(The following article appeared in the September 15, 1977, issue of Inprecor
[For further coverage see "The Coming Elections in Sri Lanka" by Ernest Harsch in the July 11 issue of Intercontinental Press (p. 798), and "Bandaranaike Routed in Sri Lanka Elections" by Ernest Harsch in the August 1 issue of Intercontinental Press (p. 880).
|For a report on the postelection events, see "Scores of Tamils Killed in Sri Lanka" in the September 12 issue of Intercontinental Press (p. 988).
The general election of July 21, 1977, completely reversed the electoral shift that had occurred in the previous elections, held May 27. 1970. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) of outgoing Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, which won 91 seats in the 1970 elections, has been reduced to 8 seats in the new, slightly enlarged 168-seat National State Assembly. The ex-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party, which won 19 and 6 seats respectively in 1970 and had served as junior partners in Bandaranaike's ruling coalition, the United Front, lost all their seats and are now without representation in parliament.
On the other hand, the conservative United National Party (UNP), which was ousted from office by the popular swing to the United Front parties in 1970 and held only 17 seats in the outgoing parliament, has now been swept into office with a larger vote than any party or coalition in the country's parliamentary history. It now holds 139 seats, with the certainty of gaining yet another seat in a postponed election in one constituency. The UNP therefore enjoys complete legislative supremacy, in addition to controlling the state apparatus.
The new Assembly is thus rid of the fake left and now stands under the total sway of the right, not only on the side of the government, but also on the side of the opposition.
Although the UNP leader J.R. Jayawardene asked for a mandate to be prime minister of all Ceylon, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) sought a mandate to establish a separate state of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Ceylon) for the Tamilspeaking people in the northern and eastern provinces. The Federal Party and the Tamil Congress, which are the parties that make up the TULF, won all the 14 seats in the northern province, taking 68.5% of the total vote and swamping the UNP, SLFP, and ISSP in all the seats they contested In the eastern province, however, the TULF secured only 3 out of 10 seats, the remaining 7 going to the UNP.
As the second largest party in the Assembly, with 17 seats, the TULF has decided to function as an opposition party in the new Assembly, and Federal Party leader Amirthalingham has been elected leader of the opposition. The new prime minister is thus faced with the problem of responding to the major political grievances of the Tamil-speaking people if he is to avoid a serious confrontation both inside and outside the Assembly on the issue of a separate Tamil state, at least in the northern province. Bandaranaike now finds herself in the embarrassing position of being in the opposition with a Tamil leader. Under the circumstances, her party has decided to function as a separate group in the opposition.
An analysis of the election results reveals many interesting features. The UNP won a little less than 3 million votes out of a total of 5.7 million votes cast, that is, about 52%. The SLFP got slightly more than 1.7 million votes, or 30%. The United Left Front (ULF), made up of the LSSP. the CP, a group that broke away from the SIFP, and other individuals supported by the latter group, got slightly more than 400,000 votes, just over 7%.
In the northern province, the TULF won 68.5% of the more than 400,000 votes cast, the UNP 7.8%, the SLFP 1.4%, and the ULF slightly less than 1%. In the eight other provinces of the country, the UNP got 55%, the SLFP 32.3%, and the ULF 7.5%. In the eastern province, which has a mixed population of about 300,000 Tamils, more than 245,000 Tamil-speaking Muslims, and about 167,000 Sinhalese (the majority of the Ceylonese population is Sinhalese), the UNP got 41.6%, the TULF 31.4%, the SLFP 24.1%, and the ULF 2.4%.
In the western province, the most highly populated and urbanized, which includes the capital city of Colombo, the UNP polled more than 942,000 votes, the SLFP about 541,000 and the ULF about 138,000, percentages of 56.8%, 32.6%, and 8.3% respectively. In the other provinces--the central, southern, northwestern, northcentral, Uva (east-central), and Sabaragamuwa (between western and central)— where the population is predominantly Sinhalese, the UNP polled 55.2%, 54.9%, 56.8%, 54.9%, 58.8%, and 54.3% respectively. This indicates an almost uniform swing to the UNP in all these provinces. The SLFP totals in these provinces were 33.4%, 29%, 35.5%, 40%, 37.6%, and 30%.
The ULF got only 1.2% of the vote in the central province, 4.3% in the northwestern, 3.6% in the north-central, and 1.9% in Uva. In the southern province, in which the CP held 4 seats in the outgoing Assembly and the LSSP 3 (out of a total of 21), the ULF won 13.3 %, as against 29% for the SIPP. In Sabaragamuwa, where some of the strongholds of the LSSP are located, including the constituency of N.M. Perera, a major party leader, and in which the LSSP had held 5 seats and the CP 1 (out of a total of 17) in the old Assembly, the ULF got 14.7% of the vote, as against the SLFP's 30%. In the southern province and in Sabaragamuwa, as well as in Uva, the UNP won all the seats, with more votes than the SLFP and ULF candidates combined in all but 2 of the 50 constituencies of those three provinces.
In the western province, in which the LSSP previously held 10 seats out of 36, it not only lost all its seats to the UNP, but was reduced to a poor third place, for the SLFP polled more votes. The CP former government minister Keuneman lost his seat in the three-member constituency of Colombo Central, where he had secured a seat in every election since 1947. He fell into fifth place, while the SLFP candidates came in third and won one seat. Subasinghe, a former SLFP minister who left the SLFP government at the very end of its term of office to become a leader of the ULF, also came in a poor third in the constituency he had held, while the SLFP candidate polled a much larger vote and came in second to the UNP.
The election results clearly show that the major polarization that took root among the masses throughout the country (except in the northern province and to some extent in the eastern province) was between the UNP and the SLFP, which were viewed as the only credible government alternatives. Although the ULF fielded 130 candidates, only those among them who had previously held seats in parliament were considered, at least to some extent, as credible alternatives to the UNP candidates. As the results attest, however, in several of these constituencies even the SLFP was accepted as the main alternative to the UNP. The ULF leaders' denunciations of J.R. Jayawardene as a "fascist" and of Bandaranaike as the leader of the "reactionary right wing of the SLFP," as well as their unconvincing prattle about "socialism," had hardly any effect on the masses.
In the context of the sharp polarization between the UNP and the SLFP, the few candidates put forward by the Anti- Capitalist United Front (ACUF)- composed of the Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP), Ceylonese section of the Fourth International, and the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU)-as well as those of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), were unable to make a sufficient impact on the masses of voters and won only several hundred votes in each of the limited number of constituencies they contested. The RMP/CMU candidates polled only 1,055 votes in the four constituencies they contested in and around Colombo. The JVP contested two seats in the southern province and two in north-central province, in areas where they had held considerable influence prior to the suppression of the JVP in 1971. Nevertheless, they won only 3,443 votes in the two provinces combined. The Revolutionary Communist League (Healyites) ran candidates in six different provinces (one in each), but won only 1,283 votes all together.
The commissioner of elections arbitrarily, unlawfully, and dishonestly refused to treat the RMP as "a recognized party for the purpose of elections" under the reactionary election law which grants "recognized parties" the advantage of paying a deposit of only 250 rupees per candidate, as against 1,000 rupees for others. They also have the right to choose a particular election symbol, which cannot be used by any other party or candidate. Furthermore, the commissioner also arbitrarily and unlawfully notified the Information Department and thereby the press that candidates not belonging to recognized parties were "independents,
" whether or not they belonged to parties and organizations, and were simply private individuals seeking election. The public was thus induced to dismiss such candidates as unworthy of serious consideration.
A glaring feature of the election campaign was that all "recognized parties" displayed thousands of posters announcing their campaign meetings, with pictures of their candidates, even though this is prohibited by the election law, which makes it an offense to display any such poster in any place visible to the publie. The attorney general and the police regard such posters as illegal, but nobody from the "recognized parties" has ever been arrested for displaying them. On the other hand, five members of the JVP were arrested for pasting up posters in connection with the recent hunger strike of Rohana Wijeweera and other political prisoners, although pasting up this sort of poster is fully legal. The CMU and RMP refrained from displaying any posters in order to avoid the danger of arrest.
The swing away from the SLFP and its former "left" allies to the UNP was undoubtedly due to the bitter experiences of the masses under the United Front government since 1970. The swing away from the traditional "left" parties was due to disillusionment with their "parliamentary road to socialism." This resulted in their being left stranded on that "road" by the masses. It is not necessary to dwell at length on the SLFP. The infamous record of brutal repression by this party, the unbridled inflation it unleashed on the country, with the resulting rise in the cost of living, the large-scale unemployment, and the unprecedented corruption and nepotism the country has experienced explain the turn away from the government party. The fact that the United Front broke up before the elections and the SLFP and the ULF were not only competing with but also denouncing each other in most constituencies served only to enhance mass distrust of both.
The overwhelming majority of new voters, numbering more than a million, undoubtedly voted for the UNP. There is also no doubt that the majority of the working class polarized between the UNP and the SLFP, with most voting for the UNP. In the case of the Tamil-speaking minorities
First Issue of New Québec
The first issue of Lutte Ouvrière, the French-language fortnightly published by the fused section of the Fourth International in Canada, the Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire-Revolutionary Workers League, is now on the newsstands. Its masthead reads, "For independence and socialism, for the workers republic of Qué- bec." The issue is dated September 28.
An editorial on page two deals with the reluctance of the Parti Québécois, the bourgeois nationalist party that holds a majority in the Québec government, to enforce its own law establishing French as the primary language in Québec, and its willingness to make deals with Ottawa at the expense of the oppressed French-speaking population in Québec and in other parts of Canada.
This is further proof, the editors state, that revolutionary Marxists have long been correct in saying that "the PQ cannot and will not fight seriously even for the independence, let alone the national liberation, of Québec."
The editors go on to explain their stand on this important issue:
"We are fighting to liberate an entire people from the yoke of Canadian imperialism. And the only social force that can accomplish this is the working class. But the determination to fight is not enough. For the bourgeois forces are nothing if not well organized. The Liberal Party of [Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott] Trudeau enjoys the support of the Canadian big bourgeoisie and controls the Canadian state apparatus, including the courts, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], and ultimately, the Canadian army.
of Ceylon (Tamils, Muslims, and plantation workers of Indian origin who had obtained citizenship rights), the results indicate that their votes also went predominantly to the UNP, except in the northern province and to some extent in the eastern.
The electoral victory of the UNP is thus due primarily to disillusionment and distrust among all sections of the population in the capacity of the SLFP, whether alone or in association with the "left" parties, to resolve any of the basic problems of the masses in Sri Lanka. It is also an indication of some hope among the masses that the UNP may do better. Under the circumstances, the very size of the vote for the UNP carries within it the seeds of serious mass unrest before long, if that hope is not realized.
In this situation, the ouster of the traditional "left" parties from the parliamentary scene is already giving rise to concern among UNP leaders, since mass unrest outside parliament will no longer find any safe outlet in the Assembly.
Trotskyist Newspaper
"And the PQ is proving more and more incapable of standing up to Ottawa's might. Since November 15 [1976], the government [of Premier René] Levesque has retreated further and further, even from the standpoint of its electoral platform, which was conservative enough. ...
"Faced with this situation, we have no other choice but to organize to achieve our goals: in our unions, our student organizations, the women's liberation movement, and everywhere. But these organizations, necessary as they are, will not suffice. We must organize on the political level, form a party of working men and women whose highest task is to take power and form a workers government.
"As against Trudeau and Levesque, we propose independence and socialism as the sole solution for Québécois men and women. The free Québec we want to build will be the Workers Republic of Québee."
Cost of Clean Water
Cleaning up all the polluted lakes and rivers in the United States by 1990 would cost $600 billion, Horace Smith, the president of the Water Pollution Control Federation, said September 28. But if nothing is done, "our water bodies are going to die," he added.
Building water treatment plants would cost $450 billion, and the remainder would be needed for operation and maintenance. (An equivalent amount is spent by the Pentagon every five years.)