Lecture delivered by Dr Jane Russell, Historian, at the inaugural Awarelogue Lecture Forum of the Awarelogue Initiative to mark the landmark of Universal Franchise in Sri Lanka
I am greatly honoured to be asked by the Awarelogue
Initiative to speak at their Lecture Forum in this year of 2021, celebrating the
90th anniversary of the advent of universal franchise in Sri Lanka. In my
lecture, I shall touch on some of the complex problems of governance and policy
faced by a small multi-ethnic island, flanked as it is and always has been, by economic
and political superpowers
Today, I want to briefly revisit the grant (and in using that word I have already encountered a problem, one that I shall look at later) of universal franchise to Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, 9 decades ago. But I am not so much interested in Ceylon’s perspective of getting universal franchise, as I covered that ground in my book written over 40 years ago. As an activist historian, I am now more interested in the motives of the British overlords, in particular the Colonial Office during the 1927-1931 period, in giving Ceylon universal franchise. Why did the Colonial Office send out those particular Donoughmore Commissioners? Why did the Donoughmore Commission decide that universal franchise and the Executive Committee system of government was the most appropriate to foster successful self-government in Sri Lanka? Why did the Commission even want to foster democracy and self-government in an imperial dependency? These are the questions I shall try to answer.
I should also like to make one disclaimer: in this brief lecture, I use the terms Ceylon, British Ceylon and Sri Lanka almost interchangeably. There is some vague method to my usage, based loosely on the date 1948, although that is in itself arbitrary, as it was in January 1973, when I first arrived in the island to take up a Commonwealth Scholarship at Peradeniya that Sri Lanka, the name of the new Republic, came into existence. If you find it at all confusing, I apologise in advance but I would ask you to bear with it – in the end it is the island of Lanka, Taprobane, Serendib, that I am talking about and no other!
First, I want to make it clear in discussing universal franchise as the basis for democracy that I am in complete agreement with wartime British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who stated in 1947 at the end of the last global war that “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government - except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Democracy is (and I quote here from the Merriam-Webster American
English dictionary) “government
by the people especially a). rule of the majority and b). a government in which
the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or
indirectly through a system of representation, usually involving periodically
held free elections.”
This otherwise acceptable definition
is strangely wanting in one respect: it does not specify who the ‘people’ are: that
is it does not state the criteria for deciding who may be eligible to vote.
Nowhere does it specify the age, race, the language, birthplace, religion,
gender, the sexual preference, educational standard, wealth and property, skin
colour, or indeed any other discriminator determining who can vote in an election.
From the turn of the 21st
century, the USA, which has long prided itself on its democratic norms and
indeed paraded its democratic institutions as a model for other countries to
follow, has come up against powerful geo-economic and political forces that do
not recognize democracy as a particularly valid form of government and
certainly not one that trumps their own
forms of governance. Whether those
challenging the primacy of democracy are from one-party states or one-person
dictatorships or indeed violent anti-establishment Islamic religious movements
like the Taliban, Islamic State or Boko Haram, these challenges are undermining
US confidence in its democratic exceptionalism to the point where it is finding
that its earlier, easy accommodation with elections and voting now under threat
internally from anti-democratic proto-authoritarians like Donald Trump. The US political
culture is now faced with the dilemma, which covertly has always dogged its
democratic credentials, of deciding whether non-white members of its populace,
and more specifically the black and/or mixed descendants of formerly enslaved
peoples have a right to vote equal to those who consider themselves ‘truer
Americans’ because of their paler skin colour and non-slave background.
Another reason I chose the
Merriam Webster definition of democracy is because it baldly states that
democracy is government based on rule by the majority. And this is where Sri
Lanka’s ninety year experience of universal franchise becomes so historically valuable.
When the Donoughmore
Commissioners came to British Ceylon in 1928, they were acutely aware that the political
turbulence caused by the October 1917 revolution in Russia had changed the
world forever. The Commissioners came to
Ceylon from a Britain where the more left-wing representatives in parliament
and government had already started to realise that the political and economic costs
of maintaining Empire were escalating to a point where it was becoming more
rational to let Empire go rather than try to hang on to it.
An Edinburgh trained medic,
and holder of the Military Cross, Dr. Thomas Drummond Shiels was appointed as a
Donoughmore Commissioner by the newly-appointed Secretary of State for the
Colonies Sydney Webb, who’d just been brought into front-line politics by being
made a peer, (Lord Passfield) by the Labour Party, who were in government in
Britain, in a coalition with the Liberals, for the very first time.
Webb was a neo-marxist and a
great admirer of the Soviet Union. He knew Drummond-Shiels, his fellow-travelling
Marxist and equally fierce anti-imperialist, would definitely become the intellectual
driving force behind the Commission, which had been tasked to find a new
constitutional settlement for British Ceylon. Privately, Drummond-Shiels was instructed
by Webb to use this opportunity to find some constitutional process, an
institutional mechanism, which would serve as a precedent, and so allow the government
in London to dispose of their imperial possessions and responsibilities in a manner
both politically practicable and ethical but also as timely as possible.
Ceylon was therefore chosen to
be a laboratory for an experiment in ‘not-quite but almost’ self-government: a
self-government which would lead, not to outright independence, but Dominion
Status, the same status accorded within the Empire to Australia, New Zealand,
Canada and South Africa, ie. the white dominions. And here we can see the white
supremacist basis which underpinned the British Empire and which would
inevitably lead to its demise - a demise which neo-marxist politicians in
Britain in the 1930’s could clearly envision, though without discerning how it might
happen.
It seems that Ceylon was considered the perfect vehicle for this attempt at 7/10ths self-government - so-called because 3 British colonial civil servants sitting in the Colombo parliament, or State Council, served as Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs and Internal Security, while all other Ministerial posts were given to elected State Councillors. But why did the leftists in the Colonial Office think Ceylon so well suited for democratic development? Well, for one British Ceylon was insulated from the influence of India and its other south and south-east Asian neighbours by its Crown Colony status.
Please allow me to digress a little here and explain something about Crown Colonies. These were special entities within the Empire; they were usually small islands,- Hong Kong, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Falklands for example - but Ceylon was considered the Premier Crown Colony. Why? Well, it was wealthy from the trade of its tea, rubber and coconut plantations; it had a two and a half thousand year plus history of Buddhist civilization; it did not have any large urban centres dominated by a plutocratic class where revolution might be seeded; the population density was low and the literacy rate was higher than in any other non-white imperial territory and English education among the elite was widespread; generally speaking, women had property and marriage rights equal to men; it had putative trade unions; a recognizable political party, the Ceylon National Congress; and the white, mostly British, but what was deemed ‘European’, plantation-owning class was small (unlike say in Kenya or Uganda). To British leftist eyes, Ceylon was a recognizably ‘westernized’ country, ripe for fully-fledged democracy.
Yet it also had all the complexities
associated with other Indo-Asian political cultures: caste division; racial,
religious and language divisions; differing climatic zones; tribal peoples, etc.
In short, Ceylon seemed a society that could be used as a model for future
constitutional settlements, not just in the other Crown Colonies, but for all
Imperial possessions, including the crown jewel of Empire, India. The
Donoughmore Commission was therefore sent to Ceylon in 1928 as the harbinger of
Imperial divestment: its job was to write the template for the leaving card of
British Empire.
The institutional insulation
of British Ceylon from its neighbours was an important element in this constitutional
experiment. British India, which included today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh and
Burma, was administered from London by the India Office, a completely separate
department to the Colonial Office, which looked after Ceylon.
Of course the position of Indian
Tamils, nowadays referred to as’ Up-Country Tamils’ in Sri Lanka and ‘Highland
Tamils’ in India, was anomalous because they were in effect dual citizens of
both British Ceylon and British India. Although having said that, they were,
along with the least liberated caste groups of the Sinhalese and Tamil
communities, the poorest educated, lowest paid and worst housed segment of the island’s
population.
But they were also one of the most
commercially valuable groups as it was from their labour that the bulk of
foreign exchange earned from the plantation economy was generated. However, because
British India had no administrative input into Ceylon’s governance, this group
could be disenfranchised willy-nilly under the Donoughmore settlement, which is
what happened as soon as the Commissioners left. Imagine how impossible this
disenfranchisement might have been if India had been a sovereign nation in 1931?
Imagine as well how Indian politics might have become enmeshed with Sri Lankan
politics if India had been able to have a say in the writing of the Donoughmore
Constitution? Isn’t it likely that India would have claimed Ceylon as a natural
part of India? Just think about it - if things had been otherwise, British
Ceylon might have been casually handed to British India, as Hong Kong was to
China in 1997, as a gift from one Empire to another….
I shall now return to my
narrative.
Significantly, Drummond-Shiels
was the only Donoughmore Commissioner to have had experience of serving as an
elected Councillor on London County Council, the LCC. In 1929, there were 148
Councillors and Aldermen elected by universal franchise to the LCC. London in
the decade after the 1st world war was a city of 8 million people,
and owing to its position as the metropolis of Empire, as cosmopolitan as it is
today. From 1919, all London’s residents, including women, had the right to vote
and stand in LCC elections. In fact, many women were elected as London
Councillors in the 1920’s. Moreover, a number of south Asians ran in the lower
tier of local borough elections, some of whom were elected. When I interviewed
Doric de Souza many years ago, he told me he’d been elected as a local borough
councillor while living in London as a young man. London local elections were
therefore ethnically diverse and incorporated an equal female franchise.
The LCC was a prestigious political
institution. It had a huge budget raised from property rates and enormous
responsibilities. Although a municipal agency, London’s government was larger
than that of many countries. Councillors served on Executive Committees
overseeing housing, education, transport and roads, social welfare, health and
sanitation, police, fire brigade, courts and justice etc. Executive Committees,
as anyone who has ever served on the EC of a sports club knows, are vehicles
for cooperative management. The three political parties represented in the LCC
were offshoots of the Liberals, the Conservatives and the Labour Party. On their
chosen EC’s, Councillors from different parties and representing very different
electorates, from the slums of the East End to the mansions of Mayfair, had to cooperate
to make London governance work. London was therefore a microcosm, not just of
Great Britain, but of the Empire as a whole.
Together with the Webbs, Sydney
and Beatrice, and Leonard Woolf, the ex-Ceylon Civil Servant, husband to
novelist Virginia, who by 1927 had become a pivotal back-room thinker on the
Labour Party’s Foreign Policy Committee, Drummond-Shiels sketched out a plan to
introduce London’s electoral and governmental system into British Ceylon. This
leftwing brains trust thought universal franchise, together with an Executive
Committee system of governance, would produce stable self-government in Ceylon,
They hoped that this would then give the lie to imperialists in Britain - politicians like Churchill, Chamberlain and other
Tory grandees, plus Lord Rothermere and his fellow right-wing press barons who
were mouthpieces of the financiers and corporate shareholders who had gained so
much from Empire - when they argued that peoples of the non-white British
colonies and imperial possessions were incapable of running their own affairs.
And this was not a forlorn hope.
If you look at the constitutional settlement in Northern Ireland enacted after
the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, it is made up of an electoral system of
large multi-member constituencies, incorporating neighbourhood Protestant and
Catholic communities, which uses the Single Transferable Vote System of
Proportional Representation and the D’Hondt procedure for awarding seats in the
Northern Ireland Assembly. It is a mechanism somewhat like the Duckworth-Lewis
method used in cricket: it ensures fair proportionality given the fact that no
Catholic will vote for a Protestant and no Protestant will vote for a Catholic.
The system of government involves an Executive Committee at its head, and a
mandatory coalition in which the First Minister is always drawn from the Protestant
majority and the Deputy First Minister from the Catholic minority. If one
resigns the other is constitutionally forced to resign as well. This form of
power-sharing, also known as co-sociational democracy, was not devised by a
Britisher at all but by a Belgium, Arend Lijphart, for societies emerging from
conflict or those with potential for conflict. Switzerland, Belgium and the
Lebanon also employ the co-sociational model.
If you study the Donoughmore
Constitution, you will find that it is a forerunner of this model of democracy.
However, because it used the First Past the Post voting system, which in 1931
was virtually the only recognized system of voting, it led to a situation where
the Sinhalese majority in the State Council was able to prevent Tamil, Muslim
and Burgher Councillors getting any real administrative power and so undermined
the power-sharing idea behind its composition.
If, and this is the last of my
many hypotheticals, if the Donoughmore Constitution had been combined with proportional
representation plus a greater constituency weightage for minority areas, the
Executive Committee system might still be in use in Sri Lanka, The
Commissioners had tried to design a system for Ceylon that would prevent
conflict arising from the permanent Sinhalese majority in parliament that
universal franchise would engender. They tried to invent a system of democratic
government that would fit Ceylon, Sri Lanka, like a glove. They failed and
their failure has resulted in civil war and economic under-achievement.
For let me be clear. Universal
franchise was not something demanded by anyone in the Sinhalese, Tamil or
Muslim communities. Neither George E. de Silva nor A E Goonesinghe, who were
the most insistent that the franchise be extended, thought of asking for or
indeed expected to get, even a full male franchise. They argued for a franchise
for males over the age of 21, resident in Ceylon, who had at least had a primary
education, ie men who could read and write in the vernacular and who had some
kind of income. What they got was beyond their wildest dreams and indeed was the
stuff of nightmares for all other representatives of Low Country and Kandyan
Sinhalese, Ceylon Tamil, Muslim and Burgher communities consulted by the
Commission.
Only the representatives of
the Indian Tamil community, for obvious reasons, were in favour of full male
franchise, regardless of any educational or income element. No-one, and I repeat
no-one, except perhaps George de Silva’s wife Agnes and a few of her Colombo female
friends, argued for votes for women. Messrs. De Silva and Goonesinghe, to give
them their due, supported their wives in asking for equal votes for women but
again what was asked for was votes for educated women.
This brings me back to the
word which I used in my opening remarks, and which seemed so problematic: that is the’ grant’ of universal franchise to
Ceylon in 1931. This word ‘grant’ suggests that the people of Ceylon were
demanding and lobbying for universal franchise in the late 1920’s. Nothing
could be further from the facts. What most of the political and commercial elite
of the island wanted and asked for when the Commission came, was a slight extension
of the existing, very proscriptive, male franchise. What they got in universal franchise
destabilised the island’s political culture immediately. It led to the Jaffna
boycott, the Pan-Sinhala Board of Ministers and the final rejection by all
communities of the Executive Committee system, in favour of the Westminster
model of parliamentary government, which proved even more unsuitable and has
now been replaced by a French model.
Universal franchise was
foisted on Ceylon in 1931. In the minds of its authors, it was a necessary act,
done for the greater good of the world – it was done to rid the world of the racial
and political injustice of Empire while introducing democratic values in
governance in former imperial entities and as an exemplar for modern governance
throughout the globe.
And overall, one might argue
that it has, generally speaking, worked. Looking at the imperial dependencies,
India is still the largest functioning democracy in the world. Ghana, and to a
lesser extent, Nigeria, Zambia and Kenya are functioning democracies in Africa.
We’ll leave out Hong Kong, as it’s a special case, but Jamaica and other
islands of the ex-British Caribbean have stuck with democratic norms. Burma is trying to get democracy back after
decades of military rule. Pakistan and Bangladesh swing between democracy and
army take-overs but they seem always to want to return to democratic ways and
oftentimes do. South Africa has, after decades, overturned minority race-government
in favour of majority rule.
There are dreadful failures of
course: Nigeria and Uganda have been through terrible periods of bloodletting
and Uganda, like Kenya, oversaw mass deportation of unwanted Asians. The
Lebanon is sadly, and through no fault of its own, a basket case and the
Israel-Palestine issue is still a running sore on the world’s body politic. But
Ceylon’s contribution to world history in taking on universal franchise,
unasked and probably prematurely, yet making it work so well for so long, has resulted
in perhaps a fairer and more equal world than otherwise might have been the
case.
