lessons must be drawn from the defeat of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike's coalition government in the March 22 election in Ceylon, the main ones being:
(1) The continued instability of bourgeois rule in Ceylon due to deteriorating economic and social conditions.
(2) The incapacity of a coalition government like the one put together by Mrs. Bandaranaike to either solve these problems or to offer a realistic perspective for their eventual solution.
(3) The deepening of the crisis -as shown by the erosion of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom party and its inability to bolster its position, except in the most superficial and passing way, by including the leading representatives of the » organized working class ina coalition government.
(4) The bankruptcy of the Perera-De Silva-Goonewardene - -leadership of the old Lanka Sama Samaja party, who, in return for posts of a few months duration in a bourgeois coalition government, threw away political capital painfully accumulated over a quarter of a century.
(5) The confirmation that Ceylon is not an exception, It is proved once more what a fatal illusion it is to think that socialism can be won by parliamentary means. The only road remains that of the class struggle, overthrow of capitalist rule, the establishment of a Workers and Peasants government, the liquidation of capitalism and construction of a planned economy,
(6) The glaring need for a mass revolutionary-socialist party in Ceylon, based on the program represented by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), to lead the way out of the present impasse.
The most striking feature shown by the March 22 election was the relative decline of the Sri Lanka Freedom party and the relative recovery of the United National party, the traditional ruling party of the Ceylonese capitalists and landlords and their imperialist backers.
From 30 parliamentary seats in the July 1960 election, the United National party increased its stake to 66, The 1960 figure for the SLFP was 753; its current strength is 41. The bulk of the new UNP seats were taken from the SLFP. ,
The Lanka Sama Samaja Party. (Revolutionary), which ran on a principled anticapitalist program, suffered an electoral setback ascribable to the confusion following the betrayal by the old Lanka Sama Samaja party leaders. The LSSP ran rival candidates in two of the four districts where the LSSP(R) nominated candidates.
In Colombo Central, where three seats were at stake, Bala Tampoe came fifth. Cafoor, a UNP candidate, received 68,3572 votes; Premadasa, another UNP candidate, 64,433; P.Keuneman, the Communist party candidate, 41,478; and Ishak, the SLFP candidate, 32,132, Shanmugathasan, the candidate of the pro-Peking Communist party received 2,427 votes, Tampoe won 4,559 votes.
In Bulathasinghala, the vote was: Mangala Moonesinghe (LSSP), 13,023; Fonseka (UNP), 10,433; and Edmund Samarakkody of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), 278.
In Moratuwa, the vote was: Rusken Fernando (UNP), 18,059; Abhayawardene (LSSP), 16,020; and Meryl Fernando of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), 1,048.
In Kankesanturai the vote was: Chelvanayagam (FP) 14,735; Baskeran (TC), 6,611; V.Karalasingham of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), 2,257. The pro-Moscow Communist party candidate polled 958 votes, the pro-Peking 741.
The reformist LSSP lost two of its twelve seats in parliament. The losers were Colvin R. de Silva, who polled 21,363 votes as against 24,652 for the UNP candidate in his district, and Mrs. Vivienne Goonewardena, who polled 13,218 votes against 14,910 for the UNP candidate.
During her campaign, Mrs. Bandaranaike repeatedly charged that imperialism was flagrantly intervening in the election. At meetings in Kiriella and Dehiowita on March 11, for instance, she stated that American and British imperialists and foreign business-~ men were financing the campaign of the United National party.
There can be no doubt of the imperialist interest in a UNP victory. Thus United Press International, the imperialist news service, stated March 23 that the victory of Dudley Senanayake, head of the UNP and now the new Prime Minister, "could be expected to improve Ceylon's deteriorating relations with the United States and end growing Chinese Communist influence here." The agency noted Senanayake's campaign promise to "allow American oil companies to. start business in Ceylon again." The authoritative New York Times in a front-page headline March 24 described Mrs. Bandaranaikers defeat as having occurred at the hands of a "Pro-Western Unit."
But imperialism is decidedly unpopular in Ceylon and it can count on very few direct votes. How then, did it succeed in strengthening its positions in the island?
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First of all, its agents resorted to the most vicious type of election propaganda, playing on the reactionary themes of "Marxists" boring from within Mrs. Bandaranaike's government, of a "Marxist conspiracy" to destroy the Buddhist religion, and of a "Marxist plot" to hand Ceylon over to the "Chinese Communists."
However, red-baiting of this kind is to be expected from the reactionary agents and spokesmen of capitalism and landlordism. Such propaganda does not have an automatic appeal and, in fact, could have boomeranged. It could take hold and gain momentum only because there was no effective challenge from the left, a clear presentation in a massive way of a realistic alternative.
The Sri Lanka Freedom party offered no realistic alternative. Its reformist palliatives had long lost their appeal. The strong showing of the SLFP in the 1960 election had already been followed by a marked decline in the strength of this party. The tendency among the masses of Ceylon for the past several years has been to polarize around something much farther to the left. One of the most promising indications of this was the formation of the United Left Front, representing the trade unions and working-class parties, which struck a big popular response and which offered potentialities -- under a correct program and vigorous leadership -- of becoming a polarizing center that could have led to the establishment of a Workers and Peasants government in Ceylon. This was the perspective which the United Secretariat of the Fourth International favored and -pressed for in accordance with the principles of the Transition Program of the Fourth International.
For the Ceylonese bourgeoisie, the United Left Front represented a deadly danger, a danger well understood by Mrs. Bandaranaike, one of their most astute representatives. About a year ago, she initiated a clever tactic with the double aim of eliminating this threat and at the same time counteracting the deteriorating positionof her own party and its rule. She did this by offering posts in © her government to the leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja party, seeking to make a deal with one of the party's popular mass figures, Dr.N.M. Perera,
Instead of exposing the trap set for the revolutionarysocialist movement in Ceylon, Dr.N.M.Perera advocated that the LSSP should seize the “historic opportunity." The left wing of the LSSP fought against his proposed betrayal of the basic principles of Trotskyism. In backing this struggle, the Fourth International called attention: to Mrs. Bandaranaike's political aims. By associating the leaders of the LSSP in her government, the Fourth International warned the Ceylon Section, Mrs, Bandaranaike hoped to at least temporarily strengthen her party and bourgeois rule in Ceylon while at the same time greatly weakening if not eliminating the threat from the left, and, in the process, associating these "Trotskyist" leaders with her government so-that they would end up com promised and discredited by her own failure to solve the burning
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economic and social problems of the country.
In a letter to the Central Committee and members of the LSSP, dated May 25, 1964, the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International made the following appeal: .
"It is clear that throughout Asia, the equilibrium reached at the time of the Geneva agreement of 1954 has been broken and that in every country in this part of the world the class struggle is again sharpening. If the mass movement does not move boldly now, reaction will inevitably set in and the present opportunity will’ turn into its opposite.
_ “In Ceylon, the SLFP government, acting as the agency of the bourgeoisie, is seeking through its proposals to disintegrate the ° United Left Front and to associate the LSSP with its bankrupt policies and further decline. The LSSP has reached a crucial moment in its history.
"Let the SLFP government appeal to you in vain!
"The only real alternative is audacious action by the LSSP. It should serve as the central driving force in mobilizing the ULF, appealing to the masses to establish a United Left Front government on the basis of a genuinely socialist program. This would prove highly attractive to elements. that have been sucked into the SLFP because of its demagogy in the past, help reorient them and open up * the possibility for a powerful bloc of the left organisations,
"The International Executive Committee of the Fourth International sends you its warmest comradely greetings. It hopes that the LSSP as a whole will remain faithful to its long tradition of uncom promising struggle against imperialism and the national bourgsoisie, and that it will successfully resist the maneuvers of the bourgeois government in order to open the road for genuine representatives of the masses to come to power.
"No coalition at the expense of socialist principles and the possibility of a socialist victory!
"Forward with the masses in struggle for a government of the United Left Front!"
Mes, Bandaranaike succeeded in her enterprise. N.M.Perera | used his influence in the United Left Front to convert this promising formation of the working class into a mere bargaining piece in the dirty game of parliamentary maneuvering. In return for a post as minister of finance and other emoluments, he destroyed the United Left Front, split his own party, played into the hands of reaction, and now stands completely discredited as the engineer of a major political defeat for the workers and peasants of Ceylon. Instead of standing firm against Perera'ts betrayal, Colvin R. de Silva and
Leslie Goonewardene, two other main leaders of the LSSP, capitulated in turn, following Perera's lead. By their capitulation they made it possible for Perera to win a majority in the LSSP, thereby wrecking the party. When the test came, they proved incapable of uphold-~ ing and applying the most elementary lessons of Marxism and the long struggle against class=-collaborationist People's Frontism,
As against supporting the reformism of the SLFP, what was . required was a firm stand for the principles of revolutionary social~ ism. The bid by Mrs, Bandaranaike for a coalition government should have been interpreted for what it was -- a sign of weakness in her position, a. proof of the beginning of a crisis in bourgeois rule in Ceylon, an indication that it would soon be the turn of revolution~ ary socialism to move into the center of the stage and that the Trotskyists must prepare for this, Mrs. Bandaranaike's bid should have been answered by reinforcement of the United Left Front, by the further clarification and elaboration of its program along classstruggle lines, by full representation for the plantation workers in the leadership of the United Left Front, by vigorous defense of the interests of the Tamil minority, by the proclamation of a radical agrarian reform program, and by active preparation for the formation of a Workers and Peasants government, including the organization and activization of rank-and-file committees on a nation-wide scale to meet the threat of a right-wing coup d'état.
Vigorous development of this course, which was what the Fourth International advocated, would have presented an inspiring alternative to the workers and peasants of Ceylon, capable of mobilizing them by the hundreds of thousands. It could even have swung the petty~ bourgeois nationalist layers away from the poisonous, reactionary demagogy of the forces centered around the UNP.
The attraction of such a program would have derived not simply from its. correctness in the abstract but from its standing as the only realistic concrete alternative to the mounting economic diffi-~ culties, the demoralizing drift and the unrelenting pressure of world imperialism. on the small island.. Instead of the perspective of remaining in the blind alley into which Mrs. Bandaranaike had taken Ceylon, or of returning to the blind alley offered by Senanayake, the people could have been inspired with the very real possibility of making Ceylon another Cuba, of gaining an alliance with the other workers states, of putting Ceylon in its rightful place in the forefront of the freedom struggles and class battles of. today which constitute the only road to a world of enduring peace and universal well being. Instead of this revolutionary socialist perspective, Perera and his collaborators could only offer -~ Mrs, Bandaranaike! That, plus her assurances that they were really Buddhists at heart who had accepted the program of the SLFP., The election defeat, which appears to have caught them completely by surprise, was well earned.
Senanayake did not win the 76 seats needed for an absolute
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majority. Consequently he, too, had to make a coalition. He succeeded in this mainly through a deal with the Federal party and. . the Tamil Congress, which hold 14 and 3 seats respectively. As a grotesque finishing touch to his career as a loyal servant of Mrs, Bandaranaike, N.M.Perera sought, after the returns were in, to appeal to these same parties, as representatives of the Tamils, to. join with him in reconstituting the defeated Bandaranaike coalition. Previously, under the pressure of Ceylonese nationalism, he had dis- -played his depreciation of the political importance of the Tamil minority. Pererats bid was rejected. Mrs. Bandaranaike, who has consistently shown herself to be a much better practitioner of power politics than Perera, then revealed to the press that she had already informed Governor General William Gopallawa she would resign. Perera reaped nothing but contemptuous laughter from all sides. He began his coalition as a would-be big-time operator in bourgeois politics; he ended within a few months as a ridiculous clown in the shambles of his experiment.
The new Senanayake government is not a stable one. Its program of saving Ceylon for the Buddhist monks and the American oil interests will scarcely win it a strong mass following. The scourges of inflation and unemployment will continue to keep the country in ~~ turmoil, Thus, whatever the temporary consequences, the tendency of the capitalists and landlords to seek greater stability through a "strong" government, backed by imperialism and prepared to meet the demands of the workers and. peasants by repressive measures, will reassert itself more elearly than ever. Far from lessening the danger of an extreme right-wing development in Ceylon, Senanayake's victory increases it.
The political tasks facing the Ceylon workers and peasants have consequently grown in acuteness. A period of increasing instability has opened in Ceylon that is intimately associated with the general situation in India and throughout Southeast Asia. Great opportunities as well as great responsibilities now rest with the Trotskyist leadership organized in the LSSP(R). We are confident that this leadership will prove. capable of living up to-the historic demands of the situation.
We ask every member of the LSSP who followed N.M,Perera and De Silva-Goonewardene in the illusion that the coalition represented’ something positive or out of the mistaken idea that this was the best way to keep the ranks together, to now study the grave lessons: of Pererats betrayal. Your place is with the Trotskyists of the LSSP(R) who remained faithful to basic principles! Around these . revolutionary socialists, it is possible, with the help of the Fourth International, to build the new leadorship and the mass party that . is the need of the hour in Ceylon.
Directeur-G6érant: Pierre FRANK. . 1'&éditeur).