Emergency '58
– The Story of the
Ceylon Race Riots
Tarzie Vittachi, 1958, Copyright
Tarzie Vittachi
1959 Ramon Magsaysay Award for
Journalism, Literature and Creative
Communication Arts
Preface
The Background
The Fifth Horseman
Goondas in Action
The Abrogation of a Pact
Tension in the
North Central Province
Polonnaruwa Aflame
The Horror Spreads
Batticaloa Killings
Emergency Declared
Jaffna Reacts
The Padaviya Panzers
General Oliver
Ethereal Buccaneers
Governor's Rule
Evidence of Conspiracy
The Premier Waves his Wand
Federalists Detained
Rural Reactions
Why did it happen?
Middle Class Tensions
The Rule of Law
Conclusion
Appendix
Glossary
Footnotes
Preface
The people of
Ceylon
have seen how the mutual respect and good will which existed between two races
for several hundred years was destroyed within the relatively brief period of
thirty months.
This book, most of which was written during
those long, tense curfew nights of May and June 1958, is a record of the
events, passions and under-currents which led to the recent communal crisis,
and of the more remarkable instances of man's inhumanity to man in those
hate-filled days. It is also an account of the rapid disintegration of the
old-established order of social and economic relationships in so far as it contributed
towards the disaster which overtook the country.
Social and economic change was perhaps
inevitable and probably necessary. Unfortunately the men who had been given a
popular mandate to initiate and carry out the change proved to be incapable of
preventing the process from degenerating into nation-wide chaos. The new order
could have been brought about without bloodshed and searing religious or
communal bitterness by the firm application of the law of the land without fear
or favouritism and by statesmanship which resolutely withstood the temptation
to yield to the shrill dictates of expediency.
When a Government, however popular, begins
to pander to racial or religious emotionalism merely because it is the loudest
of the raucous demands made on it, and then meddles in the administration and
enforcement of law and order for the benefit of its favourites or to win the
plaudits of a crowd, however hysterical it may be, catastrophe is certain.
At the risk of losing the monumental
support of the anti-Muslim Congress sympathizers, Mahatma Gandhi once said:
"No cabinet
worthy of being representative of a large mass of mankind can afford to take
any step merely because it is likely to win the hasty applause of an unthinking
public. In the midst of insanity, should not our best representatives retain
sanity and bravely prevent a wreck of the ship of state under their care?"
Can anyone doubt that if this glorious
principle of statesmanship had been applied in
Ceylon
the bloodbath of 1958 could have been avoided?
Many Ceylonese—Sinhalese and Tamils—lost
their lives in the riots of May and June. Many of them lost their children,
their property, their means of livelihood and some even their reason. In
Colombo,
Jaffna,
Anuradhapura,
Polonnaruwa, Batticaloa, Eravur, Kurunegala and many
other places where the two communities clashed the ugly scars will remain
tender long after time has buried the physical signs of chaos. There is no
sense in putting the blame on one community or the other. A race cannot be held
responsible for the bestiality of some of its members. Neither is there any
sense in trying to find a final answer to the question: who started it—was it
the Sinhalese or the Tamils? The answer depends entirely on how far back in
events you want to go—a never-ending and unrewarding pastime.
Emergency ‘58 ends with a question: ‘Have
we come to the parting of the ways?’
Many thoughtful people believe that we
have. Others, more hopeful, feel that the bloodbath we have emerged from has
purified the national spirit and given people a costly lesson in humility.
There is, perhaps, a more practical way to
think about it. The problems of
Ceylon—social,
economic, political, religious and racial—are minute compared to those faced by
India or
Indonesia. This is a small country with a relatively tiny population. The
physical difficulties of distance which confront the governments of large land
masses are absent here.
Ceylon is one of the few countries in the world which is not squashed
economically by a heavy defence-budget.
What is lacking is responsible leadership
among both communities and statesmanship at the centre of government. We now
know the cost of postponing decisions and surrendering wretchedly to political
expediency when problems, which often thrive on neglect, assume massive
proportions. Is it not possible for a small people like us to throw away the
labels which have divided us, one group from another, and work towards a
national rather than a sectional ideal? There is no dearth of men who have the
intelligence and the desire to work for this aim. Is it impossible to get them
together?
Emergency ‘58 is not likely to please every
reader. On the contrary, it is certain to displease many. I do not know how to
write with text-book discretion about the suffering we saw around us and the
terror and the hate on the faces of people we had known all our lives. Human
history can never be a chronological festoon of events held together by nicely
defined causes. The story of a man is the story of a succession of states like
love, fear, hate, indecision, self-assurance, ecstasy, depression.
The story of the race riots of 1958 is a
story of violence, unreason, anger, jealousy, fear, cynicism, vengeance and
many other states of heart and mind which the people of
Ceylon experienced.
I have presented it like that and, therefore, I will freely admit that
Emergency ‘58 is opinionated. But I make one claim for the book: it has been
written with the old journalistic saw in mind :facts are sacred, comment is
free.
Many friends helped me to write this book
because they believed that the facts must be recorded. I shall not list their
names, as is customary, for the very simple reason that I would prefer not to
involve them unnecessarily in any official reaction which Emergency ‘58 may
provoke.
T.V.Colombo ‘58.
The Background
"what a tide of woes
Comes rushing on this woeful land at
once!" Richard II
In May and June 1958, the
Island of
Ceylon, the
peaceful tea-garden, burst into flaming headlines in the world’s press. ‘Seven
Thousand Britons Ordered to Quit Ceylon’, ‘Hundreds Killed in Race-Riots’,
‘State of Emergency Declared’, ‘Dawn to Dusk Curfew Imposed’, ‘Northern Rebel
Leaders Arrested’, ‘Strict Press Censorship’, ‘Civil Liberties Suspended’,
‘Tea, Rubber Piles High in Colombo Port’, '12,000 Refugees Removed to Safety’
proclaimed the special correspondents who had been forced by the severity of
censorship to sneak out of Ceylon and file their stories with a Madras dateline.
What had happened to
Ceylon—that
tranquil, beautiful and profitable island, which had always been regarded in
the West as a model among the newly independent countries? The people of
Ceylon
had seemed really to have assimilated parliamentary democracy and the nice
forms and conventions that make such a system work. The ugly racialism which
had followed the partition of India and the granting of independence had,
mercifully, not touched the island, while the religious fanaticism which had so
severely afflicted Pakistan, Burma and India seemed to have by-passed it.
Ceylon’s
living standards were noticeably better than her neighbours’, so that the
spread of communism seemed a remote possibility in spite of the garrulity of
the Marxists and the complexity of Left-Wing political parties there. The
activities of the Communists, Trotskyists and
Bolshevik Leninists who formed groups and united fronts with fervent enthusiasm
only to splinter into screaming ‘fractions’ a few months later, were looked
upon with tolerance by the Government and its friends abroad, particularly in
the Commonwealth
Here was a democratic country where many
races and many faiths existed side by side in tolerance and dignity. Moderation
appeared to be the key-note of this right little, tight little island. No
wonder that a High Commissioner for
Ceylon in
London once publicly boasted at a Guildhall banquet that
Ceylon
was a ‘little bit of
England’. And, superficially at any rate, it was from many points of view.
Ceylon is about half the size of
England,
about 25,000 square miles in extent. Her economy, like
Britain’s,
depends principally on her export products. Tea, for which
Ceylon is
justifiably famous, is still largely owned and grown by the British companies
who thereby produce as much as 62 per cent of the island’s foreign income.
Rubber and coconut produce are the other major sources of wealth.
Plumbago, gems and a few other mineral products have a
steady market abroad. There is no large-scale industry and very few and meagre
small-scale industries to produce wealth and opportunities for employment. A
huge slice of
Ceylon’s national income—more than a third—goes to pay the annual bill on
food imports: rice, flour, dried fish, canned products, meat, fruit, lentils of
various kinds and even spices. If the world markets for tea, rubber and coconut
are disturbed for any reason and prices fall,
Ceylon
finds herself in Debtor’s Street. This is the danger of a lop-sided economy,
particularly when the greater part of the food requirements of the people is
imported.
On this economy about 9,000,000 people
subsist. There are 6,000,000 Sinhalese who originally came from
Northern India and settled in
Ceylon
over 2,000 years ago. The Sinhalese settled mainly in what are now called the
North Central, North-Western and Southern Provinces. The capitals of the most
powerful Sinhalese kings were
Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, which up to the present day show impressive
archaeological evidence of having been centres of a magnificent civilization
inspired and tempered by the ideals of Buddhism. Later, when these
civilizations crumbled and the jungle tide swept over
Anuradhapura and
Polonnaruwa, the Sinhalese moved south and south-westward towards
Kandy and
Colombo.
For many centuries the north and eastern
parts of
Ceylon have been peopled mainly by another race, the Tamils. The Tamils
are a people of Dravidian stock who spilled over from
South India to the
Jaffna
Peninsula in
the north and worked their way south and south-eastward, setting up a powerful
kingdom. In 164 B.C. the epic battle between King Dutugemunu
of the Sinhalesc and King Elara
of the Tamils took place. According to tradition the issue was settled by the
two kings chivalrously fighting each other on elephants. Elara
was killed. This battle settled the final verdict, according to Sinhalese historians,
on which race was to predominate in
Ceylon.
Echoes of this battle of nearly 2000 years ago were to be heard on the same
plains in 1958.
By the end of the sixteenth century, when
Europe started taking an active
commercial interest in
Ceylon, the centre of gravity of the Sinhalese population had shifted
south and southwestward. The Tamils concentrated in
the north and the eastern maritime plains. On the fertile plains of the west
which had once been so intensely cultivated by the farmer Kings of Ceylon that
they could boast that ‘not one drop of rain water would reach the sea without
having grown one grain of rice’, the equatorial forest now grew dense and
forbidding. Cities, temples, palaces, massive irrigation works were trampled
into the ground by the giant trees.
This gradual process produced many results,
one of the most significant being the actual physical isolation of the two main
racial groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamil peasantry. The peasantry makes up
the vast majority of the population of
Ceylon.
This separation exists up to the present day and has been, as we shall see,
largely responsible for the fact that for several hundred years, the Sinhalese
and the Tamils have been able to live peaceably without recourse to the
internecine warfare which had impoverished the ancient kingdoms of the
Sinhalese and the Tamils.
But the forest and the scrub which acted as
an insulating agent between the two races are being stripped once again under
the force of ‘progress’. Bulldozers, tractors and technicians from the Colombo
Plan and various other international agencies are helping the Ceylon Govern
ment to clear the jungle and make the plains fertile and
populous once again. It is a strange quirk of destiny and an illuminating
instance of the peculiar polarity of every process, that the recapture of the
land from waste, and its resettlement, has also brought about a recrudescence
of the economic competitiveness and bitterness which caused the inter-racial
wars in ancient
Ceylon.
There is, of course, more to it than that.
The physical separation that existed between the peasantry was not evident in
the middle classes. For many scores of years the biggest ‘industry’ in
Ceylon
has been the public service. The dearest wish of almost every parent is that
their sons should find employment in the civil service or the clerical service,
or in one of the Government’s technical departments. The Tamils particularly,
who in the south were not blessed by fertility of soil, always regarded a job
in the government service as a kind of sinecure qua non. Sons in the public
service, with pension rights and other ‘perks’ to their credit, fetched good
prices in the dowry market.
All went smoothly as long as the public
services and, as a spillover, the mercantile
services, were expanding fast enough to absorb the growing educated population.
But by the end of World War Two the public services had reached saturation
point. Since 1948, ten years of independence have not produced the industrial
and agricultural expansion which was essential to increase wealth and maintain
employment levels. The inevitable result has been the creation of a large
articulate class of educated, semi-educated and disgruntled young men and women
who, as might be expected, are easy prey to the strident seductiveness of
racialism, hyper-nationalism or communism. The easiest explanation offered for
their inability to find employment or gain promotion in the public service was
that the Tamils were deliberately and cunningly packing the services with their
own kind.
In an economy which is expanding people
have no time, desire nor motive for race-hate, class-hate or religious hate. It
is only when a country’s economy is on the down—grade that the inner stresses
of society begin to make themselves felt. Group relationships begin to break up
inexorably when the economy is unable to sustain the pressure of population and
insecurity haunts the people. It is also an observable fact that politicians
will try to exploit this situation, particularly when they have no foreign
political interests of any magnitude with which to distract the people’s
attention from domestic problems.
Ever since the grant of independence in
1948, there has been in
Ceylon a tremendous churning up of emotionalism—the chief feature being
fear of insecurity. Beside the 6,000,000 Sinhalese and the 1,000,000
indigenous Tamils referred to already, there are 1,000,000 South Indian Tamil
immigrant labourers who were brought over by the British for cheap labour on
the estates.
Their existence in
Ceylon
was the subject of constant reproach against the Government by the growing
population in the hill country, a group which is loosely referred to as the ‘Kandyans’. The first Prime Minister of Ceylon, D. S. Senanayake,
put an end to the open influx of South Indian labour by enacting the Ceylon
Citizenship Act which defined the qualifications for citizenship in
Ceylon.
Although this Act was specifically intended to limit Indian immigration it had
the effect of excluding British and all other foreign people in
Ceylon
from citizenship rights and privileges, with the result that even Britons with
long-established business interests in
Ceylon
have to secure temporary residence permits to stay in the island even for a
brief period.
The fear of being evicted from their
relatively comfortable billets on the tea estates hammered the Indian Tamils
into powerful organizations which could paralyse the entire tea trade at will.
The fear of unemployment for themselves and their children impelled the Kandyan
peasantry to demand the expulsion of the Indians. The fear that this
Tamil-speaking group of 1,000,000 indigenous Tamils and 1,000,000 Indian Tamils
would join together and form a really formidable minority caused the Sinhalese
politicians considerable anxiety. Every community in
Ceylon
was affected by this fear of insecurity.
The
Ceylon
Moors, numbering over half a million— mainly traders and businessmen—were
afraid of being lumped together with the Tamil minorities, particularly because
many of them had adopted Tamil as their mother tongue.
The Burghers too—a group of about 45,000
descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch regimes in Ceylon, most of whom had
identified their interests with those of the British and had adopted the
Western modes of living, even to the extent of regarding English as their
mother tongue—reacted quickly to this feeling of insecurity. Many of them could
not contemplate a future under different standards from those to which they
were accustomed, and the fear that their children would have to live under
disadvantages due to their fair colour or their relative unfamiliarity with the
Sinhalese language and traditions, drove them away to
Australia,
Canada or
Britain as immigrants.
The
British residents, planters and merchants, who just after Independence numbered
around 7,000, had soon got over their initial panic and decided that
independent Ceylon was progressing steadily enough, and its government was
stable enough, to guarantee the safety of their business interests in Ceylon.
Until about 1951 they overcame their fears of expropriation—but after the death
of D. S. Senanayake the major efflux of British people and capital began.
Present indications are that there are not more than 3,000 Britons in planting
and business in
Ceylon. During the past two years many of their investments in
Ceylon
tea estates have been sold to Ceylonese businessmen and speculators who have
bought up the control of big companies incorporated in
London.
This widespread fear of political, social and
economic insecurity is at the root of the disorders that
Ceylon
has been going through recently.
Many observers of the
Ceylon
scene are frankly amazed that ‘language’ appears to be the issue over which the
Ceylonese have been killing each other. Underlying this amazement is the
often-expressed opinion that it was a retrograde step from the point of view of
‘Progress’, international relations and national unity, to have removed English
as the first language of the country, as Ceylon did in 1956. This opinion betrays a
profound lack of appreciation of what ‘language’ means in countries like
Ceylon, India, Pakistan and Burma.
Those who feel that it was a pity to downgrade
English to the position of a second language do not realize that only about 5
to 6 per cent of the population were literate in English even after 150 years
of British rule in Ceylon—and the standard of ‘literacy’, in this sense, has
been the ability to write a signature in English. The actual number of people
who used English as their first language was very small. English was, and still
is, the prerogative of a minute section of the population. But though small,
this section of the population—generally regarded as the middle class—has
wielded a monopoly of political, administrative and economic power in
Ceylon.
They have been accustomed to speak, write, think and even dream in English.
The administration of the country was conducted in English. The law is in
English and the Courts are conducted in English, although almost 95 per cent of
the people do not know any English at all.
Until last year it was not possible to send a
telegram unless it was first translated into English. One of the remarkable
features of
Ceylon is that, unlike in
Britain,
almost every trade union is directly controlled by politicians. Many visitors
to
Ceylon have been appalled by this phenomenon and prospective investors
bolt when they come across it: it is certainly an unfortunate development but
the cause of it, again, was language. The law, as we have seen, was written in
a language that 95 per cent of the people did not understand. Every
politician, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the Communists and Trotskyites
were quick to rush in to fill it in the field of unionism by acting as
interpreters, guides and advocates of labour. They were responsible for
building up a formidable network of trade unions within twenty-five years.
Language, therefore, has been much more
complex and significant a problem than is usually appreciated. The switch-over
from English as the official language to Swabhasa, or
the Mother Tongue, was thus inevitable with the growth of democracy. The
awkward question was: which mother tongue— Sinhalese or Tamil or both?
At first glance the answer seems obvious—80
per cent of the people are Sinhalese. Ergo: Sinhalese must be the national language.
In fact that is decision of the present all-Sinhalese Government of
Ceylon
argued when they were campaigning for election in March and April 1956.
The Tamils, however, felt differently. The
extent of their participation in public life had been far in excess of their
numbers. Tamil leaders had fought shoulder to shoulder with Sinhalese patriots
in the struggle for independence. Their language had a rich heritage and was
used as a live language by nearly 50,000,000 people in
South India and
Ceylon.
Why, they asked, should it now take second place to a language which is spoken,
after all, by only 6,000,000 people? In any case, they asked, why should not
the Tamil language be used in the areas where the Tamils predominate?
The election campaign of 1956 was begun on
this issue. The United National Party which had been in power for eight years
under three Prime Ministers—D. S. Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake, and Sir John
Kotelawala—had resolutely refused to create communal disharmony by allowing
this dispute to come to a head. But Kotelawala had made the grievous error of
publicly stating that his Government would uphold the principle of parity of
status for Sinhalese and Tamil. This made it official and feeling became much
more violent and open than ever before. The Government party back-benches were
embarrassed by the demands of their electorates to save the Sinhalese
language from the ‘indignity’ of being yoked with a minority language.
The present Prime Minister, S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike, despite—or perhaps because of—his aristocratic background and
his
Oxford education, found no difficulty in denouncing the status quo. His
campaign for power was openly based on the cry, ‘Sinhalese Only’. In the English
version of his election manifesto he squared his conscience by writing in a
clause providing for the ‘reasonable use of Tamil’ but this was conspicuously
absent in the more significant Sinhalese version. The Kotelawala Government
then made the biggest tactical and moral blunder they could possibly make.
Hoping to ride back to power on the popular ‘Sinhalese Only’ wave, they
abandoned their policy of parity for Tamil and adopted the Bandaranaike line.
What they had not realized was that the
‘Sinhala Only’ cry was a potent issue only because the Government was opposing
it, and that as soon as the Government accepted it too, it ceased to be an
issue. Thus Bandaranaike had won his point without a fight and the Kotelawala
Government had sacrificed the support of the Tamils and the respect of the
liberal-minded middle class. The rest of the campaign was fought on religious
issues. The United election front led by Bandaranaike was given massive support
by an ad hoc organization of over 12,000 Buddhist monks who came out of their
temples and hermitages to canvass openly against the Kotelawala regime which,
they claimed, was influenced by the Christians, particularly the Catholics.
Here were the best election agents any
politician could wish for—12,000 men whose words were holy to over 5,000,000
people, campaigning for the downfall of the Government, zealously and, what is
more, gratis. Bandaranaike also promised the Kandyan peasants that he would
drive the Indian Tamil labourer away from the tea estates.
When, on top of this, he offered a
socialist programme of nationalizing foreign-owned tea estates and mercantile
firms and of evicting the British from Trincomalee harbour and the Negombo
Air-field used by the Royal Air Force, he had every popular dissident element
in
Ceylon behind him. When the election results came in the Government party
had lost fifty-two out of sixty seats and the Mahajana
Eksath Peramuna, Bandaranaike’s People’s United
Front, which had offered sixty candidates for election, had won fifty-one
seats.
In the predominantly Tamil areas the
Federal Party led by S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, who advocated a Federal form of
government with equal status for Tamil as an official language, swept the
polls. They had presented a slate of fourteen candidates, ten of whom were
returned.
There was widespread jubilation at the
defeat of a Government which had ruled for eight years without noticeably
changing the living conditions of the people. Very soon, however, the new
Government, composed largely of tenderfoot politicians who had never been in
authority before, realized that there was a vast difference between an election
campaign and running a country.
Prime Minister Bandaranaike himself with
long years of political experience as a responsible Cabinet Minister behind
him, realized this readily enough and tried his best to hold his team of young,
inexperienced bucking broncos together. He soon found that the forces which had
been released by his victory were too formidable to resist. Labour demands
became so vociferous and violent that he was soon compelled to introduce
repressive measures which even the Kotelawala Government had not used.
The Communists and the extreme Left Wing
members of his own Cabinet, like Food Minister Philip Gunawardene, began
putting on the pressure for the nationalization of foreign-owned tea estates,
insurance companies and banks. Bandaranaike used his armoury of eloquence to
withstand this demand because he realized very well that
Ceylon
could not risk jeopardizing her best source of income by meddling with the tea
estates. He, like his predecessors, also realized that
Ceylon
could not develop without a considerable flow of new capital from abroad. Bandaranaike
found himself the prisoner of his election promises.
To assuage (one of his favourite words) the
militant Sinhalese he enacted the Sinhalese Only Act, thereby setting off a
series of disorders two months after the new Government took over. This was the
first outburst of racialism on such a scale. The area most seriously affected
was the
Gal
Oya
Valley—the newly-opened colony for the reclaiming and settlement of the
land on the eastern side of
Ceylon.
Over 150 people were killed during that brief spell of open race-hate.
Religious rivalry grew apace. Fortunately there has been no open religious
violence up to the moment of writing, although many a flare-up has seemed
imminent. In August 1957 the Tamils threatened an island-wide Satyagraha or
civil disobedience campaign.
This danger was averted by the forging of a
pact between Bandaranaike and the Federal Party leader, Chelvanayakam. Almost
exactly a year later the Bandaranaike—Chelvanayakam (or B—C) Pact was
jettisoned, which led to the large-scale riots and bloodshed of May—June 1958.
Ceylon is
now afflicted by a general malaise which no one can escape sensing. National
unity has been shattered. The racial and religious tolerance which leavened our
relationships has been sacrificed for political expediency.
Increasing poverty
and unemployment have brought the people to the brink of
communism. The next outbreak of violence may not be racial or even religious.
During the latter days of the 1958 riots the attack was directed noticeably
against Government officials and the middle class. The pattern is clear. Unless
the Government is able to open up new avenues for employment, increase the
productivity of the island quickly and effectively, maintain law and order
without succumbing to sectional and separatist demands, when violence breaks
out again, it is likely that Ceylon’s system of parliamentary democracy will
be thrown away for something more ‘efficient’ and ruthless.
The Fifth Horseman
The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse rode
into
Ceylon in May 1958, without fuss or
warning. No one recognized the hoof beats on the dusty, provincial roads, where
they were first heard. People knew about War, Pestilence, Famine and Flood
—these were disasters which they accepted as part of their human heritage,
although they had never suffered seriously from war or pestilence or famine.
They had only just come through a devastating flood but, within weeks, the
Black Christmas which had brought these waters down had been all but forgotten
except by those who had lost a son, daughter or parent. The bounty of nature
and of willing friends abroad had swiftly brought the green flush back to the
paddy country in the
North
Central
Province.
War they had experienced, too, but it had
never been a blight for
Ceylon. Very few of our people had ever heard a shot fired in fear or
anger. War had brought prosperity to
Ceylon,
boom prices for tea, rubber, coconut, full employment or as near full
employment as we had ever come across before, and a steady bank balance in
London so that
while we set about building up the agrarian economy we could afford to buy our
food with crisp pound notes.
Of pestilence we had had some cruel
knowledge. The ravages of malaria and ugly tropical fevers had been
experienced by the older people. But with new drugs and new methods of
prevention people had begun to take their immunity for granted and to regard
their neighbours in perpetually pox-ridden
Bombay and
Calcutta with lofty
sympathy.
Only the greybeards had ever spoken of
famine, many, many years ago. But these stories hardly earned a whimper of
interest because everyone knows that for a Ceylonese one meal of rice missed is
a catastrophe of major magnitude.
Slight though our acquaintance with these
disasters was, it was still acquaintance. But for most of our people in 1958
the Fifth Horseman—Race-Hate—was hardly even that. We had heard about the
attempts of the Australian settlers to decimate the Aborigines or herd them
into Tasmania; we had read of the process by which the Red Indians had been
corralled into reservations; we had read of the Nazi gas chambers, Buchenwald
and Belsen; and the tribulations of the Jews who exist on their patch of desert
in Israel are horribly tender and raw in our memories. We had read the lurid
account of how the waters of the
Indus and the
Ganges had turned red with the rivulets of blood that flowed into them
from the Hindu— Muslim massacres which accompanied the partition of
India.
The Gal Oya race-killings of 1956, in
Ceylon,
and the ugly episode of
Little
Rock in 1957 should have
warned us that the Fifth Horseman took no notice of time, place, literacy or
standard of living.
But these episodes did not wake us up in
time. It could not possibly happen here. Of course we had heard our parents
talk of the Riots of 1915 and the brutalizing of the Muslim population by the
Sinhalese, but all those stories were so interlarded with incidents featuring
acts of personal heroism that the Cynical Generation put them in the same
category as the omnipresent and unfailing family yarn that father always came
first in class during his time.
It couldn’t happen in
Ceylon.
That is what we all thought. After all we had lived together, Sinhalese and
Tamils, for so long, sharing our profits and losses, celebrating each other’s
petty triumphs and consoling each other in our misfortunes and, what is more,
respecting each other for integrity and for ability when we recognized it. And
above all, we had always been able to indulge in mild teasing about each
other’s idiosyncrasies in much the same way that the English rag the Scots.
It couldn’t happen in
Ceylon.
Of course there were racial and caste prejudices underlying the common
pleasantries of social behaviour and of course there were politicians trying to
stir these murky depths into foaming activity. But what of that? Look at the
composition of the delegation that went to borrow 50,000,000 dollars from
Washington at the
very time of the race riots in
Ceylon—was
that not as fair a mixed bag of Ceylonese as you could wish? Here and there you
could hear a low growl from someone pointing out that one religious group was
conspicuously omitted from that selection.[1]
But, peremptorily, you shushed this protest because it was ‘divisive’ in
character and too awkward to deal with anyway, without getting yourself into
very deep waters indeed.
So it couldn’t happen in
Ceylon.
But it has happened, and the chances are that it will happen again and again in
other forms, perhaps more vicious and meaningless than the tragedy we have just
encountered. How did it happen? Where did it begin? What course did it take?
That is the burden of this story.
Goondas in Action
In April 1958 the Ministry of Lands and
Land Development was advised by its field officers that the projected transfer
of 400 Tamil families who had been displaced by the closing down of the Royal
Navy dockyards in Trincomalee should be put off for more propitious times.
Under the Government’s plan these labourers were to be taken to
East Padavia for resettlement
as farmers on land newly opened for colonies.
Sinhalese colonists from places ranging from
Veyangoda to Kosgoda, squatters from various distant places and some of the
older established Sinhalese families who regarded this province as being
traditionally Sinhalese, were opposed to the settling of Tamils in the
Polonnaruwa or
Anuradhapura districts. Stirred by the constant cacophony of communalists who
had been preaching the gospel of race-hatred in every part of the island for
over two years, their objections were shot through with unprecedented
bitterness.
In fact, the field officers of the Land
Development Department had reported that Action Committees had been formed and
that there were open threats of violence if the transfer scheme was carried
out. From Kebitigollewa, a little Sinhalese village standing on the Medawachchiya—Pulmoddai Road,
had come a direct declaration of war: a war to the knife and the knife to the
hilt, should any Tamils pass that way to settle in the farm colonies.
The Government was persuaded to put off the
settlement plans.
Meanwhile race-hatred was being churned up
elsewhere. Several months before the Tamil Federalists in the north,
desperately anxious to find a popular gimmick to symbolize their struggle for
linguistic equity, had begun to obliterate with tar the Sinhalese character ~
(Sri) which had replaced the English letters on the registration plates of
motor vehicles. New cars moving in the north and the east with the offending
letter had their plates smeared with tar. The Tamil ‘Shri’ character was
substituted for the officially accepted Sinhalese character. The Government
took a top-level tactical decision not to prosecute any of the offenders for
fear that they would be built up into martyrs. Federal supporters went about in
the Peninsular and the east coast with illegal number plates.
It is quite true that the use of the
Sinhalese character for this purpose at a time when language was a sore point
was unnecessary and provocative. Nevertheless the tame decision to permit
people, however provoked they may have been, to flout the law blatantly and to
continue to do so for months with complete impunity brought the prestige of the
Government and the police into abject disrepute. The impression among the
Sinhalese in the south was that the Government had abdicated its authority in
the northern and eastern provinces of
Ceylon.
In the north the new buses of the Transport Board—inevitably SRI numbered—were
daubed with the equivalent Tamil sign. This set off an ugly wave of reprisals
in the predominantly Sinhalese areas.
Bands of Sinhalese rough-necks were suddenly
let off the leash in
Colombo. Bare bodied, sarongs held shoulder high displaying genitals
unashamedly, armed with tar-pails and brushes and brooms they shrieked through
the streets of Colombo tarring every visible Tamil letter on street signs,
kiosk name boards, bus bodies, destination boards, name plates on gates and
bills posted on walls. They were armed with ladders to reach roof level where
necessary.
Outside Saraswathie Lodge—a ‘Brahmin’
thosey kiosk in Bambalapitiya—I watched a gang of these goondas smearing tar on
the Tamil language poster advertising the Thinakaran newspaper for sale.
Someone shouted to the tar-brush artist:
‘Go on. Paint a huge Sinhala Sri sign on
the bastard’s door.’ The artist beamed at this inspiration but his past caught
up with him at this very moment. He handed over the brush tamely to another: he
himself was completely illiterate. He could not write even the in Sinhalese.
These were the types who were so vociferous about the glory of the language for
which they were willing to exterminate a people and vivisect a nation.
The goondas, once started, did a thorough
job of it. They invaded even the public offices—even the relatively sacrosanct
second and third floors. In spite of their rank illiteracy they seemed to know
where the Tamil politicians lived in
Colombo. Their
walls were defaced with huge black letters. They even had sufficient sense of
dramatic irony and temerity to give the tar brush treatment to the
Left-Hand-Drive rear warning plate in English, Sinhalese and Tamil on the Prime
Minister’s Cadillac.
Within twelve hours they had covered the
whole of
Colombo. Next day the wave struck the suburbs and the provincial towns.
And then the ineluctable wave of reprisals swept through
Jaffna and
Batticaloa. And the police looked on. They had been given strict—but
verbal—instructions not to interfere.
The goondas soon discovered this. On the
third day, when they found that they were running short of Tamil signs to tar,
they started picking on anyone who looked like a Tamil to keep themselves in
training. Two or three men were tarred on the streets. It was only then that
the police intervened. But the hate-wave had scudded through the whole island
and had now spent itself for the present.
The official response was—no prosecutions.
What was the charge anyway? Mischief? Damage to public property? But there was
no evidence to convict a crow, let alone the hundreds of men who had rampaged
around the streets of
Ceylon in hysterical gangs.
The Government ‘deplored’ the ‘incident’,
leader writers ‘viewed with alarm’, the police made the obvious guess about
‘who was at the bottom of it’ and the wiseacres wagged their hoary heads and
cackled over the dreadful state of Lanka. But no one even attempted seriously
to piece these seemingly isolated episodes together and discern a pattern in
them. It was just another Untoward Event—like the Ganemulla train fiasco[2]
and the Imbulgoda ambush.[3]
No one responsible for the preservation of order realized at the time that if
such a tide of hatred could sweep through the entire country so swiftly, it
could happen again in a more deadly form if the original impact was more
powerful and its spread was better managed.
Another dangerous sub-plot in the evolution
of the tragic drama was the organized boycott of Tamil-owned kiosks and shops
in isolated areas. This campaign had been set afoot by certain militant monks
who, with consummate cynicism, chose villages in Attanagalla, the Prime
Minister’s own constituency, as the take-off point for their campaign. This
movement swiftly spread to other outlying towns such as Welimada, Kurunegala
and Badulla.
The Prime Minister, Mr S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike, continued with his year-long efforts to convince the people that
the Bandaranaike—Chelvanayakam Pact which he had made with the Federal Party a
year ago, was a fool-proof solution of the Communal Problem, inspired by his
understanding of the doctrine of the Middle Way. For instance, a newspaper
reported:
The Prime Minister, Mr S. W. R. D.
Bandaranaike, presiding at the prize distribution of the Sri Gnanaratna
Buddhist Sunday School, Panadura, said that knotty problems of State had been
successfully tackled by invoking the principles and tenets of Buddhism. ‘The
Middle Path, Maddiyama Prathipadawa, has been my magic wand and I shall always
stick by this principle,’ he said. (Ceylon
Daily News.)
The yes-men round him smirked complacently
whenever he referred to his Magic Wand for solving problems in that special
tone of voice which accompanies a double entendre.
Mr Bandaranaike said much the same thing
when he justified the Bandaranaike—Chelvanayakam Pact at the Annual Sessions
of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party held at Kelaniya on March I and 2. The relevant
section of his Presidential Address is:
‘In the discussion which the leaders of the
Federal Party had with me an honourable solution was reached. In thinking over
this problem I had in mind the fact that I am not merely a Prime Minister but a
Buddhist Prime Minister. And my Buddhism is not of the “label” variety. I embraced
Buddhism because I was intellectually convinced of its worth. At this juncture
I said to myself: “Buddhism means so much to me, let me be dictated to only by
the tenets of my faith, in these discussions. I am happy to say a solution was
immediately forthcoming.’ (Sunday Observer, March 2, 1958.)
But the oftener he defended the B—C Pact
the clearer it became that, in the Prime Minister’s own opinion, it needed
defending. The longer he delayed its implementation with the twin instruments of
the Regional Councils Act and the Reasonable Use of Tamil Act, the weaker
became the enthusiasm of the Sinhalese as well as of the Tamils.
The voices of the critics of the B-C Pact
seemed to increase in volume and effectiveness as time went by. At the height
of the tar-brush campaign it became evident that even within the Government
Party there was a wide divergence of opinion about the efficacy of the major
miracle of Mr Bandaranaike’s Magic Wand - the B-C Pact. Even his own kin and
henchmen muttered together in the dark corridors of Sravasti about how
unpopular the Lokka (the Boss) was becoming in the country by persisting in his
defence of the Pact. No one dared to approach him—it was hard to endure the
whip-crack of the Lokka’s pliant tongue. Till the last moment he spoke in
eulogies about the wondrous nature of the B—C Pact, of communal harmony, of
brotherhood and of national unity. But no one had yet seen the Bills which for
a whole year were being fabricated by the Legal Draughtsmen. And no one was
impressed.
The Abrogation of a Pact
On the morning of April 9 a police message
reached Mr Bandaranaike warning him that about 200 bhikkus or monks and 300
others were setting out on a visitation to the Prime Minister’s residence in
Rosmead Place
to demand the abrogation of the Pact. They would arrive at
9 a.m.
The Prime Minister left the house early
that morning to attend to some very important work in his office. The bhikkus
came, the crowds gathered, the gates of the Bandaranaike Walawwa were closed
against them and armed police were hurriedly summoned to throw a barbed-wire
cordon to keep the uninvited guests out. The bhikkus decided to bivouac on the
street. Peddlers, cool-drink carts, betel sellers and even bangle merchants
pitched their stalls hard by. Dhana was brought to the bhikkus at the appointed
hour for food.
In the meantime, the Prime Minister was
fighting off the opposition to the Pact among his own party colleagues with
desperate fury.
At
4.15 p.m. the B—C Pact was torn
into pathetic shreds by its principal author who now claimed that its
implementation had been rendered impossible by the activities of the
Federalists.
The Prime Minister had gone home that
afternoon accompanied by half a dozen Ministers who stood on the leeward side
of the barbed-wire barricade while Mr Bandaranaike listened to the shrill
denunciations of the monks. The Minister of Health sat on the Street facing the
monks and preached a sermon, promising them redress if they would only be
patient. The Prime Minister consulted his colleagues. The monks had won. The
Magic Pact was no more. But the monks insisted on getting this promise in
writing. The Prime Minister went into the house and the Health Minister, hardly
able to suppress the look of relief on her face, brought the written pledge
out to the monks. Yet another victory for Direct Action had been chalked up.
The nation was left wondering what next. In
two years the people had experienced two new theories of politics: government
by crisis and government by scapegoat. What crisis next? was the big question.
Then the Communist-party-inspired strikes
broke out. The Public Service Workers’ Trade Union Federation, whose leadership
was Communist but which was mainly independent at the rank-and-file level,
staged one of the most costly farces in the history of trade unionism in
Ceylon.
The Government, unofficially of course,
resorted to thuggery to break the strike.
A gang of thirty-eight thugs, imported,
according to police sources, from the Grandpass area and from
Shanty
Town in
McCallum Road,
had been organized into a mobile unit. They went round the city in a truck,
beating up strikers demonstrating on the streets. The troops were called out to
patrol the streets. This had the immediate effect of attracting public
sympathy, which previously had been lacking, to the PSWTUF. Opposition Leader
N. M. Perera scored a quick political victory for the Trotskyites by demanding
the withdrawal of the troops by nightfall of that day or else. . . . The
troops were withdrawn despite Food Minister Philip Gunawardene’s protests.
The Government tried every device which had
been employed by the previous Government against the public servants eleven
years ago: the Finance Minister put out propaganda to the effect that there
were only 1,750 on strike when actually many thousands were out; the Labour
Minister, T. B. Illangaratne, declared the strike illegal and appealed to the
patriotic sentiments of the clerks even as the Labour Minister of ‘947 had
appealed to him and his colleagues who were then out on strike; the Food
Minister tried to make out that this was a Tamil plot to weaken the Sinhalese
Government even as Finance Minister J. R. Jayawardene had tried to drive a
communal wedge into the 1947 strike.
But the PSWTUF held out for a fortnight in
a futile frenzy at the unexpected ferocity of the Government, which had
hitherto capitulated to labour demands supported by some show of violence.
The Government won that battle outright.
The Public Service Workers’ Trade Union Federation broke up after the strikers
split into warring factions and the net economic result was the loss of two
weeks’ pay for every striker. The Government, without a doubt, had won a major
battle. But—it was a pyrrhic victory, which was sufficiently expensive in terms
of its reputation as a workers’ government to cost it the war, eventually.
From the PSWTUF crisis to the next. The
Communist-controlled Ceylon Trade Union Federation, which had come out a day
after the PSWTUF, found they had caught a Tartar for once during the past two
years. On the management side the Ceylon Employers’ Federation, encouraged by
the Government’s firmness against the PSWTUF, had decided to stage a Custer’s
Last Stand against political trade unionism. The Prime Minister and the Labour
Minister, both heartened by the defeat of the PSWTUF and concerned about the
grave losses to revenue caused by the cancellation of tea shipments, declared
the CTUF strike illegal and refused to intervene. The Employers’ Federation was
advised by the Prime Minister to hold out even as he had done against the
clerks. The employers went to it with a will. Large notices appeared in the
newspapers calling attention to the illegality of the strike. These were
followed by notices calling for new recruits. This too was done at the instance
of the Government.
When events had reached this pass, the
Trotskyite Unions which had watched the CTUF struggle with lofty detachment
were impelled by pressure from their rank and file to make some display of solidarity.
From the moment they showed signs of active interest in the CTUF—CEF struggle,
the Prime Minister began to relent—perhaps retract is the apter word. Instead
of allowing the Employers’ Federation to make their last-ditch stand against
the Communists, the Prime Minister called for ‘negotiations’.
The CEF took the view that there was no
point whatever in ‘negotiating’ at that stage in an illegal strike. But on the
ground of national interest the Government pleaded, cajoled and then finally
tried to browbeat the employers into agreeing to accept every striker back and
retain in addition, if they must, the men already recruited. At the last
meeting the Prime Minister threatened to use emergency powers to take over the
companies and run them himself if they did not give in. It was dangerous to the
CEF to keep the men newly recruited in preference to those on strike, it was
argued. The CEF replied that they would cope as best they could. That evening
shocking and tangible justification of the Prime Minister’s concern for the
danger to the CEF was forthcoming.
An explosive meeting of the Communist and
Trotskyite Unions was held in
Hyde Park—not a hundred yards away from Lipton’s Circus, sensitive nerve
centre of the dispute.
The police, for some strange reason,
withdrew every officer on duty fifteen minutes before the meeting concluded. On
a nice calculation, a dashing cracker was exploded in the crowd by a man whose
identity the police and press reporters well knew. When the noise died down
hysterical panic took over. The mob ran panting, bleating, slobbering with fear
and subhuman anger, breaking every glass window and door in the vicinity. A
dispensary which had no Connection whatever with the dispute had its show
windows and giant coloured bottle smashed to smithereens. The tea kiosk at the
corner, which had supplied meals to the strikers for weeks, was damaged.
Several Ceylonese firms—Car Mart, United Tractors, Tuckers, Bousteads—against
whom the CTUF had no quarrel whatever at the time, were given the ‘treatment’.
Passing cars were stoned. A taxi was burned. Some motor bicycles were set on
fire. A hunt began for ‘Europeans’ to molest and, maybe, lynch.
There was pandemonium for forty minutes.
Then the police returned and restored order. It was a very costly forty
minutes. Thuggery had scored another victory. None of the miscreants was
prosecuted.
The employers still held out. The Prime
Minister who, not a fortnight before, had denounced the strike as illegal was
now all for appeasement. He threatened again to nationalize the CEF firms.
Their answer was direct: ‘If we capitulate to the CTUF now we might as well
pack up for good.’ They were determined to call what they believed to be the
Government’s bluff. The impasse was complete.
Elsewhere, in the meantime, the next crisis
which was to help the Government over the labour crisis was gathering. The
Fifth Horseman had pounded his way into Ceylon with his treacherous army of
destruction.
Tension in the North Central Province
The Annual Federal Party Convention began
at about this time in Vavuniya, forty miles from Anuradhapura, the capital of
the Sinhalese-dominated district.
The Federalists, whose bid for recognition
as the party of the Tamil-speaking people had reached its peak in May, June and
July 1957, had dissipated a great deal of this popularity in their futile
indignation over the Sri sign on vehicles. The longer Mr Bandaranaike put off the
enactment of the Regional Councils Bill and the Reasonable Use of Tamil Bill
the dimmer became the lustre of the halo worn by Mr Chelvanayakam, the
Federalist leader.
In the north and the east other voices
which had been shouted down a year before began to be heard again. The
conviction grew that Mr Bandaranaike had never intended to implement the B—C
Pact and that therefore the Federal Party had been bamboozled into calling off
the massive satyagraha they had planned for August 1957.
Mr Bandaranaike’s sudden volte face on
April 9, when he broke up the pact which he himself had forged, set the pendulum
of popularity swinging back in favour of the Federalists. They appeared once
more in public as the aggrieved party. Mr Chelvanayakam was seen again as the
martyred victim of the Government’s duplicity.
Mr Bandaranaike, for his part, declared
that notwithstanding the abrogation of the Pact he would present the two
controversial Bills guaranteeing ‘fair play’ to the Tamils when Parliament
reconvened in June.
This announcement was greeted with loud
protests from the militant Sinhala elements who stood by the slogan: ‘Ceylon
for the Sinhalese’ and ‘Sinhalese Only from Point Pedro to Dondra Head’.
This in turn increased the fervour of the
Tamils for a separate State.
It was in this atmosphere that the Vavuniya
Convention was prepared. The Federal Party Chiefs, sensing the mood of the
moment, went all out to make the convention a key event. Special arrangements
were made in advance for the transport of delegates and supporters from every
part of the island. Extra bogeys were attached to the train from Batticaloa.
At this stage our story ties up with the
disturbances over the resettlement of Tamil labour in Polonnaruwa and Padaviya
related earlier. Sinhalese labourers had organized themselves as a striking
force against any infiltration of Tamils from Trincomalee. This loose
organization had been employed before— on two or three occasions—as shock
troops which acted at the instigation of certain politicians to whom they were
beholden. A year ago they had been sent as far as Maho to break up a meeting
called to hear Dudley Senanayake denouncing the B—C Pact.
In May—June 1957 confronted by the threat
of a mass satyagraha by the Tamils, Sinhalese settlers and labourers in the
Padaviya area had been warned by the politicians to prepare themselves against
a Tamil invasion from the Trincomalee district. They began to refer to
themselves in epic terms as the Sinhala Hamudawa or the Sinhalese Army. But the
tension had eased on both sides of the communal barrier when the Bandaranaike—Chelvanayakam
Pact was signed at the end o July that year. The Sinhalese politicians, too,
had then shown signs of remorse. The Minister of Lands had instructed his
officials to set apart 400 allotments for the Tamil labourers who were being
laid off by the evacuation of the Royal Navy from Trincomalee. On the basis of
five to a family this meant the settling of 2,000 Tamils in Padaviya.
The Sinhalese labourers, however, would
have none of it. Led by a monk, a gang of Sinhalese squatters came in one night
and occupied eleven Wadiyas intended to accommodate the Tamils who would camp
there to clear the land for settlement.
The Ministry could or would do nothing to
counter this forcible occupation. Once again the Government, by inaction, gave
its tacit sanction to a fait accompli carried out deliberately and openly by
people who seemed to be confident of being able to flout authority with
impunity. The squatters formed Action Committees and proceeded to clear the
land and settle in according to the pattern set by the official settlers.
Their political bosses now decided to use
these ‘shock troops’ to stage demonstrations against the Tamils bound for the
Vavuniya Convention. There is reason to believe that no murderous violence was
intended at this stage. The orders were to stone buses and trains, hoot and
generally signify ‘disapprobation’. The Sinhalese labourers were ready and
began the treatment on random passers-by who happened to be Tamil, even before
the real trek to Vavuniya began.
But events moved too fast for them. On May
22, five hundred thugs and hooligans invaded the Polonnaruwa station, and
smashed up the windows of the Batticaloa train in their frantic search for
Convention-bound Tamils. The General Manager of Railways, Mr E. Black, said:
‘According to the information we have—telegraph
wires too have been cut—passengers entraining from Batticaloa were alarmed at
threats that a gang was to attack them as they were under the impression that
most of the passengers were going to the Federal Convention at Vavuniya. At
Welikande, all but one of the passengers got off the train in fear. The train
went on to Polonnaruwa with the one passenger. At midnight, as the train
steamed in, the gang set about the train and the lone passenger. The train was
stopped and left for Colombo at 7 a.m. this morning without a single passenger.
The incident occurred at midnight. The passenger was sent to hospital by the
Railway Officers there. A Railway Official was sent from Colombo today to hold
an inquiry.’
The Observer reported this incident in more
detail on May 24:
‘On Thursday night, passengers were
intimidated into getting off at Welikande as news had reached them that a gang
of men were on the way to prevent them from making the trip as they felt that
passengers must be prevented from getting to Vavuniya for the Federal
Convention.
One passenger however continued the trip
but was severely assaulted at Polonnaruwa station. A gang of men, alleged to
have numbered nearly 5oo, got on the train at this station, smashed windows,
went from carriage to carriage looking for passengers, damaging railway
equipment as they did so.
They found one passenger who cowered in his
seat, pleading with them to leave him alone as he did not belong to the
community they were looking for.
“You are all the same”, was the reply and
they began assaulting him. He was later despatched to hospital.
All telegraph wires had been cut and there
is still no communication between Polonnaruwa and Colombo. The train which
should have arrived in
Colombo that morning, left the station at
7 a.m. in the
morning and arrived in
Colombo late last evening. Meanwhile a Board of Inquiry has been despatched
to Polonnaruwa by the General Manager.’
On the night of the 23rd at 9.15 p.m. the
Batticaloa— Colombo train was derailed at the 215th mile on the Batticaloa—Eravur
line. Two men, Police-Sergeant Appuhamy and railway porter Victor Fernando,
were killed in the wreck. Many others were injured, some of them very
seriously. Hoodlums, on the watch for Vavuniya-bound passengers, attacked the
wrecked train. Fortunately there were only forty-seven people on that train.
The wreckers had made a serious miscalculation. There were very few Tamils on
board. And it was the Sinhalese who suffered most.
At 6 p.m. on May 24 a crowd—nearly a
thousand strong— again invaded the premises of the Polonnaruwa railway station.
They assaulted everybody in sight, including Sinhalese travellers and railway
officials, and damaged a good deal of railway property.
Assistant Superintendent of Police
Johnpillai who was travelling on leave to Valaichenai at the time, was beaten
up at Giritale. Timely arrival of police patrols saved his life. Mr Johnpillai,
who was in a critical condition, was rushed to hospital together with several
others who had suffered at the hands of the goondas.
That night police sources reported that
after an armed party had cleared the crowd out of the railway station things
were reasonably quiet. But the Railway Department took the precaution of
cancelling, immediately, all trains which were scheduled to run between
Batticaloa and Colombo.
Polonnaruwa Aflame
Polonnaruwa town was buzzing with people
and carefully calculated rumours. They huddled en masse in the streets,
exchanging stories of a threatened Tamil invasion from Trincomalee and from
Batticaloa. Labourers from the Land Development Department, the Irrigation
Department and from the Government farms who made up the Sinhala Hamudawa were
constantly on the rampage, raping, looting and beating up Tamil labourers and
public officers. The rumours that a Tamil army was marching to destroy
Polonnaruwa gave the roughnecks a heroic stature. More veerayas (heroes) joined
in to share the glory of saving the ancient Sinhalese capital from the Tamil
hordes as their ancestors had done a thousand years before them.
A notable feature of these activities was
that the Sinhalese colonists who had settled in the area for some years, and
therefore had some stake in general orderliness, took no part in the rioting.
The vast majority of the Hamudawa were imported Government labourers and the
rest were recently arrived squatters who had no roots yet in the area.
Many of these labourers were marked
‘present’ on the check-rolls while they were busy marauding in the town area.
It would have taken a brave supervising officer to refuse to mark their
attendance. Some of these men, in fact, had their attendance marked
simultaneously in two places—on the check roll at their work places and on the
register of the remand jail after they were arrested.
There was some evidence of method in all
this madness—it was crudely but effectively planned. The rioters had arranged
signals—one peal of a temple bell to signify police, two to signify army and so
on. They also had a simple system of hand signals to give their associates in the
distance such information as which way a police patrol went. The element of
planning was even more evident in the agent provocateur system which was widely
used. Many thugs—some of them well-known criminals —had shaved their heads and
assumed the yellow robes was bhikku.
A taxi driver known to the police as a bad
hat of a stopped on the road. He had a shaven head. Under the cushions of the
seat they found two soiled yellow robes. Police reports record that two ‘monks’
arrested for looting and arson were car-drivers by ‘occupation’. These phoney
priests went about whipping up race-hatred, spreading false stories and taking
part in the lucrative side of this game—robbery and looting.
Whenever the police went after a looter
with a shaven head he disappeared into a house and came back in the invulnerable
robes of a monk. Monks were ordained in Polonnaruwa in those few days faster
than ever before in the history of Upasampada, the Buddhist ordination
ceremony. They paid no attention to the sacrilege they were committing in the
sacred robes that the Buddha Himself had worn. This menace became so bad that
the police took a decision to arrest every man with a shaven head. They later
discovered that a few innocent Muslims had fallen into their net.
All this went on while Polonnaruwa had no
government nor even a Government Agent of its own. The Government Agent of
Anuradhapura, Deryck Aluwihare, had been ordered to look after both provinces
in perhaps the toughest assignment ever given to a young Civil Servant. With
the assistance of a few civil administration officers, a small police force
under A.S.P. Bertram Weerasinghe and a small army unit of fifty men (and with
no orders yet from Colombo), he was flying between Anuradhapura and
Polonnaruwa, trying to maintain order. He had asked for reinforcements from
Colombo but the Government seemed reluctant to take the situation in the North
Central Province seriously.
Community life in Polonnaruwa was
completely disorganized. The bazaar was seething with frenzied hatred. The
first task of the administration, or what there was of it, was to provide a
refuge for the Tamils whose lives were in danger— it was quite impossible to
protect isolated people with the meagre means at their disposal. The Government
Agent organized a refugee camp hard by the Kachcheri. Refugees streaming into
the camp soon disorganized the rudimentary sanitary arrangements which had been
provided.
Before very long the goondas turned their
spite against the Tamil officials in the Government offices. Government Agent
Aluwihare then set up a refugee camp for them in an isolated Irrigation
Department bungalow, stationing five policemen there for their protection. The
people, the Government Agent and the refugees knew deep within themselves how
vulnerable they were. How could five policemen defend this house against
hundreds of hoodlums demented by blood lust?
The situation of the refugees became worse
when the merchants, under threat of reprisals from the goondas, refused point
blank to sell foodstuffs to the officials looking after the refugees.
A quick decision was taken. Army personnel
commandeered whatever provisions were needed under the Government Agent’s
receipt.[4]
The thugs displayed a temerity which was
quite unprecedented. They had complete assurance that the police would never
dare to open fire. The Apey Aanduwa (The government is ours) bug had got deep
into their veins. As the situation deteriorated, desperate measures were
needed. The ringleaders of the racial revolt and people suspected of using
their position and influence to stir up trouble were arrested. Among them were
half a dozen chairmen of village committees and a few other parish pump
politicians. The goondas had developed a slick technique of throwing dynamite.
They carried it in the breast pockets of their shirts, with the fuse hanging
out. As the ‘enemy’ approached they struck a match, lit the fuse, pulled out
the stick of dynamite and flung it at point-blank range.
On May 24 and 25 murder stalked the streets
in broad daylight. Fleeing Tamils, and Sinhalese who were suspected of having
given them sanctuary, had their brains strewn about. A deaf mute scavenging
labourer was assaulted to death in the Hingurakgoda area—just to see what had
made him tick. The goondas burnt two men alive, one at Hingurakgoda, and the
other at Minneriya.
On the night of May 25, one of the most
heinous crimes in the history of Ceylon was carried out. Almost simultaneously,
on the Government farms at Polonnaruwa and Hingurakgoda, the thugs struck remorselessly.
The Tamil labourers in the Polonnaruwa sugar-cane plantation fled when they
saw the enemy approaching and hid in the sugar-cane bushes. The goondas wasted
no time. They set the sugar cane alight and flushed out the Tamils. As they
came out screaming, men, women and children were cut down with home-made
swords, grass-cutting knives and katties, or pulped under heavy clubs.[5]
At the Government farm at Hingurakgoda,
too, the Tamils were slaughtered that night. One woman in sheer terror embraced
her two children and jumped into a well. The rioters were enjoying themselves
thoroughly. They ripped open the belly of a woman eight months pregnant, and
left her to bleed to death. First estimates of the mass murders on that night
were frightening: 150—200 was a quick guess on the basis of forty families on
an average of four each. This estimate was later pruned down to around seventy,
on the basis of bodies recovered and the possibility that many Tamils had got
away in time.
The hoodlums were now motorized. They
roamed the district in trucks, smashing up kiosks and houses and killing any
Tamils who got in their way.
On the morning of May 26, the expected
Emergency had not yet been proclaimed. The situation in Polonnaruwa seemed
beyond hope. Government Agent Aluwihare, ASP. Weerasinghe and their colleagues
had not had a wink of sleep or rest for four days. They had been promised army
reinforcements and Bren guns but there were no signs of their coming.
The refugee camps were now overcrowded.
Aluwihare had a hunch that the Irrigation
bungalow which gave sanctuary to the Tamil public officers was no longer safe
and he had moved its occupants into the main camp near the Kachcheri. The
police had received information that the goondas from Minneriya, Hingurakgoda
and Padaviya were planning to build tip their forces for a major assault on the
night of May 26. The targets were to be the refugee camp and the police station
in which the public officials—mostly Sinhalese—--had flow taken refuge. The
basis of the war had shifted it was an all—out struggle against the forces of
authority who stood in the way of the Sinhala Hamuduwa taking complete control
of Polonnaruwa.
That morning at about 8.30 Government Agent
Aluwihare and a Land Development
Officer, Vasa de Silva, who was doing yeoman service in the district, were
jeeping down a long lonely roadway which led to the bund of the Parakrama
Samudra. They were on the look-out for a suitable site for a second refugee.
camp, away from the main centre of excitement. Suddenly they saw signs that
the goondas had passed that way. There were three bodies on the road. They
stopped the jeep and dismounted to see if there was any life left in the
bodies. The first man they looked at was very dead indeed. His brain had spilled
out on the roadway. As Aluwihare was turning away he heard shouting and saw a
huge truck load of about fifty thugs advancing on them from the front. They
were shooting ‘There’s the Government Agent. Kill him. That’s the rascal who is
helping the Tamils. Kill him ‘
The two officers whipped their jeep round.
It must have been a terrifying ordeal. They managed to escape only because between
them and the advancing truck the road had been strewn with new metal which had
not yet been rammed down. The truck bobbed up and down, preventing the thugs
from shooting, and was delayed just long enough for the officers to turn the
jeep and speed to the safety of the police station.
All morning, apparently by prior
arrangement, the goondas were building up their forces. From Minneriya,
Giritale and Hingurakgoda the gangs converged on Polonnaruwa for a door-die
attack on the last bastion of authority—the police station. The police station
was now crowded with Sinhalese officials against whom the terrorism was now
being directed because they were the symbol of law and order.
The defenders were in a desperate plight.
The police rank and file were afraid that if they made a fight of it against
the terrorists they would be hauled up before a Commission of Inquiry. This fear
of a political inquisition had sapped their morale considerably and it was
mainly their confidence in their officers which enabled them even to make a
show of resistance. The mob was certain that the police would never shoot and
their experience of the past two years during which the politicians had
publicly denounced the police and taken the side of the crowd, right or wrong,
increased the fears of the police.
At about
noon Government
Agent Aluwihare and A.S.P. Bertram Weerasinghe[6]
and their wives went to lunch at the Polonnaruwa rest house.
About 1000
goondas were lying about on the slope leading to the rest house,
recuperating their strength for the Grand Finale they were going to stage that
night. About fifty of them suddenly walked into the rest house. The women,
including Mrs Miriam Gaskell, the rest house keeper, were asked to stay in.
Aluwihare and Weerasinghe met the men in the veranda and asked them what they
wanted. They wanted tea. Mrs Gaskell accordingly made tea for her ‘guests’, who
departed peacefully enough except that they ignored the regulation that
refreshments had to be paid for.
As the day wore on the tension increased.
The crowds outside the police station had grown to about 3,000. The small army
unit and the handful of police kept them at bay. But the goondas were enjoying
themselves, hooting, hurling obscenities at the police and the officials. They
caught a Tamil official making his way to the station and beat him up to the
gates of the station and then withdrew. The police dared not fire and the army
said that they had no orders to shoot if there was a charge.
The refugees in the station breathed a huge
sigh of relief when they saw the promised army reinforcements coming in. It was
2 p.m. It was only a platoon of twenty-five men—half the unit having been
ordered to relieve Hingurakgoda. Things were no longer hopeless, however,
because the new platoon had brought a Bren gun.
The arrival of army reinforcements drove
the goonda leaders into a frenzied ‘conference’. Later events showed that they
had taken the size of the unit as an indication that this was only the advance
party of a larger force that would arrive that afternoon to relieve the
beleaguered town. Their decision was attack now before the opposition was
better fortified.
The Bren gun was mounted near the gate. At
3.20 p.m. the first wave of goondas advanced towards the police station, with
sarongs lifted, shouting obscenities and coarse defiance. They were still
confident that Apey Aanduwa would not shoot them down.
As they came nearer, the Bren fired a burst
over their heads to warn them. This had just the opposite effect. They took it
as confirmation that the army was only bluffing. The roar of the crowd became
louder and the obscenities more defiant. The entire 3,000 now began to swarm
towards the barricade. At this point the army unit commander said that he
needed authority to open fire. Aluwihare signed the order. The officer put the
paper in his pocket and walked out. On came the mob. They were only a few yards
away now. One man in front raised his sarong, displaying his genitals in foul
defiance of the army. The Bren opened fire and the passionate exhibitionist
fell dead. Two of his comrades shared his fate.
The crowd scattered in all directions as
the Bren stuttered briefly. Men who had been borne up by a demoniacal courage
reinforced by an assurance that they were politically protected now fled
screaming in terror, and forgathered in groups far away from the range of the
gun.
Forty-five minutes later the Minister of
Lands, C. P. de Silva, M.P. for Polonnaruwa, accompanied by his Director of
Land Development, Chandra de Fonseka, arrived at the police station. They had
flown in from
Colombo and had seen the havoc at Hingurakgoda en route. The Minister’s
first comment was: ‘This is worse than Gal Oya in 1956."
The goondas accosted their M.P. and
demanded his explanation for the shooting of their three comrades. The burden
of their lament was that the Government Agent, the police and the army had
killed Sinhalese veerayas while protecting the Tamils. ‘We did not send you to
Parliament to get your army to kill Sinhalese,’ they wailed.
It must have been a devilishly tricky
dilemma for the Minister. He knew very well, as he told the officials, that the
shooting of the three hoodlums had prevented a massacre of hundreds in
Polonnaruwa that afternoon. But it was politically very awkward for him as the
M.P. for the area and Minister in charge of the settlements in the district to
answer the persistent question: Why is the army killing Sinhalese?
The Horror Spreads
This question was going to loom large in
the next few days and twist the entire picture out of focus.
If there had been any chance whatever at
this stage of keeping Sinhalese tempers under control it vanished completely
following the Prime Minister’s broadcast call to the nation of May 26. The call
was, no doubt, well intentioned and a statement to the nation was, for once,
essential and even overdue. But, unwittingly or otherwise, it contained a
reference which had the effect of blowing raw oxygen into a fire that was
already raging vigorously. By a strangely inexplicable perversion of logic Mr
Bandaranaike tried to explain away a situation by substituting the effect for
the cause. The relevant portion of the speech was:
An unfortunate situation has arisen
resulting in communal tension. Certain incidents in the Batticaloa District
where some people lost their lives, including Mr D. A. Seneviratne, a former
Mayor of Nuwara Eliya, have resulted in various acts of violence and
lawlessness in other areas—for example Polonnaruwa, Dambulla, Galawela,
Kuliyapitiya and even Colombo.
The killing of Seneviratne on May 25 was
thus officially declared to be the cause of the uprising, although the Communal
riots had begun on May 22 with the attack on the Polonnaruwa
