Dayan's father and the LSSP

"On this period I cannot comment because by then the Coalition government had broken up and the SLFP and the LSSP were going their separate ways to the shared massive defeat in 1977 and the inauguration of the JRJ regime."
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By Batty Weerakoon

(September 14, Coloombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) DJ’s attempt to seek congruence of his recall from Geneva with his father Mervyn de Silva’s fortunes in Lake House, published in last week’s Sunday Island is indeed interesting reading despite its several inaccuracies in respect of what he sees as an attempted take-over of Lake House in 1964 by the short-lived SLFP-LSSP government of that year, and the fate of his father in the hands of the Lake House owners in their false or mistaken belief that it was MdeS, their editor of CDN, that had lobbied for the take-over decision when he had met the Prime Minister Mrs. B and Felix Dias at the Non-Alligned (NAM) summit in Cairo in 1964.

I may have got DJ wrong in my attempt to unravel his tortuous thinking on this matter and I shall confine myself to stating the fact that there was no decision of the government in 1964 to take over the Lake House enterprise, and that the fall of that short-lived government was when it lost the vote on the Throne Speech that year due to a sudden and conspiratorial change of political positions within the SLFP’s parliamentary group and its impact on the vote on the Throne Speech.

For DJ the father-son saga does not end here. Though harassed MdeS survived in Lake House. DJ says that his father was not fired in that instance, and "that was to happen at the peak of his career, as Editor Daily News and Editor in Chief Lake House, at the hands of the SUP and Prime Minister Bandaranaike, over a decade later, in late 1975 or early ‘76."

On this period I cannot comment because by then the Coalition government had broken up and the SLFP and the LSSP were going their separate ways to the shared massive defeat in 1977 and the inauguration of the JRJ regime.

All this is of course by-the-way. My concern is the comment that while all parties had some objection or other to MdeS, to the "Samasamajist second raters he was a CIA agent." The term Samasamajist can cover several groupings but in fairness to the LSSP of that time I need to say that the few of us in the Party who knew Mervyn de Silva had no reason to doubt his integrity as a journalist. He was admirably gifted and though we knew he had his fetishes and fads as when he turned to Karl Kautsky in the post-Krushev era we had no reason to clash with him or doubt the seriousness of his concern. I may also add something to his credit which I knew personally. Though he knew JRJ well enough to have his son released from one of his several lock-ups he waited patiently, despite grave stress, to see him gain his freedom in the course of time. That speaks volumes for him.

-Sri Lanka Guardian