Premadasa Memorial Lecture

(Delivered for the Premadasa Centre Commemoration Meeting May 2000)

Mrs Amaratunga greeting President Premadasa

I cannot begin by thanking the Premadasa Foundation for asking me to speak today, because I have to admit that it was in fact I who suggested this talk, and its title. The reason is a news item I saw in January which I found quite upsetting. This was an article, accompanied by a matching cartoon, entitled ‘Premadasa in a saree?’. It was by a generally very intelligent and perceptive journalist, and it claimed that Mrs Kumaratunga was behaving like Mr President Premadasa in that she proposed to have a referendum so as to avoid a general election.

The comparison was of course nonsensical. Mrs Kumaratunga in fact told her cabinet that she intended to have elections because she was not like J R Jayewardene. And of course the referendum, the infamous referendum of 1982, was Mr Jayewardene’s. However, there is a tendency in what one might call the drawing rooms of Colombo to attribute this, and all other sins of the long UNP regime, to Mr Premadasa. And it is that tendency, which in essence passes almost unquestioned now, that I want to challenge, by recourse to what rarely forms part of political debate in this country, namely a reference to unquestioned facts, to chronological precision, and to rational argument.

Of course this habit of blaming someone you dislike is a common historical phenomenon. It happened in Sri Lanka in the ‘Mahavamsa’ for instance, where you find poor King Mahasena accused of every crime possible. Unless you look at the actual archaealogical remains, you would not realize how much he did, what he built, in terms of both temples and tanks. It happened in early Greek history, with Thucydides who cannot allow the populist Cleon any merit, it happened in Britain where Richard III was accused of killing the Princes in the Tower. An establishment, whether traditional or new, writes history on its own terms. So now, in the drawing rooms of Colombo, President Premadasa is seen as the cause of all that was deplorable in the country’s recent history. And when I saw in January this appalling error of fact I thought one should at least try to do something to set the records straight.

And perhaps I was moved the more because I remembered that this was not the first time I had felt the man was being maligned. Way back in 1993, after the assassination of President Premadasa, he was replaced by possibly the worst President that we have had - and that’s saying a lot, given how severe the competition is for that title. I was away when D B Wijetunge was formally elected to the vacant position by Parliament, and when I came back there was this claim in Colombo that his initials, D B W, stood for ‘Doing Bloody Well’ …… ‘We can now breathe again,’ they said, in the drawing rooms of Colombo, ‘We are safe, we are free.’ And let me pay tribute now to the late founder of the Liberal party, Dr Chanaka Amaratunga , who was the first to explode this bubble, who saw things clearly and told me in July itself that the man was awful, all he was interested in was making money and staying in position for as long as possible. Constitutional reform meant to him only a way of changing the way of electing the President, giving this right to the then Parliament, so that he would be re-elected.

And I was struck then by a thought that has recurred to me often since. It arose from my main discipline, which is Literature, and it was a phrase from a wonderful novel called ‘Jane Eyre’ in which the hero, who wants to marry Jane, is already married to a mad woman. He looks at her, Bertha Mason as her name was, and then looks at Jane, and compares what he has with what he thinks he ought to have, and says ‘And this is my wife!’ You can hear the contempt and despair in his voice as you read what he says. And this phrase occurred to me then when I reflected that we had had a President who, though obviously not perfect, was really quite a good President. But, now that he had been replaced by a clown, people went around saying how wonderful it was that this was our President.

And the phrase occurred to me even more forcefully during the Southern Province election campaign of 1994 when, it will be recalled, Mr Wijetunge managed to alienate all the minorities. He did it very effectively, deliberately I fear, because he thought that if he presented himself as the champion of Sinhala Buddhists he would win a massive majority. So in those days he presented himself as the second Dutugemunu, in the words of one of his most loyal adherents Dr Rajitha Senaratne, who has in fact been a notably loyal follower of whomever he supports at any point. First it was the present President in the days of the Bahujana Nidhahas Pakshaya, then he became President Wijetunge’s most prominent cheerleader, and now it is the turn of poor Ranil Wickremasinghe. Anyway, Dr Senaratne used down in the South to stand on the stage and announce that here was the second Dutugemunu coming to rescue the Sinhala people from these terrible Tamils and Muslims. Then a helicopter would descend into the grounds in Matara or wherever it was, and a little ladder was thrown out, and security men swarmed down it, and then Mr Wijetunge emerged and scuttled down the stairs - he could move very fast, in those days – and then he would run up to the platform and get into a bullet proof glass cage. From there, the door safely shut, he would address the assembled masses in the role of the 2nd Dutugemunu, leading his country against the enemy. And I used to think at the time, ‘And this is our President?’

And I am afraid a similar thought comes to me even now, when I realise that the present President is in a similar situation. She has certainly to be careful because we know that she has in fact been a target of assassination, and it’s certainly not her fault, as with Bertha Mason, that she suffers for the sins of those who came before her. But when I think of her locked up in Temple Trees, a prisoner in that mansion, I think of the first Mrs Rochester, locked up in her attic, rattling around there, unable to deal direct with the world’s realities. And I think as Mr Rochester did, ‘And this is our President?’; and I cannot but compare her with Mr Premadasa in his heyday.

The third thing that made me realise there was something radically wrong with the record happened when I was talking to a former Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, who remarked on the fact that there had been a reign of terror under President Premadasa. When I asked why he said this, he referred to for instance the lawyer Wijedasa Liyanaarachchi who was tortured and killed while in state custody, and also the three boys in Ratnapura who had nails driven through their heads. All this was appalling, I acknowledged, but I pointed out that these incidents had happened while Mr Jayewardene was President. He didn’t believe me at first. But the fact, we should be very clear, is that the worst excesses, excesses that contributed to a heightening of the brutalities on either side, occurred in 1988. Yet all that was soon forgotten, in the urgency to blame Mr Premadasa for everything.

And the phenomenon continues. Very recently I was told again that, however bad things are now, there is no atmosphere of fear as in Premadasa’s time. And when I asked what they meant, the killing of Vijaya Kumaranatunga was given as an example. There was astonishment, and possibly disbelief, when I pointed out that that had taken place in February 1988, when Mr Jayewardene was still talking of running for yet another term as President.

And not only have people in Colombo forgotten precision about dates and sequences, you actually have a situation now where this government has set up several commissions all of which seem designed to prove that Mr Premadasa killed everybody. He killed Mr Vijaya Kumaranatunga, he killed Gen. Kobbekaduwa, he killed Mr Athulathmudali, and I have even heard it said that he killed Mr Dissanayake – though that, I was hastily assured, was a mistake, when it was pointed out that Mr Dissanayake died a year and a half after President Premadasa. I am waiting indeed for the commission that will say he killed himself, for that too is a story I have heard from those who cannot conceive anything positive about him.

Such a level of absurdity has worried me for some time now, because it is by refusing to face facts that we promote a situation when the excesses of the past will easily be repeated. Finally in January, with the preposterous claim about the referendum, I thought there was a case to try to get the record straight. And so, given that at that time the UNP too had been fighting shy of Mr Premadasa’s legacy, and it was only the Premadasa Centre that had continued a steadfast allegiance, I thought of volunteering my services. They accepted very graciously, though I suspect they wondered what I would say, when I gave them the title I preferred, Ranasinghe Premadasa and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy.

The main point of the title is of course that he cannot be held responsible for all the horrors that occurred. Having said that however, the title does make clear that, when Mr Premadasa became President, Liberal Democracy was in need of restoration. If Mr Premadasa helped to restore it, which I believe he did, we must also acknowledge that it needed to be restored. That means that it had been destroyed, which we must acknowledge had happened in the preceding decade, when in fact he was in government, which means that he must bear some of the responsibility for what occurred. One cannot gainsay the fact that he was a member, he was in fact Prime Minister, of the most awful regime this country has endured, a regime that institutionalised authoritarianism and promoted sectarianism, and for that reason he has to be seen as guilty.

But in some mitigation as least let us say that, even though Mr Premadasa was Prime Minister, he really had no power at all. He should have resisted and he didn’t, he went along with all those awful measures, beginning with this preposterous constitution. But in that respect he is no more guilty than all those other members of the UNP who were in power during that period, including Mr Athulathmudali, Mr Dissanayake, Mr Ranil Wickremasinghe, even Mr Ronnie de Mel. All of them watched while the institutions of democracy were traduced, the opposition, the judiciary, the media, the franchise. They said nothing when their colleagues engaged in racist violence, and they all relished the trappings and the fruits of power. But most of them, coming as they do from the class that makes opinions, are not seen as irredeemably guilty. It is Mr Premadasa who is put beyond the pale, largely I would suggest because the establishment does not see him as ‘one of us’, as they do all the others.

Of course it could be said that he was different, he was after all Prime Minister, which means that he was involved in the decision making process. That is clearly a foolish argument, given how things have been in actuality over the last decade. The fact is, even though one has the title of Prime Minister, one really has no power at all. Leaving aside Mr Wijetunge in the days when he occupied the post, we have only to consider our present Prime Minister. I have no doubt that her mind at any rate still functions well, but she clearly contributes nothing either to the process or the policy decisions of government. Indeed, despite or perhaps because of her age, she is just a tool in the hands of real authority.

As an instance of this, let me recall the incident about 4 years ago when she was told to introduce a motion depriving Mr Wijepala Mendis of his civic rights. She herself had been deprived of her civic rights 20 years ago, in a very unfair manner that involved parliament setting aside a decision by the Court of Appeal through a retroactive Constitutional Amendment. She knew that what the present government was doing was wrong. I wrote to her at the time, suggesting that she should not move the motion, since apart from the injustice it would also seem to validate what had been done to her. She took note of that letter, I was told, and Mr Lakshman Jayakody mentioned in that context that she was not keen to do this, and in fact the motion was shelved. But then, some months later, she did move the motion because, as Prime Minister, she has to do what she is told by the bosses. And the bosses, I am afraid, are not only the President but also those who surround the President, those who carry tales, those whose adverse reports lead, in our top heavy system, to punishment and deprivation.

So, if not quite in the same way as poor Mrs Bandaranaike, we can see why Mr Premadasa as Prime Minister did what he was told. So too we must grant that he also contributed to the appalling constitutional chicanery that took place in the 70s and 80s, and to the repression that led to really virulent terrorism breaking out in the North and in the South in the late 80s.

And we have to go further. It is also true that in the year 1989 he presided over the crushing of JVP terrorism in a markedly brutal fashion. That cannot be denied. However I think here there are a few more notable mitigating factors. One is that, given the situation he inherited, emergency measures were called for. Secondly, he did try to arrange a ceasefire, and there is reason to believe he was genuine in this, because he appointed to monitor the ceasefire a committee that was not a committee of yes men, and that checked out the situation carefully and wrote a markedly independent report. Still, the ceasefire did not bear fruit, hostilities were resumed, and we did have a very bloody period in the latter half of 1989.

But deplorable as this was, what I also find sad is that everyone associates that period with Mr Premadasa, and sees him as almost solely responsible for it, while there is no critical memory of who actually directed operations. Mr Ranjan Wijeratne, another person who was indubitably ‘one of us’, a denizen of the drawing rooms of Colombo, is considered sacrosanct, not to be referred to as a murderer. He is simply a man who did his duty, who saved the country from the terror. Perhaps that too is a legitimate point of view. Whether he contributed to the conditions that led to terror is not perhaps a fair question. I address it however because I remember that, in the days when the Liberal party was young, we ran a little competition on who would make the best successor to Mr Jayewardene. I was younger then, and naïve, and I thought Ranjan Wijeratne, with his reputation for honesty and efficiency and so on, would be a good candidate. I remember however being told by somebody that, though he would be quite wonderful, everyone would be dead: the country would be very prosperous but no one would be left to enjoy this.

And we have to remember, with regard to what happened in 1989, for which both Mr Premadasa and Mr Wijeratne have to bear responsibility as well as all those in the UNP government of the time, that there was at that time a balance of power between two violent forces. Given that Mr Premadasa headed what was to all intents and purposes a duly elected government, and that he had offered a ceasefire which was turned down, I am not quite sure what else he could have done except offer the solution provided by Mr Wijeratne. Of course there were excesses, and culpable excesses, which should have been avoided. But in fairness to Mr Premadasa it should be recognized that he took the first opportunity he could to disband the death squads which had by the end of 1989 taken on a life of their own.

This was after the murder of Richard de Zoysa, when the public outcry, the determination of his mother to identify the killers, the international pressure, contributed to a sense that things had to change. And here admittedly I speculate, but my view is that Mr Premadasa took the opportunity at this stage to reassert what might be called civilian control. The week after Richard de Zoysa’s death it was reported to his mother that Mr Wijeratne had had a party at the BMICH at which he had thanked the squads for their work, promised them immunity for what had been done, and then made it clear that henceforth, if they did anything illegal, they were on their own.

So the death squads were disbanded. It was with that that the legacy of the Jayewardene years was left behind. And I think that when we judge Mr Premadasa’s record we have to recognise that it was after the mess he had inherited was cleared up that his real years of government began. It was only three years, three short years from 1990 to 1993. But what he achieved during that period was I think quite remarkable.

To explain then my use of a title like Ranasinghe Premadasa and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy, I shall refer to three areas that I think lie at the heart of the concept. This may not be easily understood at first, since there are some aspects of Liberal Democracy which are really not understood in Sri Lanka. We believe that we are a democracy and, just as we think we speak English better than the English, we think we run a democracy better than the English. And in discussing the concept we claim that we have experienced two different democratic alternatives, the present Presidential system and the Parliamentary or Westminster system.

With regard to the latter, we introduced into the constitution the concept that parliament is supreme, and indeed even in the present system we have kept clauses that affirm the supremacy of parliament over almost all other branches of government. This we claim follows a British model. However, in Britain there is no constitution, and while therefore in theory Parliament can legislate at will, in fact even before accession to the European Union the British parliament regulated itself. Sri Lankan parliaments however have arrogated absolute powers, to themselves directly as in the 1972 constituion, and then to a hybrid of the President and themselves in the 1978 constitution. And perhaps because of what Michael Roberts describes as the Asokan Paradigm, but also because it has been constitutionally entrenched, the leader goes unchallenged, whether it is a Prime Minister as before 1978 or a President as after that.

That I am afraid is not democracy, or at any rate not liberal democracy. J R Jayewardene could claim that as an elected leader he could do anything, except change the sex of his subjects, but in a liberal democracy any power must be limited. And to ensure that, to ensure that power is exercised in accordance with law and justice, you need other institutions that are independent, chief amongst which is the judiciary.

Now there is a lot that is wrong with the system of appointments to the judiciary in this country. There is discussion about changing this, and I believe this is an area on which consensus may be reached. At present however what happens is that the President has an unlimited discretion. And unfortunately we have had examples of the misuse of that discretion by at least two of our Presidents. We know that J R Jayewardene first appointed his own lawyer as Chief Justice, and then later passed over the most Senior Supreme Court Justice and appointed someone junior who he was sure would never go against his wishes. And I have to admit that I thought Mr Premadasa would do something similar. When the vacancy arose in 1991, I thought that he would appoint the then Attorney General who had behaved disgracefully over the Richard de Zoysa case. Indeed the Attorney General thought he would be appointed, and there was certainly room to think that he may have acted as he did in Richard’s case, where he refused to charge the people against whom evidence was given, mainly because he expected to be made Chief Justice.

However Mr Premadasa instead appointed Mr G P A Silva who has I think been universally recognised over the last 10 years as an absolutely independent entity. And looking then at his other judicial appointments, you realized that every appointment he made was of the most senior person available. That seems to me evidence that he was at least trying to build up the institution as a independent entity in a manner that had been neglected in the previous decade. That had seen cavalier appointments, the barracking of judges who gave independent judgments, contempt towards such judgments through executive action. Nothing of the sort occurred in Mr Premadasa’s time

And one remembers all that when one thinks of what happened earlier this year when Mrs Kumaratunga appointed the Attorney General Mr Sarath Silva to be Chief Justice. Now there is nothing wrong in appointing the Attorney General as Chief Justice, it is an accepted practice, and this particular Attorney General was clearly a very able man. Still, I only wish Mr Silva had not prior to his exalted appointments sat on commissions such as the Vijaya Kumaranatunga commission and produced conclusions that suited the government without any regard to fact or the rules of evidence. In this regard I should note that I have been told by Manouri Muttetuwegama, whose integrity cannot be doubted, and who was a Director of Lake House at the time, that the report in the ‘Daily News’ was misleading, and that my criticism of the judgement was unfair. But the impression given in the paper was that Mr Silva claimed Vijaya Kumaranatunga must have been killed by Mr Premadasa because Mr Premadasa was the UNP Presidential candidate and Vijaya Kumaranatunga would be his strongest rivaln (Quote ‘"Vijaya had become the formidable rival and opponent of the Prime Minister (i.e. Mr. Premadasa) at the Presidential election scheduled for later that year." (p.63) Unquote).

Now this, as any of you who were around in 1988 know, is arrant nonsense. And if that sort of statement is made by someone who aspires to the post of Chief Justice and then is appointed, one certainly fears for the independence of the judiciary. As I said it could be claimed that the appointment was not wrong, it is certainly permitted by our constitution and by previous practice, but the fact is that it does take away from what Mr Premadasa established, which is appointments to such influential positions that no one could question or criticize. And in that respect I think we see the basic difference between a man who was confident that what he was doing was the right thing and what people wanted, and those who need to be propped up by their own adherents.

And so too it is a fact that under Mr Premadasa no one doubted the results of elections. I am not saying there weren’t irregularities, there have always been irregularities, but despite these right through until 1977 we always felt that the final result was what the people wanted. After that there were serious doubts, including with regard to Mr Premadasa’s own election as President, though for that you cannot blame him since it was the JVP call for a boycott that most damaged Mrs Bandaranaike. After Mr Premadasa took over as President however, in the local government elections in 1991, and the Eastern Province elections a couple of years later, all the results were such that everyone accepted them as genuine. That wasn’t the case before him, and I am sorry to say, after the Wayamba Provincial Council election, that it has not always been the case since.

So too with the media. It is extraordinary, not that the present government claims it has restored media freedom, because of course any government would like the credit for that, but rather that so many people believe it. This is despite the fact that a simple glance back in time will reveal that independent journals that were very critical of the government like ‘Ravaya’ began under Mr Premadasa. They were critical of government during Mr Premadasa’s time. And yet you have this strange association of interests opposed to Mr Premadasa, so that people say it was either this government or Mr Wijetunge who liberated the media. Again, licenses for independent radio and television were first given in Mr Premadasa’s time. There were some restrictions, but the fact is that the whole concept of an independent media really developed then. So, if we consider the basic attitude in his time to institutions that furnish parallel power bases to government, I think we can recognize someone who really understood what Liberal Democracy is about.

The second area I wish to consider is that of economic policy. Here what we are told is that it was Mr Jayewardene who opened up the economy. To some extent that is true, in that the whole idea of large scale involvement of the private sector in economic activity, and the rejection of the statist socialism of the 60s and early 70s, began with Mr Jayewardene. But Mr Jayewardene was not really interested in economic development, what he stood for was crony capitalism. So he allowed private sector economic activity in some areas, but in others in fact he took over things so that at the end of his tenure proportionately more of the economy was in state hands than in 1977. The actual process of privatisation, handing back to the private sector what successive governments had taken over, began with Mr Premadasa. And even though the present government sometimes claims that the privatisation wasn’t done honestly or transparently, there was certainly more transparency than happens now. I think if you compare the privatisation of the plantations that began under Mr Premadasa with what has happened to Air Lanka or indeed the quite preposterous gas deal done with Shell, you see the difference straight away. It is a simple fact that there were no allegations of corruption when the plantations were privatized, and the deal whereby 22 private sector companies took over management of the plantations, a very brilliant piece of work that ensured competition, is seen as unquestionably above board. And whomsoever you blame for what is happening now, such is clearly not the case at present.

And there was not only privatisation, there were corrective measures with regard to the irregularities of the Jayewardene government. Whenever my students who have been brought up on statist economic principles criticize privatisation by mentioning the Shell deal, I point out what happened to telephones when private sector involvement was first permitted, and then what happened afterwards when proper principles were followed with regard to private sector activity. Initially, private sector involvement in telephones, limited to mobile phones, was in terms of a monopoly for Celltel, which was granted to the son of Mr Jayewardene’s secretary together with the son of a senior Civil Servant. Celltels then cost millions as you remember. When Mr Premadasa came in, and it was decided to introduce competition, there was an attempt to restrict this to just one company. But two licenses were given, and as a result the price of mobile telephones plummeted. Of course that is just one example, but it goes to show someone who understood that privatisation has to go together with competition. With such a lesson behind us, what happened with regard to gas is truly startling. The charitable explanation is that it was a blunder, but I think this is not the time to be charitable, when so much damage is being done.

So you can see that the idea of a private sector driven economy was pushed by Mr Premadasa, and he took it far enough for it to be impossible for anyone to roll back what was done. There are people in this government who would very happily do so, though fortunately I don’t think the President is one of them. Yet given the outlook of her party I think it would have been difficult to move forward were it not that Mr Premadasa had moved far enough and fast enough to make retreat impossible.

The third area which I think is particularly important is the question of empowerment. What I refer to by this is the third aspect of liberalism that, in the modern context and in a country like ours, is particularly important. The rule of law to restrict the exercise of power is a vital aspect of liberalism, and so is economic freedom. But liberals in situations such as ours must also be keenly aware of what John Rawls called the ‘maxi-min’ principle, the idea that the state needs to ensure that the lot of the worst off improves. In this regard I think the efforts Mr Premadasa made to extend development to areas that were otherwise not developed was really stupendous. I still remember when he started his garment factory programme, that I too thought this was somewhat impractical. I remember a friend who owned a garment factory near Katunayake saying that what was required was impossible, that if they opened a garment factory in Hambantota they would have to close the factory in the Free Trade Zone.

It was only later that I realised that Mr Premadasa’s point would have been that this was just what he wanted. If you can only have one factory, have it in the poorest part of the country, not in the Free Trade Zone. Have it where the workers can live at home and therefore actually use the money they make, not near the capital where they pay enormous boarding fees and get very little out of it. And developing this cult of industrialisation all over the country was an inspiring move, a more dynamic step than Sri Lanka had experienced for years. The results were remarkable. If for instance you recall places like Vavuniya 20 years ago, and look at what happened to it during Mr Premadasa’s three years in office, you will realise that it turned into a boom town.

So too the Eastern Province was developing apace, and when you see its situation now and register what has been thrown away during the last 4 years, because the General wanted to hoist the flag in Jaffna, you see the difference between planned and random actions. What has happened in the last few years is that forces in the East were withdrawn, economic development stopped and you now have a situation where nothing is moving, so that if you are a young Tamil student in school it is quite understandable that you join the LTTE because you have got nothing else to do, nothing to hope for. Mr Premadasa on the contrary understood the fundamental fact that one of the main causes of separatism was the lack of development at the periphery, in the Tamil as well as the Sinhala regions. The failure of this government to address itself to these issues is I think a reason to assume that we will not have a successful settlement of the Northern problem.

I suspect too that we will also soon have another Southern problem, because if you contrast the activity or the lack of activity of the Southern Development Authority with the measures Mr Premadasa took you will see the difference between someone who really believed government is about deprived people and a dispensation that has no idea what is going on in other parts of the country. Whereas in Mr Premadasa’s time, going hand in hand with particular targets was the very solid development of infrastructure through for instance the Gam Udawa programme that the people in the drawing rooms of Colombo thought was just an expensive Birthday party.

I suppose you have to be aware of the situation in the country at large to understand that that programme was instead a very subtle way of ensuring infrastructural development in distant areas. And you look at the list of Gam Udawa sites over the last decade of his life and you realise how he targeted them very carefully. So the fact that this sort of exercise no longer occurs seems to me again symptomatic of a dispensation that has ceased to know or to care.

So my argument is that if you take these areas, areas I think are important for the functioning or developing of liberal democracy – first the building up independent institutions that are able to stand by themselves and to challenge the executive and the legislative authorities, second the encouragement of private sector activity and going further and ensuring that it is the engine of development in every respect, and third the requirement of modern liberalism that you use state resources primarily to develop those areas that otherwise wouldn’t get anything - if as I said you consider all these areas, you realise that here is someone who can be described as a genuine liberal democrat.

And that is the sense in which I think the restoration of liberal democracy was primarily due to Mr Premadasa. I mean then both the democratic part, which had been destroyed over 11 years, and the liberal part which perhaps hadn’t even existed because of 20 or 30 years of statist socialism. And I think that if he had lived we would have also had more input from the private sector in areas such as social services, education and so on, input which is essential if we are to develop.

Now in dealing with Mr Premadasa’s years in office, I would like to suggest that apart from his acquiescence in the excesses of the 1977-88 government, Mr Premadasa had one major problem. This is that he found it difficult to work with some people. This was a pity. Had he tried to work together with Mr Athulathmudali and Mr Dissanayake, I think he could have harnessed their great talents. I may be wrong of course, there may have been great difficulties, but we should note that in general he was very very good at picking able people and allowing them to work on their own. He was able to devolve both the powers of central government to local institutions, and what might be termed personal power to people of ability whom he allowed to run particular sections of the administration with a free hand. And that again is unfortunately not something we see now, when the calibre of those who make and implement decisions is disappointing, so that it seems everything has to be referred back to the central authority and even then doesn’t work. For instance, if we look at the new educational reforms - which are really quite good, though not especially new since they are by and large the reforms prescribed by the Commission Mr Premadasa set up in the early 90s, and the Chairman he appointed continues to chair not only the Commission but also the National Institute of Education – there are problems in implementation because no one quite knows who is in charge. Is it the Presidential Secretariat? Is it the President? Is it her Social Advisor Dr De Mel? Is it the Minister of Education Mr Pathirana? Is it the Ministry Secretary Prof Gunawardena? Is it the National Institute of Education? No one is sure. And I think in Mr Premadasa’s day there would have been a clear chain of command and a solid system for reporting back. He was very good at that, and that is a skill that seems to have been lost.

Again, whereas he was efficient and imaginative in developing local government institutions, now we have a situation where the whole question of devolution is tied up in politics and pride and ethnicity. The Liberal party has long believed in much more devolution than we have now, but devolution based on the principle of Subsidiarity where you actually pass on more administrative powers to smaller units, Pradeshiya Sabhas or Zonal Authorities or whatever, where you don’t decentralize from Colombo only to centralize in Galle or Trincomalee or Ratnapura. Our belief is that you have to allow certain decisions to be made in much smaller areas, districts or zones, and M Premadasa tried to do this. The Pradeshiya Sabhas he started were working quite well and they could have been taken further. Now however no one has any idea about what will happen to them. So in those respects I think there was a lot that he tried, a lot that I think any future government interested in development who do well to look at.

So much then for his work, his innovations, and the principles upon which I believe he worked. Yet now, before I conclude, I would like to make yet another literary reference, one that has often occurred to me when I think of the struggle Mr Premadasa had to win acceptance, and how, right through his life and more so now, there are many who refuse to think of him as a leader on a par with the rest. In this regard I am reminded of one of my favorite novels, called ‘Lord Jim’. As many people may not know it well, let me briefly relate the story.

It is about a character who dreams in his youth of accomplishing much in his life. However, as a young sailor he jumps from the ship he was supposed to be in charge of, leaving those who depended on him to drown. Later he cannot quite understand why he jumped, instead of behaving heroically as he always thought he would. He argues that he didn’t really mean to jump and that some day he will prove himself, he will do the right thing if he gets the chance. And he does get such a chance, he gets his own area to run, and he does a fantastic job. But at the end one little problem which I won’t go into in detail occurs, and a friend of his dies because he wasn’t careful enough, and he has to accept responsibility for it. He realises that what he has achieved is over, he can accomplish nothing more because no one will trust him again, and so he goes upto his friend’s father and basically says, ‘ Shoot me.’

Now I don’t think the parallels can be taken too far, and it may just be me being fanciful, but I think Mr Premadasa, working for 11 years under Mr Jayewardene in a context in which the priorities were all Colombo based, really felt ashamed later of what he had done. And when he finally did become President, having gone through much in order to get the post, he tried to work extremely hard and he did work extremely well, once he was able to function freely. For three years he did a great job. But then he had a little problem, when some in his party left him and the DUNF was set up. Still, I think that that could have proved a great opportunity, for if you had had extremely able and intelligent people on either side you might actually have developed a government and opposition network that could have proved beneficial as in more open political dispensations.

Unfortunately in the run up to Provincial Council elections of 1993, Mr Athulathmudali was shot. Now I know there are people who claim that Mr Premadasa was responsible for the murder, but this I don’t believe for a moment. But I do believe that he should have been more careful about insisting on security for his principal opponent. The security arrangements for that meeting were really not very good. Who was responsible for it I don’t know, but I think Mr Premadasa realised after Mr Athulathmudali was dead that no one was now going to believe that he was not involved. And it really made him feel very upset, and if you listened to his last speech, you would realise that this was some one who felt he had lost a lot himself by Mr Athulathmudali’s death. The story goes that the Indian Embassy had actually warned both of them that the LTTE was gunning for both, and they both should have taken greater precautions, but obsessed by their own rivalry they didn’t. And then, after Mr Athulathmudali had died, Mr Premadasa was indeed in a difficult situation.

I think then sometimes that perhaps the ending of ‘Lord Jim’ has its parallels, so I would like to end with a quote from that book, bearing in mind that one of the great difficulties Mr Premadasa had was with the elite establishment in Colombo that kept telling him he was not one of them. Not part of the elite, not part of the group of people who alone deserved in their book to run the country. And however well he did they kept saying that he was not doing a good job, how could he, for he was not one of them.

So let me end with a few lines from the end of ‘Lord Jim’, lines that I think are singularly appropriate to Mr Premadasa in his dying -

He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success! For it may very well be that in the short moments of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side…

Is he satisfied – quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us

Rajiva Wijesinha