Prof. K. M. de Silva remembers Sri Lanka’s first Prime Minister: D. S. Senanayake

He did it his way, on his terms

D. S. Senanayake, one of the outstanding figures of Sri Lanka’s modern history was born a hundred and seventeen years ago, on October 20, 1884. This brief commemorative article is intended to focus on two areas of his political work, first in land policy and irrigation, and then, his role in the negotiations with Britain on Sri Lanka’s independence. In both these, his influence on the history of the country has been profoundly important.

In the eyes of many observers of national politics, DS did not have the credentials for the role he was chosen for when he first entered the national legislature in 1924. With his elder brother FR’s sudden death on January 1, 1926, few expected DS to fill the huge void in national politics that resulted from this but he did fill that void, adequately at the beginning, and with great competence in a couple of years. He did it on his own terms and in his own way.

The first opportunity for national leadership came his way in 1927/28 when he accepted membership of the prestigious Land Commission. DS, by now a rising star of the island’s political leadership, was beginning his association with an area of public policy he was to dominate virtually for the rest of his life. The Land Commission sat for two years and the thoroughness of its investigations and the range and quality of its policy recommendations made it one of the great official commissions of inquiry of the 19th and 20th centuries. The recommendations of the Land Commission constituted a fundamental change in the government’s land policy, and a calculated reversal of trends that had been in force since the 1830s, from focusing on sales of state owned lands to planters, British and Sri Lankan, to reserving such land in future for the peasants. Thanks to D. S. Senanayake, the legislation required to implement the recommendations of the Land Commission was drafted and adopted more speedily than normal practice would have permitted.

D. S. Senanayake’s record of success in the implementation of the recommendations of the Land Commission was substantial enough, but more notable were his efforts to go beyond those recommendations. The Land Commission had not been very enthusiastic about dry zone agriculture and the encouragement of a shift of population there. Under his leadership there was a much greater appreciation of the potential value of the undeveloped dry zone. Even before the government moved to promote it, there was a steady but significant stream of migrants there with Minneriya as the special attraction — striking evidence of a spontaneous response to economic and population pressure. It was largely through his initiative that faith in the peasant as an agent of economic change established itself as part of the conventional wisdom of the day, and with it greater appreciation of the potential value of the dry zone.

One of his greatest achievements was the comprehensive rehabilitation of the Polonnaruwa district. Away from the Polonnaruvwa district, he initiated a thorough repair of the Kalawewa in Anuradhapura, and of one of the greatest technological achievements of ancient Sri Lanka, the Jayaganga. His crowning achievement as the re-builder of ancient irrigation works and re-claimer of the dry zone was the restoration of the Parakrama Samudra, the largest reservoir constructed in ancient times.

In the years after independence, when he was prime minister, he launched the building of an irrigation complex which overshadowed even the Parakrama Samudra in scale — the Gal Oya scheme. He did not live to see the completion of the Gal Oya scheme, a historic achievement, the first major irrigation project constructed in the country since the days of the Polonnaruwa kings in the 12th century. The massive reservoir at Inginiyagala which was part of the project, was seven times larger than the Parakrama Samudra. After his death it was named the Senanayake Samudra. Even today after the construction of several dams on the Mahaweli, the Senanayake Samudra contains the largest volume of water of any irrigation scheme in the country, larger than Kotmale or Victoria. Only Randenigala comes anywhere close to it.

The second theme of this short paper, the negotiations on the island’s independence conducted in the 1940s shows a unique feature - in comparison with the cognate process in undivided India, and Myanmar (Burma) - the dominance of a single individual, D. S. Senanayake, in the negotiating process. He took charge of it in December 1942 and kept the initiative in his hands till his objective - Sri Lanka’s independence - was attained in 1947-48. In his negotiations with the Colonial Office, and the colonial administration in the island, he was fortunate in having the advice and assistance of Dr. (later Sir) Ivor Jennings, the first Vice Chancellor of the newly established University of Ceylon, a constitutional lawyer of the first rank. Seldom has a colonial political leader been so well served by an expatriate advisor as Senanayake was by Jennings in the negotiations for independence.

Senanayake’s tactics and strategies reflected his own political convictions, with their emphasis on pragmatism and moderation, as well as the political traditions of the mainstream of nationalist politics in Sri Lanka with its well-known proclivity for peaceful constitutional agitation. Moreover, he was a realist who saw the practical advantages of accepting constitutional change in instalments till his objective was reached.

The draft constitution prepared in 1943-44 for presentation to the British government was entirely the work of Jennings serving as constitutional advisor to Senanayake. The Ministers’ Draft Constitution of 1944, as this came to be called, acquired a wider significance when the Soulbury Commission adopted all its main features in its own report. Even before the Soulbury report was published Senanayake was invited to Whitehall for discussions on constitutional reform in Sri Lanka. The Colonial Office records show that Senanayake handled his negotiations of July-August 1945 with an aplomb that belied his lack of anything more than a secondary education. Thanks to the regular briefings he had from Jennings (who had travelled to the UK to be with Senanayake) his mastery of the intricacies of constitutional reform impressed the hard-headed phalanx of officials and experts he faced.

Throughout his negotiations with the British, Senanayake faced the opposition of G.G. Ponnambalam whose battle cry of “50-50” i.e., the equal division of seats in the national legislature between the Sinhalese majority and the minorities, which was begun in the late 1930s, and reached its peak in 1944 when the Tamil Congress was formed. Nor did Senanayake have much support from the Muslim community in the early stages of his career as the principal political leader of the day. Yet by 1945 he had won the support of the Muslims and had undermined Ponnambalam’s support among the Tamil members of the state council. In November 1945, Senanayake’s triumph was complete when he secured a vote of 51 to 3 in the State Council in favour of the White Paper issued in London incorporating the principal recommendations of the Soulbury Report.

Senanayake’s principal objective from this time onwards was to move to complete Dominion Status, but the Labour government was not so enthusiastic about this, and the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee himself proposed a waiting period of six years from 1947 for this. But the impending partition of the British raj and the fearful violence that broke out prior to and after the partition of British India helped Senanayake’s cause. Even more than the Indian situation, the decision taken to grant independence to Myanmar spurred the Colonial Office mandarins to press ahead with Sri Lanka’s passage to independence.

A significant section of Sri Lanka’s left-wing intelligentsia has never given Senanayake due credit for his skilful negotiations on Sri Lanka’s independence. They regarded the Indian political campaign for independence as the model to be followed. Senanayake had no faith in the Indian pattern of agitation, and sought instead to follow the path to independence set by Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In doing so he indicated a preference for a political tradition that the more learned and doctrinaire critics of the left found distinctly unattractive. When Nehru himself, accepted Dominion Status, Senanayake saw it as a vindication of the campaign he had conducted at a time when Dominion Status had few advocates in India.