Where is the CBK "Potha" ?

File photos

by Rajpal Abeynayake

(February 25, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It is a pity that nobody did a real appraisal of the Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge era. The only real executive president before her, J. R. Jayewardene had a grand tome released about his life and his politics authored by a scholarly duo, K. M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins. This work is authoritative and though it is the authorized biography, it paints a picture that accurately deconstructs the milieu in which the Old Fox came into politics and proceeded to re-fashion the nation in his own (rather reactionary!) worldview.

But the important thing is that somebody did come out with the authoritative work on his time. Not so in the case of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge (CBK). Though during her presidential tenure a biography was commissioned and rather infamously botched by some Englishmen who erred on some of the basic details about the subject, nothing close to something that has the authoritative stamp of the Wriggins/de Silva tome on JRJ emerged.

Until somebody steps into that lacuna and writes the authentic and representative biography of Sri Lanka’s fourth executive president, the chronicle of contemporary Sri Lankan politics would be grossly incomplete.

This is not because CBK is of equal importance to JRJ in the historical record, and neither because CBK cut a 10-4formidable political figure in her own right as the first president of a post-independence generation. Though she made a tremendous historical contribution in her time by being anointed leader in that fundamentally vitally important task of bringing down the 17 year excess of UNP rule, some would alternately argue that her tenure as president was rather forgettable.

A biography however is more about learning the lessons of history than about remembering the life of a person, and as much as Nehru’s biography would bear out the story of post-colonial India in her infancy, the biography of Adolf Hitler would impart lessons about human behaviour that leads to disasters such as the Third Reich.

Crying need

Viewed from that prism, a crying need for the ultimate CBK biography exists because that would begin to charter the contours of a post-war generation that was so starkly different to say the sum political talent personified by those of the immediate pre-independence generation, such as CBK’s own father, SWRD.

CBK was a fairytale liberal who many would say would have been the dream of the Tamil diaspora for instance, before she burnt fingers at the hands of the LTTE. It would be interesting to know exactly where CBK was imparted those memorable core values -- was it at Sciences Po or Sorbonne or wherever she was schooled, or was it at the hands of the more locally active ‘ideologues’ of her time such as the now rather only-too-well known Kumar Rupesinghe and his like —- her one-time brother-in-law?

CBK believed and still seems to believe that there was something major that was not done right by the Tamils by the Sinhala majority, and it is interesting for a future biographer to chronicle whether she held these views entirely by conviction, or part by what she may have considered necessary expediency i.e. that she has to pander to the worldview of the Western educated NGO community and those of that immediate circle, because she thought it imperative to cultivate the donor West to lead successfully?

In hindsight, particularly, that CBK and Co interpretation of the National Question, so-called, in her time, and the other attendant issues, seemed to have been rooted in an entirely wrong set of assumptions.

One such was that a negotiated settlement would be possible with the anointed ‘sole representatives of the Tamil people,’ the LTTE.

Alright, CBK can be given some of the benefit of hindsight. All said and done, at that time during the height of the execrable LTTE’s power, there were many honourable persons who believed out of genuine conviction that a negotiated settlement would be possible.

But yet, there are no signs that the CBK political school of thought came out of this negative political experience either regretful or chastened.

That is I daresay because the CBKs of the world moved in a milieu that was so completely moulded by the designs of the very colonial powers her own father and his comrades in the Ceylonese independence struggle fought to expel.

A study of CBK

So a study of CBK and what made her decision making political comrades tick would not merely be the study of an era, it would be almost a civilisational discourse on post-colonialism and the formation of a post-colonial power elite almost in the spitting image of the departed colonial power.

Not just that, a CBK biography would be able to detail how such apparently ‘rooted’ people who came to power courtesy of adoring rural electorates such as in Attanagala, came to be the interlocutors for a worldview that was the remotest you could imagine from the collective worldviews of those largely peasant electors.
So how exactly does a person or a powerful section of the ruling elite become so immersed in what was loosely called a ‘very liberal’ political ethos?

Was it courtesy the social scientists circle - the ICES - Radhika, and those near and dear to CBK’s ideological persuasion?

Or was it on the other hand that CBK was the Chosen One among the Establishment, both foreign and local, let us say the Solheims and the then business elite of her time, such as the now fallen ‘Solo-U’ Kotelawala — and was it that she inculcated their worldview kicking and screaming virtually, because she thought there was no power outside of their sponsorship?

Some would think that latter view would be charitable. Either way, how did such an almost quaintly deracinated leadership personified by CBK come to be created? And is there any room whatsoever to say that her political school of thought may be down but not out, but would have its comeuppance one day? Whatever, but, somebody should write the CBK biography to provide at least some answers to these rather important unanswered posers of our time.