An Evening With Jayampathy: A Response To Hoole
By S. Krishnananthan –July 1, 2016
S. Krishnananthan
The article of Prof. Ratnajeevan Hoole in the Colombo Telegraph, “An evening in Jaffna with Hon. Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne”, has many inaccuracies and distortions and as the Chair of the meeting I should clarify what was actually said.
Dr. Wickramaratne was in Jaffna as a resource person for a workshop for senior officers of the Northern Provincial Council on “Provincial Administration and Finance” conducted by the Institute for Constitutional Studies. Whenever he visits Jaffna he makes it a point to meet the members of the Jaffna Managers’ Forum and this was another such occasion. The persons who accompanied him were the other resource persons who had come for the workshop and not “LSSP cohorts” as Prof. Hoole describes.
Dr. Jayampathy quoted Dr. Colvin as saying, “When a constitution is made, it is not made by the Minister of Constitutional Affairs”, meaning that the final product depends on the strengths of the various political forces involved. Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama, who was the Secretary of the Ministry of Justice at that time, has said that the first draft prepared by Colvin did not have the phrase ‘unitary state’. But Felix Dias Bandaranaike had insisted on a ‘unitary state’. Dr. Jayampathy explained that the basic resolution approved by the Constituent Assembly was for Buddhism to be given its ‘rightful place’ but, again, the rightists succeeded in giving Buddhism ‘the foremost place’ in the final version. The balance of power within the Constituent assembly during 1970-1972 was clearly against the nonracial forces. With regard to Dr. Hoole’s reference to a Professor of Sinhala who helped Dr. Colvin with the translation, it was true that Prof. P.E. E. Fernando helped in the translation.
According to Dr. Hoole, Dr. Jayampathy said that the Tamil MPs contributed to the lack of legitimacy of the 1972 Constitution by being absent at the final vote. What he actually said was that the United Front failed to respond to MP Dharmalingam’s request to at least abolish Kachcheris and establish elected bodies at District level if it could not go outside the unitary state. Yet, the Tamil MPs continued to participate and kept away only after there was no agreement on the language issue. Dr. Jayampathy blamed the United Front for this and said that if the Tamil MPs stayed on, the 1972 Constitution would have had greater legitimacy even if the Tamil MPs would not have finally supported it.
