Michael Roberts
At a moment when the world is reflecting on the extreme impact of Zealotry via tales re NINE/ELEVEN, a letter from Rajiva Wijesinha in Colombo reminded me of a fighter for peace and justice: namely Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe. The best epitaph for this good soul as a man of faith trained in the political sciences who was forthright in his confronatations with zealotry is an article I wrote around 40 odd years back when island Lanka was locked within ethnic conflict and its atrocities.
A Man inspired, A Man who inspired: Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe
Father Lakshman Wickremasinghe came into my life in a big way from 1958 at Peradeniya Campus. I was heavily involved in Student Christian Movement (SCM) activities then and Father Lak’s appointment as campus chaplain was a godsend to all of us in the SCM. As firm as energetic, never commandeering, but always persistent and organized, Father Lak, as we called him with some affection, proved an inspirational figure within the campus.
Though the Campus chaplaincy and Church were quite some distance away, a long trudge up hill and down, the Sunday services were a real drawcard. Bible study classes, mostly student led, were held in the tutorial rooms at the Arts Faculty, but also sometimes at the chaplaincy. Father Lak also made it a point to drop in occasionally at the weekly prayer meeting in Ramanathan Hall where I was housed. Looking back, perhaps the most momentous step that occurred under his ‘regime’ was the initiation of mixed carol services with Tamil and Sinhala hymns among the usual English ones. This was in step with the socio-political transformations of that decade and our time. It was rendered all the more meaningful by the sheer beauty of hymnal expression, the arrangement of space and the religiosity of so many of the student regulars. Not all the bouquets were due to Father Lak in these works of ‘art, for the Christian student body had so many talented hands and minds, but he certainly drew the best out of people.
To me, then, Father Lak was both mentor and friend. Mark Cooray and I went to him when we decided to organize a going-away party and the chaplaincy below the church was readily loaned to us for the big event. And when as a temporary assistant lecturer, I was advised by Labby (WJF Labrooy to the world) to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, Father Lak was among those I named as a Referee (together with Labby, Leslie Handunge and one of my old schoolteachers, Miss Anghie). And when I was fortunate enough to secure the scholarship, it was to Father Lak that I went for advice on which hall to select. “Merton,” he said, while giving me the name of Dr. Lucas, a Fellow there whom he knew well, in case my choice was approved. And so it was to Merton College I went, a place of residence and collegial interaction, not least in the fields of rugger, cricket and soccer, that served me so well.
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Later in the mid-1960s when I returned with my wife Shona to teach in the Department of History at Peradeniya “Bishop Lak”, as he had become after his consecration in 1962, used to drop by occasionally at our annexe in Siebel Place. This was Bishop Lak in his very best parish mode, a friend always. Though both of us were no longer practicing Christians, he never took an evangelistic line so that our chats were often about Sri Lankan affairs or about common friends, gossip one can say but the very best of amiable and concerned Sri Lankan gossip.
I was one of the Peradeniya mob involved in organizing the Ceylon Studies Seminar (CSS) series from 1969 onwards. These involved stirring discussions on Sri Lankan affairs on the basis of written academic papers. By 1972 several of us were alive to the sharpening of Sri Lankan Tamil sentiments and their profound sense of grievance – that is, the deterioration of ethnic political relations. Among the factors that were so central importance to SL Tamil fervour at that time was (a) the gerrymandering of University entrance results to the prestigious science areas through a process of standardization on top of a district quota system[i] and (b) the new republican constitution of 1972.
When, therefore, the CSS organized a half-day seminar to review the new constitutional arrangements, Bishop Lak was among those who made presentations — not only because he had intimate knowledge about the issues at hand and the inner workings of the lead-up process, but also because of his own disciplinary background in political science.
At about this point Jane Russell, postgraduate student at the History Department in Peradeniya, came back from a research stint in the Jaffna Peninsula and told me that there were some young men there who felt that their Tamil leaders (mostly with Colombo bases) had let them down. As far as they were concerned, the Tamils living in Colombo and its environs could die. I took this seriously. They had moved to the extreme pole and possessed the “power of polarity,” with its absence of ethical constraints because of its own motivating sense of righteousness.
There were yet other ominous signs.[ii] Despite dismissive opinions from voices within the campus, some of the leading CSS hands side-stepped this resistance and proceeded to organize a one-day seminar on “The Sinhala-Tamil Problem” in Colombo – since Colombo was the hegemonic centre of the island where most far-reaching decisions were reached. If we wished to be heard, the attempt had to be in Colombo.
For us of the CSS this was a massive logistical exercise. Father Kenneth Fernando provided the parish hall facilities at the Anglican Cathedral free of charge. The Marga Institute under Godfrey Gunatilleke and Chandra Soysa assisted and Mark Cooray at the Law College agreed to be chair.
From inadequate memory I can say that the seminar took place on either the 6th or 9th of October 1973. Though many politicians had been sent personal invitations, few turned up. Gamini Dissanayake and Premadasa Udagama, the latter with Kumar Rupesinghe in tow, were among the exceptions – present for a little while in the afternoon. It was evident, too, that the audience was disproportionately Tamil in composition, while the Sinhalese in the ‘crowd’ included quite a few Christians resident in Colombo (e.g. Elmo Wijesinghe, LSD and Sita Pieris). The Peradeniya contingent included foreigners within the study network such as Anthony Ellman, Janice Jiggins and Jane Russell. The conclusion one can draw is that the politically-active Sinhala people, including many Sinhala Buddhists, simply did not recognise the existence of a serious problem. They were sitting on a claymore mine and blissfully unaware of it.
The morning sessions involved a presentation of “Historical Perspectives” by C. R. De Silva[iii] of the History Department, Peradeniya and two presentations of Sinhalese and Tamil positions by Nissanka Wijeyeratne[iv] and Senator Tiruchelvam respectively. The afternoon sessions were devoted to what we called “Bridge-Building” and involved four speakers, viz., Neville Jayaweera, V. Karalasingham, Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe and myself.
Each collection of papers was followed by a controlled discussion. Members of the audience could come up to the platform and speak for a set period of time subject to Cooray’s control through a bell (to deter those prolix and excessive). This was the first (and last) time that I saw and heard such political figures as A. Amirthalingam, Sivasidamparam and N N. Sanmugathasan.
My recollections of this affair, of course, are disjointed and incomplete. But let me jot down some memories in point-form.
- Karalasingham hectored the audience in booming voice – to the point where Anthony Ellman got up in disgust and left.
- Shanmugaratnam stressed that all of us, then, were queuing for bread and that we did not do so as Sinhalese or Tamils – a point that drew a rousing cheer. But, on reflection, this was so silly. The wherewithal of life was (is) directed by economic opportunity and jobs and the fact remained that the Tamils were subject to some measure of discrimination in job opportunity, especially in the highly-valued (overvalued of course) government sector.
- In the course of her comments Janice Jiggins put her foot in it when she referred to the Karaiyār “low castes” — drawing an immediate retort from a gentleman on the floor who shot up and interjected “take that back.” Jiggins was totally non-plussed. I quickly passed on a note to my left saying that she should re-phrase it to “non-Vellalar castes.” Later, and rather to my surprise, I discovered that the gentleman in question was not a Tamil, but a Sinhalese of Karava lineage, Jagath Wijayanayake,[v] a person who was passionately involved in pressing Karava history and its supposedly Kshātriya origins. As an aside, what is the moral here? The more we struggle over history the more complexity (and fantasy) that develops.
- During his comment from the podium as floor, Amirthaligam fiercely reminded Wijeyeratne about the manner in which he, as GA and supremo in the Jaffna area during the 1960s, had reacted when a group of Tamil women had brought a tarantula in a bottle to display it as evidence – because it had been dropped among the female satyagraha protesters by a soldier. Wijeyeratne, we were told, had adopted an air of Buddhist compassion for animal life and exaggeratedly released the tarantula so that it could live.
- At one point, Mano Singham, a young man who had been a Trinitian, made a stirring address[vi] where he reprimanded the senior generations for letting the situation deteriorate to its present state and warned all those present that the time for remedial action was in the here and now; or else…. This little speech was then seconded by a senior gentleman, Lionel Fernando, who had taught Singham. “Listen to that young man,” he affirmed.
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So, now, some 35 years later, we are only too aware that we did not listen; or, rather, that those who listened and those who tried to avert the sharpening of conflict, failed in their efforts. With Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe this failure was not for want of trying. I came to know subsequently that he had battled continuously to get moderate voices on all sides of the three or four fences to come up with mediations. There are several untold stories here and I can only provide a glimpse of his untiring endeavours through a happenchance event in 1981. Let me take up this tale.
In 1981 I was in Sri Lanka on a year’s sabbatical study leave with my family and undertaking research on the city of Colombo.[vii] On the political front the UNP government of J. R. Jayewardene had proposed a system of district councils as a step towards the appeasement of the Tamils. While considered inadequate, the scheme was under serious consideration in certain Tamil quarters.
At this point Bishop Lak decided to assemble a small party of well-meaning individuals outside the formal political arena to sit down with him in Kurunegala so as to hammer out some practical ideas for this type of decentralization. A key figure in this effort was R. S. Wijeyesekere, a senior executive with Forbes & Walker.
Bishop Lak persuaded Professors K. Indrapala and Luther Jeyasingham to come down to Kurunegala for this workshop from their base in Jaffna; while canvassing Neelan Tiruchelvam, Michael Roberts and XY a gentleman with links to the Indian Tamils and plantation people whose name I forget to join this venture. I persuaded him to invite Gerald Peiris from Peradeniya University to attend.
As it happened, I went to Kurunegala a day earlier so I had a chance of chatting with Bishop Lak for a fair amount of time. It was then that the tale of (some of) his efforts to forge amiable discussions among well-meaning personnel in both the Sinhala and Tamil communities, among them several bhikkhus, unfolded, or rather, was unfolded. I now wish I had tape-recorded these details. Such commitment! Such an untiring and earnest pursuit of moderate politics! And so many well-intentioned people ready to support his work!
That workshop in Kurunegala – just one month or so after the shooting of a policeman at an election meeting in Jaffna involving V. Yogeshwaran (a Member of Parliament from the Tamil United Liberation Front) which in turn triggered reprisal attacks by policemen that saw the Jaffna Library burnt down – was as intense as it was rewarding to the participants. Thereafter, I spent a week or so drafting a summary of the discussions.
This “report” was sent to Bishop Lak. I do not know whether he utilized it or not; and in what way he deployed it if at all (my copy is misplaced).[viii] It could be surmised that it went down in flames, metaphorically speaking, in the course of the burnings and killings of Black July 1983. And with that atrocious, obscene moment, Bishop Lak’s life-endeavour collapsed. His heart gave way.
END NOTES
[i] See the article by C. R. de Silva, entitled “The Impact of Nationalism on Education: The Schools Take-Over (1961) and the University Admissions Crisis, 1970-1975,” in Michael Roberts (ed.), Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protest in Modern Sri Lanka,Colombo: Marga Publications, pp. 474-99.
[ii] See chapter 14, “A Biographical Episode,” in Roberts, Exploring Confrontation, Reading: Harwood, 1994 and Roberts, “Sri Lanka: Ethnic Conflict and Political Crisis, A Review Article”, Ethnic Studies Report, 1988, vol. 6: 40-62.
[iii] A funny sidelight: Dr Colvin R. de Silva had been sent an invitation and he got agitated when he saw our notice with its reference to a talk by “C. R. de Silva.” He sent us a telegram saying he was otherwise engaged.
[iv] Nissanka Wijeyeratne had been a senior administrator in the Ceylon civil service and been G. A. in the north at one time; but had then joined the United Left front and become a Minister in its cabinet; while his younger brother, Tissa Wijeyeratne, at one point an active member of the Ceylon Communist Party, was also a vocal figure in ULF circles in the 1970s.
[v] F. B. Jagath Wijayanayake was at one time the President of the Sri Lanka Kshātriya Association.
[vi] I thank Marshall Fernando for reminding me about this incident.
[vii] See my “The Two Faces of the Port City: Colombo in Modern Times,” in Frank Broeze (ed.), Brides of the Ocean: Port Cities of Asia, 1500 to Modern Times, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1989a, pp. 173-87. This is also available in People Inbetween, (Sarvodaya, 1989) as chapter 7.
[viii] I also sent it to Gerald Peiris. I recall that he argued against the thrust of our decentralization suggestions. One ground was that decentralization meant more efficient victimization of people by local/regional politicians with power, including that of their goon squads. This stance on Peiris’s part is in line with his more recent opposition to federalism on a variety of grounds.
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The Jaffna library was burnt when I was the District Governor of the Lions Clubs. Dr.Yogu Pasupathy wanted me to get funds from Lions Clubs International (LCI) to re-build the library. I was able to get funds from LCI to rebuild the Children’s Sction of the library.
How the 1973 Ceylon-Studies meeting held in Colombo totally missed the bus.
Comment (13-Sept.2026) by Chandre Dharma-wardana for Michael Robert’s posting regarding the above meeting.
Michael Roberts says, harking back to 1973 “I had a chance of chatting with Bishop Lak for a fair amount of time. It was then that the tale of (some of) his efforts to forge amiable discussions among well-meaning personnel in both the Sinhala and Tamil communities, among them several bhikkhus, unfolded, or rather, was unfolded.”
Roberts discusses the 1973 meeting chaired by Mark Coorey. I personally knew or was well acquainted with many of the people (Mark Coorey, Jiggins, Shanmugathasan etc). However, I did not attend the meeting as many of us in the Science Faculties heard about the event only afterwards. The two-cultures that C.P. Snow referred to existed strongly in Sri Lankan academia.
I will refer to this meeting as the 1973CS-meeting.
Micahel Robets had emphasized in red the following text: “The conclusion one can draw is that the politically-active Sinhala people, including many Sinhala Buddhists, simply did not recognise the existence of a serious problem. They were sitting on a claymore mine and blissfully unaware of it.”
I concur completely with him, and want to add that even the Tamil speakers were in the same boat. The main issues did not seem to have got discussed. The usual statements from various preset ideological positions (e.f., Marxist or liberal democratic or anthropological, i.e., caste analysis etc.) seem to have been aired.
The problem was (is) THIS: all this good people, and scholars (foreign and local), except perhaps a few people such as Jane Russell among Western scholars (and people such as Gamini Iriyagolle—a historian and CCS man– among local scholars), had failed to realize how futile these types of efforts had already become, mainly because those in Peradeniya, and those in Colombo including Bishop Lak, did not speak or read Tamil and were unaware of the level of polarization, as well as the “sacrificial devotion” that had already emerged among the SL Tamils, by 1973.
The 1973CS-meeting or, at a higher level, meetings between the LTTE and GOSL (e.g., later at Timpu) were basically futile, given ground realties.
In hindsight we can say that these Anglophone academics (as well as most of us) underestimated the coming catastrophe because they (and we) did not read the political pamphlets that were entirely in the Tamil language.
Unfortunately, this is still the same today, even with instant machine translation now available via AI.
They did not understand that Colvin R de Silva’s constitution provided an excuse and a reason for the Eelamists to increase political polarization. Following the 1972 constitution, mainstream Tamil political parties formed the Tamil United Front (TUF) (later the TULF). Its youth wing and underground organizations openly declared that peaceful agitation had failed. Colvin who had famously talked of “one-language, two nations, two-languages, one nation” only a few years previously had hatched a monoethnic constitution.
However, in fairness to the SLFP-LSSP government, their policies were no where as discriminatory as what was placed on the Chinese minority (30%) in Malaysia by 1970, with clear special rights to Malays (60%) as “Bhumiputra”, with the suppression of English as well as Chinese and having Malay Only as the official language.
However, learning from previous ethnic violence, the Chinese minority followed a different (and successful) path completely, eschewing violence and concentrating on capturing power in the financial and mercantile sector of the country, while leaving politics mainly to the Malays. In contrast, the TULF in its Vaddukkoddai resolution opened the door for military action, pitting some 7% of the population (mostly Tamils in the North), against the Sinhalese and Muslims constituting 80% of the population.
I had known Jane Russell to some extent, and she had spent some time in Jaffna and she seem to be in the know. In contrast, I think most of these scholars at the 1973CS-meeting did not know that the militants in the TULF, and the “boys” who had already decided to target those “well-meaning” Tamils as Thurogi, (traitors) to the cause of Eelam.
Janice Jiggins was correct in referring to the existing highly unjust discrimination in Tamil society that the Tamil leaders (and most scholars) ignored while focusing intensely on the political loss of power and resulting discrimination that the Tamils were exposed to, due to Sinhala Only, University admissions bill and the 1972 Colvin Constitution.
But the Caste issue was irrelevant at the burning moment; caste discrimination had existed for millennia and was culturally and politically accepted, while the hit on the power of high-caste Tamils, limited admission of their children to University etc., were new, previously unheard of highly visible phenomena that triggered intense grievance among the elite Tamils. They translated/transferred the elite-strata feelings to the masses of Tamils using Ethnic Identity and patriotism to Eelam, and began supporting paramilitary action in their Tamil language propaganda. Chelvanayagam and others began to organize “Makkal Padai” in response.
Most of the “well-meaning” people that Roberts refers to probably did not know the gravity of this rapidly worsening situation. For instance, only a few years before this 1973CS-meeting, in September 1970, shortly after the United Front coalition led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike came to power, Deputy Cultural Minister Somaweera Chandrasiri traveled to Jaffna. During his visit, he delivered a speech making conciliatory remarks regarding ethnic harmony, heavily emphasizing that the Sinhalese and Tamils shared extensive cultural links and historical overlaps. But the Tamil youth viewed his integrationist and conciliatory rhetoric as a treacherous attempt to dilute Tamil national identity, the Eelam objective, and assimilate them into the majority culture. His car was targeted in a bomb attack while he was touring Jaffna. The device failed to destroy the vehicle or kill the deputy minister, allowing him to escape unscathed.
The attack was carried out by Ponnudurai Sivakumaran, a highly influential figure in early Tamil militancy who belonged to the Tamil Students League (well before the LTTE consolidated power under Prabhakaran). Soon after, Chelvanayagam appeared in a picture with Sivakumaran, establishing his prestige. Sivakumaran would later become famous in militant history when he was surrounded by police in 1974 after a failed bank robbery, he swallowed a cyanide capsule to avoid torture and interrogation. His suicide established the cyanide capsule tradition that Velupillai Prabhakaran later made a mandatory requirement for all LTTE cadres.
By 1973, the Tamil political narrative had already shifted decisively toward justification of violence and Kasi Anandan had begun writing his highly inflammatory, militant poetry. By 1973, his Unarchchik-kavithaigal (highly charged, “spirited” or emotive poetry) was already circulating extensively. His verses were viewed by the state as incitement and sedition, and by Tamil youth as a holy rallying cry. Kasi Anandan wrote scathing poems targeting Tamil politicians who co-operated with the Colombo government (such as the actions surrounding the Somaweera Chandrasiri or Alfred Duraiappah circles). His lines frequently romanticized martyrdom, calling on Tamil youth to offer their lives and take up arms for Tamil Eelam, bloody sacrifice and eliminating thurogi.
By 1973, political literature, student leaflets, and street pamphlets in Jaffna abandoned the rhetoric of “federalism” and “compromise”. The written Tamil word became a vehicle for advocating armed resistance and total secession.
Therefore, in such Eelam Tamil lines of thought, everyone–Sinhalese, Tamil, or foreigner– who came to the 1973CS-meeting and who were “well-meaning” in the sense used by Roberts would have been judged to be “thurogi” by the measures used by the Tamil Student League. Also, as far as I know, no one at this 1973CS-meeting referred to the attempt to blow up Somaweera Chandrasiri as a sign and symptom of the times. Not one of the Tamil contributors mentioned Kasi Anandan. People such as Shanmugathasan, a historian, a Tamil and leader of the Chinese-Wing Communist party came to the 1973CS-meeting and uttered his usual Marxist class-based interpretation and utterly failed to see the coming violence and Fascism of the Eelamists. Many Marxists actually became fellow travellers of the Eelamists.
This meeting should have discussed Kasi Anandan, noted, catalogued and evaluated the increasing violence, and even the threat against the Colombo Tamils posed by Eelamists (something that Jane Russell noted). The Colombo Tamils were also seen as enemy by the Ultra-nationalist Sinhalese fascists.
The JRJ government allowed the 1983 pogrom to go on without rapidly taking action to protect the innocent Tamil civilians. However, according to Sebastian Rasalingam, the 1983 pogrom was not just a pogrom carried out by the JRJ goons alone, but also sponsored by Prabhakaran who knew the propaganda value of the pogrom for his movement. Rasalingam refers to the dubious role of Nadesan, a Colombo police officer during the 1983 pogrom, who later became a key LTTEer. Other writers of that era (e.g., Dougals Wickramaratna based in London) have noted that most of the Colombo DIGs were Tamils, that they failed to exercise their authority, and that none of them have written their memoirs. They could have provided us an inside picture of what actually happened.
The attack on Buddhist pilgrims in Anuradhapura, the attack on the Temple of the Tooth, and even the attack in Aranthalawa were subsequent LTTE attempts to enrage the Sinhalese and create pogroms of Tamils —but by then the Sinhalese had stopped reacting to such provocations. All this requires serious quantitative study by social scientists. But alas, it is likely that these topics will never be studied objectively, as many of the key players are not alive anymore.
1973 was just two years after the first JVP uprising. The government intelligence knew very well about the rise of youth extremism in Jaffna in the wake of the rise of youth extremism in the south. In all probability government security agents operated extra judicially and harassed and tortured innocent tamils merely on suspicion.
In 1974 I was the President of Vidyodaya University and it was the year when Minster Bad-Ud-Deen Mohammad worked hard to establish the Jaffna campus to show that his University admissions bill was merely affirmative action and not based on lack of goodwill towards Tamils. Tamil politicians themselves had been the main obstacle to establishing a University in the North as there were rival proposals for the site. Finally, the Minister took unilateral action. When the ministry requested us to release staff from our universities, I recommended release of Dr. Sivathamby to go to Jaffna, together with Mr. Wijayasurendra, assistant Registrar of Vidyodaay, who expressed willingness to go to Jaffna, with an idealism for “bridging the ethnic divide”. I was personally more pessimistic and told him that at a time when existing campuses were falling into the hands of student terrorists, the Jaffna campus will totally spin out of control to become a hotbed of Eelamist fascism. Although I recommended sending a Tamil officer, it was Wijesurendra who went there as Registrar.
In fact, Wijesurendra soon found that he and the Sinhalese students were totally unwelcome; they faced assault and thuggery. If there was to be a University in Jaffna, then at that moment in history it had to be a mono-ethnic Tamil Eelamist University and nothing else. Soon enough, the campus was ethnically cleansed. That is another dramatic story with contrasting stories coming from both sides of the ethnic divide.
Fortunately, today we have some degree of multi-ethnic character in the student body once again in the Jaffna University, and in most campuses. Nevertheless, Kasi Anadan’s blood curdling racist poetry is still being read with reverence by various members of the Tamil Diaspora, for example in New York USA, as seen in a speech by Chandi Sinnathurai, in February, 2006.
Chandre Dharmawardana.