People’s Protest Against Policy – a First

A hartal strikes at the heart of a state

A day can change everything and overturn the status quo of a decade. One such day was 12 August 1953. It ended a sense that sunny Ceylon could continue basking in the warm afterglow of independence forever without taking stock of its own household.

In a world where some Asian nations were ‘going to hell in a handbasket,’ this came as a sharp knock on the noggins of the incumbent administration and served as a wake-up call for the country.

The hartal of 1953 took the form of an islandwide strike engineered by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and other leftist parties to protest against the unbearably rising cost of living – especially soaring rice prices, which hit the average islander where it hurt most… in the breadbasket.

This came in the wake of certain policies and actions of the governing United National Party (UNP), which placed it at odds with the common or garden citizens of a largely agricultural populace that had long enjoyed a rice subsidy that was now drastically reduced.

Being intended to strike fear and anxiety into the heart of government, the countrywide exercise of civil disobedience was a rude shock to the state in general and the UNP in particular, whose modus operandi in the five years since independence had tended to be elitist, favouring English-speaking bureaucrats and operating a Western orientated administration that was demonstrably out of the touch with the pulse of the ordinary islander.

However taken aback it may have been (cabinet ministers even sought refuge in a Royal Navy vessel berthed at Colombo Port!), the government reacted with vigour and despatch, and violent clashes between state and protestors saw scores seriously injured and 10 killed.

A red-letter day for militant socialism and citizen political activism, to which the ‘Old Left’ looks back in nostalgia even today, the ramifications of the protest – a first of its kind in which the people’s struggled against an elected government was expressed apolitically – were far-reaching.

The sitting prime minister Dudley Senanayake was taken ill and resigned, and a new premier (Sir John Kotelawala) was installed; the military often brutally quelled the rioting under emergency provincial regulations; the rice subsidy was partially restored; and the country put in place policies – including membership of the UN by 1955 – that restored a semblance of Ceylon’s shining international image.

A red-letter day for militant socialism and citizen political activism, to which the ‘Old Left’ looks back in nostalgia even today, the ramifications of the protest … were far-reaching