The phrase ‘The Children of ’56’ coined by Mervyn de Silva in 1973 (Sri Lanka: The End of Welfare Politics, South Asian Review, UK, 1973), recorded as such in the published doctoral thesis of Prof. Gamini Samaranayake, was plagiarised and popularised in Sinhala by the founding ‘philosopher’ of Jathika Chinthanaya.
I am literally a child of ’56. That was the year Ceylon/Sri Lanka’s two-party system was born with the replacement in power of the dominant postcolonial party the UNP, commencing the alternation in power of two democratic parties/coalitions, two decades before India passed that landmark of political development. 2026 is the 70th anniversary year of the birth of the island’s two-party system.
The shocking success of the JVP, leaping from 3 seats and 3% to the Presidency and a 2/3rds majority in Parliament was possible only because of the crisis of the two-party system and the two main political traditions:
The SLFP had been the most successful political party in the country. Under two leaders, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa, it led the country for two decades uninterruptedly from 1994 to 2014.
Before 1994 and CBK, the SLFP led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike had been in the Opposition for 17 years.
The SLFP suffered two crashes:
When the SLFP-led coalition Government’s popularity was free-falling with the OPEC oil price shock (1973), its economic policy was criticised imprecisely as ‘too far to the left’, which meant in reality, too far in the direction of ‘statism’ and ‘self-sufficiency’. Sirimavo Bandaranaike attempted to course-correct by removing Dr. NM Perera and the LSSP from the Government and appointing Felix Dias Bandaranaike as Finance Minister. He was accurately perceived as ‘too far to the authoritarian right’, and further jeopardised the centre-left SLFP and the constricted coalition (SLFP-CPSL).
The SLFP crashed to its worst defeat with the TULF scoring more seats in the 1977 parliament. The party’s crisis was compounded by the dismal showing of its candidate Hector Kobbekaduwa at the Presidential election of October 1982 against incumbent JR Jayewardene.
But there was one option which if exercised could have mitigated the crisis of the UF coalition in the 1970s, narrowed the margin between the Jayewardene UNP and the SLFP candidate in October 1982, and shortened the SLFP’s 17-year spell of defeat.
The SLFP had within its topmost ranks a figure who was seen simultaneously as a moderate democrat in economics and governance, but also a progressive who enjoyed the support of the LSSP- CPSL and the USSR. That was the SLFP’s Deputy Leader and the UF Government’s Deputy Prime Minister who acted for Madam Bandaranaike when she was overseas: Maithripala Senanayake of Anuradhapura, an electorally unbeaten political giant from the rural Sinhala heartland who had also studied Tamil and was married to a journalist who was an ethnic Tamil.
Had Maithripala Senanayake been given a fair chance, it could have reduced the extent of (but not entirely avoided) the swing to the UNP in 1977 and given JR a run for his money in October 1982.
After decades of marginalisation by the Ratwatte-Bandaranaikes, a bitterly disappointed Maithripala Senanayake finally defected to JR Jayewardene, rather like Philip Gunawardena did to Dudley Senanayake.
Squandered chances
It took almost two decades from the 1977 debacle for the SLFP to win under Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.
No President since JR Jayewardene had the chances and options of CBK as president but she consistently ignored them in favour of unrealistic, irrational, irresponsible experimentation.
After the Tigers returned unilaterally to war in 1995 despite her offer of an overgenerous political package, she could have leveraged the goodwill and support she enjoyed from India, implemented the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and the 13th Amendment, appointing an interim administration for the territory (as Douglas Devananda urged). Instead, she continued to chase in 1997, in wartime, the mirage of a political package with the LTTE which she now publicly divulges as federalism.
Despite the fact that an LTTE suicide bomber tried to kill her at an election rally in 1999, she pursued a Norwegian-facilitated peace effort. When ‘9/11’ provided the perfect opening for widespread global support to win the war and follow-up with devolution, she continued dogmatically with the one-sided Norwegian effort.
The rise of the extremist ultranationalist Sinhala new right ancestor of the BBS, led at the time by Champika Ranawake, was an outcome-as was the dramatic ascendancy of the JVP.
Whitewashing the JVP
The JVP was crushed and decapitated in November 1989, the very year after it assassinated Vijaya Kumaratunga by shooting him in the face on his doorstep. At the time the JVP didn’t disclaim the brutal killing despite the huge public opinion backlash. Instead, on the day of Vijaya’s funeral, the JVP’s front organisation-cum-military wing the DJV (precursor of today’s NPP or JJB) distributed an openly justificatory leaflet entitled ‘Vijaya Yavvey Aiy?’ which in translation meant ‘Why Was Vijaya Despatched?’ It called him a CIA agent, among other things.
The JVP’s catapulting to the Presidency and huge preponderance in Parliament in 2024 was mightily assisted by the laundering through a Presidential Commission appointed by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga of the stain of the delegitimising sin of Vijaya Kumaratunga’s cruel murder. She had viciously and irrationally accused President Premadasa (at the time, Prime Minister) and not Wijeweera’s JVP of murdering her husband and father of her two children. This despite the arrest and long, detailed confession by the gunman tasked and trained by the JVP for this and a series of other assassinations.
Chandrika’s accusation was unethical because Premadasa who had been blown up by a Tiger suicide bomber had no way to defend himself. It was irrational because if Vijaya ran for the Presidency as he had announced, it would have split more votes from Mrs. Bandaranaike and helped Premadasa far more than Vijaya’s successor Ossie Abeygoonesekara’s candidacy did in 1988.
Betrayal 2005
The worst damage to the SLFP came at the tail-end of her term when she went against the counsel of her brilliant Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, and persisted in the project of a post-tsunami power-sharing mechanism (PTOMS) with the Tigers. That ‘Munich’-type betrayal was thwarted on two fronts:
The US Government, which emphasised that it was prevented by Congress from contributing funds to any structure involving a designated terrorist organisation. I was at the US Ambassador Jeff Lunstead’s when Asst Secretary of State Christina Roca told that upfront to Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, CBK’s chief negotiator with the LTTE over the PTOMS.
The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka which froze the vital middle tier of the mechanism located in the Wanni since it was inaccessible to the Sri Lankan State.
Fortunately for the SLFP, its founding father (CBK’s father) SWRD Bandaranaike had a firm partner from the South when he began his independent political journey: DA Rajapaksa, whose son was the popular Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, a populist rebel known to dissent from the ‘CBK line’.
Out of options, CBK grudgingly nominated Mahinda who won the 2005 Presidential election-but not before she had gouged a wound that has never healed in the SLFP.
I was a visiting Adjunct Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC in Fall 2005 when CBK came to town accompanied by Ambassador Dhanapala. The purpose of her visit was to lobby in support of his bid for the post of UN Secretary-General. Prof. Walter Anderson who headed the South Asia program at SAIS, called me into his office and told me that Sri Lanka’s President had hosted a dinner the previous night which he had attended, and rolled-out a view quite contrary to that which I had said on the record at Georgetown’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on a panel with Ambassador Bernard Gunatilleke and Gajan Ponnambalam, Chaired by Ambassador Teresita Schaeffer. Neil de Votta and Asoka Bandarage participated, Ravinatha Aryasinha was present, TamilNet carried a report.
I predicted that:
Prabhakaran would boycott the Presidential Election because he discouraged ‘Eelam Tamil’ participation in a Sri Lankan election.
Mahinda Rajapaksa would win the Presidency.
The Tigers would launch the Final War.
Mahinda would defeat them.
The US and India should support the Sri Lankan State against the Tigers, and endeavour to shape the postwar outcome in the direction of implementing existing devolution.
Following my presentation, Steve Ghitelman who headed the South Asia desk of the US State Department’s prestigious research wing, the INR, came up and invited me to speak on the upcoming election and the peace process to an inter-agency audience convened by/at the State Dept, which I did.
Prof. Walter Anderson told me that President Kumaratunga had informed them at dinner that she would support Opposition candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe at the election, he would win, Mahinda would lose, and she and Ranil together would offer Prabhakaran a federal solution, ushering in peace.
Knowing CBK to be a lady of her word, I promptly pressed the ejector-button on my Washington gig, returned to Colombo and leaped into the election campaign, appearing on TV in support of Mahinda.
Mahinda Rajapaksa had to contest with a divided SLFP, his old friend Anura Bandaranaike (and even Sarath Amunugama) against him. After Mahinda won, Mangala Samaraweera tried to stall his assumption of SLFP leadership. MR plugged the gap with the support of his family ‘clan’, the ultranationalist Hela Urumaya, and the JVP. Mahinda had been until then, an opponent of an SLFP-JVP alliance which he prophesied would siphon-off SLFP votes to the JVP someday.
The UNP was wrecked by Ranil, the SLFP by Chandrika, the SLPP by Gotabaya. That’s how and why AKD and the JVP prevailed
Betrayal 2015
Chandrika Kumaratunga’s role in forming a coalition between a breakaway faction of the SLFP led by Maithripala Sirisena and the UNP against the MR Presidency would’ve been politically legitimate in the aftermath of Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra’s killing, except she forged a coalition which she knew from experience was unsustainable.
CBK’s experiment in political cohabitation with Ranil Wickremesinghe who was Prime Minister in 2001-2003, ended because she simply had to fire him, go for an election and defeat him. No cohabitation between SLFP and UNP was sustainable so long as Ranil, with his neoliberal and abjectly pro-Western views, was partner.
An SLFP-UNP bloc was sustainable only as a centrist coalition, feasible if the UNP was represented by a liberal-centrist whose views were compatible with the SLFP’s. Chandrika could have insisted on Karu Jayasuriya as the dissident SLFP’s partner. A Maithri-Karu convergence would have been sustainable.
Instead, CBK visited the UNP headquarters Siri Kotha and stitched together a Sirisena-Wickremesinghe equation. In 2015 she put into practice the plan she had divulged in Washington DC in Autumn 2005.
The SLFP’s base and (therefore) most of the SLFP parliamentary group couldn’t be won over to the Yahapalanaya agenda driven by Ranil’s UNP which didn’t shift to the centre but remained on the neoliberal right.
Two devastating outcomes issued from CBK’s 2015 move:
1. The SLFP shattered, with the overwhelming majority remaining loyal to Mahinda Rajapaksa and launching the SLPP.
2. The infant breakaway SLPP crushingly defeated the governing UNP of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe, reducing it to 20% of the vote at the Feb 2018 Local Government election.
Desperate to save the SLFP from terminal erosion by alignment with Ranil’s UNP, President Sirisena re-linked in late-2018 with Mahinda Rajapaksa who had retained the bulk of the SLFP’s vote-base. This ’52-day experiment’ was thwarted by the decision of the Supreme Court which predictably ruled-out a dissolution and snap election. In conversations from Moscow with Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Sirisena, I had cautioned that a snap election was highly improbable, and urged a non-binding Referendum instead.
The elated, delusional UNP thought that the next election was in the bag. The reality was that the UNP never emerged from the 20% trough of February 2018-nor did or has its derivative/successor, the SJB.
The SLPP swept the board in 2019, but that led to another disaster because it was not Mahinda Rajapaksa who was candidate. Mahinda had blundered in attempting a third term, with a colluding CJ dismissing as unnecessary a referendum to change the constitutional two-term limit-and lost the gamble (2015). The Yahapalanaya Government (2015-2019) then unfairly banned Mahinda from running for even a non-consecutive third term, which had it existed in Brazil would have prevented Lula being re-elected.
The far-right Gotabaya Rajapaksa candidacy and constituency issued from:
The necessity which arose with the gap left by the ban on MR’s candidacy.
The shift in the balance of the SLFP and its partners, strengthening the ultranationalist element when Chandrika divided it in 2005 in her attempt to sabotage Mahinda.
The catastrophic Gotabaya Presidency was overthrown by the Sri Lankan citizens led by the university students and youth.
Chandrika’s whitewashing of the JVP’s murder of her husband; appeasement of the LTTE; overlong dalliance with the hardly-neutral Norwegians; attempts to federalise the Sri Lankan State; indecisiveness in fighting the war; ignoring Lakshman Kadirgamar’s reluctance about the PTOMS; tilt to Ranil over Mahinda in 2005; midwifery of the Yahapalanaya bipartisan coalition with Ranil’s UNP; set off a chain reaction which exploded BOTH the SLFP and the UNP, the twin pillars of Sri Lankan democracy, at their bases-thereby creating the systemic void the JVP filled.
The SLFP created by SWRD Bandaranaike breaking away from the UNP, was realigned by Chandrika with the UNP under its most neoliberal leader, ending the two-party system as we knew it from 1951, making inevitable the rise of new forces to fill the space, play the role.
Post-2019
Instead of voting for their own Dullas Alahapperuma at the Parliamentary selection of the President in 2022 (which Mahinda Rajapaksa disclosed he did), the SLPP, conceived through opposing the 2015 coalition with Ranil’s UNP, supported Ranil Wickremesinghe instead, making him President. Thus, Ranil who was never elected President by the citizenry, was appointed to that post by Gotabaya Rajapaksa and endorsed by the SLPP-reloading Chandrika’s 2015 ‘hybrid’.
Ranil’s economic stabilisation/adjustment ‘shock therapy’ (2022-2024) further crunched the SLPP’s base after Gotabaya’s ‘fertiliser shock’ had shrunk it (2019-2022). SLPP voters shifted to the JVP-NPP.
When Namal Rajapaksa boldly broke away from the Ranil-led project and ran as SLPP candidate in 2024, elements of the SLPP and SLFP who had opposed the Yahapalanaya coalition, ironically stayed to support Ranil-mimicking Chandrika’s 2015 model.
Having co-founded the SLMP with Vijaya and outflanked her sibling Anura Bandaranaike from the left, critiquing his tilt towards JR’s UNP, CBK turned architect of an SLFP-UNP coalition, reversing, negating and betraying her great father’s 1951 and 1956 breakthroughs.
The UNP was wrecked by Ranil, the SLFP by Chandrika, the SLPP by Gotabaya. That’s how and why AKD and the JVP prevailed.
To recover, the SLFP and SLPP must recognise and re-converge around the peak point and highest achievement of the entire SLFP/centre-left tradition since its founding 75 years ago and the 1956 victory 70 years ago: Mahinda Rajapaksa’s history-making first term as President.