CEYLON’S WORKERS

(as it probably was) by Baumgartner, Governor of the Bank of France, himself.

In fact he has been trying to impose such a policy, in the interests of high finance, on de Gaulle’s predecessors— never with more than partial success. They were not ready to administer such strong medicine to French capitalism because they feared the effect on the Assembly and the electorate.

Now de Gaulle gets his votes first and reveals his policy afterwards. The socialists, who played a major part in putting de Gaulle in, now shed crocodile tears. ‘Austerity at the expense of the workers and peasants’, laments Le Populaire.

But what did they expect? The general was brought to power to solve the problems of French capitalism, and at whose expense could he be expected to solve them, if not at that of the workers and peasants? RACIALISM has always been a favourite—if not indispensable—tool of every ruling class threatened with expropriation. In Ceylon, too, racialism has always gone hand in hand with the attacks of the capitalist class against the working-class movement.

In the years of the depression racialist propaganda was directed mainly against the Indian estate workers who form the overwhelming majority of the labour force on the tea plantations.

Immediately after the war the United National Party government tried to rekindle the communalist fires with such reactionary measures as the Citizenship Bill and the Immigrants and Emigrants Bill. These completely disfranchised the

Indian workers and virtually made serfs of them.

A more sinister aspect of these Bills was that they established an entirely new and dangerous principle into State legislation: that the State is conterminous with the nation and the nation with the race.

The campaign which the UNP began against the Indian Tamil workers was transformed, in the course of a few years, into a campaign of hate and violence against all national and religious minorities, in particular the ‘indigenous’ Tamil peasantry in the north and the Tamil white-collar workers and professional workers in the towns. _ The landslide victory of Bandaranaike and his ragtag and bob-tail coalition in 1956 gave a new impetus to the antiTamil ‘Sinhalese Only’ campaign of the communalists.

Left was seriously isolated This campaign for Sinhalese as the only State language found an initial response amongst the village people, who had been deprived for so long of the benefits of administration . in their native tongue. For a period the Left was seriously isolated.

Not unnaturally, communalism in the south began to evoke similar sentiments among the Jaffna Tamils in the northern peninsula, who formed the Federal Party and began to demand a Federal State for Ceylon.

The tragic riots of 1956 which resulted from the passing of the ‘Sinhalese Only’ Bill were a gift to the Federalists, who clamoured even more loudly than before for a Federal State.

The danger of separatism was averted at the last moment only by the signing of the infamous Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam agreement (now referred fo as the B-C Pact), which gave certain rights to the Tamils in the north but excluded the Jaffna Tamils in the south.

The shameless way this pact was torn up and a new and more frenzied anti-Tamil campaign was launched is well described by Tarzie Vittachi in his ‘Emergency °58’ (André Deutsch, 10s. 6d.)

(To be concluded)