if you do that you
will see your own tail!”
Dahanayake was not merely a member of parliament, a minister and later the
caretaker prime minister. He was an institution. When he contested the Galle
electorate in 1947 after representing the Bibile electorate earlier he was
to face one of the richest men of his times, Thomas Amarasuriya. Amarasuriya
with his lavish spending on the election campaign posed a real challenge to
Dahanayake who was only a member of the upper middleclass family. But he was
not deterred by all the money. In his speeches he told the voters of Galle:
“I have brought before you a huge tree which has currency notes as all its
leaves. I am going to shake the branches of that tree and all of you collect
the currency notes that will fall. You can take all that money but you know
whom to vote for.” Of course Wijeyananda Dahanayake won that election
defeating Amarasuriya and remained the member for Galle for decades to come
till he finally retired from politics at an old age.
Unfortunately in this era we will not see the likes of Wijeyananda
Dahanayke, N. M. Perera, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike or Dudley Senanayake.
Today’s politicians some of whom have connections with criminal gangs or
drug smugglers are a far cry from the politicians and statesmen of
yesteryear. The one thing that cannot escape any student of politics is that
those politicians did not enter parliament to amass ill gotten wealth but
were people who had made their contribution to the country even in some
small way.