From The Hartal Of 1953 To Weliweriya Bala Tampoe And The Inspiration For Struggle
Bala Tampoe
Ahilan Kadirgamar
“The government raised the price of rice in the confidence that this measure would meet with no real resistance from the people, even though they may protest against it… On 12 August the workers and rural poor took to the streets, smashed buses, uprooted railway lines and telegraph posts, stopped railway trains, blocked roads, fought the police in numerous places, and demonstrated their power and anger in a hundred other ways. The government, struck with terror, proclaimed a State of Emergency, and then sent the price of rice tumbling down. This was not all. Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake, shaken out of his senses, resigned soon after… The Hartal taught other and no less important lessons. It taught the urban working class that their brothers and sisters of the village are indeed mighty allies in any direct struggle. It taught both the workers and the rural poor that, together, they are fully capable of challenging and even smashing the forces of the capitalist state. … The masses will enter the next great struggle with the confidence they have gained from the Hartal. But the next struggle will be against a more experienced and better prepared enemy.” — Bala Tampoe, ‘Some Lessons of the Hartal’ written in 1956
On a recent morning, I met again with ninety one year old Bala Tampoe, General Secretary of Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) at his seaside office. I was meeting Bala to learn about the challenges facing trade unions and to understand the history of the labour movement. Some of us, activists and researchers, belonging to the recently formed voluntary Collective for Economic Democratisation, which strives for political economic analysis in solidarity with progressive struggles, have been engaging the legacy of the Great Hartal sixty years ago and its relevance today. In the interview, Bala spoke of the anti-colonial struggle and decolonisation, his entry into the LSSP underground in 1941, his early career as a lecturer in agriculture, his emergence as a trade union leader in 1948 and his decades of organising the working class which continues to this day. He articulated the historical challenges for the trade union movement, their problematic relationship to political parties and the manner in which parliamentarianism serves an exploitative capitalist system.
