Sri Lanka in the Modern Age by Wickramasinghe Nira;

Author:Wickramasinghe, Nira; [Wickramasinghe, Nira;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190225797
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The war years

Regi Siriwardena’s delightful account of his own experience with the LSSP during the war years gives a sense of what it meant to be a member at that time. ‘It wasn’t a party that you could join by filling a form, paying a membership fee or declaring your support for it. You had to be recruited into it, and this meant that the party organs had to be satisfied that you understood and accepted the party’s political objectives, and that you could be relied on to participate actively in its work.’26 There was a galling cultural gulf between the English-speaking elite cadres or vanguard that ran the party and the Sinhalaand Tamil-speaking masses. The latter were limited in their readings to a translation of the Communist Manifesto, a summary of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and the party’s paper and study classes. The Central Committee, later renamed the Regional Committee, had only a very small minority of worker members. Discussions were in English.27 However, there were many worker and peasant members who reached out to the non-elite sections of the population.

In 1939 the executive committee of the LSSP passed a motion of no confidence in the Third International and expelled the Stalinist minority from the party. In November of the following year, a United Socialist Party (USP) was inaugurated by the Stalinist faction under the leadership of Dr S.A. Wickramasinghe. The USP succeeded to a certain extent in penetrating the trade union sector which was previously a stronghold of the Sama Samajists. In July 1943, following Stalin’s dissolution of the Third International, a secret conference of USP leaders was held which decided to dissolve the party and form the Ceylon Communist Party. Among the founding members were the older group of LSSP members such as Dr S.A. Wickramasinghe, M.G. Mendis, the Rev. Saranankara and T. Duraisingham, reinforced by university graduates from the Ceylon University and Cambridge among whom P. Keuneman stood out.28 In the early 1940s a rapprochement took place between the Communist Party and the Ceylon National Congress where young radicals were gradually taking control. In 1943 the CNC admitted the CP to its membership, thus demonstrating that the struggle for independence from British rule transcended class and ideological differences. D.S. Senanayake left the CNC in protest, a move viewed by some as carefully calculated. However, the CP and CNC differed fundamentally in their positions on minorities and the Indian immigration problem and the alliance would not survive after the end of the war.29

After the executive committee of the LSSP expelled the Stalinist minority from the party it adopted a revolutionary programme inspired by the Fourth International. One of the main issues was the policy to adopt towards the War. The LSSP encouraged revolutionary defeatism. In March 1940 some party members burned an effigy of the Governor on the Galle Face Green and Governor Caldecott was personally attacked in articles of the Samasamajaya, where he was called ‘the rogue elephant’ or ‘the chief imperialist henchman’. In

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