128th Birth Anniversary of D. S. Senanayake
| by K. K. S. Perera
( October 21, 2012, Colombo, Sri
Lanka Guardian) John Seymour, author of,
‘Hard way to India’, writing to ‘Ceylon Observer’ on March 24, 1952, two days
after the first Prime Minister of Ceylon, suffered a stroke and fell off police
mare ‘Chitra’ on Galle Face, says,
"The Prime Minister very
amusingly told me, how he had made a train trip to Batticaloa, many years ago
as Minister of Agriculture (under Donoughmore constitution, in 1930’s) and how
the train had stopped at a siding in the jungles of Minneriya. He had got down
wandered off into the jungle and came across by accident the Minneriya tank,
abandoned for centuries. The farmer in him had been struck immediately. He had
returned to Colombo, determined to push the government to commence restoration
of the tank and resettlement of dry zone."
DS foresaw future growth when he
undertook development of dry zone commencing with Minneriya. He came from a
village which had a sort of sturdy peasants. He started schemes to exploit the
resources of Minneriya, Kalaweva, Topaweva, Giritale and Balalu weva. However
he would be remembered for Gal-Oya, which was designed for better exploitation
of 250,000 acres of irrigable and high land. The scheme was named after him.
That his dream was right, nobody now dare deny though he had many critics then.
DS, the Boxer and Cricketer at St
Thomas’, was nick-named ‘Jungle John’ not because of his craze for trekking
jungle paths of the dry zone looking for lands, but for his dislike to
conventional book-education in school. His academic qualifications would not
have made him a junior public servant, but reading books is not the only way of
learning. DS acquired knowledge by meeting people, observing them, doing things
and managing, rather than in reading about things in books. He had the sort of
wisdom that books cannot instruct. His aim was to relieve the pressure of
densely populated South and he believed that it was far better for a man to
spend his life growing rice, like his ancestors had done, rather than spent his
days selling cups of tea in a little boutique.
DS was a man to inspire devotion;
one could see people of much greater sophistication and with a higher IQ
willingly following him: knowing that his particular brand of balanced judgment
and commonsense was what needed for running a country like Ceylon in the mid
nineteenth century.
DS’s patriotism was exhibited in
no uncertain terms in a serious issue that arose with British authorities in
1949 when they tried to impose authority over small Ceylon, a signatory to the
‘Sterling Assets Agreement’ and attempted to manipulate our healthy dollar
Reserves. It was in early 1949, the Commonwealth’s economic situation was in
dire straits; JR the finance minister and his adviser John Exter, (later the
first governor of the Central Bank), led a delegation to a Finance Minister’s
Conference summoned by them. DS was anxious to keep Ceylon’s dollar earnings as
our foreign exchange. JR sought the PM’s advice on what they were to do if the
British government refused their request. DS replied;
"We are an independent
nation. Our dollar earnings are our own...., if we are not allowed to act
independently then obviously we must leave the ‘Sterling Area...’, the UK
government cannot oppose this. So go ahead and tell them you will leave unless
you are permitted to keep your country’s earnings" - (JRJ speech,
president. Arch. File 195 a).
DS was imprisoned in 1915 by the
British rulers during the communal riots, along with his two older brothers FR,
DC and a host of freedom fighters, and faced the prospect of execution. The
suspicion arose over his involvement in the Temperance movement with his
brothers. In a strange turn of events all three of them played an active role
in anti-arrack campaign in spite of the fact that their father, Don Spater
Senanayake, built his empire re-investing profits earned from graphite mining
in the arrack and toll renting trade.
In his statement to the
authorities, after the arrest, young DS who was just 30-years, said,
"..., A town guard came to
my residence around 5.30 am along with two armed Punjabi soldiers, woke me up
and without allowing me to go to the toilet,.., took me to Welikade prison and
put me in a cell where I had no place to sit. We were in solitary imprisonment
with no one to talk to, a servant pushed some food in an unclean tin plate. I
stayed hungry for two days...., I was charged for instigating riots, there was
no evidence to prove the charge..."
In early January, 1952, the PM’s
health condition deteriorated. He was diabetic; his heart had been weakened,
and he was hospitalized. A specialist flown from UK confirmed that his heart
had weakened to the point where a total collapse and death was inevitable
within three months. His close circle of friends, that included Esmond
Wickremasinghe, Governor General Lord Soulbury and Dr Goonewardene, thought it
was necessary to get to know his views on who will succeed him. This they did
without leaving any room for him to suspect that his end was near. DS was to
say 10 days before his death.
"Lionel (Sir John, the
second in command) can’t win elections; Dudley can, but he is my son, so I do
not wish to talk."
DS, who played in the
Royal-Thomian big match in the year 1902, was seen at the Oval not only
watching his Alma Mater beating Royal, after a lapse of seven years, but
joining some old Thomians in singing the chorus of Esto Perpetua, some days
before his death.
A little known story of DS, the
schoolboy, is one AS told by the late Rev, J S H Edirisinghe, one of his
teachers at St Thomas’. When DS became a minister, the old master wrote
congratulating his pupil. The reply was that, "if that pupil had learnt a
tenth of all the master had laboured to knock into his head, I should today be
a better minister".
Probably that master had a unique
way of ‘knocking things into the head’ of this pupil.
