"Tiruchelvam, a leading and influential ideologue of Tamil separatist movement, had signaled it on Independence Day, leaving no doubt about their political agenda. In keeping with the separatist ideology of Jaffna Tamils ONLY, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, father of Jaffna Tamil separatism, launched his Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi, (Tamil State Party disguised in English as Federal Party) on December 18, at the General Clerical Service Union headquarters in Maradana, Colombo."
(November 09, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) Three separate political events took place on February 4, 1948 in close proximity to each other. The consequences of all three events rolled down the post-independence decades dragging the nation from one crisis to another. Each moved, oftentimes interacting with each other, until they all spiraled down into a cauldron of exploding violence.
Two of the major events of the Independence Day took place on the city end Galle Road. The Marxists held a mass rally at the Galle Face Green to condemn what they described as the “fake independence” (eeniya nidahasa). It began around 2.30 p.m. and the setting sun was directly in the eyes of the seething mass of heads who were squinting at the fire ball taking its own cool time to sink into the horizon. I was among them, a raw teenager ready to receive any messianic message that would salvage the world and deliver it into a just and fair society laden with the cornucopia of perennial goods and services. I was waiting patiently in the wilting sun, like any other head in that committed gathering, to take in every word that fell from the lips of legendary Marxist leaders, some of whom had attained the romantic status of “exemplary revolutionaries” for having challenged aggressively not only the might of he British Raj but also for slipping out of British jails during World War II. They were then the most formidable political force outside the first post-independence government headed by D. S. Senanayake.
The Marxist elite came from the plantocracy, academia, and professional and intellectual domains. But they were fragmented into irreconcilable ideological camps. On Independence Day they were divided into rival Stalinist and Trotskyite parties mainly. The Trotskyites too were divided into Bolshevik Leninist Party of India headed by Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Doric de Souza, English lecturer at Peradeniya University, Bernard Soyza etc. The Stalinists were led by Dr. S. A. Wickremesinghe, the good doctor from Matara ably assisted by the Cambridge returnee, Pieter Keuneman, and N. Shamuganthan etc. Philip Gunawardena, who was also known as the “father of Marxism”, split from the Lanka Sama Samaja Party headed by Dr. N. M. Perera and formed the Nava Lanka Sama Samaja Party.
On the first day of independence the fragmented Marxists shed their ideological differences temporarily to unite against the United National Party, a coalition of multi-ethnic leaders who joined hands to set sail on uncharted waters to define the contours of the new nation and its future as they sailed along. The Tamils, the Muslims, the Burghers and even some Europeans rallied round the pragmatic and far-sighted leadership of D. S. Senanayake who had earned the coveted status of being the “Father of the nation”.
By and large, they constituted the conservative leadership of the day. It was this elitist leadership that was holding the glittering state celebrations of independence at “Temple Trees”, the official residence of the Prime Minister, D. S. Senanayake, which was only a few hundred yards away from Galle Face Green where the Marxists were lambasting the new government. The Galle Face protest meeting was over around 8 p.m. and the bus I took that night to go home went pass the “Temple Trees”, illuminated like a Wesak lantern. It did not inspire any nationalist fervour in me.
The aggressive anti-imperialist role played by the Trotskyites in particular during the War – the Communists were collaborating with the British who were allies of Soviet Union fighting the common enemy, Hitler -- convinced me that they were the genuine patriots who would defend the nation and protect the masses. I swallowed the Marxist version of history uncritically. My headpiece was filled with the anti-establishment ideologies fed to me by my political heroes of Left. On the way home I told myself that the celebrations at “Temple Trees” were a mockery of independence where the decadent bourgeoisie was having a good time at our expense.
More than that, I felt that the Senanayake government had no right to celebrate independence because they had signed secret agreements with the British to lease Trincomalee harbour and other bases. We were told by our Marxist leaders that the Senanayakes has sold the nation to the Western bloc and Ceylon (as it was known then) would be a target for the enemies. We were told that in the imperialist West would wage their next world war against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the model society for the Third World countries.
The Marxist clichés of the time and its ideological panacea had fixed my mind in a state of certainty that no counter argument could change my opinion. Even after I read the God that Failed, the confessions of the leading icons of Let-wingers like the poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, some of whom had fought in the Spanish Civil War behind the Communist barricades against fascist Franco backed by Hitler, I stuck to my ideological fixations. Besides, the earful I received at Galle Face Green was still ringing my ears. I believed every word of what I heard. I still remember the opening sentence of Dr. Colvin R. de Silva who was invariably presented as the last speaker because he could weave a spell-binding rhetoric to electrify the crowds and keep them transfixed. In his characteristic hoarse voice he thundered: “If there are enemies in this Galle Face Green today, I address them also, because I know our enemies are also here to spy on us. Therefore, I say comrades, friends and enemies!” I was enthralled by the audacity of the challenge he threw down from his platform to the CID spies. I thought it was great.
Those words were echoing in my head and when I passed “Temple Trees”. It was not a symbol of inspiration to me. Nor did it invoke any nationalist sentiment in me. On the contrary, I felt that it was the last bastion of the enemies of the nation. The Senanayakes and the Bandaranaikes were, to me, the failed bourgeois/comprador leaders who were driving the nation to ground. Hardly anyone in my circle had a good word for the Senanayakes and the Bandaranaikes. Our youthful milieu consisted mainly of Left-leaning intellectuals who seemed to know what they were talking about. They came across as those who knew what was wrong with our society and what remedies were required to solve the problems. Ideology ruled over reality.
On the Day of Independence the Senanayakes and the Bandaranaiakes at “Temple Trees” and the Marxists are the Galle Face end were staging two great events that had a lasting impact on the subsequent developments of the new nation. Both forces were poised as the two formidable forces heading for a “revolutionary” conflict out of which a new and a better world would be born, I thought. I believed that the coming class war would end in a glorious revolution (our model was the October Revolution which I didn’t know at the time that it actually took place in November!) as the final solution to usher in the new era of eliminating grinding poverty and establishing a heaven on earth. The Marxists always kept promising that the revolution was coming round corner, but it never came. However, when it did come in the distorted version of the JVP uprising of 1971 the fathers of the revolution were caught unawares. Taken aback, Dr. N. M. Perera accused the JVPers of being CIA agents.
Apart from these two major events there was a third event that was taking place on Independence Day which was never recorded at the time or even noticed by anyone except the passenger in the car that was cruising in the suburbs of Colombo. The car was flying a flag which was not known to many in the south. Inside the car was Murugeysen Tiruchelvam, who was the then Deputy Solicitor-General. It was the Nandi (Bull) flag, heralding the Tamil separatist movement. (See, Senator Tiruchelvam’s Legacy – p 22, edited by Ram Balasubramanian, Vijitha Yapa Publications., 2007). It was the symbol of Tamil separatists before Velupillai Prabhakaran dictated the design of his MGM-style flag to a street artist in the streets of Chennai, who, following instructions, drew a snarling tiger putting his head out of a ring of 33 bullets crossed by two guns with fixed bayonets.
Though Tiruchelvam’s flag-flying exercise was the least known event at the time it turned out to be the symbol of the most divisive and violent of events to come, challenging the nation, its identity, its sovereignty, territorial integrity and its future. It foreshadowed the events that were to unfold with disastrous consequences, mostly to the Jaffna Tamils. Eventually, it overtook Marxist “revolutionary” movements and emerged as the most brutal of violent movements.
Tiruchelvam’s provocative political act in 1948, incidentally, was not instigated by the rise of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, or his Sinhala Only Bill of 1956, or the Citizenship Bill passed by the D. S. Senanayake’s multi-ethnic government with the consent of G. G. Ponnambalam, the acknowledged leader of the Tamils at the time. Nor was this act prompted by Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike or Mr. N. Q. Dias, one of the most brilliant civil servants who steered the nation both from within and from outside the public service in its formative stage in the post-independence era..
Tiruchelvam’s singular act signaling separatism is a key event that points to the failure of the left-leaning and pro-separatist sociologists, political scientists, historians, academics, journalists and usual claque in NGOs to understand the post-colonial forces unleashed by the mono-ethnic political forces that has been gathering momentum from the 19th century after Arumuka Navalar consolidated the casteist forces under the Hindu ideology. He elevated the Vellahalas (sudras, the agricultural labourers) who came from the feet of Brahma, according to classical Hinduism, to that of the highest caste, nearest to the Brahmins (in the absence of Brahmins in Jaffna), who came from the head of Brahma. It was a religious revival that handed power to the Vellahlas who abused it to oppress and persecute the low-castes of Jaffna in the most brutal fashion.
More than any other force, it is the Vellahala factor that dominated the feudal, colonial and post-independence politics. Their impact on Jaffna politics, and consequently national politics, has been under-written, under-reported and under-analyzed. The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), which boasted of being the leading research centre for South Asia, studiously avoided peeping over the cadjan fences of Jaffna while all resources were directed explore the Sinhala-Buddhist south to manipulate their partisan political agenda. ICES like other NGOs focused exclusively on the Sinhala-Buddhist with each publication, seminar, lecture, exhibition etc., blaming only the Sinhala-Buddhists.
With these forces ganging up against the Sinhala-Buddhists, the conventional interpretation of events pointed the finger at Bandaranaike and the rise of suppressed and oppressed forces in 1956. But as the sequence of events proves, the Tamils did not need any provocation from the south to pursue separatist politics. The manipulated and the craftily nurtured political culture of Jaffna advanced incrementally, over the feudal, colonial and post-independence years, to consolidate the mono-ethnic grip of the Vellahla ruling class. Tiruchelvam, a leading and influential ideologue of Tamil separatist movement, had signaled it on Independence Day, leaving no doubt about their political agenda. In keeping with the separatist ideology of Jaffna Tamils ONLY, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, father of Jaffna Tamil separatism, launched his Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi, (Tamil State Party disguised in English as Federal Party) on December 18, at the General Clerical Service Union headquarters in Maradana, Colombo.
In assessing the manifestations of historical forces it is an indispensable requirement to follow the sequence of events, with the preceding event leading to the subsequent event. The impact and the consequences of political forces can be understood rationally only if the sequence is arranged and analysed according to the dates that produces history in a logical and consequential order. In history letter “B” inexorably and invariably follows letter “A” always and not vice versa.
The discourse on Sri Lankan events had gone awry leading to unacceptable levels of violence because the pundits who claim to know their onions brushed aside this basic principle. The starting point of those who traced Sri Lankan events was not “A” but “B”. (“B”, incidentally, stands also for Bandaranaike). This reversal of the calendrical order distorted their perspectives. It was, of course, convenient for their partisan political agenda. But it did not help them grasp the natural order of events flowing from one to another. They, in fact, pretended that “A” does not exist in their historical calendar. A whole new school of social scientists, imbued more with partisan ideology than reality, re-wrote history using “B” as the starting point. They refused to acknowledge the preceding events that began with “A”. There was a method in their madness: if they acknowledged “A” then they would have to reject “B” as the cause of the on-going Sri Lankan crisis. If they incorporated the inner logic of their selected sequence of events it would have denied them their preferred position of hiding behind a mono-causal theory that blamed only the Sinhala-Buddhists.
So what constitutes “A”? It is symbolized comprehensively and unambiguously in the Nandi flag flown by Tiruchelvam on Independence Day. It was a highly provocative act that foreshadowed the direction of peninsular politics. It was also and act of defiance threatening the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the new nation. It marked the beginning of the aggressive and confrontational politics that would be launched by the northern political class/caste against the south exacerbating inter-ethnic relations. It was a declaration of the elitist Jaffna political class/caste that rejected out of hand any willingness to live peacefully in a multi-cultural society. It was a blatant declaration of the commitment of one single minority community to live only in a mono-ethnic domain carved out of fictitious history and concocted geography. Any doubts about the political agenda of Jaffna Tamils were dispelled on December 18, 1949 when Tiruchelvam’s political guru, Chelvanayakam, launched the Tamil State Party.
It should also be noted that it was a decision made only by the Tamil-speaking minority of Jaffna without the mass backing of the other three Tamil-speaking communities, the Muslims of the east, the Indian Tamils of the central hills or even the Tamils of the east who were considered to be inferior to that of the Jaffna Tamils. In fact, Chelvanayakam’s move to build a pan-Tamil movement (iyakkam) collapsed because the localized and limited political interests of non-Jaffna Tamils did not coincide with the broader and larger objectives of Chelvanayakam’s move to grab a disproportionate share power from the majority. It was this community that opted for separatism long before Bandaranaike ever became a force in the south.
Two of the major events of the Independence Day took place on the city end Galle Road. The Marxists held a mass rally at the Galle Face Green to condemn what they described as the “fake independence” (eeniya nidahasa). It began around 2.30 p.m. and the setting sun was directly in the eyes of the seething mass of heads who were squinting at the fire ball taking its own cool time to sink into the horizon. I was among them, a raw teenager ready to receive any messianic message that would salvage the world and deliver it into a just and fair society laden with the cornucopia of perennial goods and services. I was waiting patiently in the wilting sun, like any other head in that committed gathering, to take in every word that fell from the lips of legendary Marxist leaders, some of whom had attained the romantic status of “exemplary revolutionaries” for having challenged aggressively not only the might of he British Raj but also for slipping out of British jails during World War II. They were then the most formidable political force outside the first post-independence government headed by D. S. Senanayake.
The Marxist elite came from the plantocracy, academia, and professional and intellectual domains. But they were fragmented into irreconcilable ideological camps. On Independence Day they were divided into rival Stalinist and Trotskyite parties mainly. The Trotskyites too were divided into Bolshevik Leninist Party of India headed by Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Doric de Souza, English lecturer at Peradeniya University, Bernard Soyza etc. The Stalinists were led by Dr. S. A. Wickremesinghe, the good doctor from Matara ably assisted by the Cambridge returnee, Pieter Keuneman, and N. Shamuganthan etc. Philip Gunawardena, who was also known as the “father of Marxism”, split from the Lanka Sama Samaja Party headed by Dr. N. M. Perera and formed the Nava Lanka Sama Samaja Party.
On the first day of independence the fragmented Marxists shed their ideological differences temporarily to unite against the United National Party, a coalition of multi-ethnic leaders who joined hands to set sail on uncharted waters to define the contours of the new nation and its future as they sailed along. The Tamils, the Muslims, the Burghers and even some Europeans rallied round the pragmatic and far-sighted leadership of D. S. Senanayake who had earned the coveted status of being the “Father of the nation”.
By and large, they constituted the conservative leadership of the day. It was this elitist leadership that was holding the glittering state celebrations of independence at “Temple Trees”, the official residence of the Prime Minister, D. S. Senanayake, which was only a few hundred yards away from Galle Face Green where the Marxists were lambasting the new government. The Galle Face protest meeting was over around 8 p.m. and the bus I took that night to go home went pass the “Temple Trees”, illuminated like a Wesak lantern. It did not inspire any nationalist fervour in me.
The aggressive anti-imperialist role played by the Trotskyites in particular during the War – the Communists were collaborating with the British who were allies of Soviet Union fighting the common enemy, Hitler -- convinced me that they were the genuine patriots who would defend the nation and protect the masses. I swallowed the Marxist version of history uncritically. My headpiece was filled with the anti-establishment ideologies fed to me by my political heroes of Left. On the way home I told myself that the celebrations at “Temple Trees” were a mockery of independence where the decadent bourgeoisie was having a good time at our expense.
More than that, I felt that the Senanayake government had no right to celebrate independence because they had signed secret agreements with the British to lease Trincomalee harbour and other bases. We were told by our Marxist leaders that the Senanayakes has sold the nation to the Western bloc and Ceylon (as it was known then) would be a target for the enemies. We were told that in the imperialist West would wage their next world war against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the model society for the Third World countries.
The Marxist clichés of the time and its ideological panacea had fixed my mind in a state of certainty that no counter argument could change my opinion. Even after I read the God that Failed, the confessions of the leading icons of Let-wingers like the poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, some of whom had fought in the Spanish Civil War behind the Communist barricades against fascist Franco backed by Hitler, I stuck to my ideological fixations. Besides, the earful I received at Galle Face Green was still ringing my ears. I believed every word of what I heard. I still remember the opening sentence of Dr. Colvin R. de Silva who was invariably presented as the last speaker because he could weave a spell-binding rhetoric to electrify the crowds and keep them transfixed. In his characteristic hoarse voice he thundered: “If there are enemies in this Galle Face Green today, I address them also, because I know our enemies are also here to spy on us. Therefore, I say comrades, friends and enemies!” I was enthralled by the audacity of the challenge he threw down from his platform to the CID spies. I thought it was great.
Those words were echoing in my head and when I passed “Temple Trees”. It was not a symbol of inspiration to me. Nor did it invoke any nationalist sentiment in me. On the contrary, I felt that it was the last bastion of the enemies of the nation. The Senanayakes and the Bandaranaikes were, to me, the failed bourgeois/comprador leaders who were driving the nation to ground. Hardly anyone in my circle had a good word for the Senanayakes and the Bandaranaikes. Our youthful milieu consisted mainly of Left-leaning intellectuals who seemed to know what they were talking about. They came across as those who knew what was wrong with our society and what remedies were required to solve the problems. Ideology ruled over reality.
On the Day of Independence the Senanayakes and the Bandaranaiakes at “Temple Trees” and the Marxists are the Galle Face end were staging two great events that had a lasting impact on the subsequent developments of the new nation. Both forces were poised as the two formidable forces heading for a “revolutionary” conflict out of which a new and a better world would be born, I thought. I believed that the coming class war would end in a glorious revolution (our model was the October Revolution which I didn’t know at the time that it actually took place in November!) as the final solution to usher in the new era of eliminating grinding poverty and establishing a heaven on earth. The Marxists always kept promising that the revolution was coming round corner, but it never came. However, when it did come in the distorted version of the JVP uprising of 1971 the fathers of the revolution were caught unawares. Taken aback, Dr. N. M. Perera accused the JVPers of being CIA agents.
Apart from these two major events there was a third event that was taking place on Independence Day which was never recorded at the time or even noticed by anyone except the passenger in the car that was cruising in the suburbs of Colombo. The car was flying a flag which was not known to many in the south. Inside the car was Murugeysen Tiruchelvam, who was the then Deputy Solicitor-General. It was the Nandi (Bull) flag, heralding the Tamil separatist movement. (See, Senator Tiruchelvam’s Legacy – p 22, edited by Ram Balasubramanian, Vijitha Yapa Publications., 2007). It was the symbol of Tamil separatists before Velupillai Prabhakaran dictated the design of his MGM-style flag to a street artist in the streets of Chennai, who, following instructions, drew a snarling tiger putting his head out of a ring of 33 bullets crossed by two guns with fixed bayonets.
Though Tiruchelvam’s flag-flying exercise was the least known event at the time it turned out to be the symbol of the most divisive and violent of events to come, challenging the nation, its identity, its sovereignty, territorial integrity and its future. It foreshadowed the events that were to unfold with disastrous consequences, mostly to the Jaffna Tamils. Eventually, it overtook Marxist “revolutionary” movements and emerged as the most brutal of violent movements.
Tiruchelvam’s provocative political act in 1948, incidentally, was not instigated by the rise of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, or his Sinhala Only Bill of 1956, or the Citizenship Bill passed by the D. S. Senanayake’s multi-ethnic government with the consent of G. G. Ponnambalam, the acknowledged leader of the Tamils at the time. Nor was this act prompted by Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike or Mr. N. Q. Dias, one of the most brilliant civil servants who steered the nation both from within and from outside the public service in its formative stage in the post-independence era..
Tiruchelvam’s singular act signaling separatism is a key event that points to the failure of the left-leaning and pro-separatist sociologists, political scientists, historians, academics, journalists and usual claque in NGOs to understand the post-colonial forces unleashed by the mono-ethnic political forces that has been gathering momentum from the 19th century after Arumuka Navalar consolidated the casteist forces under the Hindu ideology. He elevated the Vellahalas (sudras, the agricultural labourers) who came from the feet of Brahma, according to classical Hinduism, to that of the highest caste, nearest to the Brahmins (in the absence of Brahmins in Jaffna), who came from the head of Brahma. It was a religious revival that handed power to the Vellahlas who abused it to oppress and persecute the low-castes of Jaffna in the most brutal fashion.
More than any other force, it is the Vellahala factor that dominated the feudal, colonial and post-independence politics. Their impact on Jaffna politics, and consequently national politics, has been under-written, under-reported and under-analyzed. The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), which boasted of being the leading research centre for South Asia, studiously avoided peeping over the cadjan fences of Jaffna while all resources were directed explore the Sinhala-Buddhist south to manipulate their partisan political agenda. ICES like other NGOs focused exclusively on the Sinhala-Buddhist with each publication, seminar, lecture, exhibition etc., blaming only the Sinhala-Buddhists.
With these forces ganging up against the Sinhala-Buddhists, the conventional interpretation of events pointed the finger at Bandaranaike and the rise of suppressed and oppressed forces in 1956. But as the sequence of events proves, the Tamils did not need any provocation from the south to pursue separatist politics. The manipulated and the craftily nurtured political culture of Jaffna advanced incrementally, over the feudal, colonial and post-independence years, to consolidate the mono-ethnic grip of the Vellahla ruling class. Tiruchelvam, a leading and influential ideologue of Tamil separatist movement, had signaled it on Independence Day, leaving no doubt about their political agenda. In keeping with the separatist ideology of Jaffna Tamils ONLY, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, father of Jaffna Tamil separatism, launched his Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi, (Tamil State Party disguised in English as Federal Party) on December 18, at the General Clerical Service Union headquarters in Maradana, Colombo.
In assessing the manifestations of historical forces it is an indispensable requirement to follow the sequence of events, with the preceding event leading to the subsequent event. The impact and the consequences of political forces can be understood rationally only if the sequence is arranged and analysed according to the dates that produces history in a logical and consequential order. In history letter “B” inexorably and invariably follows letter “A” always and not vice versa.
The discourse on Sri Lankan events had gone awry leading to unacceptable levels of violence because the pundits who claim to know their onions brushed aside this basic principle. The starting point of those who traced Sri Lankan events was not “A” but “B”. (“B”, incidentally, stands also for Bandaranaike). This reversal of the calendrical order distorted their perspectives. It was, of course, convenient for their partisan political agenda. But it did not help them grasp the natural order of events flowing from one to another. They, in fact, pretended that “A” does not exist in their historical calendar. A whole new school of social scientists, imbued more with partisan ideology than reality, re-wrote history using “B” as the starting point. They refused to acknowledge the preceding events that began with “A”. There was a method in their madness: if they acknowledged “A” then they would have to reject “B” as the cause of the on-going Sri Lankan crisis. If they incorporated the inner logic of their selected sequence of events it would have denied them their preferred position of hiding behind a mono-causal theory that blamed only the Sinhala-Buddhists.
So what constitutes “A”? It is symbolized comprehensively and unambiguously in the Nandi flag flown by Tiruchelvam on Independence Day. It was a highly provocative act that foreshadowed the direction of peninsular politics. It was also and act of defiance threatening the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the new nation. It marked the beginning of the aggressive and confrontational politics that would be launched by the northern political class/caste against the south exacerbating inter-ethnic relations. It was a declaration of the elitist Jaffna political class/caste that rejected out of hand any willingness to live peacefully in a multi-cultural society. It was a blatant declaration of the commitment of one single minority community to live only in a mono-ethnic domain carved out of fictitious history and concocted geography. Any doubts about the political agenda of Jaffna Tamils were dispelled on December 18, 1949 when Tiruchelvam’s political guru, Chelvanayakam, launched the Tamil State Party.
It should also be noted that it was a decision made only by the Tamil-speaking minority of Jaffna without the mass backing of the other three Tamil-speaking communities, the Muslims of the east, the Indian Tamils of the central hills or even the Tamils of the east who were considered to be inferior to that of the Jaffna Tamils. In fact, Chelvanayakam’s move to build a pan-Tamil movement (iyakkam) collapsed because the localized and limited political interests of non-Jaffna Tamils did not coincide with the broader and larger objectives of Chelvanayakam’s move to grab a disproportionate share power from the majority. It was this community that opted for separatism long before Bandaranaike ever became a force in the south.
In the wise old adage it is revealed that coming events cast their shadows and in hindsight it is now clear how these three events cast a long shadow across the post-independence era.
H.L.D.Mahindapala: Editor, Sunday and Daily Observer (1990 - 1994). President, Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association (1991 -1993). Secretary-General, South Asia Media Association (1993 -1994). He has been featured as a political commentator in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Services and other mainstream TV and radio stations in Australia.) - Sri Lanka Guardian
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