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I wish to share a few anecdotes with you
 I
joined former Rural Industrial Development Minister S. Thondaman
as Media Officer in 1978. He was my good contact since 1957.
I asked him two weeks later how he felt about being minister. “There
is a lot of difference,” he said, “police clear the road
for me to travel, they salute me whenever they meet me, and high
state officials are constantly in attendance. In short, I am now
a powerful man,” he said. I noticed that he enjoyed this new
life.
In the late 1980s, his son Ramanathan, my university batch-mate,
was appointed Education Minister of the Central Province. I asked
him whether he enjoyed his new position. “Now I became a wise
man. All that I say are pearls of wisdom. If I ask them to study
the English language because it is the gateway to advancement they
call it a profound truth and applaud me.”
Mudliyar M.S. Kariappar was the first pole-vaulter I met in my reporting
life. He won the Kalmunai electorate as a Federal Party candidate
and crossed over to the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike government in 1957.
He told me this gem: “You cannot do anything by shouting from
the opposition. Crossover to the government then you can serve the
people who elected you.”
In the next year, 1959, Sir Razik Fareed joined the Dahanayake government
which was formed after S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s assassination.
Cartoonist Jiffry Yoonus caricatured him as a somersaulting monkey.
Sir Razik summoned Jiffry’s elder brother S.H. Yoonus and told
him: “Yes. I am somersaulting for the benefit of the Moor community.”
Thondaman was considered an expert political trend watcher. He went
wrong in 1994. He expected the UNP to win and entered into an electoral
agreement with it. He went wrong, because he listened to the new
breed of party officials and hangers on who enjoyed the perks and
respect that flowed from the positions they held, encircled him
and cut him from his earlier strength of ground-level contact.
Thondaman
was shocked when the People’s Alliance led by Chandrika Kumaratunga
won the poll.
I was a visitor to the CWC office during that time.
The
officials had lost their income, vehicles and the number of callers
dwindled. They were determined to get the privileges back. Feelers
were sent to Kumaratunga who had only one-seat majority in Parliament.
She responded favourably. I was called to the CWC office the next
day and strongly advised to tell Thondaman that he should join the
government ‘in the interest of the Indian Tamil community.’
Thondaman joined the Kumaratunga government and the group that encircled
him got back their privileges.
I noticed since then that the groups that joined the government
gradually eroded. It happened to the LSSP. It happened to the Communist
Party. In the 1960s, when the LSSP leadership was talking of quitting
the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government, Edmund Samarakoddy, who had
earlier broken away from the LSSP, caustically told journalists:
“These buggers have become beggars.” The fate that befell
those once strong Marxist parties is now history.
The minority parties that are talking ‘big’ about rethinking
their support to the government and about bargaining afresh the
‘interests of their communities,’ are only trying to gain
respectability while computing the actual numbers each side possesses.
If the opposition could defeat the government with their support,
they would ask for a few more positions and pole-vault. If the government
would survive they would become docile. They are watching the numbers.
(The writer is a senior journalist who reported similar dramas in
the past.)
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