1 - Puzzles and agendas

Summary

It is appropriate to conclude by placing the Sri Lankan case in the broader Indian context. Its distinctive features are the weakness of the caste system, the strength of communal identities, the early and advanced politicisation of rural society, the importance of the plantation economy, and the absence of agrarian movements.

Introduction: the problem

This book had small beginnings in the early 1970s, when I first became acquainted with Sri Lanka. At that time the current of left-wing radicalism which had long been prominent in Sri Lankan politics had reached a peak. The rural-oriented United Front coalition of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the Communist Party and the (Trotskyist) Lanka Sama Samaj Party, headed by Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, had won the 1970 general election on a radical-socialist-statist programme of economic reform. The state sector was expanding rapidly at the expense of the private market economy. The personnel of the ruling parties were cashing in, and many others, including poorer people, were pushing in the queue for a share in the material benefits of political power. The new government had already been seriously challenged from the left by the Insurgency of April 1971. Although the JVP movement, which led the Insurgency, had been vigorously repressed, the government's broader response was a series of attempts to validate its own radical credentials. Much of the privately owned plantation sector had been nationalised in 1972, and preparations were being made to nationalise all corporately owned estates in 1975.