Castigated by the LSSP as fake at that time, Sri Lanka’s independence eventually became a fact, even though, as S.W.R.D Bandaranaike warned in his famous independence-day oration, for many Sri Lankans political freedom could not come alive in the absence of economic freedoms. The state of our parliament and our democracy, on other hand, is more distressing now than it has ever been. As for national unity, it is in the eye of the beholder whether the country is more divided or united, notwithstanding the military reclamation of the island’s northern territories. The State and its quislings are celebrating ‘future minds’ in Jaffna while its living bodies are going through hell. How have we come to this pass?

You can do anything and get away with it

In a public lecture at the Colombo New Town Hall sometime in 1976, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva offered a somewhat subjective observation of the change in the attitude and values in Lanka’s public life – between what was there when he started public life in the 1930s and what he saw when he returned to the island after independence from his political exile in India. What earlier used to be a generally abiding respect for law and propriety in public affairs, he said, seemed to have given way to an attitude of indifference and impunity that "you can do anything and get away with it." The public lecture was an extension of the LSSP’s No Confidence Motion in Parliament against the then Prime Minister, Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s alleged impropriety in the declaration of her landholdings under the Land Reform Law, and Colvin used the ethical slide in the country after independence to put in perspective Mrs. Bandaranaike’s actions to circumvent the law.

The 1976 No Confidence Motion was perhaps the last motion of no confidence moved by the LSSP in Parliament. The LSSP and the entire Left were wiped out of parliament in the 1977 elections and nothing has been the same since. Indeed, the new UNP government used the land declarations as one of the grounds to suspend Mrs. Bandaranaike’s civil rights, but re-privatized some of the nationalized lands and even restored to its friends and families new lands better than what they had given up earlier! All of it without a hum! "Not a dog barked", boasted JR, when he took away Mrs. Bandaranaike’s civil rights.

From 1948 till 1977, the LSSP and the CP were past masters of the parliamentary process and vigilant protectors of the powers and functions of parliament. They used parliament to keep governments, ministers and officials on alert and on their toes all the time. They protected the public interest and looked after the public good. They did not need the courts to do their job as the representatives of the people.

The cavalier attitude, "you can do anything and get away with it", has infected not just inconsequential minions, senior officials and ministers, but even the hallowed Central Bank. How else could one explain the Bank’s advocacy role and lack of oversight in the Petroleum Corporation’s hedging fiasco in oil purchases? A leader like NM would have raked red the Bank Governor over parliamentary coals for his too-clever-by-half games with the country’s finances. Such a leader would have pilloried the government over prices. Everyone would have got the message, and there would not have been the occasion for a stand off with the Supreme Court.

The contrast with today’s parliament, the pathetic incompetence of parliamentarians and their collective impotence are all too distressing. It is the lack of parliamentary oversight and authority that has tilted the so called separation of powers towards the judiciary. The public has no other recourse than to run to the Supreme Court for relief in everything from school admission, to public corruption and petrol pricing. It is a sad commentary on the forensic competence of the entire cabinet that it could not see that its decision to ignore the Supreme Court order to reduce the price of petrol could backfire by putting in question the earlier Court order suspending payment of hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds to banks in the controversial hedging deals.

Even under colonial rule, when the legislative body had limited elected members and authority, the LSSP used every legitimate method to advance the cause of independence and to bring redress to the disadvantaged people. The legal process was not spared and the courts sided with the LSSP in striking resounding blows against the colonial government in the Bracegirdle affair and in the judicial inquiry into the police shooting of P. S. Govindan, a plantation worker.

Today, a prominent newspaper editor is killed in full public glare for political reasons and the system is corrupted enough to pull the curtain and let the killers go free. The rest of us have been treated to a pseudo moral sermon by an establishment apologist about blessings in murders: the murder of Lasantha Wickramatunge may lead to the gradual withdrawal of death squads just as it happened after the murder of Richard de Zoysa decades earlier. The State apologists obviously did not know that the late Wickramatunge would anticipate their sophistries and pre-empt them by writing with uncanny premonition a devastating indictment of his killers and their direct and indirect masters. The whole world is awash with the posthumous indictment.

A reflective question

The ultimate blame for all of this is the constitutional house that JR created in 1978. But JR’s house did not come out of thin air, and there was more to it by way of genealogy than the unintended precedent set by the 1972 Constitution with Dr. Colvin R. de Silva as Minister of Constitutional Affairs. Further, the criticisms of the 1978 Constitution by NM and Colvin could not stop the JR juggernaut and their anticipatory warnings have been tragically proven to be correct. A more reflective question is, given the extent to which the Old Left Parties and their leaders dominated parliament even without ever forming a government on their own, did they do enough for the parliamentary system to sink roots among the people and to cultivate the people’s awareness and readiness to be parliament’s ultimate protectors.

There is no question that the LSSP uniquely contributed to raising political awareness among the people especially in the early years after the introduction of universal voting rights. Jayadeva Uyangoda has drawn attention to this aspect based on his research of that period and to the fact that not enough credit has been given to the LSSP on this score. The point though is that the LSSP itself may not have given itself much credit because of what Hector Abhayawardhana would call in 1964 as the simultaneous functioning "on the two planes of parliamentarism and doctrinaire revolutionsm." Hector’s 1964 challenge to the LSSP and the Left was that they could not continue to function simultaneously on these two planes. The response to this challenge was the beginning of coalition politics which later grew into the more formal United Front Government.

The point here is that neither the proponents nor the detractors of coalition politics addressed the crucial significance of parliament itself. The former took it for granted, while the latter denounced it as the opium against revolution. The impossibility of mobilizing a text book revolutionary movement in an open society was lost on the doctrinaire revolutionaries, while the constraints of simultaneously operating on the two planes inhibited the Left from taking practical advantage of its own parliamentary achievements. As Ranjith Amarasinghe has noted in his scholarly study of LSSP in the pre-1964 period, at critical moments, both before and after independence, doctrinaire considerations prevailed over more pragmatic calculations.

In fairness, the LSSP was an open party from the beginning and its leading lights were not "disgruntled men" who had gravitated to Marxism to resolve personal contradictions. Although the first manifesto of the LSSP, as Hector recalled at the 1985 Peradeniya University seminar on "Marxism and the Left Movement" to mark its fiftieth anniversary, was greatly inspired by the old Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, there was a notable discrepancy between the two. While the Communist Manifesto was "clear and crisp" in identifying the ‘proletariat’ as the only "revolutionary class", noted Hector, the LSSP Manifesto made not one mention of the proletariat or working class, but assigned the agency of the Sri Lankan revolution to the "toiling masses."

This, Hector argued, was a reflection of the LSSP leaders’ grasp of the social and political realities of Sri Lanka, and was also consistent with the political content of Marx’s concept of the proletariat as opposed to its purely philosophical content. The political content was a measure of the radical necessities that the working and dispossessed classes were denied and their urge to realize these necessities through collective action. Like the Communist Manifesto, the LSSP Manifesto listed "22 immediate demands reflecting the concrete needs of the working people" and other demands for the welfare of the village society that were "realizable within the framework of normal capitalist society." From its inception, enhancing social product and welfare has been a constant priority of the LSSP, and whatever may have been its other failures, it is fair to say that the LSSP never gave up on that priority.