CAN PREVENT MILITARY RULE

By the beginning of 1958 the MEP (People’s United Front) had squandered its political capital and sold whatever political principles could even remotely be called socialist in return for foreign loans. .

Nationalization of the tea estates was postponed indefinitely. This was one of the MEP’s major election PLP PP LLL PLP PL LLL LPP PLDI IDL LI III LID DIP IID IID III IIIS This is the last in a series of three articles by Michael Banda, a member of the Editorial! Board of The Newsletter, who recently returned from a visit to Ceylon. Previous articles appeared on January 3 (pp. 7-8) and January 10 (pp. 13-14).

promises, Tea was to the Ceylonese people what cotton is to the Egyptians: the central pillar of its economy.

More than 45 per cent. of the tea estates (in terms of acreage) is owned by sterling and other foreign-owned companies.

No plan of national economic development could be successfully carried out so long as the key industry—and major source of the national revenue—was left in foreign private hands.

The abandonment of this major anti-imperialist. plank and the continuation of the United National Party’s economic programme in industry and agriculture soon revealed the spuriousness of Bandaranaike’s ‘socialism’, Neither effective nor permanent _ The MEP, it is true, has made things a bit better, but by no stretch of the imagination can its measures be equated with socialism. Nor have they proved an effective or permanent antidote to communalism.

There is no doubt whatever that the MEP régime: would have’ collapsed had it not been for the continual spate of race-hatred and communal propaganda which the government released. The Federalists in the north must also bear a share of the responsibility.

The only party which has not succumbed to the communalist wave and has fought consistently for intercommunal unity in a really free and independent Ceylon is the working-class party—the Marxist LSSP (Socialist Party).

More than seven months Despite repression, isolation and temporary unpopularity the LSSP did not for a single moment abandon its stand on parity of status for Sinhalese and Tamil.

It did so not because of some abstract love of democracy or martyrdom but because it saw that the only alternative

to parity would be a disunited Ceylon torn by civil war and completely subjugated to foreign imperialism.

Its stand has been vindicated and its popularity today is greater than it ever was before.

Unfortunately its forecasts of racial disunity and the dangers of dictatorship have been underlined by the events of May 1958, and the government’s proclamation of an emergency which it has continued for more than seven months.

The MEP almost completely lost the support and confidence of the racial and religious minorities. Now, thanks to its policy of unbridled terror during the emergency, it has also lost a considerable following among the Sinhalese Buddhists.

What few elements of the working class did support it before the elections no longer do so today. The government’s failure to check inflation and to solve the acute unemployment which exists in the rural areas has lost it the support of the peasantry.

At the same time the government, by its vacillation and procrastination, has lost the support of the capitalist class; the big imperialist representatives treat it with contempt. Assailed from the Left and spurned by the Right the government can rule only by bayonet and baton.

This is the major reason for the refusal of the ‘democrat’ Bandaranaike to lift the emergency and hold a_ general election.

This policy however has a logic of its own. It is not enough to rely on the armed forces—it becomes necessary to increase their powers and augment their numbers.

His coterie of demagogues Sooner or later a Frankenstein is created. Whether his name is de Gaulle or Ayub Khan is immaterial. The fact is that no parliamentary régime has survived this risky business.

Whether Ceylon follows the tragic example of Pakistan, Sudan, Siam and Burma does not depend on Bandaranaike and the coterie of demagogues and parvenus who comprise his cabinet.

The only power that can weld all the religious and national minorities into one nation, provide full employment, nationalize the means of production, abolish rural poverty, expand production on a planned and diversified basis and banish the spectre of military and police dictatorship for ever is the organized Labour movement, led by the LSSP.