by Neville Chinivasagam; published April 6, 2004
Sachi Sri Kantha’s “Bob Dylan Stares at Sri Lanka” (Tamil Sangam, Feb. 25 2004) most admirably and humorously stares at presidential politics enthused by Lakshman Kadirgamar. It is well known Kadirgamar is indescribably Ms. Kumaratunge’s mouthpiece, voicing her presidential imaginings to earn him the epitaph summed up by Sachi: “a political clown par excellence.”
Sachi’s suggestive epitaph for Lakshman Kadirgamar brought back memories of my school days at Trinity College, Kandy. The look back brought up two of my classmates: Lakshman Kadirgamar and Lakshman Jayakody. I have not met either for many years with Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Governments’ anti-Tamil race discriminations. In that space of time each has become nationally prominent in Sri Lanka politics. It prompted me to ask if there was something in us as kids to faintly signal our future as adults. Each has played an incomparably different role in politics from the other for national prominence. Lakshman Kadirgamar is a Tamil, and a political anti-Tamil bureaucrat who has made himself the indispensable political strategist to a flip-flop Sinhala President displaying a lack of brightness and lack of self-confidence to resolutely solve the Sinhala/Tamil racial politics without further bloodshed. Lakshman Jayakody is a Sinhala. He is an elected long-standing and distinguished Sinhala parliamentarian and has held important Ministerial appointments avowedly with right-wing socialist leanings appropriate to his aristocratic land-owning family background and has never, as I have heard, compromised under any circumstances his ethical forthrightness and integrity for political opportunity and greed.
I am not a politician like either. My political pride is Sri Lankan born Tamil, and in the Tamil Diaspora. My Tamil political pride and aspirations contrast sharply, divisively, irreconcilably and, in truth, derisively with those hoped for by Lakshman Kadirgamar. He, like myself, was born and suckled unpretentiously on a Tamil mother’s breasts nourishing Tamil pride. But, unlike myself, he is a Tamil without Tamil pride and a “drifter” without a spiritual bond to his Tamil birthright. Call him a quisling and neither Tamil nor Sinhala will deny the characterization unhesitatingly. Vidkun Quisling in World War II betrayed the Norwegians to the Nazis for personal political power and greed. Quisling was a hero to the Nazis. Adolf Hitler led (misled) the Nazis. Hitler’s psychosis for personal power, greed and opportunity, like Quisling’s, was race hate and race discrimination and he chose, again like Quisling, his kindred, the German Jews, as easy victims because they were Germans by birthright. Neither history (secular) nor religion (spiritual) has ever acclaimed betrayal of one’s own people other than as damning one’s self willingly to Hell and the Devil.
A 20/20 hindsight of my Trinity schoolmates who were either senior or junior and wherever living will unmistakably recall Lakshman Kadirgamar (LK). We nicknamed him “PK,” abbreviated for “Personality King.” When growing up at Trinity’s upper-school (from age 13 or so) LK seemed to have personality distinctiveness. It showed up in his need, like a natural obligation, to impress everyone with his personality for dependence on him like a polestar for a guide or advisor rather than take the risk himself as a leader. Our naïve and playful young minds had unwittingly detected his adult role for a dependable advisor than be leader himself. Our nicknaming him “PK” or “Personality King” matched him ideally when contrasted with the Trinity lifestyle. The Trinity lifestyle brought us up, teaching an outward bound boarding school education: hearty and zestfully, relishing fun for innocent schoolboy mischief and each of us a buddy to the other. The buddy loyalty to each other infused into our young souls an education, teaching us togetherness collectively as one united body. The ethical infusion of loyalty to one another percolated into our young and freshly molding conscience the morality of right and wrong, good and evil to the extent that it even bonded our unity daringly against any un-invoked discipline from the school’s authorities. A reminder of it is a comedy, and in our times historically by Napier House to which Lakshman Jayakody and I belonged. Summed up, the Trinity lifestyle degraded Individualism at the expense of the other (s) or betrayal as anathema, or worse.
At Trinity “PK” was a go-getter. He won every possible glittering award Trinity had. He left Trinity with Machievellian pride of “The Prince.” He had learnt to command the school’s power politics. He was not swollen-headed, but an amiable carpetbagger who knew to steam ahead unnerved. He extruded his Trinity “PK” at Oxford University and trumped his card to win the Presidency of the prestigious Oxford Union. After Oxford he was confronted by a hopeless and daunting future by Sinhala Governments, who crudely and wickedly denied ambitious Tamils with no other choice than unavoidably for a soldier’s brave badge as a Tiger, or the courageous intellectual and political activism of an exile in the Tamil Diaspora; or the Tamil National Front (TNA) for national politics. He chose none of these. Instead, he chose for PK vanity the home run as advisor to Ms. Kumaratunge, whose father had begun the anti-Tamil hatred in 1956, similar to Adolf Hitler’s racism. Sachi’s appropriate epitaph of “political clown” wrings from LK his honesty if he is a dedicated Leninist-Bolshevik-Marxist like the JVP, or he is shamelessly ready to serve them satisfy their Tamil hate.
Lakshman Jayakody (LJ) was elected a young parliamentarian upon leaving Trinity, similar to the land-owning English pocket borough parliamentarian. He converted to Arya-Sinhala nationalism. I had returned to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) after my law studies in England. My Trinity friends had doubts about his political integrity. He invited me for lunch. We lunched in the Parliament restaurant. Walking through the corridors I recall his saying the Tamil members had made Parliament prestigious, especially faulting British colonial rule. Our chitchat took us to Napier House and its Literary Association. I had been a zealous admirer of the Free India Movement and its historic struggle to be harbinger and example for Ceylon’s (now Sri Lanka) independence from British colonialism. This had got me into conflict with Napier’s House Master, an Anglican ministerial hopeful from Belfast who was recruited from Lord Mountbatten’s SEAC Intelligence Command. Over coffee, LJ reminded me of my long absence from Ceylon and he discussed the negative future of the Sinhala/Tamil conflict and its very strong potential for open hostility. He distinguished our sitting across the luncheon table not as Trinity and Napier House mates, but as Sinhala and Tamil to let me know of the reality of the Sinhala racial discrimination that had begun to take its early toll. He regarded my education in England and my travels in Europe invaluable to the Tamils and regretted he had missed such an opportunity for the Sinhala. He advised we each had a duty to uplift our people: he for the Sinhala and I for the Tamils. But in my case, to cut the story to its bottom line, he notionally foresaw the likelihood of a Tamil Diaspora and advised my activism was yet to come. I am grateful I left Ceylon.