by SAMAN GUNADASA
Sri Lanka’s governing UNP cabinet in 1952
A mass semi-insurrectionary uprising, popularly known as the “hartal” (a strike coupled with a general stoppage of work and small businesses), erupted in Sri Lanka 67 years ago on August 12, 1953. It shook the ruling class of the island to the core and marked a political turning point.
Lacking a genuine revolutionary leadership, that is a Marxist-Trotskyist party, the uprising was defeated by the right-wing United National Party (UNP) government. This bitter experience has powerful lessons today for the working class in preparing for its revolutionary struggles ahead.
Internationally, the year 1953 was tumultuous. Workers’ uprisings erupted in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in June against the Stalinist governments installed by the Soviet bureaucracy. Then in August came a near two week-long general strike of four million French workers against austerity measures.
Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) suffered an economic crisis. Rubber and tea exports fell sharply because of the end of a boom created by the three-year bloody Korean War begun in 1950 by the US imperialism.
The UNP government, which came to power just a year earlier with a convincing majority, took ruthless steps in July 1953. It removed the subsidy for rice, the country’s staple food, increasing the price three-fold. It also raised the prices of essential commodities such as sugar, withdrew the midday meal for school children and slashed expenditure on health and other social programs, while increasing charges on railway transport and postal, telephone and telegraphic services.
Finance Minister J. R. Jayewardene said the government had to remove the food subsidy “because it could not find the money to finance the country’s development program.” He cynically told the poor: “Grow your own food.” At the same time, he announced tax concessions and other handouts to the rich
The unbearable inroads into living conditions ignited discontent among workers and the rural poor, which had been simmering for years. In 1948, the ruling elite, long servile to British colonial rule, had supported formal independence in order to quell the struggles of the working people for improved social and living conditions.
Just after this “independence,” the UNP government abolished the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Indian-origin plantation workers. It was a cynical step calculated to divide the working class along ethnic lines and thus prop up capitalist rule.
On July 23, 1953, as mass opposition brewed against the government’s austerity measures, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which commanded considerable support among workers and in rural areas, announced a one-day protest on August 12.
World Socialist Web Site for more