மறக்கப்பட்ட தியாகி

The Forgotten Martyr

June 5, 2008: On this day sixty one years ago, Velupillai Kandasamy of Moolai Road, Vaddukoddai, a member of the Government Clerical Service Union (GCSU) was shot dead when the colonial government of the day headed by the Acting British Governor ordered a strike action to be crushed without mercy.

The strike action followed the failure of the government to honour some of the promises made to help bring an earlier general strike the previous year to an end.

The negotiation that followed the 1946 General Strike was obviously made in bad faith by the government that became concerned that if this was not controlled, the entire country could be paralyzed. The chief spokesperson for the Government Workers Trade Union Federation (GWTUF) was Dr N M Perera who was promptly arrested. The workers refused to negotiate a settlement until Dr Perera was released and allowed to be their spokesperson as the adviser to the GWTUF.

When the country became independent in 1948, Dr Perera became the first Opposition Leader in Parliament.

When the second strike action was launched in June 1947, the government, no doubt on the orders of the colonial authorities in London’s Whitehall ordered the Ceylon Defence Force that was believed to have been on some form of inaction or leave from action, to support the police to break up the strike with whatever force or facility they deemed needed to bring the workers back to work.

Following a strike meeting at Colombo’s Hyde Park, the workers marched to Kolonnawa but at Dematagoda the armed forces engaged them with fire during which Velupillai Kandasamy of the GCSU fell as a martyr.

A warm and friendly young man and a bachelor, Kandasamy had six siblings, five of them girls and he was the only breadwinner of the family. In his memory, June 5 was declared Kandasamy Day and a monument were erected in Colombo at the very spot he was killed. But both the Kandasamy Day and the Kandasamy Memorial soon became victims of pan-Sinhala racism.

Where the Kandasamy Memorial was erected, racist vandals thought it fit to place a statue of Lord Buddha on it and Kandasamy Day has been promptly forgotten. Velupillai Kandasamy became not only a victim of the British colonial outrage and arrogance but also of the Sinhala/Buddhist racists and jingoists.

By Victor Karunairajan