Reflections on Black July 1983

Mr. Bandaranaike himself was assassinated just a year after the legislation was passed. The legislation could have been fully amended by successive governments at any time during the last 70 years. That it was not, was a disservice to subsequent generations.

What many people today do not know is that he tried to recognise the Tamil people in the years building up to this act but was vociferously shouted down by members not only of the opposition but of his own party.

July 26 is the anniversary of the signing of the historical agreement called the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, which in 1956 was created to recognise and protect the rights of the Tamil people within the state, offering regional autonomy to Tamil people by recognising Tamil as the official administrative language in the North. Mr. Bandaranaike co-created this pact and although the agreement lasted only nine months, it deserves to be more recognised.

The UNP had had a bi-lingual position until they realised that they needed to amplify Sinhala chauvinism. In 1957, J.R. Jayewardene strategically stirred up Sinhala nationalist sentiment, only nine years after the country had achieved independence from the British, by organising a public rally and march protesting the pact and what it represented. The march on October 4, 1957 was highly theatrical and triumphalist, and was planned to proceed with great publicity and fanfare from Grandpass in Colombo to the sacred Buddhist city of Kandy, home of the icons of Buddhism.

Mr. Jayewardene and Mr. Dudley Senanayake headlined the march, stating that the pact would divide the nation. The performative weaponisation of Buddhist cultural tradition, first begun a decade previously, then commenced. The intervention of Buddhist monks into political life, and their presence at ceremonial events, became normalised. The great religion of Buddhism taught peace and compassion as its central concepts but those who weaponised it repurposed it to fit their own political agenda.

This anti-pact protest march in fact was a short one and not the epic unfolding that had been promised and envisioned. Ironically, its outcome resulted in exactly what the organisers of the march were claiming to be protesting against: a binary split and a fracture in the country which polarised the majority and the minority communities.

The 72 mile march was planned by Mr. Jayewardene, the leader of the opposition party, the UNP. Wider claims of love of the motherland aside, it was an attempt to shore up support for his party in the minds of the emotive populace after their crushing defeat in the 1956 elections. The marchers never reached Kandy, being assaulted by stones thrown by pro-government supporters. They had intended to ask the gods to bless the country, in that most sacred of sites, they said, to keep it unified and not divided.

After this, fierce rallies were staged in Colombo by Mr. Jayewardene and Mr. Senanayake, including a massive gathering at Mr. Bandaranaike’s private residence in Rosmead Place with the grounds and garden of the house called Tintagel filled with angry crowds who had been stirred up by the opportunistic opposition MPs, led by Buddhist monks.

The pressure became so extreme over the next several months that Mr. Bandaranaike abrogated the pact in 1958. Within his own party, pressure was also being directed at him, notably by the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) coalition and the Viplavakari Lanka Sama Samaja (VLSSP) Party ministers Phillip Gunawardena and William de Silva – no doubt, with threats and menaces. Mr. Bandaranaike was murdered by a man a year later, an individual dressed in the robes of a Buddhist monk, who was angry that various lucrative trade contracts were not being directed towards himself and his allies.

The tensions behind Mr. Bandaranaike’s actions at that time were illustrated in a famous political cartoon by Aubrey Collette titled  “Cat’s Out Of The Bag”. In the centre of a large room, the caricatured figure of Mr. Bandaranaike is seen opening a large string bag, out of which comes a roaring Sinhala lion with a banner proclaiming Sinhalese Only. Confronted by this ferocity is a horrified Tamil lady in a saree, protecting her small son. In the doorway and in the shadows, clearly overseeing the proceedings with malice and gleefulness but not directly connected to the bag or the lion, are shadowed politicians in their national dress. The placement of the figures by the artist strongly suggests that Mr. Bandaranaike was sent out as a scapegoat by those who later profited for decades on the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism that the Sinhala Only Act engendered.

Instead of focusing on Mr. Bandaranaike as the signer of the act into law, subsequent generations would do well to examine who actually profited in the long term from the division of the country after his assassination two years after the act was passed. It is clear that Mr. Senanayake and Mr. Jayewardene were indeed the two who did so, continually furthering their political power and consolidating their status. The continual and repetitive devaluation of the minorities added fuel to their numbers. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism really benefitted them.

If we look at the image of the Sinhala lion and what it signifies, including its representation on the national flag holding a sword in its paw, we can contrast two central concepts of power. The lion is the universal king of beasts, an emblem of power and might. Yet power centred on physical domination is a primitive form of power, and exercises itself through the fear it causes in its citizens. A better model, especially for a democratic socialist republic, would be of protective rather than aggressive power where all peoples were guaranteed safety and the right to live and work in peace and without harassment.

Members of any ruling party who cease to care about the rights and dignity of all a country’s citizens, are insensitive to the citizens’ differing situations and with the goal of ensuring peace and co-existence not in their sights, inevitably begin to pursue vainglorious domination instead of justice, ultimately destroy the safety and welfare of the very citizens who have voted them into power. It’s a numbers game in politics, and this is why Facebook, X and other digital platforms are so useful in generating voting blocs and echo chambers with people being rage-baited to comment and identify with issues and vote with their ideals and emotions and perpetrate cancel culture, joining personality cults and critiquing designated targets in hordes like bots.

Indeed, the subsequent seven decades from 1958 to date have seen a fractured society and a vulnerable and volatile citizenry. Every election cycle to this day sees the emergence of racist and derogatory rhetoric and ethnic tensions, cynically stoked by majoritarian parties with vested interests in leveraging ethnic division. The use of social media and digital technology amplify the reach of racist propaganda in an extreme way. Recent laughing emojis posted under people’s names after NewsWire posted a story about the excavation of mass graves in Chemmani, evidence of the systematic slaughter that occurred, were sickening visual evidence of the callousness of the Facebook users who posted them.

In 1948, D.S. Senanayake had passed the Citizenship Act that disenfranchised three quarters of a million Tamil plantation workers to give their land to landless Sinhalese. The Gal Oya Scheme consolidated this internal colonisation of the country. His son Dudley Senanayake seems to have extended this physical territory domination that secured a voting base among the Sinhalese majority by strategically invoking a romanticisation of the Mahavamsa narrative. In the 1960s, he structured the post-colonial state as a custodian of Buddhist culture. This immediately marginalised the minority Tamils, Muslims and Christians. By doing so he sacrificed national unity to shore up support for his coalition. The aggressive nationalist vision promoted the majority Sinhala Buddhists over all other groups, inciting disrespect for the differing religious and cultural traditions of the minorities.

Mr. Jayewardene then utilised nationalist rhetoric for two decades to build a victory that finally came to him in 1977. This personal achievement was 20 years in the making. In the two decades from 1956 to 1978, attempts were made to amend the demarcations of the Sinhala Only legislation. In 1965, nine years after that incendiary act was signed, the Dudley Senanayake-Chelvanayakam Pact was signed and the District Councils Bill was gazetted in 1968. This provided that steps would be taken under the Tamil Special Provisions Act to make Tamil the language of administration and record in the Northern and Eastern Provinces for Tamil people to conduct their business in Tamil across the whole island and to enable legal proceedings to be conducted in Tamil in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. These were essentially the terms of the original pact that SWRD had drawn up with Chelvanayakam and a decade later his own SLFP party and the LSSP and CP protested it to the point where it was abandoned.

Unsurprisingly, successive governments failed to implement the laws, enacted by parliament, with regard to the use of the Tamil language, creating ongoing discouragement and resentment. Politicians tend to cater to the wishes and interests of the majority, particularly majorities which they have to a great extent not only catered to but shaped, over years of expedient and opportunistic strategy. They then act as if the minority do not exist as they do not need their support in order to maintain their own political position. In 1978, J.R. Jayewardene made himself executive president with enhanced powers and a new constitution and a multi-member proportional system for parliamentary elections.

He attempted at that time to put on a conciliatory display towards the minority Tamils. Under the new constitution, Tamil was granted official language status as a national language although Sinhala was enshrined as the official language of the country. However, the true attitudes towards the minority community held by the new executive president and his party were on full display only three years later.

In 1981, Mr. Jayewardene was the president of the country, head of the UNP, with Ranasinghe Premadasa as prime minister.  On May 31, 1981 the country saw the atrocity of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. Watching from the Jaffna Rest House as the library burned were Cyril Mathew Minister of Industries and Scientific Affairs and Gamini Dissanayake Minister for Lands, Land Development and Mahaweli Development, who later claimed it was the work of a few drunk policemen. The attack on the library was never properly investigated and the perpetrators were never held to account, adding another episode of impunity in the country.

In Colombo in 1983, eyewitness testimony reports that the Jayewardene administration and the police and armed forces did nothing to stop the looting and burning and terror that was unleashed on the Tamil citizens. The addresses of families and shop owners and business owners of Tamil origin were accurately identified from what could only be government records. And thus the riots began, which killed many thousands of people and destabilised the country for nearly 30 years.

President’s Counsel and Former President of the Bar Association Mr. Saliya Pieris, recalled the violent outbreak of the civil war. “Despite declarations of curfew, it was clear that the all-powerful Executive President and his government with a five-sixths majority had lost control. Was it that they had lost control or that they did not want to control until it was too late? We will never know. For three days, President Jayewardene was off air. I remember my parents’ anger and disgust at his failure to address the nation. He had won the presidential election just eight months before. When he eventually did come on national TV about three days later it was not to express remorse or anger at the violence but to condemn separatism and to announce the 6th Amendment to the constitution banning separatism. He lacked empathy to understand the anguish and suffering of the people who had been torn from their homes and whose loved ones had been killed. The 6th Amendment was another counterproductive amendment brought as a knee-jerk reaction which resulted in the ouster of the moderate TULF MPs from Parliament, thus strengthening the LTTE.”

So let us remember the day that Mr. Bandaranaike and Mr. Chelvanayakam tried to make a pact, 70 years ago, to respect the Tamil people, which was made into law and which then  lasted for nine months. It is easy to forget the attitude of inclusiveness and respect that motivated that, in the majoritarian mayhem that followed. All the braying and brutishness that accompanies the nationalisation of religion should not fracture or erase that brief but significant moment of higher aspirations.