UK Economist journal viewed Sri Lanka as model democracy in ...

THE ECONOMIST

July 30, 1977 Pg. 13

It can be done; Mr Jayawardene's sweeping victory keeps Sri Lanka at the top of Asia's democratic league table

For the sixth time since it became independent in 1948, Sri Lanka has changed its government by the simple but, it seemed until recently, increasingly unfashionable method of holding a general election. The island that used to be known as Ceylon is one of the few countries in post-imperial Asia which have been able to create a democratic system; it is the only one which has known an orderly alternation of ruling parties. How?

The odds seemed against it. Is politics have not been free from the corruption and nepotism that have discredited parliamentary systems elsewhere. Nor from violence. Mrs Bandaranaike, so shatteringly defeated on July 21st, inherited her party's leadership when her husband was assassinated.

Over the years the island has seen communal riots, rice riots, labour conflicts and an insurrection in 1971 by the revolutionary left.

It is not a homogeneous nation. Its Hindu, Moslem, Christian and other minorities make up a third of the population, and among the Buddhists there are old antipathies between the "low country" Sinhalese of the south-west and the Kandyan highlanders. New expectations impinge as explosively on old poverty as in other third-world countries; and the feeding of a population which has doubled since independence requires massive imports of rice, which in turn depend on exports of tea and rubber to sharply fluctuating world markets.

The helpful sea

On the other side of the scales, the island's most obvious advantage is that it is an island.

It has known many invasions, but the last of them - the British invasion - was nearly 200 years ago. No threatened fronties or irredentist ambitions; so no strong military establishment impatiently watching the politicians fumble. Educational levels have long been high by Asian standards, and other forms of social welfare were introduced before independence. Ceylon gained its independence quietly, with 17 years of universal suffrage and orderly elections already behind it, and under the leadership of D. S. Senanayake, a man dedicated both to the parliamentary system and to the protection of minorities. His chief limitation, and that of the United National party which he founded, was his reliance on the educated and Westernised middle class, in whose ranks the minorities were prominent.

But the inevitable Sinhalese reaction to this took a parliamentary, non-violent form: the creation by Solomon Bandaranaike in 1951 of the Sri Lanka Freedom party, which drew its strength from the rural lower-middle classes. At first the SLFP was almost as conservative as the UNP, in its different way; but Bandaranaike's widow led it into alliance with the left, an uneasy alliance which collapsed before this election. The past seven years saw many purportedly socialist measures which did little to improve the position of the poor but far too much, in most people's eys, to improve that of the prime minister and her friends and relations. The electorate's response (see page 58) has been to vote out the whole of the left and nearly all of Mrs Bandarnaike's party and to award four fifths of parliamentary seats to a spectacularly revived United National party which, under the skilful leadership of Mr Junius Jayawardene, has contrived to win wide support among the poor without abandoning its belief that the economy needs a vigorous private sector.

Source: http://society.ezinemark.com/uk-economist-journal-viewed-sri-lanka-as-model-democracy-in-1977-then-entered-reaganomics-18e3f382b95.html

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