Appreciations
View(s):He steered the CTB around and made it efficient
ANIL KUMAR MOONESINGHE
My father, Anil Kumar Moonesinghe, who passed away 15 years ago, was born into a different Sri Lanka from today. Then called Ceylon, it lodged securely in the bosom of His British Majesty’s “Empire on which the Sun never set”. Europeans ruled the roost, assisted by “Brown Sahibs” who received crumbs off the table, a “Planter Raj”.
The middle classes were fairly well-off. Portraits of the King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary adorned their parlours. The British Union Jack decorated the roads for their weddings (only replaced by the Lion Flag after 1972). However, workers and farmers faced abysmal conditions: uneducated and unhealthy, they faced widespread malnutrition and high infant mortality and maternal death rates.
The conditions of the Great Depression of the 1930s made his wealthy family tighten its belt, which helped radicalise him in his childhood.Coming from a Sinhalese Buddhist background at a time when Sinhalese Buddhists were third-class citizens in their own country, also helped the process of radicalisation, as did his family’s decidedly anti-British sentiments.
These sentiments turned my father towards the enemies of the British Empire, as it did many nationalists at the time. When the Japanese attacked Colombo in April 1942, the 15-year-old was at Rajagaha, near Galle, from where he fired a shotgun (with no result) at RAF Catalina seaplanes overhead. He tried to organise the local boys into a brigade to help the Japanese when they landed. Back in Royal College, he gained the nickname “Rommel”, because he kept saying that the German general of that name would chase the British beyond the Suez Canal.
However, he was no fan of fascism, and found himself drawn to socialism. He contributed an article on the Red Air Force to the Royal College magazine. He came under the influence of his Trotskyist schoolmasters, the legendary RCL “Dickie” Attygalle and Osmund Jayaratne.
After leaving Royal, my father entered University College Colombo. An avid athlete, he represented his College at Lahore, in what was then British India. Winning an exhibition to University College London, he embarked on a ship for London. There, he threw himself into politics, joining the Revolutionary Communist Party (being a founder-member of the International Socialist group) and the trade union movement (he worked part-time as a crane driver in a factory). He later joined the Labour Party.
Returning to Sri Lanka, he became a member of the Lanka Samasamaja Party and an organiser for the Lanka Estate Workers’ Union.While committed to Marxist internationalism, he never broke from his Sinhalese Buddhist roots. The Dinamina later described him in these terms:
“Anil Moonesinghe is a revolutionary. However, his supporters describe him as a new type of revolutionary… The Lanka Samasamaja Party is a party which honours the political philosophy of Leon Trotsky. However, without limiting his party to that philosophy, he is described as one of the young leaders who is pushing the party towards nationalist and religious thinking.”
It was through organising a strike at Mohomediya Estate in Agalawatte that he received a political introduction to the Pas Yodun Korale. At the 1956 general election, he won the Agalawatte parliamentary seat.
He immediately began working for the development of the area, building roads and schools through self-help. Within years, this effort produced a reward: the educational level of Agalawatte leaped upwards, through students having schools, and roads by which to go to them.
In 1964, together with LSSP Leader N.M. Perera and Cholmondely Goonewardena, he joined the Cabinet of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, serving as Transport Minister. He laid the foundation stone for the new international airport at Katunayake, and developed the Ceylon Transport Board. Workers in the Railway remember him for having put doors on their toilets and providing a free soap ration.
Unseated by an election petition, he threw himself into trade union work, founding the United Corporations and Mercantile Union. As a small boy, I sometimes accompanied him when he went outstations to organise. We would camp out on the bund of a tank or stay with a working-class comrade. I remember we once stayed in a house in Trincomalee, which had no proper toilet, only a bucket of excrement.
My father had the knack for speaking in simple language. He once spoke of how the Buddhist scriptures were in Pali, the vulgar tongue, and not in Sanskrit, the language of the educated. When he explained Marxist analyses, he would put it in terms people would understand.
In 1970, with the victory of the United Front, he became CTB Chairman. He took up the job with his characteristic enthusiasm, working a 16-hour day, 7 days a week. He had a hands-on approach, once servicing eight buses in one day in order to demonstrate that it could be done. While he led by example, he had a profound understanding of the need for a system and for discipline.
At the same time, he set about constructing an industrial democracy. While Minister, he had introduced Employees Councils, emulating the Yugoslav model. In 1970 the workers spontaneously set up their own councils. My father institutionalised them, getting the Elections Department to oversee democratic elections, and integrated them into the management structure at each depot, workshop or office. This strategy paid dividends, and he was able to turn the CTB around and make it profitable, as well as efficient and responsive to public needs.
He also used the CTB as a motor for industrial development, sourcing as many local manufacturers as possible to provide spare parts. He also developed the internal manufacturing capability of the CTB, aiming to have locally manufactured buses on the road by 1976. Only the prototype, “Lanka 1” came out by the time he left. He attempted to manufacture the Citroen FAF utility vehicle, as an affordable alternative; again only the prototype was completed.
His plan was to have half the Board of Directors elected by the employees’ councils, which he could not accomplish. The new Central Bus Station at the Pettah, intended to house a hotel for travellers, a cinema, and shops, remains partially-built.
In 1977, he contested Matugama, but lost in the UNP landslide. During the 1980 General Strike, the launching of which he had opposed as being premature, he was jailed by J.R. Jayewardene’s regime. In 1982, he split from the LSSP and supported Kobbekaduwa’s candidacy at the Presidential election, persuading the latter to campaign in Jaffna.
In 1983, he successfully contested the Matugama by-election on the SLFP ticket. Such was his reputation that the UNP Members of Parliament did not allow him to complete his first speech on his return, and the then Prime Minister Premadasa launched a vicious personal attack on him.
The last few kilometres of the Pelawatte-Baduraliya Road, which he began building as MP for Agalawatte, remained unfinished until his return to Parliament. He worked hard at providing people with housing, water and electricity, as well as providing with livelihoods. He began an industrial estate, but the ceramic products factory he planned with foreign participation, to use the kaolin deposits by the Kalu Ganga, was sabotaged by the regime.
When the proposal for the Southern Expressway came up, he campaigned to have it diverted inland, so that the villages in the hinterland would get developed. He proposed a second international airport at Welipenna, close to the South-East Coastal tourism areas, but it was shot down by opposition from the UNP. He also proposed a Kalu Ganga scheme, by which to alleviate the problem of flooding, advocating that the flood waters be diverted to the Dry Zone.
During the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, he risked his life to save Tamil families. A few years later, during the “White Terror”, he intervened to save the lives of innocents being victimised by both sides.
With the People’s Alliance victory of 1994, he was widely expected to be Minister of Transport, but Chandrika Kumaratunga refused to give him the portfolio, despite the spontaneous demands of the CTB workers. He watched in agony as lesser persons completed the UNP’s job of demolishing the organisation he had built up.
It was therefore with the greatest pleasure that he responded to the request from Dinesh Gunawardena, who became Minister of Transport in 2000, for advice on re-building the CTB. Unfortunately, he never lived to see the creation of the reborn Sri Lanka Transport Board.
His memorial is in the many CTB depots and bus stands he built around the country, in the Shalika Auditorium at Park Road and the Matugama auditorium, the remnants of the Central Bus Station, the Bandaranaike International Airport. But even more, it is in the vision of a publicly owned, efficient public transport system as well as in the high educational attainment of the Pasyodun Korale.
Vinod Moonesinghe
Treasured memories
RANJIT ERIYAGAMA
It is now three years to this 14th of December and
there is
Not a day that passes that I do not think of you. I go
through life knowing you will never again be there for
me.
You were loving, kind and sincere to me and every one
else. All who knew you, respect you to this day.
Everyone who associated with you closely will fondly
remember and treasure those lovely times spent with
you over the years.
You are ever in my heart and miss you more than
words
Could ever say.
This is samsara the never ending stream of life. You
meet
You love and then depart. As the years go by slowly,
in our
Hearts he will always stay, loved, missed and
remembered
Every day.
May you attain the supreme bliss of nirvana
Ever loving wife Sreema