Publishing information: Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement. Copyright 1991, Duke University Press. Posted with permission. All rights reserved. This material may be saved or photocopied for personal use but may not be otherwise reproduced, stored or transmitted by any medium without explicit permission. Any alteration to or republication of this material is expressly forbidden. Please direct permissions inquiries to: Permissions Officer, Box 90660, Durham, NC 27708, USA; or fax 919.688.3524.
Transcribed: Johannes Schneider for the ETOL February, 2001
Ceylon which since 1972 has officially been called Sri Lanka, is one of the two countries in the world (Bolivia being the other) in which Trotskyism was for a certain period of time a significant factor in national politics. For more than forty years it had members in the national parliament, during most of this period it was the single most important political element in the labor movement, and on two occasions the Trotskyists had members in the national government.
Sri Lanka is not a country which Marxist theory would indicate as likely to be a major center of strength of a movement such as Trotskyism, advocating a proletarian revolution. An island of 25,332 square miles located to the south of the Indian subcontinent, it had a population in 1980 of approximately fifteen million people, only a relatively small minority of whom could be classified as proletarians. The economy of the country remained overwhelmingly agricultural, the majority of the gainfully employed people still being landholding or sharecropping peasants.
Until 1948 Ceylon was a British colony. However, for almost two decades before the date of independence the British had conducted an “experiment” in the island. In the so-called Donoughmore Constitution, enacted in 1931, Ceylon had been granted wide internal self-government with the British continuing to control only defense and foreign affairs, and reserving certain “extraordinary“ powers for emergency use. The British moved the island towards independence at approximately the same time they took that step with regard to India.
The British had been only the last of many alien conquerors of Ceylon. The “indigenous” people of the island, the Sinhalese, believe themselves to be descended from people from north India who arrived twenty-five hundred years ago. Today, they make up about 70 percent of the population. The second largest element, constituting something over 20 percent of the people, are the Tamils, descended from invaders and immigrants from Dravidian southern India. They are about equally divided between “Ceylon Tamils,” whose ancestors arrived many centuries ago, and “Indian Tamils,” who were brought into Ceylon during the last century to work on plantations and who in 1948 were deprived of Ceylonese citizenship.
The rest of the inhabitants are descended in whole or in part from subsequent conquerors of the island. The Portuguese occupied the coastal areas in 1505, were driven out by the Dutch in 1696, and the British finally took control in 1796. Numerous Sinhalese today have Portuguese names and they and others are Roman Catholics, also reflecting the Portuguese colonial past. The “Burghers,” Christian and with Dutch names, are a tiny but still quite influential part of the population. There are few Anglo-Ceylonese today, reflecting the fact that the British unlike their Portuguese and Dutch predecessors generally brought their European wives and families with them and took them back to Britain when they returned, and so did not establish Ceylonese families. They did leave the Ceylonese upper classes literate in English, the official language of colonial days and a major political issue after independence.
The successive conquests of Ceylon largely determined the religious composition of the population. Most of the Sinhalese are Buddhists and most Tamils are Hindus. These two religious groups are divided among themselves, however, and in addition to them there are Moslem and Christian minorities which cut across racial (“communal”) lines [1].
It was against this background of colonial history — a “developing” economy and communal, linguistic and religious diversity — that the Trotskyist movement of Ceylon grew and declined. These factors play major roles in determining the history of Trotskyism in the island.
However, the ideas and leadership of Ceylonese and International Trotskyism also contributed to the rise and decline of the movement. Because it did become a significant element in national politics it was almost inevitably faced with the problems of revolution versus reform. This found particular expression in controversies over the Trotskyists’ participation in parliament, and even more bitter disputes over the decision first taken in 1964 to form part of a government coalition in which they were junior partners.
The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which for a quarter of a century was the Ceylonese affiliate of the Fourth International and was by the mid-1980s still the largest of those groups in Sri Lanka claiming to be Trotskyist, is the oldest surviving party in the island. It was not the first party to be established in Ceylon nor the first party oriented toward the organized labor movement.
During the 1920s, A. E. Goonesinghe took the lead in establishing the Ceylon Labor Union, the country’s pioneering union group. He had contacts with the British labor movement and participated in the Imperial Labor Conference in London in 1928 after which, with some aid from his British colleagues, he established the Ceylon Trade Union Congress, with twenty-two affiliated organizations. Goonesinghe was also the principal organizer of the Labor Party, probably the first political organization in Ceylon to call itself a “party”.
Goonesinghe was a Sinhalese and a rather militant one. As a consequence the union movement which also began to develop in the late 1920s among the largely Tamil plantation workers was alienated from his organizations and established its own separate groups [2].
The trade union and political movement of Goonesinghe was not the breeding ground of the Marxist-Leninist movement in Ceylon. On the contrary, once the young people who were to establish the LSSP had begun their work one of the first things they undertook to accomplish was to organize a trade union movement to rival that led by Goonesinghe and the Labor Party.
Trotskyism and Marxism-Leninism in general had their origins in Ceylon in a group of young men who returned home after studying abroad principally in Great Britain, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. George Lerski says of these people that “they learned their socialism mainly in the classrooms of the London School of Economics and Social Sciences, dominated in the interwar period by the fascinating personality of Harold J. Laski. But America also can claim to have influenced at least one of the founding fathers of Ceylonese Trotskyism, namely D. R. R. Gunawardena. ... He was introduced to so-called scientific socialism during his studies in the late twenties at the University of Wisconsin, where, together with his Indian counterpart, Jayaprakash Narayan, he ‘received his training in Marxism from Scott Nearing.’ ”[3].
The returning students found their country after 1929 suffering severely from the Great Depression. This intensified the growing disenchantment with British colonial control of the country which had found earlier expression in the Ceylon National Congress, established during World War I, and in the growth of the early trade union movement and the Labor Party.
Leslie Goonewardene has noted that “the group at the commencement numbered a bare half dozen. ... But it gradually expanded. It might be of interest today to recall that N. M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Philip Gunawardena and Robert Gunawardena were among the members of the original group.”[4]
The young radicals (all from the Sinhalese upper classes) undertook to become involved in the labor movement. They succeeded in 1932 in organizing a union at the Wellawatte Mills, with Dr. Colvin R. de Silva as president and Vernon Gunasekera as secretary. In the following year it won a long strike[5]. This success provoked the first conflict with the established labor movement of A. B. Goonesinghe, and Leslie Goonewardene has noted that “excepting the Wellawatte Mills, in this clash Mr. Goonesinghe was generally the victor. The young enthusiasts learned in the hard way that the working class does not lightly abandon its traditional leadership.”[6]
But it was not their labor activities which first won the young Marxists widespread support, but rather a symbolic anticolonialist campaign which they undertook in 1933. This was a protest organized against the sale of “veterans’ poppies” on Armistice Day, with the proceeds from the sales going to British veterans’ organizations. The protestors organized the rival sale of Suriya flowers, with the money from these sales going to help Ceylonese World War I veterans rather than those of Britain. This Suriya Mal Movement “was launched on the initiative of the leftist-controlled South Colombo Youth League.” George Lerski has noted that this group was “manipulated from behind the scenes by a nucleus of convinced Socialists (Dr. N. M. Perera, Dr. A. S. Wickremasinghe, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Vernon Gunasekera, and the two Gunawardena brothers, Philip and Robert. ... ”[7]
Another campaign of the young Marxists which gained wide attention and was to have long-run political results for them was provoked by a widespread malaria epidemic which broke out in the Kegalla and Kurunegala districts in West-Central Ceylon in October 1934. Even official reports said that the very high number of fatalities from this epidemic was due to the widespread malnutrition in the areas involved.
The young Marxists did not confine themselves to denouncing government policies In this situation. They decided to go out in the beleaguered region themselves and carry out relief activities. George Lerski has written that “Dr. A. S. Wickremasinghe, as the medical expert, took command in the countryside while the young barrister Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, the political scientist Dr. N. M. Perera, and the fiery revolutionist D. R. R. Gunawardena served as dispensary orderlies and distributors of necessities.” Lerski added that “from these activities they gained long-lasting popularity as dedicated social workers ... it was later to secure them parliamentary seats in the post-World War II elections, not so much on the basis of their party program as on their own personal appeal.”[8]
Finally, the returned radical students began to engage in overt political and electoral activity. In 1931 in the first election under the new Donoughmore Constitution and the first conducted under universal adult suffrage, one of them, Dr. A. S. Wickremasinghe, was elected to the new State Council. Although there were a handful of other opposition members of the Council Wickremasinghe was the only Marxist in the body, and he gained a reputation as a bitter critic of the government and became “the target of concentrated attack by members who represented the vested interests of the Ceylonese Establishment.”[9]
The young Marxists decided to organize a political party in late 1936. George Lerski has suggested that the reason for their decision was the approach of elections for the Second State Council. He recounted that “On December 18, 1935, some twenty determined intellectuals, workers, and students formed the Ceylon Socialist (or Equality( party. Oriented toward the working masses, these ‘founding fathers’ of the LSSP (most of them being between twenty-five and thirty years old) did not want an English name for the organization: Sinhalese being the language of the overwhelming majority, it was the Sinhalese designation that was of utmost importance. Thus the very name, the Lanka Sama Samaia Party, was an innovation.”[10]
Leslie Goonewardene has noted that “as a matter of fact, when the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was formed there were no accepted words in Sinhalese to describe the words ‘Socialist’ or ‘Communist.’ That is how the word ‘Samasamajaya’ coined by Mr. Dally Hayawardena ... to describe the word ’Socialist’ came to be chosen. The new term had the added advantage of not being associated with the ideas of reformism that are attached to the English word ‘Socialist.’”[11]
The founding convention of the LSSP adopted a “Manifesto,” which Lerski has commented “resembles more the sober Fabian approach than the revolutionary philosophy of full-blooded Marxists.”[12] Among its general statements of principle was its proclamation that the party was committed to “the achievement of complete national independence, the nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the abolition of inequalities arising from differences of race, caste, creed or sex.”[1]
This document also listed some twenty-two “demands,” which Lerski has described as “humanitarian cum economic.” These included such labor issues as a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, an eight-hour day, the ending of compulsory registration of trade unions, “factory legislation to ensure decent working conditions,” and a social security system including “sick benefits, old-age benefits, maternity benefits.” It also included issues relevant to the peasantry, including free pasture lands, supply of seed paddy without interest, end of irrigation payments, and “abolition of Forest Laws relating to removal of brushwood and transport of timber.” Finally, there were such general demands as a more progressive income tax reestablishment of inheritance taxes, and an end to indirect taxes [14].
A few months after the establishment of the party Philip Gunawardena insisted in the State Council that “our party is not a Communist Party. ... It is a party which is much less militant and less demanding than the section of the Communist or Third International.” Lerski has said that “though most Samasamajists refused to be identified with the Stalinist Comintern, neither could they at that time be considered to be committed followers of Trotsky’s apocalyptic doctrine of the permanent revolution.”[15]
The founding convention of the LSSP elected the party’s new leaders. Colvin R. de Silva was chosen as its president, and Vernon Gunasekera, “another able lawyer well versed in Marxism-Leninism” was named the national secretary of the party. Both of these young men were well-to-do Sinhalese [16].
One decision of the founding congress of the LSSP was that the new party should run four candidates in the forthcoming elections for the State Council, the national parliament. One was A. S. Wickremasinghe, the sitting member, elected as an independent in 1931. The others were Philip Gunawardena, described by George Lerski as “a popular tribune”; N. M. Perera, “the party’s shrewd political scientist”; and “the quiet but effective Marxist organizer, Leslie Goonewardene.”[17] Two of these nominees, Perera and Gunawardena, were elected [18].
The two Samasamajista members of the State Council served for four years until their removal in mid-1940 for their opposition to World War II. They were both among the most active and vocal members of the Island’s parliament, although their techniques were somewhat different. Philip Gunawardena tended to be the more explosive or even demagogic of the two, with N. M. Perera being “a more skillful dialectician.”[19]
During their first four years as parliamentarians, Gunawardena and Perera participated in a wide variety of debates. They served on the Executive Committee of Labor, Industry and Commerce of the Council, and there carried on agitation for unemployment insurance, old age pensions, an eight-hour day, and the end of “assisted immigration” from India. They also worked for a more equitable tax system, fighting particularly for the progressive inheritance tax, and also sought unsuccessfully to get enactment of an income tax and a reduction of indirect imposts.
The LSSP deputies, although both had been educated largely in British schools in Ceylon and in overseas universities, were particularly concerned with the development of indigenous schools which taught in the local languages. They helped to bring about expansion of the primary and secondary school systems and fought for the organization of a full-fledged university [20].
Leslie Goonewardene claimed that “a number of reforms and measures of social amelioration are directly attributable to the agitation” of the LSSP in this period. Among these were measures establishing a school lunch program, modifying the traditional “headman” system, and abolition of irrigation taxes[21].
Gunawardena and Perera were loyal to their Marxist beliefs in opposing communalism, whether on the part of the Sinhalese or the Tamils. They particularly denounced the efforts of the militant Sinhala Maha Sabha Movement, which sought a preferential position for the Sinhalese, and was headed by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the minister of local affairs. George Lerski has commented that they “were definitely in the forefront of the opposition to chauvinistic bigotry, which was to divide the Ceylonese people so tragically two decades later. In particular they stood firmly against any discrimination toward the permanently domiciled plantation workers.”[22] Although opposing any further importation of Indian laborers for the plantations, they defended the rights of the Tamil workers who were already in the island. They particularly opposed attempts to disenfranchise the so-called “Indian Tamils,” those who had arrived in Ceylon during the twentieth century.
The Samasamajists reiterated on every appropriate occasion their party’s demand for the independence of Ceylon. At the same time they supported moves increasing Ceylonese control of the country’s affairs. They were particularly active in arguing the use of the indigenous languages-Sinhalese and Tamil-in the courts, local government and even in the State Council itself.
Gunawardena and Perera took an active part in discussions of a possible new constitution for the island. They opposed the adoption of a British type parliamentary regime, favoring some modification of the State Council system under which committees of the Council were closely involved in the conduct of the various cabinet ministries.
Given its Marxist, if not Marxist-Leninist, orientation, the LSSP attempted in its early years to establish influence in the organized labor movement. Since they were allied to some degree in the State Council with A. E. Goonesinghe, they also sought for a while in 1936-37 to work with him and his followers in the trade unions. By the middle of 1937 this proved impossible.
The Samasamajists succeeded in organizing a number of unions under their own control. These included organizations among the railroaders, and in some of the country’s limited number of manufacturing firms. They even made a beginning in establishing organizations among the plantation workers [23].
It was the LSSP efforts among the estate or plantation workers that gained the party most attention, in connection with the so-called “Brassgirdle incident.” Mark Anthony Lester Brassgirdle was a young Australian who went to work for a tea plantation but was dismissed for siding with the workers in a strike. He thereupon joined the LSSP and was coopted into its executive committee. Soon afterwards the governor ordered him deported. He went into hiding and the LSSP was able to protect him until he appeared at a mass meeting on May 5, 1937, which the Comintern publication Inprecor claimed was attended by 50,000 people.”[24] Meanwhile, the State Council had overwhelmingly voted to condemn the government’s deportation order. Arrested at LSSP headquarters after the May 5 meeting, Brassgirdle was brought to court, where the Ceylon Supreme Court vacated the order that he be deported.
The Brassgirdle case helped to underscore the LSSP as a defender of the underdog and of Ceylonese national rights. George Lerski has noted that “defeated in the State Council and quashed by the Supreme Court verdict, the Governor’s hasty order of deportation turned into a smashing political victory of the LSSP.”[25]
Among the plantation workers the LSSP’s principal competitor was the trade union organization of the Ceylon Indian Congress, a Tamil political group. However, the LSSP succeeded in organizing an All-Ceylon Estate Workers Union under its own leadership during the upsurge of plantation workers unionization in 1939-40 [26].
In most of the unions established under LSSP auspices the leading posts were held by the middle and upper class Samasamajist leaders themselves, but there were some notable exceptions. One of the most important rank and file leaders to rise to prominence both in the unions and the party was G. P. Perera (no relative of N. M. Perera). Robert Keamey has said of him that
As a worker in a cigarette factory during the late 1930s, Perera participated in formulating workers’ demands and became involved in collective bargaining and the labor movement. At about the same time his concern with trade unionism was developed, he was attracted by nationalist agitation. Through his involvement in the labor movement, Perera came into contact with N. M. Perera and other early Samasamajists. As the newly formed LSSP was deeply concerned with the problems of organized labor and also was an uninhibited critic of colonial rule, G. P. Perera found himself drawn toward the party, which he soon joined. He continued his labor activity in the issp-led trade unions, organizing and leading one notable three-month strike in 1942. Later, he became a vice president of the CFL. and an officer of several affiliated unions, as well as a member of the LSSP central committee [27].
Meanwhile, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party extended its organizational activities. It held its first regular national conference in December 1936 and its second one a year later. It began to issue several publications. Its official organ in Sinhalese was started in July 1936 with a circulation reported at 2,000 which was said to have grown to 20,000 by May 1937 [28].
After the Brassgirdle incident the party undertook a major organizational campaign under the direction of Edmund Samarakkody. It concentrated first on Colombo and the areas around it, and by the time of its second national conference the party membership had risen from its original 80 to 800. There were twenty-one branch organizations of the party by that time. However, the LSSP leaders soon decided to limit membership growth, fearful that too rapid accretion of support might dilute the ideological purity of the organization.
The leadership of the party consisted of an eighteen-member executive committee which met regularly each month. A few members who were inactive were dropped from the committee. Its members were very active in speaking at meetings which were organized in various parts of the country. Among the leading speakers were Colvin R. de Silva, the party president, Leslie Goonewardene, Philip Gunawardena, and N. M. Perera [29].
During the 1936-1939 period the LSSP was by no means a Trotskyist party. Its principal foreign contacts appear to have been with the Congress Socialist Party of India, with which it had “fraternal relations.” An LSSP delegation attended by invitation the Indian National Congress session in Faizpur in 1936, and in April 1937 Kamaladevi Chattepadyaya, a Congress Socialist Party leader, visited Ceylon and spoke at meetings organized in various parts of the island by the LSSP [30].
During its first four and a half years the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was avowedly Marxist but it had not clearly indicated to which branch of Marxism it adhered. As a matter of fact, it had within it a wide variety of people ranging, as one of its founders said, “from pale pink to various kinds of red”[31]. The most important of the elements represented were supporters of Leon Trotsky and Stalinists.
Speaking of the resolutions passed at the LSSP second congress, George Lerski has commented that “no part of this anti-imperialist and socially radical platform indicates that two years after the official launching of the social movement the party theoreticians considered themselves already to be the open followers of the exiled Leon Trotsky.” Lerski added that “it may have been ominous however, that there is no mention of the Soviet Union and its socialist achievements in the four resolutions dealing with international affairs.”[32]
Nevertheless, it seems clear that there were well defined pro-Stalin and pro-Trotsky elements in the leadership of the party. C. E. L. Wickremasinghe has told the writer that there was in those early years a Stalinist group which was well recognized as such[33]. On the other hand, George Lerski has said that “It is quite possible that a secret ‘T’ (Trotsky) cell was already in control of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and that the very lack of any expressed approval for Stalin could thus be attributed to the ‘Totschweigen’ tactics on the part of the conscientious Trotskyite leadership.” He added that “Vernon Gunasekera related in private conversation that a secret inner group existed within the wider ‘T’ conspiracy circle, and that he along with five other convinced Trotskyites (Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, the two Gunawardena brothers Philip and Robert, and Dr. N. M. Perera) actually prepared the political decisions for the ‘T’ mainstream of the party, almost from its beginning.”[34] C. E. L. Wickremasinghe attributed the Trotskyist inclination of the majority of the LSSP leadership to the influence of Philip Gunawardena, who from the time of his return from studying abroad had been a strong anti-Stalinist and saw Trotsky as the only viable alternative to Stalin. The majority of the other leaders, Wickremasinghe said, tended to go along with Gunawardena [35].
The conflict between the two elements in the party leadership came to a head during the first months of World War II. The anti-Stalinist elements in the LSSP were alienated by the Comintern’s slavish endorsement of the gyrations of the USSR just before and after the outbreak of the war. As a result, in December 1939 the LSSP executive committee, by 29-5, adopted a resolution to the effect that “since the Third International has not acted in the interests of the international revolutionary working-class movement, while expressing its solidarity with the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party declared that it has no faith in the Third International.”[36]
The five opponents of this motion were S. A. Wickremasinghe, M. G. Mendis (joint secretary of the party), K. Ramanathan, editor of its Tamil language paper, W. Arlyaratne, and A. Gunasekera. At the first 1940 meeting of the executive committee they were expelled from the party. Their demand that a new party conference be called to consider the issue was ignored by the majority of the leadership [37].
In November the pro-Stalinists established the United Socialist Party, with Dr. S. A. Wickremasinghe as chairman and Pieter Keuneman as secretary general [38]. They were to remain for more than thirty years joint leaders of what in 1943 became the Communist Party. From 1940 on, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was clearly and professedly a Trotskyist organization.
The anticolonialist attitude of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was certain sooner or later to bring it into direct conflict with the government and the British authorities once the British Empire was engaged in war. This was particularly the case after the defeats of the Allies during April and May 1940.
>From its inception the party had opposed Ceylonese financial contributions to the Ceylon Defense Force and their representatives in the State Council argued and voted against these. Basically they argued that these were forces designed to maintain colonial rule rather than to defend the island from outside attack. Once the Second World War had begun the LSSP strongly opposed Ceylonese contributions to financing new military installations, particularly those of the Royal Air Force. George Lerski has commented that “Dr. Perera continued his attack on the proposed Supplementary Estimate for the Defence of Ceylon in a way that could be hardly distinguished from ordinary sedition.”[39]
Philip Gunawardena clearly stated the ideological basis of the LSSP position in this period. In the State Council on September 5, 1939 he said that “this war too is for the division and redivision of the colonies and semi-colonies. We refuse to be a Party to any Imperialist War. ... The class struggle has refused to stop because a country is at war. Therefore, Sir, on behalf of my Party, I state that we refuse to consider that the people of this country are at war with any people anywhere else in the world, and therefore we refuse to participate in any Imperialist war.”[40]
The LSSP position did not waver in the face of the success of the German blitzkrieg in April and May 1940. On May 17, in arguing against appropriation of funds for an RAF base, N. M. Perera asked in the State Council, “Might I first ask the question, whether the Honorable the Chief Secretary is very serious, because the latest information is that they have practically capitulated? I do not know whether this is necessary. By the time they get ready, the war will be over and there is nothing to provide for. Secondly, might I know whether the Royal Air Force is now retreating to the East because they make it their practice or their habit to retreat according to plan?”[41]
The LSSP strongly opposed legislation designed to give the government special powers to limit civil liberties in case of an emergency. A speech in opposition to such a measure marked the last appearance of N. M. Perera in the Council, on May 30, 1940 [42].
On June 18, 1940, the two LSSP members of the State Council, N. M. Perera and Philip Gunawardena were arrested along with the party’s president, Colvin R. de Silva. On the following day Edmund Samarakkody was also arrested. Leslie S. Goonewardene succeeded in avoiding arrest[43].
The jailing of some of its principal leaders did not end all activity by the LSSP. In preparation for possible illegalization the party had established an underground apparatus headed by Reggie Senanayake and Doric de Souza [44]. One of its first acts was to organize a mass demonstration against the arrest of the party leaders, which was broken up by the police [45]. Although its press was suppressed the underground apparatus, led by Leslie Goonewardene, was able to bring out some publications in spite of the ban. In April 1941 the LSSP was able to hold an underground conference attended by forty-two delegates and helped to organize a wave of strikes in the following month. At the April 1941 meeting the party adopted a clearly Trotskyist statement of principles [46].
While incarcerated the LSSP leaders used their enforced “leisure” to work out in some detail programs for basic changes in a number of areas, including education and agriculture, which they hoped to carry out once they were able to come to power.
On April 5, 1942 Colvin R. de Silva, Philip Gunawardena, N. M. Perera and Edmund Samarakkody escaped from prison in company of one of their guards during the only air raid that the Japanese ever made on Colombo. After being hidden by the underground party organization for some time, the first three escaped to India, where they passed the rest of the war. Samarakkody decided to remain behind to work in the LSSP underground [47].
Most of the principal leaders of the LSSP spent the greater part of World War II in India. They did not give up political activity as a result. In April 1942 they joined with a group of Indian colleagues to organize the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India. The statement of principles of that group stated, “Recognizing the unity of the revolutionary struggle in India and Ceylon, and the need to build a single revolutionary party on a continental scale, the LSSP entered the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India as a constituent unit at the inauguration of the latter in 1942. By this act the LSSP ceased to exist as an independent party and its members adopted as their own program of action that of the new Party. ...”[48]
The last statement in this explanation was to cause some trouble after the Ceylonese leaders returned home. It was partially responsible for a division in the party’s ranks. In addition the membership of the Ceylonese Trotskyists in an Indian organization proved to be a handicap with the Sinhalese, who made up the majority of the population of Ceylon and were more or less hostile to the Tamil population with its origins in India [49].
The connection between the Indian and Ceylonese Trotskyist groups continued for some time, however. Leslie Goonewardene has written that “this organizational connection was to continue for some years till after the transfer of power in India in 1947 and in Ceylon in 1948, such an organizational connection ceased to have any meaning. The Ceylon party then became a directly affiliated section of the Fourth International.”[50]
Among the early Ceylonese refugees who worked towards establishing the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (which affiliated with the Fourth International) were Bernard Soysa, V. Kalasingham, Doric de Souza, and Leslie Goonewardene. Sometime later Colvin de Silva, N. M. Perera, and Philip Gunawardena arrived in India after escaping from prison. Other Ceylonese Trotskyists in India after 1942 included S. C. C. Anthonipillai, V. Karalasingham, Allan Mendis, Lionel Cooray, Reggie Senanayake, and Robert Gunawardena [51].
A number of the Ceylonese Trotskyists were picked up by the Indian police from time to time. When this occurred they were sent back to Ceylon, where they were jailed [52].
During the latter part of the war a split developed among the Ceylonese Trotskyists. Leslie Goonewardene has written about this that “There were no differences in regard to program or policy. The differences centered mainly around organizational questions. One faction called itself the Bolshevik-Leninist faction and declared that the other faction was attempting to dilute the party and convert it into a loose organization. The other faction, calling itself the Workers Opposition, declared that the party machine had been captured by a group of intellectuals who were obstructing the expansion of the party among the working class.” N. M. Perera and Philip and Robert Gunawardena were among the leaders of the Bolshevik-Leninist faction; while Done de Souza, Edmund Samarakkody, Bernard Soysa, and William Silva were principal figures in the Workers Opposition.
The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) sided with the Workers Opposition group and in a letter signed by Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene the BLPI announced on October 8, 1945 the expulsion of N. M. Perera and Philip Gunawardena [53].
At first both groups continued to call themselves the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. After failure of an effort to reunite the two groups, the faction recognized by the BLPI, “realizing the confusion arising from two parties using the same name, and recognizing that the other and larger party was considered in fact by the masses to be the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, decided to change its name to Bolshevik Samasamaja Party.”[54]
This division in the Trotskyist ranks in Ceylon continued until 1950. Both the Lanka Sama Samaja and the Bolshevik Samasamaja groups participated in the 1947 election for the fourth State Council, and supported each other’s nominees. The LSSP elected the second largest number of deputies of any party, ten, and received 204,020 votes. On the other hand, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party elected five deputies and received 113,193 votes. This showing of the Trotskyist groups compared with the 751,432 votes and forty-two members of the State Council won by the Victorious group, the United National Party [55].
In the debates in the State Council preceding the granting of independence to Ceylon by the British, the two Trotskyist groups took different positions. Although they both argued that the British maintained too much influence for themselves in independent Ceylon, the LSSP voted for the final motion accepting independence while the Bolshevik-Samasamajists voted in the negative ”[56].
As a result of their showing in the 1947 election the Lanka Sama Samaja members of parliament became the first official Opposition in newly independent Ceylon. The leader of the LSSP delegation, N. M. Perera, was officially chosen leader of the Opposition, the first person to hold that title [57]. Robert Kearney has noted that “at independence, it was the largest single party in opposition to the governing UNP, and the Samasamajists harbored expectations of eventually replacing the UNP in power.”[58]
However, Trotskyist activities were by no means confined to the electoral and parliamentary spheres. They resumed their work in the organized labor movement, which now began to grow rapidly. As James Jupp has noted, in 1946 “the Samasamajists were able to establish control of the Ceylon Federation of Labor and the Government Workers’ Trade Union Federation.”[59]
During the decade after World War II the ranks of Ceylonese organized labor swelled to an estimated 300,000 members “and were mainly in Marxist unions and the Ceylon Workers Congress.” They engaged not only in limited economic strikes and collective bargaining but also in several nationwide movements. These included two general strikes in 1946 and 1947 and the so-called “hartal” of 1953 [60].
A “hartal” is something more than a general strike; it involves the voluntary closing of schools and places of business in addition to workers’ staying away from their jobs. That of August 12, 1953, was organized as a protest against the government’s decision to end a weekly rice ration which had been established during World War H. It was called “the most significant direct mass action this country has seen. ...” James Jupp recorded that “a joint statement of the Ceylon Federation of Labor (LSSP), the Ceylon Federation of Trade Unions (CP), the Ceylon Workers Congress and the Ceylon Mercantile Union (LSSP), called upon ‘the trade unions and all unorganized workers to prepare for a one-day general strike and to form united action committees in all places of work for carrying this into effect.’ ” The hartal succeeded in its objective of preventing elimination of the rice ration.
Ernest Mandel has stressed the role of the LSSP in this 1953 popular demonstration. He wrote, “The LSSP leadership appeared as a really revolutionary team at the head of insurgent masses, fighting in the streets simultaneously for immediate material gains for the impoverished masses and for the socialist overthrow of the capitalist regime.”[61]
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Last updated on: 13.2.2005