Sri Lanka's sticky future

by Roger Sandall

(New Lugano Review, October-December 1979)

A historic reversal

Apple green gave a strange appearance to His Excellency's weathered, wily face, and seemed a strange hue for a portrait of the national leader. But in Sri Lanka green was highly symbolic, and in the eyes of his numerous supporters a bright green portrait of President J. R. Jayewardene was both natural and right. Green was the colour of the United National Party, the party which he had single-handedly reconstructed and revived before leading it, in July 1977, to such a sweeping victory over Mrs Bandaranaike's forces that she was left with only 18 seats out of 168.

It had been a historic reversal. For 30 years no single party had been pre-eminent, and government by fragile coalition had been the rule. Now for the first time since independence one party had won an absolute majority of the popular vote: 53.9 for the UNP compared to 31.2 for Mrs Bandaraike's SLFP.

Still more surprising was the fate of the Marxist candidates. Ever since the 1930s certain veterans of the left had been regularly returned from constituencies in the southwest, and the fact that some of them were Trotskyites had given the Sri Lankan parliament an agreeably antiquarian flavour which few other assemblies could boast. Yet in 1977 even these venerable oddities were gracelessly cast aside: whereas the SLFP vote fell by only about 5%, the Marxist vote fell by nearly one half.^l

Now, six months later, the Jayewardene government was moving fast — or as fast as the paralysing impediments of the state bureaucracies would allow — to try and counteract the political and economic tendencies of virtually the entire post-independence era. Two hundred square miles of land close to Colombo was to be declared a Free Trade Zone. Within this area a complex of export-oriented factories was to be built by anyone willing to invest. There would be facilities for off-shore banking and shipping registration. And finally (and revealingly) tax treatment would be sufficiently lenient "to compete with Singapore". This showed what President Jayewardene had in mind. Sri Lankapore, free-trading and prosperous, would arise from the ruins of thirty years of uninterrupted economic decline.

Dilapidation's masterpiece

One can only hope that something new arises, for today's Colombo is dilapidation's masterpiece. True, some bright new paintwork has recently appeared on public buildings, and that domed allusion to the Washington Capitol, the Colombo Town Hall, positively shines. But its very brightness stands out as eye-catchingly strange. More indicative of the general state of affairs is the metropolitan taxi fleet, an amazing collection of 25-year-old Morris Minors which are now — such are the regulations controlling the importation of cars — worth twice as much (Rs 40,000 or $ US 2,666) as they were when first sold in 1952.

Their bodies tropically rusted, their motors continually and ingeniously rebuilt, they are the visible symbols both of economic exhaustion and of the resourcefulness with which the people try to cope. And if the final effect on the visitor to this attractive country is somewhat depressing, this has little to do with the level of material poverty. Instead it has to do with the calamitous condition of institutional morale — with the mounting evidence that the overblown apparatus of the state is now unmanageable.

To be sure, not all visitors take such a gloomy view. Mr Charles W. Yost, for example, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, offers his opinion that despite being one of the poorest countries in terms of per capita Gross National Product, the recent history of Sri Lanka is a remarkable "success story" in human welfare and a veritable model for the Third World. He finds evidence for this in Sri Lanka's Physical Quality of Life Index, something which is based on such matters as life expectancy, mortality, and literacy. According to Mr Yost Sri Lanka rates 83 out of a possible 100 on this index, compared with Algeria at 42, India at 41, and Iran a wretched 38. The high Sri Lankan rating, we are told, "is a direct outcome of its 89% literacy rate."

His report in the Monitor points out that "in sharp contrast with other developing countries, Sri Lanka's increase in income during recent years has been highest for the poorest 40% of the population and lowest for the most affluent 20%. Sri Lanka has had four free elections, each time resulting in a change of government. In these elections more than 80% of the registered voters have voted, a performance far better than that of voters in the U.S.A." Furthermore, in a Third World of exploding populations, Sri Lanka "has a birth rate of only 28 per 1000, lower than that of any other low-income coutry and lower than all but a very few middle-income countries."²

Any fair assessment must take such matters into account. Yet some of the very things Mr Yost is so enthusiastic about look rather different when you move in for a closer view. At first the news that 89% of the population is literate sounds splendid — until one asks about the sort of education this literacy serves. What is it that the students study now that a "national" education has substantially altered the curricular priorities of the past? And what, exactly, has been the net result of creating a huge demi-intelligentsia of rural high-school graduates (the main recruits to the bloody insurrection of 1971) whose aspirations to well-paid white-collar employment have absolutely no chance of fulfilment, either now or in any foreseeable future?

If the distribution of the available crumbs is fairer than elsewhere in Asia this too is something one wants to applaud. Who would wish to see the callous extremes of certain other countries in the region made general? Yet the question has to be asked: to what extent is the fact that there are only a few crumbs available related to an exclusive political preoccupation with distribution, and to an economic philosophy which assumes that productivity is something which can be left to look after itself?

The answer to these questions casts a long shadow across Mr Yost's shining success story, and suggests that Mr Jayewardene, who has been compared in the press with Charles de Gaulle, will need all the latter's talents (and perhaps a few more besides) successfully to redirect his nation's destiny. As for the analogy itself, taken as anything more than a journalistic gambit it would be hard to sustain; and insofar as it suggests that the role and capacities of both men in relation to nationalistic politics are similar, it is entirely false.

An Asian de Gaulle?

Nevertheless in at least one respect the comparison does make sense. Like de Gaulle in his later years, Mr Jayewardene, at 72, with a lifetime of distinguished service behind him, is evidently inclined to view his own political future with a certain detachment, and for this reason he has been willing to prescribe unpopular remedies with very nearly a surgeon's indifference to their public appeal. The more than two-thirds majority his party enjoys has enabled him to introduce a constitutional change which has given him, as President, an executive authority hitherto reserved for parliament itself; and while this authority has not yet been tested, what is plain is that the new and elevated role he has designed for the presidency is intended to raise at least one governmental figure above the destructive entanglements of the spoils system — a system which now completely dominates ground-level Sri Lankan politics.

Under Mrs Bandaranaike's United Front the spoils system led to what became known as "the MP's Raj". The authority of the civil administration, already weak, was completely usurped, and United Front MPs directly dictated the appointment, transfer, and promotion of whoever they chose. What this meant in practice is illustrated by the case of representative X from the Southern Province, a man who in 1970 was having difficulty meeting the payments on both his car and his house, and whose numerous kinsmen were either unable or unwilling to help.

By 1977 he owned three cars. In addition to a house in the country he now owned a three-storey residence in Colombo. Upwards of a hundred kinsmen had been placed in government jobs, a process greatly facilitated by the nationalization of the tea estates. For example, his brother, who until then had been a bus conductor in Colombo, was given the job of one of the estate managers the MP had fired. As for his sons, by 1977 both of them were in England attending expensive public schools. The electorate was a mining area rich in gems, and the control exercised by the MP over the local activities of the State Gem Corporation also greatly benefited his family. My informant, who continued to be a supporter of Mrs Bandaranaike and the United Front, appeared morally spreadeagled between a sad realization that such things could not go on (tea production on the nationalized estate had fallen by more than a half) and an awed admiration for the MP's piratical prowess.

Graft, nepotism, and jobbery, so wise men say, are relative matters in Asia. Yet in Sri Lanka in recent years they very nearly achieved the absolute. Acute food shortages resulted from a monumental insurance swindle involving whole shiploads of imported foodstuffs which were already spoiled by the time they were loaded in foreign ports. The national airline. Air Ceylon, has had to be liquidated. As a continuing enquiry has shown, it was rotten from top to bottom. For those with the right connections "empty" seats had been made available for next to nothing — with predictable results. An ever-expanding proportion of seats were permanently "empty", an ever-diminishing number of fares were paid, and the airline ended up being run simply as a family benefit for the ruling dynasty and its friends. As with a number of other Sri Lankan national enterprises it was expected to run on paper, not on cash.

State enterprises 'owned by the people'

Curiously, this is nothing new. A whimsical unreality regarding the economics of state enterprises, which are of course "owned by the people", seems to have characterised Sri Lankan public attitudes right from the start. Mrs Bandaranaike's use of the national airline as a family concern for which no payment was necessary is, after all, scarcely distinguishable from the attitude toward the Colombo city bus service displayed by her late husband almost 30 years ago. "The buses are now yours!" he told his delighted audience on the day the private bus companies were taken over. Whereupon hundreds of happy citizens climbed aboard and refused to pay.

The merry game of what might be called "play-way socialism" has been played in the worst possible economic conditions. Sri Lanka is completely at the mercy of fluctuating commodity prices for coconut, rubber, and tea, and for 30 years the overall trends have been to her disadvantage. With steadily rising import costs, and falling export income, the nation has borrowed heavily, and recently up to 28% of the national revenue has gone toward servicing foreign debts. As if this weren't enough, the country has had to support a range of welfare services unequalled anywhere in Asia (human welfare "success stories" have their price); no less than 50 inefficient state corporations and statutory boards to whom much of the nation's economy is entrusted; and an administrative bureaucracy serving these agencies which must rank among the least disciplined and productive anywhere.

"No government, however capable or efficient, could ever hope to succeed in its policies with the extreme bureaucratic systems existing in Sri Lanka". Thus the ILO, a sympathetic witness. The experience of trying to combine the goals of welfare socialism with the procedures of an ossified colonial bureaucracy has not been a happy one. In effect this meant putting a centralised organization incapable of economic performance at the service of an egalitarian philosophy hostile to economic performance. And the doctrinaire extension of this system, regardless of need, merit, or circumstance, has powerfully contributed to the present economic impasse.

"In retrospect our views regarding the corporations", says the Ceylon Daily News in an editorial on "Corporate Liabilities" in March 1978, "are conditioned by the fact that many of them show budget losses, the abuses of which the top rungs of their hierarchy are guilty, and their labour problems. The Chairmen and Directors of Corporations formed a new highly privileged sector in society spending a great deal of their time attending international conferences and seminars, often combined with business deals; not uncommon was the education of their children abroad. Nearer home was the brazen misuse of corporation vehicles to transport children to school and wives to market which the public could not fail to see." ³

Life in a government office

Most of the things one reads about Sri Lankan government offices are alarming. Yet the reality appears to be even worse. "Discipline has collapsed completely," one amiable middle-range public servant told me, as he arrived home at noon to relax on his verandah, the day's work done. "The Department Head wishes to dictate a letter after lunch, but he must wait for his peon (clerk) to come back from doing the family shopping during the afternoon. He waits and waits. But the peon does not return, and at 5.00 pm the Department Head goes home. Then at 6.00 pm the peon comes back to the office, signs in, and does four hours overtime."

And why doesn't the Department Head fire the peon? Why does he tolerate this "overtime"? "He does not fire the peon, first, because the Union wouldn't like it. And second, because of the complicated rules regarding dismissal in the public service. And third, he does not fire the peon because he can never be sure the peon will not fire him! The peon may know people in the Party. And if he knows the right people then he may be able to get the boss suddenly transferred a hundred miles away. That is why the boss doesn't fire the peon, and why he does not even dare to ask the peon to do his afternoon shopping a little earlier. You see?"

And as he said this my genial informant looked at me with the smiling wisdom of one who, having mastered the system, now felt fully secure. Under this system, between 1970 and 1977, anyone from the humblest clerk to the highest diplomat in the foreign service might be anonymously struck down, removed, or sent to some mosquito-ridden Siberia. The present government is trying to introduce legislation to deal with this state of affairs, and one can only wish it luck. But it is not hard to see that however convincingly the public contest of the election was won, the much more difficult social and institutional battles which lie ahead of "J.R." have only just begun.

Certainly, battle has been joined. And on a number of separate fronts. During February and March three or more official enquiries into various state corporations or services were being reported in the morning paper, any one of them providing entertaining breakfast reading. When members of a committee of enquiry visited the railway workshops one night they found the luxury Hitachi coaches filled with sleeping workers, while another squad of snorers were tucked up in the stretchers of the railway ambulance. These workshops had the responsibility of handling engine maintenance. The Committee, when it examined the log books, found that none of the reported defects had been attended to.

At first this sort of thing is amusing. But after a steady diet of such reports a comic response is impossible. One cannot smile: one despairs. Even a Sri Lanka columnist, contemplating the ordeal of train travel, was to be found morbidly meditating on the processes of post-colonial degeneration rather in the manner of V. S. Naipaul writing about India:

"One wonders, lying there in that so-called 'First Class Berth', what progress has been achieved in 30 years? Those trains, those fittings in the trains, the colours used to paint them, indeed the entire equipment dates back to British times; to those bad old colonial days we are eager to condemn. Instead let us ask ourselves what we, the people who have been left to care for these services, have done? 'Taking care', 'maintaining', 'looking after' are not phrases that figure very prominently in the average Sri Lankan's vocabulary . . . There is no progress, only deterioration and depreciation of goods and services. And a terrible, terrifying miasma of frustration pervading the land."⁴

The economics of state enterprises

The difficulty of reforming the various state services and agencies is revealed in the following comments by Sri Lankan economist N. Balakrishnan: "From their very inception many industrial as well as other corporations in the state sector have been troubled by several problems such as management inefficiency, technical deficiencies in planning, over-staffing and defective pricing policies. These have contributed in many undertakings to very poor economic results.

Explicitly or implicitly, public sector enterprises (including industrial ones) have been associated with many objectives reflecting both growth and 'welfare' considerations. They have become the chief instruments furthering state ownership and social control in  the economy; they are expected to function as a "leading sector" promoting capital formation and long-term development. At times they have also been looked upon chiefly as employment outlets and enterprises providing goods or services to the public at relatively low prices.

"In the early years political pressures seem to have contributed to the maintenance of low selling prices by some industrial and other state enterprises During the early stages the state industrial corporations were not altogether free from the influence of "subsidy pricing", largely inherited from the other public sector enterprises providing basic services, where the consumer had long been subsidised against rising costs and prices. As one writer suggested, 'the public sector industries have suffered owing to too close an association with the concept of public service, with insufficient concern for the concept of an independent commercial corporation'."⁵

Repeated studies exposing the inefficiency of the corporations led to demand for improvements, and by 1974 "some individual corporations recorded a return of 15-20% on capital employed in production." But chronic problems remained :"excess machine capacity, a surplus workforce, absence of forward planning, deficient management and excessive outlays on overheads ..."⁶ As for capacity, "in some cases only about 50% of the annual estimated capacity levels has been common in many state industrial corporations." In this connection there was an especially intriguing item in the Five Year Plan announced by the United Front in 1972: 75% of the proposed increase in the productivity of the state sector was, it was vainly hoped, to come from the fuller utilization of hitherto unused plant capacity. Tell that to the peon — or for that matter to his Department Head! But while it is easy enough to laugh at Mrs Bandaranaike's embarrassments, they remain Mr Jayewardene's too.

The need to make Sri Lanka less dependent on imported foodstuffs has preoccupied successive governments. Yet state intervention down in the rice paddies reveals policies very nearly as out of touch with reality as in the case of the state industrial corporations. Guaranteed prices were introduced to encourage production. But because the cooperative societies to whom the peasant was obliged to sell his crop were unable to store it, and were incapable of prompt payment for rice received, no more rice was grown.

Crop insurance was also tried. But the payment of premia was resented as just another form of tax, and the only clear long-term consequence has been "the expectation that insurance benefits should be provided by the government without reciprocal obligations on the part of the peasant agriculturist." ⁷ A variety of credit arrangements were introduced, but defaults have been high.

No doubt genuine hardship accounts for some of them, but since surveys have repeatedly shown that loans to friends and relatives have been promptly repaid, the high rate of default "may also be due to an impression prevalent among peasants that somehow it is not necessary to repay government loans." Credit has been viewed as a form of social welfare, "a view refurbished by the pledges given from time to time by responsible politicians to get the state to write off these debts."⁸

Kill the kulaks

The "kill the kulaks" mentality of the urban left intelligentsia endorses the view that iniquitous tenurial arrangements prevail in the countryside, and that it is the duty of right-thinking men to rescue the tenant cultivator from "a condition of impecunious servitude" as one document put it. But the tenant himself, with that deplorably false consciousness which is the despair of progressive people everywhere, sees it rather differently.

"Quite apart from mutual economic necessity in the traditional milieu of the village, the landlord and tenant are not viewed as mutually antagonistic classes — as middle-class reformist legislators have viewed the relationship — but as two groups within rural society, often bound by ties of kinship."⁹ Such familistic arrangements, and the inhibiting attitudes they sustain, are not normally the stuff of peasant revolutions.

Yet in 1971 Sri Lanka did almost have a revolution — or at any rate a rural insurrection, usually referred to as "the insurgency", in which somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people may have died. And it is when one considers the nature of this rising that one sees the profoundly misleading character of the analogy drawn between Mr Jayewardene and Charles de Gaulle. For the 1971 insurrection was in important respects a nationalist rising, the result of many years of educational policies designed to reinforce nationalistic sentiments and ideals.

De Gaulle represented in his own person the nationalism he was able to direct and manipulate to his country's advantage. By contrast, the exact opposite is true of Mr Jayewardene. In Sri Lanka today the urbane, Oxford-educated President is the very antithesis of those qualities which distinguish the new, raw, and abrasive nationalistic ethos: the parochial Buddhism of the bhikkus (priests), Sinhala linguistic chauvinism, and a strident hostility to the western culture of the anglicised, English-speaking elite.

To be sure, the nationalist ingredient in the insurrection is not emphasised in most interpretations. Within the Marxist camp a good deal of time has been spent solemnly debating whether the rising was an organized affair at all, or was, instead, merely the spontaneous expression of the rural revolutionary psyche. The answer to this question, needless to say, is felt to be of considerable importance for revolutionary theory. But in addition, the debate has partly reflected the painful domestic problem of fixing responsibility for what happened. If the insurrection was orga­nized, then plainly what had to be done was to round up the organizers and charge and sentence them. But if it wasn't, then one was free to regard those involved as more-or-less innocent creatures of pure emotionality, and to treat them as indulgently as if their actions represented little more than youthful crimes passionels.

In fact there is no doubt at all that whatever organization the insurrection possessed was provided by the Marxist People's Liberation Front, the JVP, and its Moscow-trained leader Rohana Wijeweera — "a professional revolutionary politician, a Marxist-Leninist, a modern Bolshevik, and a proletarian revolutionary", in his own unambiguous words.¹⁰ But this is still only half the story. For when we come to the energies which the JVP was able to direct, the frustrations it was able to exploit, the hostilities it was able to bring into sharper focus — then what we find are forces which have as little to do with Mr Wijeweera as they do with those familiar Marxist visions of the revolutionary oppressed.

A resentful demi-intelligentsia

As is often the case, the true motive for insurrection was not oppression but ressentiment—the ressentiment of the new, post-colonial, Sinhala-educated demi-intelligentsia of high-school graduates, trapped in their unemployed and unemployable thousands in the rural areas, determined not to spend their lives growing rice or tapping rubber trees, filled with high hopes, equipped with meaningless qualifications, sitting bitterly in their hamlets feeling betrayed.

Although they themselves would fiercely reject such an interpretation, there was indeed one sense in which their feeling of betrayal was fully justified. For while, on the one hand, their frustrations were the universal frustrations of unemployable humanities students everywhere, it was in fact the educational policies of successive left-wing nationalist politicians which had ensured that in their case the door to useful employment would be even more firmly closed. These politicians fostered the sort of isolationist education which ensured a trained incapacity for the modem world.

The subjects taught—Buddhist culture, Sinhalese history and literature, Ethics, History, and Art—belong more to the curricular requirements of self-conscious cultural renaissance than to anything else. Anyone morbidly interested in the decline of secular rationalism in our time; in its displacement by every kind of emotional, anti-secular nationalism; and in the melding of these unhealths with messianic politics, will find much to ponder in the state of Sri Lanka's schools and universities today.

Admittedly, assertions about Sri Lanka today (this was written in 1979, RS) must take into account the current efforts of the Jayewardene government to reverse these trends. "Choose your medium of study: Government leaves option of Sinhala, Tamil, or English to student" is the headline on the front page of the Ceylon Daily News for March 25th 1978. And the front-page prominence given to this decision demonstrates the importance the government attaches to the matter.

Until this pronouncement both Tamil and Sinhala students were obliged to study in their own languages, whatever the subject and however inappropriate this might be, from primary right up through tertiary levels. Only students who were neither Tamil nor Sinhala, a tiny minority, were permitted to study in English, and much effort went into translating lectures and texts. One university teacher cleverly rendered his sociology lectures into Sinhala using linguistic "archaeologisms" derived from Sanskrit roots. The result, I am told, is language of an opacity which would astonish even veteran connoisseurs of sociologese. No-one has any idea what it's all about.

Yet what could have had worthier aspirations than the movement for cultural revival? And who could have been a nobler figurehead for such a revival than Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, a noted art historian, a cultural diplomat who interpreted the East to the West, and a scholar who, as Keeper of Indian and Muhammadan Art, was for 30 years one of the most distinguished intellectual ornaments of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts?

Coomaraswamy and cultural nationalism

Today the movement he fathered has been coarsely politicised, and those who regard themselves as his disciples now pursue harshly chauvinistic aims. The tone and manner of the present generation of cultural revivalists may be studied in an article by Sarathchandra Wickramasuriya in the Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities for June 1976 — "A generation of Spiritual Bastards and Intellectual Pariahs". This is how the author characterises those Sri Lankans who choose to honour the cultural inheritance of both East and West. His article reveals much of interest, and gives a clear idea of the decidedly inhumane state of mind which is now parading itself, on Sri Lankan campuses, under the incongruous banner of the "humanities".

The article is intellectually dedicated to Coomaraswamy, and quotes liberally from his works. It is mainly an attack on colonial education for the merciless way it severed "cultural roots" — indeed, from Mr Wickramasuriya's account that's about all it did. Opposed to such a colonial inheritance, he argues, there must come into being the sort of national education which Coomaraswamy seems to have envisaged, an education which "had necessarily to be based upon the respective nation's indigenous languages, indigenous customs, manners, and above all the country's traditional arts, crafts, and literature."

The author does not tell us exactly which of his nation's customs he is most anxious to see preserved in the 20th century, but he does make it perfectly clear that in a truly "national" education there won't be much room for natural science — or indeed science of any kind. After all, a national education is "necessarily" based on other things.

Today the consequences of such an educational emphasis are already apparent, and while it may once have served helpfully to boost battered post-colonial egos, against this must be set the fact that it has sharpened the communal hostilities between Sinhalese and Tamils, has intensified the spirit of linguistic chauvinism, and in its generally anti-rational character has encouraged the development of a society, already astrologically obsessed, which allows itself to be ordered by planetary conjunctions and a whole calendar of endlessly pored-over auspicious dates and times. Mrs Bandaranaike's 19 overseas journeys awaited on the stars. So did Mr Jayewardene's swearing-in.

What is it that leads a highly civilized man to resort to the unpleasant rhetoric of "bastardry" to describe something as commonplace and as healthy as the mingling of cultural traditions? For the phrase about "spiritual bastards" is Coomaraswamy's own. One can only speculate that it goes back to the emotional scars he may have suffered as a child of mixed parentage (his father was the distinguished Sri Lankan, Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy, his mother was English) subjected to the withering environment of a turn-of-the-century British Public School.

Puristic nationalism

But regardless of the original reasons, such invective now serves the narrow purposes of puristic nationalism. Whatever may be the case in other parts of the world, on the contemporary Sri Lankan campus the division between "the two cultures" is assiduously cultivated, and perhaps nowhere is the anti-scientific bias of the "humanitarians" so deliberate and so malign.

Those who uphold science in these circumstances deserve nothing but praise. As if the severe economic handicaps under which they labour were not enough, to have to persevere in an intellectual climate increasingly hostile to the very principles of scientific enquiry is a considerable test of one's morale, energy, and dedication. Yet in spite of everything men and women continue to publish their research in publications such as the Journal of the National Science Council of Sri Lanka and the Ceylon Medical Journal. And in my own case, admiration is combined with the personal gratitude one feels, after being hospitalised in Colombo, for the attentions of a graduate of the Colombo Medical School whose knowledge and capabilities were second to none.

I had heard that only one medical text had been translated into Sinhala, and asked about the political pressure to teach medical courses exclusively in the national tongues. He replied that while linguistic radicalization had been a considerable nuisance, it had been brought to a halt when it was forcefully pointed out to the authorities that if it were taken much further Sri Lankan medical degrees would simply cease to be recognized abroad.

It is to be hoped that the Jayewardene government's new policies will save the situation. But it is late in the day. Already the divisions created by past policies, and the profound differences in educational aims they embody, have caused widespread confusion. Standards are menaced. And inevitably a sauve qui peut attitude has taken hold amongst those English-speaking academics who are still able to find positions overseas. For ten years at least, but accelerating at a spectacular rate during the years of the United Front, they have been fleeing the country while the reputation of Sri Lankan scholarship still stands high.

The diaspora of the intelligentsia

At home, the "diaspora of the intelligentsia" has caused widespread resentment. And this has led to the open assertion of much uglier motives for suppressing English. There were those in the Bandaranaike government, and there are still many active today, who believe that one of the "advantages" of an exclusively Sinhala education is that it ensures that even the brightest scholars will be unable to take their talents overseas. "In the years to come", writes one, "it is the Sinhala-educated rural youth who will play an important role in the future of the country ... The Sinhala rural youth because of his lack of knowledge of English and his inability to reach the close-knit elitist class, will continue to remain in Ceylon as loyal sons of this country."

Cutting a man's foot off so that he cannot run away has always been one way of securing his permanent, if crippled, services. But this is the first time I have seen the resulting incapacity to desert described as "loyalty".

One of J. R.'s first moves was to amnesty all members of the People's Revolutionary Front who were still in jail. During February and March of 1978 the JVP was busy organizing once again, and was having a funds drive — on the one hand going from door to door, and on the other, it appeared, robbing jewellers and banks. Admittedly the police were reluctant positively to identify the affiliation of the well-dressed young people whose daring daylight seizures were being reported every few days.¹² But they implied that the pattern of the attacks did seem familiar.

As for the more prosaic business of soliciting donations door to door, the experience of an elderly woman, who personally supported the UNP, was typical. She heard noises at the front of her house, and arrived there to find three neatly dressed young men standing in her foyer, urging her to buy a copy of their paper, Red Power, and courteously requesting a donation for their cause. An instinct for self-preservation, looking ahead to possible consequences, led her to pay up.

I wish I had witnessed the scene. It was, after all, a profoundly symbolic tableau. In the foreground, the young Sinhala-educated revolutionaries. Behind them, around the walls, the books of an aged member of the old anglicised intelligentsia, now rapidly becoming eclipsed — books embodying a literature and a culture which a national education had ensured the young revolutionaries would never know... The urgent voice of H. G. Wells worrying about the fate of mankind. The civilized meditations of Aldous Huxley. The sturdy entertainments of J. B. Priestley. The art of Virginia Woolf.

A number of works on the shelves dealt with post-war political developments in Asia, among them Derk Bodde's account of the events in Peking in 1949, Peking Diary. I was surprised to leam from it that Mao's troops were already setting up those essential instruments of Chinese public order, the secret denunciation boxes, on Peking street comers only two months after the city was in their hands.

On March 4 the Ceylon Daily News informed its readers that a later conquerer than Mao, Mr Pham Van Dong, had come to town. President Jayewardene welcomed him warmly, and it is a measure of the extent to which even comparatively conservative politicians find it wise to honour Sri Lanka's socialist traditions that he chose this occasion to proclaim his country The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. After this the president gave the victor of Vietnam the following advice: "Violence achieves nothing. Victory achieved by violence does not last. . ."¹³ It was not reported whether Mr Pham was seen to smile; nor whether his local supporters, who on the occasion of his last visit some years ago" stormed the American Embassy, were heard to laugh. Possibly they weren't even there to hear the speech. After all, with the varied excitements of fund-raising to attend to, they did have more urgent things to do.

Sri Lankapore?

Sri Lankapore: one wonders how realistic the notion is. In the context of the newly proclaimed Democratic Socialist Republic it all seemed wildly improbable. Nevertheless, in the very same week that the nation awoke to find itself so precipitately and tendentiously renamed, the Jayewardene government was vigorously pushing ahead with its Free Trade Zone near Colombo, and even dropping hints that other zones in other parts of the country would be declared.

It may well be that the creation of industries which import materials or parts, and then use Sri Lankan labour to fabricate or assemble, will do something to reduce the huge pool of unemployed. I hope so. If one nonetheless has lingering doubts about the final outcome it is because this enterprise will so plainly pit two opposing forces against each other — economic internationalism and cultural xenophobia — in what is bound to lead to a political trial of strength. And from my own reading of the situation the potential of nationalistic xenophobia, energetically organized by those representatives of the left who are now so busy in the universities and schools, cannot be underestimated in any calculation of the long-run trends over the years ahead.

1. Vijaya Samaweera, "Sri Lanka's 1977 General Election: The Resurgence of the UNP", Asian Survey, Dec. 1977.

2. Charles W. Yost, "A Third-World Success Story", The Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 10 1978.

3. Ceylon Daily News, March 3 1978.

4. Colombo "Observer", March 18 1978.

5. N. Balakrishnan, "Industrial Policy and Development Since Independence", in Sri Lanka:A Survey, K. M. de Silva (editor) C. Hurst and Co., London, 1977, p. 198.

6. Ibid., p. 199.

7. L. A. Wickremaratne, "Peasant Agriculture", in Sri Lanka: A Survey, op. cit., p. 246.

8. Ibid., p. 248.

9. Ibid., p. 249.

10. A. C. Alles, Insurgency - 1971, Colombo Apothecaries' Co. Ltd., Colombo, 1976, p. 5.

11. Ibid., p. 255.

12. Ceylon Daily News, March 10 1978; Weekend, March 26 1978.

13. Ceylon Daily News, March 4 1978.