Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe and his championing of Human Rights

 In memory of Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe who died on October 23, 1983

I have written much about my uncle Lakshman since his death, for I continue overwhelmed by the impact he had on so many. Most recently I found in a book about the Student Christian

Movement of Sri Lanka that many of the contributors celebrated his seminal influence, covering social and political commitment as well as personal pastoral care.   

But I was disappointed that only one article referred to the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka of which he had been a founder member at its inception in the early 70s, in response to the government treatment of the young JVP insurrectionists of 1971. And when he died, in 1983, he was its Chairman and, as Rajan Hoole put it, ‘a leading critic of the succeeding Jayewardene government’s anti-labour and anti-Tamil measures’.   

Unfortunately the CRM is now almost forgotten. It has no Wikipedia entry, and there is no mention of it in the Wikipedia article about Human Rights in Sri Lanka. That article practically begins with the assertion that ‘Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the British government, the United States Department of State and the European Union, have expressed concern about the state of human rights in Sri Lanka.’ Apart from this woefully Westernized approach to Rights, I am saddened by the fact that current advocates here have not drawn attention to their own work about the problems this country faces. But since many of them are financed by the Western agencies highlighted in the article, I suppose they see no reason to make it clear that Sri Lankans too are concerned about the Rights of their own people.   

The article naturally focuses on the Civil War, with only a very short account of the JVP insurrection of 1971 and a slightly longer one about that of the 80s. Together these are allocated just a bit more space than the section on LGBT Rights, and much less than is devoted to Child Marriage, this last section being a detailed critique of the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act.  These are important issues, but that the article says so little about the southern insurrections when thousands were brutally killed makes clear how little human lives count in Western eyes, unless the victims have appealed to their interests, or rather to their prejudices.   

 Given his commitment to social justice, he was a strong supporter of the 1970 United Front Government, he had no hesitation in working together with idealists, predominantly supporters of the social vision of that government, in condemning the treatment of the young insurrectionists   

I am more proud then of Lakshman’s universal commitment to Rights, and his forthright approach to affirming the need to uphold these when such commitment was not fashionable. Though given his commitment to social justice, he was a strong supporter of the 1970 United Front Government, he had no hesitation in working together with idealists, predominantly supporters of the social vision of that government, in condemning the treatment of the young insurrectionists.   

But this is not registered and surprisingly Hoole who did refer to his later work was denigratory about his politics in the 70s, for he wrote‘Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe, addressing the SCM at Peradeniya …. decried Christians who had prayed for a UNP victory and told us to expect drastic changes towards social justice. The era of the common man had arrived, but the commonness pertained only to the Sinhalese as was evident.  Fortunately the book includes Michael Roberts’ descriptions of Lakshman’s participation in the discussions of the Ceylon Studies Seminar, including at the October 1973 Conference of the Sinhala-Tamil problem. I can understand Hoole’s anguish given his single-minded approach to the Sri Lankan situation, but it seems to me understandable that Lakshman should, while aware of the ethnic problem, also celebrate measures such as land reform and the takeover of the plantations – where he did help the workers, for as Sydney Knight record, ‘To help these folk to earn a living, Bishop Lakshman began projects in plantation areas in his diocese, for example the basket-making project in Pussellawa etc.’   

Though Lakshman’s anguish about increasing violence against Tamils is known, we need to recall his other concerns

Hoole’s criticism is I fear because he does not register the qualitative difference between measures which took no notice of Tamil concerns and those that actively oppressed them. It was in 1977 that, soon after the election Jayewardene had won, there was an attack on Tamils, which it was believed the new government had encouraged, a game changer for it brought physical suffering and even death whereas in the preceding years, unlike for the JVP youngsters, it had been limitation of opportunities.   

Lakshman understood straightaway the difference that the country faced with the advent of Jayewardene’s government. I had myself thought it heralded new hope for the country, and I came back at the end of 1979 in the expectation that we would now develop rapidly, with a reduction of the deprivation I had learned hit so many under the previous regime.   
But in 1980 that early promise had faded away, the seal of the authoritarianism for me being the deprivation of Mrs Bandaranaike’s Civic Rights. For Lakshman it had been established a few months earlier, with the ruthless treatment of workers in the General Strike of July 1980. By then he was Chair of the Civil Rights Movement, and a doughty champion of workers’ rights, which as the SCM book makes clear was something dear to the heart of its membership, nurtured as it had been by Lakshman and his own mentor Celestine Fernando. 

 
Though Lakshman’s anguish about increasing violence against Tamils is known, we need to recall his other concerns, and also the sharp letter he sent to The Times (which had celebrated the postponement of elections and claimed that ‘Capitalist Tea tastes Sweeter’), pointing out how democracy had been traduced by that referendum.   
He was by then in England, supposed to be resting to recover from a heart attack. But as we know from the intensity of his actions when he did get back, an intensity that led to his death, he could not rest when the afflicted needed comfort.