Remembering the Premadasa legacy

The life and work of the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa offers a huge opportunity for research and researchers. Premadasa enjoys an iconic status in Sri Lanka. Thus he stands on his own, above and beyond the commonplace divides. He has earned his particular niche in history.

Whether you talk of roads or ports or exports or public administration or small entrepreneurship or paddy marketing or sports stadia or youth affairs, very soon the reference to a Premadasa landmark or a specific Premadasa intervention is inevitable. So universal is the relevance and immediacy of the Premadasa legacy. Within a very short period of ten years as Prime Minister and Minister of Housing, and four and a half as President, Premadasa left an imprint on the Sri Lankan memory and reality.

Four immediate qualities of Premadasa can be recalled as a basis for this huge fund of memory and trust. First his roots in his people, which made him a special kind of politician. Second, his allegiance to a value system and ethics, which underpinned his life and actions. Third, Premadasa the thinker and the visionary, who crafted a homegrown ideology with coherence and substance. Fourth and last, Premadasa the leader, who demonstrated qualities of vision and strategy which enabled him to give superlative leadership to a country in multi-faceted crisis.

Premadasa had a particular relationship with his people. This was a matter of laying down and growing roots among them over several decades. Whether it was the early growing years at his Sucharitha residence or in the later years as a seasoned politician, Premadasa had realized for himself that the most dependable political capital a politician could ever have, were people. That was the bedrock of politics.

The more solid the foundations which one built among them, the more solid was one’s political future. For a person who entered the political battle ground without the inheritance of family reputation, class background, caste dominance, wealth and the sips of the golden spoon, what else was there to build upon than the trust and the credibility of the masses? Hence his passion for people. They were the ever renewing source of his creativity and sustenance. He always found them to be a reliable bulwark against the man made storms of the political firmament. He intuitively knew the enormity of the people’s knowledge systems. He equally knew the value of tradition and history.

Premadasa continuously built upon the Buddhist values and ethics that he inherited from his family life and home life. He always referred back to the classical childhood texts like the Sakaskada. He found in culture and religion a living source of spiritual truth and reality which helped him to resonate and communicate with his people.

Once again, he had imbibed these spiritual norms in the course of his boyhood, education, adulthood, social interaction and early forays into civic life. This taught him to never fear truth, never transgress the civic values of his culture and people, and to practise openness in politics. Hence he came to accept accountability as a political principle very early in life and sustained this practice throughout his career. It was this influence that made him accept standards of simplicity and discipline which gave him an iron frame to help him withstand the brickbats and assaults of political barbarism.

Premadasa was a thinker and ideologue. Apart from having a fine intelligence enriched in the school of a hard travelled life over the toughest of terrains, he was a great cultivator of the mind. He read and studied all the time. He was a learner par excellence and picked up ideas from a myriad sources. In this respect, he had a penchant for listening and choosing the rich seeds of insight and creativity from the idea of ordinary folk. He realized that behind so-called ordinary folk, there often were gems of folk wisdom. He had had a well rounded education starting with the traditional pirivena texts and extending to the works of Tagore and Gandhi and further onto Marx, Galbraith and Schumacher. He had the mastery of four languages - Sinhala, Pali, English and Tamil. He was culturally at home in multicultural Sri Lanka and had close human relationships cross-cutting all the divides. He was a great admirer of modern science and technology and used them to the fullest in public communication. Above all, he was a brilliant writer, speaker, parliamentary debater, and analyst. He held his audiences spellbound, irrespective of their origin and provenance, spell-bound by the fluency and soundness of his argument.

Finally comes the quality of leadership. His was a very long process of evolution to national leadership through a most rigorous and challenging process of uphill struggle. Every possible bar and obstruction that could be used was used to halt and deflect his determination to reach the top. This is where his qualities of innate leadership and courage stood in good stead.

He had a vision and strategy for his country. He had worked at crafting it for many decades. He first put it out in his book Pera Maga Lakuna of 1976. Later he again recomposed and updated this vision and strategy in his 1988 Presidential manifesto titled A New Vision And A New Deal. These are extremely insightful texts to read and understand the ideas that drove Premadasa.

Opportunities aplenty

What we already have with us is very little in terms of what should potentially be there. The earliest small book is Bradman Weerakoon’s Ranasinghe Premadasa, Political Biography of 1992. Next we have Dayan Jayatilleke’s carefully crafted analytical book Sri Lanka - The Travails of a Democracy, Unfinished War, Protracted Crisis of 1995. Dr A.T. Ariyaratne wrote Janadhipathi Premadasai MAMAI in Sinhala about 1997, on the strained relationship between the two of them. Next comes the present writer’s analysis of Premadasa’s development praxis with special reference to the Million Houses Programme and the Janasaviya Programme in his lengthy case study of Sri Lanka in the book Pro Poor Growth And Governance in South Asia, Decentralisation and Participatory Development, co-edited by Ponna Wignaraja and Susil Sirivardana, which came out in 2004. Piyasiri Kularatne wrote a political analysis titled Premadasa Gathanayen Pasu in 1994 in Sinhala. Bradman Weerakoon wrote another memoir in his Rendering Unto Caesar published in 2005. 2006 saw the publication of two more memoirs in Sinhala, first by Evans Cooray titled Janasetha Sedu Janapathi Sevane and K.H.J. Wijedasa’s Pahan Sanvegaya containing several chapters on Premadasa.

Sources are enormous

In contrast to what we have, the ground left uncovered is enormous. The potential subjects waiting to be investigated and analysed and put into perspective is huge. The Premadasa oeuvre itself consists of speeches made both in Sri Lanka and at several global fora, Parliamentary contributions, recorded speeches, letters written to heads of states, notes in files and private letters exchanged, Secondary sources are government reports and Presidential Commission reports both published as sessional papers and those not published, Cabinet papers, newspaper reports and articles, magazine articles, critical articles in journals here and abroad.

A good idea of the volume of material available can be had from an exercise conducted by the Development Planning Unit of London University which got all the available material on the various Housing Programmes from 1978 to 2002 collected, photocopied and bound for reference purposes and kept in their Library. This was when the Million Houses Programme was a syllabus topic in their Housing Development course. All of us were surprised when this collection resulted in an eight volume set of bound and titled books!

The potential material for research as the reader will see is enormous. A huge range of social science material is available. Particularly rich are the areas of domestic politics, Indo Sri Lanka Relations, the Peace Process, development policy with special reference to housing, poverty and local government. The area of biography is also fascinating.

The real repository Premadasa deserves is a Memorial Centre. Two good models of such centres are the Indira Gandhi Memorial Centre for the Arts and the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Centre, both of which are in Delhi. But since such a wish seems to be so far from the imagination of the Premadasa trustees, perhaps a transitional arrangement for the Premadasa Archive seems to be a more realistic expectation.. Adequate arrangements to commemorate national leaders are vital responsibilities of a nation’s rulers and all her people.