( an experience in managing ethnic conflict )
by
Neville Jayaweera
Part 4
Administrator or Manager
Before I begin narrating how I faced up to the impending mass protest, I want to take some time discussing a seemingly theoretical but critical question. Should a Government Agent be an administrator or a manager? The distinction is not merely semantic or only one of form, but profoundly one of substance and content.
Naturally the answer will vary from district to district, some districts requiring strong administrators and others requiring competent managers. However, that still begs the question about what precisely distinguishes an administrator from a manager.
One of the many important lessons I learnt during my 3 year tenure as General Manager of the Gal Oya Development Board ( GODB) , between 1960 and 1963, prior to assuming responsibilities as the GA of Jaffna, was about the important differences that distinguish an administrator from a manager. A good administrator does not always make an effective manager, nor vice versa, and few there are who excel in both roles.
A manager differs from an administrator in important ways, principally in mind set and in general outlook. Whereas the administrator is generally status oriented, embedded in the status quo, and tied down by regulations, the manager must be goal oriented, looking to change the status quo, and seeking to create precedents rather than be tied down by them. Whereas the administrator tends to be hierarchical and authoritarian, content with receiving and giving orders, the manager has to be consultative and participatory and try to ensure that all the actors are involved in decision making. Whereas the word “productivity”, i.e. the ratio of returns to investments, never enters the administrator’s vocabulary, it should always at the heart of every manager’s exertions. Above all, whereas the administrator is loathe to leave the beaten track and experiment, the manager has always to be innovative, and be constantly looking out for alternative ways to realise his goals.
Peter Drucker, one of the great management consultants of all time, once summed up with a powerful metaphor what it means to be a good manager or a good leader. He said that a good manager, indeed any good leader, has to be able to keep his eyes on the stars but simultaneously, keep his nose to the grindstone. What he was saying was that it was not enough for the leader or manager to be exclusively a visionary and a theoretician, or exclusively a doer and a practitioner. He had to be both. If the manager or leader has his eyes glued to the stars and is not scanning the road ahead, he is bound to end up in the ditch. On the other hand if he has his nose constantly close to the ground and has no vision of the distant scene, then also he will not know where he is going and will end up in the ditch. He has to be able to do both.
What has all this to do with my job as GA of Jaffna? Simply this! If I was to resolve the mountainous problems that were rising up before me, I could not afford to be the stereotype Civil Service administrator, content merely with enforcing the government’s fiat and seeking only to preserve law and order. I had to define my goals as broadly as possible, and those goals had to encompass a reality that was much wider than the status quo. I had to be fair and just by all. I had to be innovative. I had to break free from precedents. I had to build confidence and trust, enter into dialogue and listen not only to what the other was saying, but more importantly to what he was not saying! I had to be Peter Drucker’s good manager, made flesh. Decades before “conflict resolution” began to appear on the agenda of the intellectual’s seminar circuit, I had to practice it, without the benefit of seminar papers on the subject!
For over a hundred and fifty years, the institution of the GA had concretised as a classic administrative job. In particular, of all the 9 provincial GAs posts, the post of GA of Jaffna had acquired a high profile as a result of its occupancy throughout the 19th Century by two prestigious colonial Civil Servants, Sir Percival Acland Dyke from 1829 to 1867 and by Sir William Twyneham for the rest of the 19th Century and between them they had bequeathed to the post of GA , a strongly authoritarian culture, which now virtually went with the job. The task for me was fundamentally to rethink and replace that culture.
That task was not as easy as it might seem. By legitimising the long established hegemony of the high caste Vellalas, the Dyke-Twyneham authoritarian culture had cemented the highly stratified Tamil caste structure and the institution of the GA, by fusing into it had become its apex. Later on in this chapter I shall dwell in depth on the caste structure of the Tamils as a factor in understanding the politics of Tamil protest.
To the barricades again
To place in context the events that followed upon my return from the meeting at Temple Trees, let me go back in time a few years.
In 1961 the Federal Party (FP) launched the Satyagraha campaign and for three months brought the administration of the North and the East to a standstill. H. Srikantha a senior Civil Servant who had been GA of Jaffna for over 7 years was transferred out and another Civil Servant, Nissanka Wijeratne, much junior to Srikantha, was posted in his place.
Wijeratne , was a nephew and favourite of Mrs Bandaranaike and was a self proclaimed Sinhala – Buddhist protagonist. While at his earlier posting as GA of Anuradhapura , he had sworn an oath before the Sri Mahabodhiya ( a branch of the world famous Bo Tree under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment) to shed his last drop of blood in defence of the Sinhala- Buddhist heritage embodied in the Sri Mahabodhiya and his world view was congruent with that of N.Q.Dias .
By sustaining for over three months their campaign to block public access to the GA’s secretariat, the Satyagrahis had brought the administration of the district to a virtual standstill. and government’s writ no longer ran in Jaffna. Wijeratne’s approach to the problem was belligerent and confrontational. He brought with him from Anuradhapura a bus load of tough locals and had them encamp within the Residency park and the task assigned to them by Wijeratne was to show aggression towards the Satyagrahis even to the extent of throwing stones at them and causing the shedding of blood ( not Wijeratne’s blood but the Satyagrahis blood !) . The situation deteriorated sharply and unable to cope with the unravelling crisis Wijeratne is said to have taken refuge in alcohol.
A state of Emergency and curfew were declared and Wijeratne was recalled. At that point, invoking Emergency Regulations, the government suppressed the post of GA and appointed Brig. Richard Udugama as Coordinator, but the situation continued to deteriorate producing an indissoluble impasse.
However, quite abruptly the FP called off their Satyagraha campaign and withdrew to plan a new strategy. The reason for their withdrawal was primarily that, after over 3 months of sitting in the blazing sun, the satygrahis had, quite literally, run out of puff! However, feelings continued to simmer on both sides as they prepared for the next round. During the stalemate, Udugama was recalled and another Civil Servant, V.P Vittachi was posted as GA to Jaffna. During the one-year and something that Vittachi was GA there was a relative quiet and he gave the district a professional;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection: keepver, by mid 1963, realising that the government was not making any moves towards resolving their outstanding problems, the FP came up with their new strategy.
The cut-off date for implementing the Official Languages Act in Jaffna, which was the 31st October 1963, was fast approaching and in order to forestall it the Tamil parties decided to launch what they called the Secessionist Movement.
Driven by paranoia and reading into the “secessionist” concept the most diabolical motives and stratagems, the government panicked. To make matters worse, Vittachi, the incumbent GA asked to be transferred out on personal grounds.
When Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike dropped in at the Residency at Badulla in July 1963 to recruit me for the Jaffna job, it was this impending secessionist agitation and the cut off date for implementing the Official Languages Act, that she had uppermost in her mind and I was to be thrown in, rather like the little Dutch boy, to stick my finger in the dyke and hold back the swelling tide of Tamil protest!
What was in issue now was not merely the outcome of the Federal Party’s Secessionist Campaign but the viability of two contending models of governance, viz. N.Q Dias’s model of perpetual confrontation, or my model of dialogue and conciliation.
Another confrontation at Temple Trees
The FP announced a massive march on the Kachcheri, for a day in the first week of Oct. 1963, to kick start their Secessionist Movement. Their aim was to signal the government that unless it conceded the minimum demands of the Tamils, they will have no alternative but to “secede”, whatever that meant. I do not think that the Tamil parties had the remotest intention of actually seceding from the Sri Lankan state and setting up separately as in later years, the LTTE and other youth militants envisaged. Rather, I think the “secessionist movement” was intended primarily to panic the government and in this they succeeded.
The FP and the Tamil Congress ( TC ) together, planned to bring supporters in buses and by train from Batticaloa, Trincomalee , Vavuniya, Mannar and from villages throughout the Jaffna District, numbering over 30,000. They were to assemble on the esplanade near the Fort and march down Main Street and demonstrate outside the Kachcheri and Residency, which were adjacent, and the highlight of the demo was to be the burning of the effigy of the Prime Minister and a copy of the Official Languages Act..
Actually, I saw through their stratagem and realised that their true intent was to provoke me into reacting with baton charges and tear gas, whereupon, with evidence of the ensuing violence and repression, they could stoke their flagging agitation and draw world-wide attention to their cause. I resolved that I would not fall for that ploy.
Wanting to keep strictly within the law, the Tamil parties applied to the Police for a permit to assemble and march. The Suptd. of Police, Jack van Sanden, consulted me and I said the permit should be issued. However, acting on instructions from N.Q.Dias the Permanent Secretary, Jingle Dissanaike, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), overruled me.
There then followed an acrimonious ding-dong tussle between the grandees in the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs in Colombo, and me. At that point the Prime Minister Mrs Bandaranaike called a truce and summoned me to Temple Trees to resolve the issue between me and her officials.
Facing fearful odds
This time however, besides the formidable N.Q.Dias and the Ministry Assistant Secretary, Stanley Jayaweera, (my brother, who at that time shared much of N.Q’s. world view) there was ranged against me a solid phalanx of brass and braid, viz, the IGP Jingle Dissanaike, plus the 3 service commanders, General Udugama, Admiral Kadirgarmar and Air Vice Marshall Amarasekera, all of the same view, that the FP and the TC should not be allowed to march and that if they did, should be crushed in their lair.
Facing these fearful odds, this solid rampart of civil and military power, I was stark alone and with no visible help. However, even as the Prime Minister invited me to state my problem, I felt in her benign smile at me that I had found favour in her sight.
What was in issue was simply the question whether the FP should be allowed to march and demonstrate on the day chosen by them for launching their so called secessionist campaign. The officials of the Ministry of Defence, military as well as civilian, were all adamant that the march and demonstration should be banned, while I was strongly of the opposite view.
I stated my position coolly, methodically, and unequivocally. I explained to the PM that the FP had a democratic right to assemble, to march, and to protest, and that if the government refused them permission to march, they would march regardless, and that that would make them an unlawful assembly. That would then necessitate the use of force to disperse them, baton charges, bleeding skulls, the arresting of their leaders, to be followed by prosecutions, and trials, all of which would make martyrs of the FP leaders and give them the publicity they wanted. What was worse, I said that such a chain of events would only aggravate the ethnic conflict throughout the country. I emphasised that what the Tamil leaders really wanted was precisely for the government to refuse them the right to march and thereby become a cat’s paw for them in their search for worldwide publicity.
Mrs Bandaranaike listened intently to both sides and again and without any prevarication ruled that my approach was right and should be given a chance. Not only that. She also said that I should co-ordinate all the police and military activities on the day of the march but that the IGP must send a riot squad, as a fall back, just in case trouble erupted.
I was quite overwhelmed. However, I had the audacity ask the Prime Minister for her ruling to be given in writing, to which also she consented! I still have in my files a copy of the minutes of that meeting.
The conference had lasted barely an hour and its outcome filled N.Q.Dias, the IGP and the 3 service commanders with total dismay.
A comment on Mrs Bandaranaike
I want to make a comment here about Mrs Bandaranaike’s decision making skills in contrast to her to late husband’s notorious habit of prevarication. It used to be said of her husband, the great S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, product of Oxford and all that, that when a delegation or any senior official would go to him with a complex problem admitting of a range of possible solutions, rather than give them a clinical and unambiguous decision, he would drown them under an avalanche of words, often meandering into totally irrelevant areas, and after two hours, leave the delegation or official concerned totally exhausted, not knowing even what their problem was, never mind knowing what the PM’s decision was!
However, when it concerned decision making, his wife, Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike, a product of St Bridget’s Covent Colombo, was clearly of a sharper mould. Up to that moment I had met Mrs Bandaranaike only thrice and on each occasion, she gave me the impression of being a person who, given the facts, could make quick and unambiguous decisions.
There are hundreds of others who were closer to Mrs Bandaranaike than I ever was, and I do not know whether they would share my perception of her decision making abilities. One of them was my brother Stanley Jayaweera of the Foreign Service, who during the 1960-65 era was very close to Mrs Bandaranaike, and he used to relate to me incidents which illustrated her decisiveness and firmness. In particular he used to tell me how when he accompanied her on the delegation to New Delhi to negotiate the Sirima-Sastri pact in the early 1960s, she stood up to the might of the Indian Foreign Office and threw down the gauntlet to her counterpart, Prime Minister Sastri, saying that unless he reigned in his Foreign Office men who were proving utterly obdurate, she would call off the whole negotiation and return to Colombo with her delegation. Sastri relented and the Pact became a reality, on her terms!
The two phases of Mrs Bandaranaike
I must also hasten to add that the Mrs Bandaranaike of the 1960-65 era, whom I have profiled so far, was a very different person from the one I encountered in the 1970s. During the period I served her government as GA of Jaffna, i.e. up to March 1965 when her government was voted out, relations between us were most cordial. She was unfailingly gracious and fair in her decisions and never encroached on my boundaries as a public servant.
However, when I served the new UNP led government of Dudley Senanayake, set up in April 1965, with the same dedication and zeal with which I had served her government, she interpreted it as an act of gross disloyalty to her and when she won a resounding victory at the polls in 1970, turned on me with great venom. She not only demoted me from the grade 1 post, I was holding at that time, as the Chairman and Director General of the Broadcasting Corporation, to a grade 3 post, as the GA of Vavuniya, but also caused my early retirement from service, when I was only 42 – for which I might add in parenthesis, I am most grateful now!
Just as I can testify to many magnificent qualities of her character, I have also heard many stories of her capacity for pettiness and vengefulness and her susceptibility to common tale carriers, about which I do not want to comment.
Be that as it may, I cannot conceal the admiration I had for her after the three encounters I had with her in the course of three months in 1963. Her basic sense of right and wrong and her instinct for fairness and justice were patent and admirable. Not least, she could make decisions!
Let me turn now to the fateful day of the mass demonstration and the launch of the Secessionist Movement.
- to be continued
