The
Political Party System |
One of the most striking features of the political
system in the more than four decades since independence
has been the existence of viable and generally stable
political parties. In the general elections held between
1952 and 1977, a two-party system emerged in which
the UNP and the SLFP alternately secured majorities
and formed governments. Observers noted, however,
that one major failure of the two-party system was
the unwillingness or inability of the UNP and the
SLFP to recruit substantial support among Tamils.
As a result, this minority was largely excluded from
party politics.
On the basis of ethnicity, three types of parties
could be defined in the late 1980s: Sinhalese-backed
parties including the UNP, the SLFP, Marxist parties,
such as the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the
Communist Party of Sri Lanka, and the numerically
insignificant splinter groups; a largely inoperative
Tamil party system composed of the Tamil United Liberation
Front (TULF); and other minority-oriented parties,
such as the Ceylon Workers' Party, which enjoyed the
support of the Indian Tamils, and the Sri Lanka Muslim
Congress.
The situation was complicated by the fact that extremist
groups, such as the Sinhalese-based People's Liberation
Front (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna--JVP) in southern
Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers based in the Northern
and Eastern provinces, challenged the legal parties
for popular support. By the late 1980s, both the intransigence
of the Jayewardene government and the use of intimidation
tactics by extremists in Jaffna District and parts
of Eastern Province dramatically reduced popular backing
among Tamils for the relatively moderate TULF.
The political party system was also weakened by the
determination of the UNP leadership to retain a solid
parliamentary majority through the use of constitutional
amendments. During the 1980s, various UNP measures
undermined the balance between the two major parties
that had been an important factor behind the political
stability of the years between 1952 and 1977.
The extension of the life of Parliament until 1989
and the passage of the amendment prohibiting the advocacy
of separatism, which resulted in the expulsion of
TULF members from Parliament, created new political
grievances. The Jayewardene government's decision
to deprive SLFP leader Sirimavo Bandaranaike of her
civil rights for seven years for alleged abuses of
power in October 1980 also weakened the two-party
system because it deprived the SLFP of its popular
leader.
Despite drastic constitutional changes since 1972,
the party system's British heritage is readily apparent
in the clear distinction made between government and
opposition legislators in Parliament (sitting, as
in Westminster, on opposite benches) and provisions
in the 1978 Constitution to prevent defections from
one party to another, previously a common practice.
Backbenchers are expected to follow the initiatives
of party leaders and can be punished with expulsion
from the party for failing to observe party discipline.
The Website:
United
National Party
The
UNP was established in 1946 by prominent nationalist
leaders such as Don Stephen Senanayake, who
became the country's first prime minister, and
S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who broke with Senanayake
in 1951, establishing the SLFP. |
 |
The UNP, originally a collection of disparate and
jealous factions, was organized to compete in the
first general elections in 1947 against leftist parties
on the platform of communal harmony, parliamentary
democracy, and anticommunism. Between 1946 and the
early 1970s, the UNP was organized around power personalities
and politically influential families rather than a
consistent ideology or a strong party organization.
In its early years it was known as the "uncle-nephew
party" because of the blood ties between its
major leaders.
When the first prime minister, Don Stephen Senanayake,
died in March 1952, he was succeeded by his son, Dudley.
In September 1953, Sir John Kotelawala, Dudley Senanayake's
uncle, assumed the leadership of the UNP government
and remained in power until April 1956. In the March
1965 general election, Dudley Senanayake again became
prime minister at the head of a UNP government.
The Sri Lanka Freedom Party |
In 1951 S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike led his faction, the
Sinhala Maha Sabha, out of the ruling UNP and established
the SLFP. Bandaranaike had organized the Sinhala Maha
Sabha in 1937 in order to promote Sinhalese culture
and community interests. Since the 1950s, SLFP platforms
have reflected the earlier organization's emphasis
on appealing to the sentiments of the Sinhalese masses
in rural areas. To this basis has been added the antiestablishment
appeal of non-revolutionary socialism. On the sensitive
issue of language, the party originally espoused the
use of both Sinhala and Tamil as national languages,
but in the mid-1950s it adopted a "Sinhala only"
policy. As the champion of the Buddhist religion,
the SLFP has customarily relied upon the socially
and politically influential Buddhist clergy, the sangha,
to carry its message to the Sinhalese villages.
Another important constituency has been the Sinhalese
middle class, whose members have resented alleged
Tamil domination of the professions, commerce, and
the civil service since the British colonial era.
In contrast to the free market orientation of the
UNP, the SLFP's policies have included economic self-sufficiency
, nationalization of major enterprises, creation of
a comprehensive welfare state, redistribution of wealth,
and a nonaligned foreign policy that favored close
ties with socialist countries. It has, however, refused
to embrace Marxism as its guiding ideology.
Like the UNP, the SLFP has been a "family party."
S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1959. After
a brief and somewhat chaotic interregnum, his widow,
Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was chosen as party leader.
In the July 1960 general election, the party won 75
out of 151 parliamentary seats, and in a coalition
with Marxist parties, Mrs. Bandaranaike became the
world's first democratically elected female head of
government. Although she was obliged to step down
from party leadership after her civil rights were
taken away in October 1980 on charges of corruption
and abuse of power, she resumed leadership of the
SLFP following a government pardon granted on January
1, 1986.
In 1977 six members of the SLFP left the party and
formed a new group, the People's Democratic Party
(PDP--Mahajana Prajathanthra). A second group, the
Sri Lanka People's Party (SLMP--Sri Lanka Mahajana
Pakshaya), was formed in 1984 by a daughter of Sirimavo
Bandaranaike, Chandrika Kumaratunge, and her husband
Vijay Kumaratunge. They claimed that the original
SLFP, under the leadership of Sirimavo Bandaranaike's
son, Anura, was excessively right wing and had become
an instrument of the Jayewardene government. Although
Sirimavo Bandaranaike reentered politics and assumed
a leadership position within the SLFP after her 1986
pardon, Anura Bandaranaike remained leader of the
parliamentary opposition. Neither the PDP nor the
SLPP had representation in Parliament in 1988.
During the late 1980s, the SLFP and the breakaway
SLPP remained split on the sensitive issue of negotiations
with Tamil separatists. The former opposed the granting
of significant concessions to the militants while
the latter joined the UNP in supporting them. In 1986
Sirimavo Bandaranaike and politically active members
of the Buddhist leadership established the Movement
for Defense of the Nation in order to campaign against
proposed grants of regional autonomy to the Tamils.
The website:
Marxist
Parties
In the late 1980s, Sri Lanka had two long-established
Marxist parties. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP)
was founded in 1935 and remained in the late 1980s
one of the very few Marxist-Leninist parties in the
world to associate itself with the revolutionary doctrines
of Leon Trotsky. This connection made it attractive
to independent-minded Marxists who resented ideological
subservience to Moscow and who aspired to adapt Marxism
to Sri Lankan conditions.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the LSSP functioned
as the primary opposition party, but its fortunes
declined after the emergence of the non-Marxist SLFP.
Like the SLPP, the LSSP joined with the ruling UNP
in the mid-1980s to support a negotiated settlement
with Tamil militants but in 1988 did not have members
in Parliament. The New Equal Society Party (Nava Sama
Samaja Party--NSSP) was in 1987 a breakaway faction
of the LSSP.
The Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL) was established
in 1943 and continued in the late 1980s to follow
the direction of the Soviet Union on matters of ideology.
Banned briefly in July 1983 along with the JVP and
the NSSP, in 1987 it had limited popular support.
Tamil United Liberation Front |
The Website:
Tamil
United Liberation Front
Tamil
United Liberation Front
Tamil
United Liberation Front
With very few exceptions, Sri Lankan Tamils have
tended to support their own parties and candidates
rather than vote for the UNP, SLFP, or the Marxist
parties. In the July 1977 general election, for example,
only 9 percent of the voters in the Tamil majority
Northern Province supported the two major parties
(the UNP, less closely associated with Sinhalese chauvinism
from the Tamil viewpoint than the SLFP, won 8 of the
9 percent).
In the years following independence, the most important
Tamil party was the Tamil Congress, led by G.G. Ponnambalam,
one of the major figures in the independence movement.
A breakaway group led by another figure, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam,
founded a second party, the Federal Party, which began
to make inroads into the Tamil Congress' constituency
by advancing proposals for a federal state structure
that would grant Tamils substantial autonomy.
In the early 1970s, several Tamil political groups,
including the Tamil Congress and the Federal Party,
formed the Tamil United Front (TUF). With the group's
adoption in 1976 of a demand for an independent state,
a "secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam,"
it changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation
Front (TULF). In the general election of July 1977,
TULF won eighteen seats in the legislature, including
all fourteen seats contested in the Jaffna Peninsula.
In October 1983, all the TULF legislators, numbering
sixteen at the time, forfeited their seats in Parliament
for refusing to swear an oath unconditionally renouncing
support for a separate state in accordance with the
Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.
In an atmosphere of intensifying ethnic violence
and polarization, their resignations deprived Sri
Lankan Tamils of a role in the legal political process
and increased tremendously the appeal of extremist
groups such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
But in December 1985, the TULF leadership softened
its position and proposed that an autonomous Tamil
State could be established within the Sri Lankan constitutional
framework in a manner similar to the federal states
of India.
The Ceylon Workers' Congress, headed in 1988 by
Suvumyamoorthy Thondaman, originally joined with other
Tamil groups to form TULF, but withdrew from the party
after the July 1977 general election, when Jayewardene
offered Thondaman a post in the UNP cabinet. In the
late 1980s, the Ceylon Workers' Congress, with one
representative, Thondaman, in Parliament, continued
to cooperate with the ruling party.
This was politically feasible because its principal
supporters, Indian Tamils located for the most part
in the central part of the country, were unresponsive
to the Sri Lankan Tamils' call for an independent
state in the north. In December 1986, the Sri Lanka
Muslim Congress, based in the Eastern Province, announced
its determination to become a national political party.
Electoral Performance
In general elections between 1952 and 1977, the two
major parties have alternately secured majorities:
the SLFP in 1956, July 1960 (elections were held in
both March and July 1960), and 1970; and the UNP in
1952, March 1960, 1965, and 1977. To govern effectively,
each party has formed coalitions with smaller groups.
The two major parties, however, have together gained
a progressively larger percentage of the popular vote
at the expense of the smaller groups: from 59.5 percent
of the total vote in 1952 to 80.6 percent in 1977.
In the July 1977 general election, the UNP, benefiting
from widespread public disaffection with the leftist
policies of the SLFP, won the largest majority in
history: 50.9 percent of the popular vote and 140
out of 168 seats contested. The SLFP's parliamentary
representation dropped dramatically from 91 to 8 seats,
though it garnered 29.7 percent of the vote. With
its eighteen seats, the TULF became the principal
opposition party. Two seats were won by the Ceylon
Workers' Congress and an independent.
The two Marxist parties, the LSSP and the CPSL, failed
to win representation. Parliamentary elections have
typically included a large number of independent candidates,
but the number elected has steadily declined since
1947. In July 1977, there were 295 independents running
without party affiliation, but only 1 secured a parliamentary
seat.
By-elections for eighteen parliamentary seats that
became vacant after the resignation of UNP members
were held in May 1983 in tandem with local government
elections. These were conducted under the system of
proportional representation outlined in the Constitution.
The UNP won fourteen of the contests, the SLFP won
three, and the People's United Front won one. Further
by elections were held during the 1984-86 period.
Sri Lanka has had only one presidential election
since promulgation of the 1978 Constitution. This
occurred on October 20, 1982. Six candidates participated.
The deeply divided SLFP, deprived of its most popular
leader, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, put up Hector Kobbekaduwa,
an obscure candidate who had served as minister of
agriculture in a SLFP government. Kobbekaduwa won
39.1 percent of the vote, compared to the incumbent
Jayewardene's 52.9 percent. The four other candidates,
who together won only 8.1 percent of the vote, represented
the JVP, LSSP, NSSP, and the Tamil Congress.
Smaller Political parties in Sri Lanka |
RCL
Revolutionary Communist League, the Sri Lankan Trotskyist
party, section of the International Committee of the
Fourth International.
Peoples Alliance, the ruling coalition of the SLFP,
CP, LSSP and a faction of the NSSP.
Lanka Sama Samaja Party, originally founded as the
Sri Lankan Trotskyist movement. It degenerated under
a Pabloite leadership and went over to reformism and
Sinhalese chauvinism. It carried out the great betrayal
of 1964, joining the SLFP-led bourgeois coalition
government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike.
CP:
Communist Party, the Stalinist organization
in Sri Lanka.
Nava Sama Samaja Party, a middle class opportunist
organization founded as a breakaway from the LSSP,
now affiliated with the Pabloite United Secretariat.
Ceylon Workers Congress, the bureaucratized union
organization on the tea plantations, which has participated
in both the UNP and PA governments.
Janatha
Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) |
The Website:
Janatha
Vimukthi Peramuna
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, founded in the 1960s as
a Maoist organization oriented to the peasantry. By
the 1980s it had become a fascistic party based on
Sinhalese chauvinism. It was much weakened after 1989
as a result of military-police repression by the UNP
regime.
Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam |
The Website:
Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the main Tamil
bourgeois nationalist organization. It has fought
a protracted military campaign for a separate Tamil
state in the north and east of Sri Lanka.
Tamil
Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) |
The Website:
Tamil
Eelam Liberation Organisation
This organisation was formally founded in 1979 though
it was in existence since 1968 as an unstructured
organisation. TELO has its origins in the Thangadorai
group under the leadership of Thangadorai and Kuttimani.
In one of their major acts, on March. 25, 1981, the
TELO committed robbery by ambushing a "Peoples
Bank" van which was returning to Jaffna town
with the day's collection. An amount of Rs. 78 lakh
rupees was taken and several policemen killed in this
hit was masterminded by Kuttimani.
Prime Minister's advisors were working overtime,
giving facilities to the militants, particularly the
TELO (Tamil Ealam Liberation Organisation) to be trained
in the use of modern arms in the camps organised in
Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, New Delhi and
elsewhere. The idea was that after the training, they
would be supplied with arms and sent to Northern Sri
Lanka to engage the Sri Lankan troops in guerrilla
action. It was supposed to be a top secret operation
without even the knowledge of the State Government
and its Intelligence agency.
