Black July: JR Confers With Alle Gunawanse And The Search For A Scapegoat

By Rajan Hoole -October 5, 2013

Rajan Hoole

Sri Lanka’s Black July – Part 34

The aim of the UNP during this crisis was to marginalise the influence of the Tamils in the economic and political life of the country. It was a two-pronged strategy where the Government attempted to control and use the violent forces of the Sinhalese nationalist Right. At the same time, they wanted to make the Left a scapegoat for the violence. This is the context for the alliance between the Government and Gunawanse, an alliance which is brought to our attention by Ratnatunga. While Ratnatunge’s focus on Gunawanse tends to draw attention away from the violence as a planned UNP affair, it does tell us about a particular segment utilised by the UNP. It is far easier for a minister (e.g. Minister Dissanayake, Gunawanse’s patron) to switch patronage to another monk, than for a monk to find another minister.

The UNP had reduced the parliamentary opposition to a non-entity. The field was thus left open to the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Under these conditions, the Government found it useful to patronise elements of the extreme Right. However, the July violence had such unforeseen repercussions that Jayewardene came under pressure from several quarters, including donor countries in the West and India. It was a telephone call from Indira Gandhi which prompted the Government’s attempt to both pacify and restrain the forces of the Right, in an attempt to end the violence. The telephone call came in the evening on 27th July, and led to a late night cabinet meeting. Indira Gandhi told Jayewardene that she was sending her foreign minister, Narasimha Rao.

Consequently, Gamini Dissanayake was sent to speak to Gunawanse in an effort to restrain his actions. (Jayewardene’s subsequent speech on television was again aimed at appeasing this constituency, which the UNP had called to arms. While Jayewardene called upon the Sinhalese to lay down their arms, he also made it clear that he was sympathetic to their feelings and blamed Tamil provocation for the riots.) The devastating potency of the violence appears to have persuaded a paranoid Jayewardene, that it was this extremist segment represented by Gunawanse which spoke for the Sinhalese masses.Read More