Sirisena Cooray: An Epilogue to a Life in Deeds
Second death anniversary
by Tisaranee Gunasekara
“Who has known the ocean.”
Rachel Carson (Undersea)
Weddings require invitations. Funerals are open spaces. None are barred; anyone can turn up, even sworn enemies. Lankan politicians make use of this openness as a political tool, thus only so far as they remain in active politics.
Sirisena Cooray never missed a funeral until the day he died (the exceptions being his spells abroad and, of course, pandemic times). The habit persisted even after he gave up politics and retired into private life. For him, going to a funeral, near or far, in a mansion or a council flat, was not a political act or even a social duty, but something as natural as talking.
It was part of who he was, a man who loved books but believed in people. Not The People, lionised and sacralised, but people, individuals flawed by life and living. Those interactions motivated him and energised him, giving him a reason to continue to be societally involved, especially during those long uncrowded years after he lost his leader-friend Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Sirisena Cooray’s house was always open, his phone number a public property. People would call, asking for a job, a house, a way in to some official space closed to ordinary citizens. His means were limited, but within that reduced space he would willingly do whatever possible, not because there was anything to gain from such involvement, but because not making the effort was unthinkable. He had left politics, but the sense of responsibility never left him. Whenever he was able to deliver, he gained a quiet sense of satisfaction. Reading was a hobby, meeting friends and travelling enjoyable. Working with and for people was occupation, vocation, life.
Sirisena Cooray belonged to an era in Lankan politics when leaders were approachable and could be approached. You did not need appointments or contacts; you did not have to go through security barriers, each more daunting than the last. You just walked in to meet parliamentarians, ministers, even prime ministers. If you were lucky, you might get a cup of tea, if you were truly fortunate, a solution to your problem. At Sirisena Cooray’s you invariably got that cup of tea. And a sympathetic ear, a promise that an effort would be made, a promise that was always kept even if the effort failed.
Imprinted by Colombo Central
Colombo Central, even when I got to know it in the mid 1990’s, was a village within a city. People had deep roots there, emotional connections and interconnections, and long memories, some handed down like non-corporeal heirlooms. It was loud and quiet, strange and quotidian, an anomaly that was also a microcosm, a place of multitudes which did not consume the individual.
Sirisena Cooray grew up in this place, and at a time when change was in the air, change from British rule to independence, change from colonial governance to electoral democracy. Man was coming into his own as citizen-voter. Even the poorest had something covetable, the franchise. Individual self-improvement was regarded as a necessary component of the larger societal regeneration the new era demanded. Ranasinghe Premadasa began his Sucharitha Movement in these fermenting times. “We grew up hearing stories about the extraordinary activities of this extraordinary young man,” Sirisena Cooray would recall in President Premadasa and I: Our Story. “Even before we met, he was a role model for me.”
Admiration led to imitation (that expression of sincerest flattery would not have been lost on Ranasinghe Premadasa). When he was 12, Sirisena Cooray and his playmates set up a society modelled on the Sucharitha Movement, called Sri Sucharitha Vaag Vardana Lama Samajaya (Children’s society for the improvement of oratorical skills would be a rough translation). There were discussions, and debates, as well as more formal gatherings with the participation of figures of local and national significance. It was the ideal launching pad for a future politician. It was also the best germinal for a life with people, a life of deeds.
Sirisena Cooray once called Ranasinghe Preamadasa a storehouse of concepts. Sirisena Cooray was a storehouse of stories, a repository of oral history of a place bypassed by historians (he was a superb narrator too, despite being an indifferent platform speaker; public audiences are anonymous; you told stories to a known audience).
One story was about bucket lavatories common in Colombo’s poorer areas then (they would survive into the early 1980’s until replaced with water closets by the Premadasa-Cooray combine); and the community of labourers brought down from India by the British to clean them. Every morning, these men and women emptied the often overflowing receptacles of human effluence into open lorries. In this community, death was celebrated the way other people celebrated births and weddings. The life of these people was so unrelentingly wretched, death came as the only possible release.
It was an experience which made a deep impression on Sirisena Cooray. Contrary to a popular misconception, both he and Ranasinghe Premadasa came from middle class backgrounds. But they were born and spent their formative years in Colombo Central, “one of the poorest, most neglected areas of the City,” the despised habitat the wretched of Lanka. It was also a patchwork of primordial pluralities, where Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims lived cheek by jowl, literally. Poverty was the common thread that bound them, a bond reinforced by a shared sense of hopelessness.
“All theory is grey,” wrote Goethe in Faust. Sirisena Cooray (whose copy of that epic rests on one of my bookshelves) agreed. Politics, he would insist during interminable arguments, has to be learned not from books but from people and their lives. And for a young man with an awakening interest in politics, Colombo Central was a good place to get to know society’s abiding socio-economic ills. Not just Poverty, but also poverty, not just Unemployment, but also unemployment, not just Homelessness but also homelessness, the nitty-gritty which adds substance to bare figures, not just statistics, but the lived-in experiences.
This knowledge helped make Ranasinghe Premadasa and Sirisena Cooray different from most other leading politicians. It taught them that grand theories and impressive statistics mattered little if they did not positively touch the lived-in experiences of ordinary people. When the Uda Gam housing programme was initiated, detractors especially on the left (a category I too belonged to) decried it saying that the houses were like chicken coops. But for a family living in a shack which was often rented that ‘chicken coop’ was a home beyond dreams.
In a tenement garden, tens of families might have had to share a single water-closet, but that was preferable infinitely to sharing bucket lavatories. To understand these seminal practical differences, it was not enough to visit the poor during election seasons or read about them in books. One must know their lives, daily and intimately. That knowledge enabled the Premadasa-Cooray duo to do more for the poor than any other leader has done before or since. That knowledge, and the sense of responsibility born of it, would compel Sirisena Cooray to do whatever he could to make a difference in one-life-at-a-time, until the day he died.
Race and Class
In Book II of Odyssey, Telemachus, the young son of Odysseus and Penelope, addresses his father’s subjects to enlist their help in beating back his mother’s unwanted suitors who were denuding his father’s property, and thus his patrimony. But Ithacans don’t respond. They are not interested. In the absence of their king, they had gained a limited and provisional agency to live their lives in the way they want.
French Revolution, with its deposing and beheading of Louis XVI and its institution of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, opened the door to a political system which turned subjects into citizens with the right to choose their rulers. People, whose historical role had been limited to labouring and soldering entered political centre stage as electors. In response, political leaders began trafficking in identity politics, invoking ethnic, religious, caste or tribal affiliations as a means to political relevance and electoral gains.
Identity politics might be an elixir for the politicians but for a country and its people it is a poisoned chalice, worsening primordial loyalties and sowing the seeds of future conflicts. This, for instance, was the legacy of 1956.
The way conceived by Ranasinghe Premadasa and practiced by Sirisena Cooray was antipodal: winning over the poor of all communities via tangible improvements in their lives. And to achieve this upward socio-economic mobility of the poor without making the rich feel threatened. This fell into the category of (what Amartya Sen called) a ‘good and just’ development model, radical in intent but non-confrontational in style. Located outside the traditional ‘either-or’ gridlock, this model viewed economic strategy as a series of compromises balancing the interests of diverse socio-economic groups, for a common good. And ‘common good’ is no myth, but a truth which makes life liveable, as we realised last year when we lost it to economic and societal collapse.
The absence of such a balanced economic strategy, together with racism, fuelled the second JVP insurgency. Ranasinghe Premadasa wanted a negotiated end to the conflict, but the JVP was uninterested. Sirisena Cooray formed and led the Ops-Combine (it operated out of his home) to halt the country’s slow fall into anarchy. In the colourful parlance of Deepthi Kumara Gunaratne, “Sirisena Cooray was a former Colombo cinema manager. He used a rural youth who had watched western films to destroy the JVP’s rural youth.
Accordingly, Cooray, who was no racist, defeated racism in the 1980’s through Western thinking” (Sirisena Cooray: Beyond Psychology – ). Sirisena Cooray attributed the success of the Ops- Combine to the new approach he brought in – stop the indiscriminate killing of JVP suspects and focus on the leadership. And, as in economics, think outside the box. For example, “I told the security personnel to get hold of the buses in advance and keep them in the army camps with the drivers and the conductors. When a curfew is declared by the JVP, these buses would be put on the roads. This way we had buses running even on the days of JVP curfews” (President Premadasa and I: Our Story).
When the LTTE broke off negotiations and the second Eelam war started, the Premadasa plan was to win back and consolidate in the East before moving up North. Consolidation meant not militarisation but development. As Sirisena Cooray wrote, “carry out development work and political reforms in the areas, giving the people a decent standard of living and a measure of self-government…
There was a presidential mobile in Vavuniya. Several garment factories were in operation as part of the 200 garment factories programme… Immediately after an area is liberated we would move in and build houses for the people in the area. Initially Mr. Premadasa wanted 1,000 houses to be built in three months in the liberated areas. By the time they were completed, he was dead” (ibid).
When Ranasinghe Premadasa was killed, his development model was abandoned by everyone except Sirisena Cooray. But Sirisena Cooray could do nothing much once he left the party, and then politics. Bereft of the space to influence development policy, he still persisted in doing what he could to make a difference, first through the Premadasa Centre, later on his own.
In the accepted political parlance of Sri Lanka, Sirisena Cooray was a reactionary. He was UNP, he was Premadasa’s man, and that meant, ipso facto, reactionary. In this rigid categorisation, his abiding non-racism and all the development work he helped implement counted for nothing.
Sirisena Cooray never saw himself as a progressive or a reactionary. Those labels didn’t matter to him. For him, as for his leader-friend, the work they did was supposed to speak for itself. He didn’t deal with theories, still less slogans. For him, the deed was what counted. Much of the developmental work he did, both as politician and as ex-politician, remain unknown and uncelebrated. That was the way he wanted it. “Don’t talk about me,” was his standing instruction. No pictures either. The singer was immaterial; only the song counted, and the many lives lightened by its melody.
