Soon after his return from Oxford he wrote a couple of articles in the Independent, a popular newspaper in the l920s, advocating that federalism is an ideal system of government for bilingual Ceylon. His baby daughter, the future President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaranatunga, must have been romping about in his spacious gardens when I was seated in the conference room of his Horagolla residence as a member of the Chelvanayakam team and confronting Mr. Bandaranaike with his Independent newspaper articles which I had preserved from my student days at Ananda College, Colombo. This was in 1957 when the Bandaranaike - Chelvanayakam Pact was signed.
The story of the signing of the Pact may be of some interest to the present younger generation of leaders as an object lesson in how leaders in the past led in national affairs. I had better recapitulate it by quoting a passage from my book, The Fall and Rise of the Tamil Nation, published in Canada ten years ago.
The Pact was finalized at a conference of Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and his Ministers on the one side and Mr. S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and his team of Federal Party leaders on the other held at the Prime Minister's Office in the then Senate Building.
This is what I wrote 10 years ago when things were fresh in my mind:
"The conference drew to a close about 2 o'clock in the morning (of 27.7.1957). I had taken down full notes of the terms as each point was agreed to. The Prime Minister ordered the waiting Press to be let in. Representatives of the local as well as the world Press trooped into the room. As their cameras and flashlights clicked, the Prime Minister announced the terms of the agreement from my notes.
"S.J.V. Chelvanayakam announced that in view of the agreement he was withdrawing the Federal Party's campaign against the Government.
"I went with Chelvanayakam to his residence when the conference was over. He knew that I was not happy. It was obvious that he was not either. He looked very grave, and would not utter a word of comment. I voiced my misgivings, and remarked that whatever the agreement was worth, we did not even have a document to vouch for what either side has agreed to. We shall have to rely solely on newspaper correspondents' reports. He looked bewildered and stared at me.
"He then recovered his composure and said that he would make an appointment with the Prime Minister that day itself and get a record embodying the terms of the agreement signed by him. He asked me to take a little rest and prepare the document in duplicate. Chelvanayakam took the document to the Prime Minister's Office at noon and got it signed by both parties. He told me on his return that Phillip Gunawardene was with the Prime Minister when he called, and that the document was read over by Gunawardene before the Prime Minister and he (Chelvanayakam) signed it. This Agreement came to be known as the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957."
This was the document which the Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike tore up at the urging of a group of Buddhist monks in February 1958, thus abrogating the Pact in response to the agitation by J. R. Jayewardene of the U.N.P., but under the pretext that A. Amirthalingam, MP for Vaddkoddai, had violated it by starting the anti-Sri campaign.
Immediately, following the signing of the pact I wrote a little booklet of some 60 or 75 pages and issued it as a Federal Party publication explaining the position of the Tamils and what made the Federal Party under Mr. Chelvanayakam's leadership to have talks with Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and his Government and enter into the B-C Pact. Let nobody mistake me as claiming to be a prophet when I say that surprisingly I gave the name "Ceylon Faces Crisis" as the title of that little booklet at that time. That indeed is precisely what Sinhalese politicians have since made Ceylon to go through, the climax of which is what we are witnessing now. The climax is so world pervading that it has persuaded Mr. Bob Rae to undertake a long journey from Canada to Ceylon to urge the Tamils and the Sinhalese to sit round a table and talk about the benefits of federalism and adopt it. Did Mr. Rae undertake the journey on his own, or was he coaxed into it by some states of the international community trying to hide behind him?
No less than 57 years have elapsed since Mr. D. S. Senanayake of the UNP successfully persuaded Whitehall to act on the basis that what the Colebrook Commission did in 1833 was to politically unite the territories of the three kingdoms Britain had captured in Ceylon in three separate wars at different times (and not an administrative unification, as it really was) and to deliver the united island country of Ceylon solely in his palms, that is, in the hands of the Sinhalese. During that 57-year period the Tamils have been treated as if they were a subject people militarily defeated and conquered by the Sinhalese. Under the tyrannical rule of the Sinhalese for half a century and more the Tamils have been crying hoarse protesting against the Sinhalese misuse of power and demanding that the pattern of government be changed to a federal system under which the Tamils could look after and manage their own affairs in their own traditional homeland territory. In a desperate show of protest and resistance to the Sinhalese tyranny they organized mass demonstrations, marches, Gandhian style Satyagraha movements, etc., all peaceful and non-violent, of course. The only response in answer from the Sinhalese governments, whether run by the UNP or by its rival SLFP, was always arrests, imprisonment in prisons and military detention camps, massacres and indiscriminate killings, pogroms, genocides, and what not.
All the while the world at large and the so-called international community deliberately kept their eyes and ears securely closed. Not a single country had the will to raise a voice of protest against the Sinhalese government's treatment of the Tamils and their abuse of power in Ceylon -- until, of course, Velupillai Prabhakaran appeared on the scene with his LTTE Army. Only now the international community have got astir; even so, it is no more than admonitions in the form of paternal advice to Prabhakaran: do only this, and not that; only this is acceptable, and not that; and so on. What shall we say of India, as much a British made union of conquered states and kingdoms as Ceylon was, which agreed to the partition of its eastern part to become the independent state of Bangladesh and its western part to separate and become Pakistan, but now sanctimoniously demanding that the unity and territorial integrity of Ceylon should never be tampered with under any circumstances and should be preserved for all time! What shall we say of the United States of America, which came into being after the 13 colonies of Britain fighting a fratricidal war against their mother country and sundering the umbilical chord of racial unity and historical ethnic integrity, now branding the liberation movement of the Tamils, the LTTE, as a terrorist organization and warning Prabhakaran to respect the political unity and the territorial integrity of far away Ceylon! How can Ambassador Coffer Black forget that it is his country which made the killing of U.S.A.'s Presidents, Vice-Presidents and Commanders-in-Chief into a perpetual cult of terrorism? After all, what is war if it is not expanded terrorism? Ask the Japanese, they will tell you all about terrorism going nuclear.
I am only too well aware that reason, logic, morality, virtue, altruism and the like have no place in statecraft and international diplomacy, much less in modern political strategies (thanks to Machiavelli and Kautilya). Nonetheless, it is not unusual that more often than not hypocrisy is the order of the day in politics, national as well as international. The more and more I think about it the more convinced I become of the wisdom behind what a Canadian Federal Court Judge said to me when I was in the witness box in a court case before him in Toronto. "After all," His Lordship said, "we live in this world, Sir, we don't live by theories.' This was a rejoinder to my statement in my testimony that all the Governments in Ceylon which got themselves returned to office after June 1972 were illegitimate and violative of the laws and the established Constitution of Ceylon, and explained to His Lordship why.
What is the provocation for my saying all this now? There is of late a plethora of media articles and comments on the ongoing stalemate in the so-called peace process. The purport of almost all of them is well-orchestrated pressure on the LTTE and President Chandrika Kumaratunga to sit round a table and have talks.
But, talks about what? What is there now to talk about and discuss which has not been discussed threadbare by generations of Sinhalese and Tamil leaders? Have not the Tamils talked, talked, and talked enough during the last half a century and more with every Sinhalese Prime Minister and President clothed with totalitarian power? Each set of "talks" resulted in "pacts" supposed to meet Tamil aspirations. A self-governing federal Tamil state shrank down to regional council. Then regional council shrank down to district council. In time district council shrank down to village committees bundled into provincial councils. The Tamils saw none of these things. It has always been a case of the Tamils climbing down and down in their aspirations for the sake of compromise and racial harmony every time "talks" are held and the Sinhalese reneging on every one of them after getting the Tamils to commit themselves in signed "pacts".
To be continued
