Mervyn de Silva's eighth death anniversary falls today:

Witty, sophisticated and thought-provoking

Rajiva Wijesinghe

Tribute: I hope the readers will not be too relieved at the fact that, after one and a half years, I will have to stop writing this column. The idea of pressure of work limiting further work has never oppressed me previously, but I suppose that with advancing age one has to be prepared for all eventualities.

It is however appropriate that the last column to appear under the heading, 'Past Perspectives', successor as it was to 'Lost Horizons', is about the doyen of Sri Lankan journalists in English throughout my childhood. I refer

 to the late Mervyn de Silva, the eighth anniversary of whose death falls today.

I still remember a particularly brilliant column he wrote during the sixties, and the comment by Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe, whose brother Esmond then ran Lake House, that here was a new journalist (even Mervyn was young) who was witty, sophisticated, thought-provoking and without vulgarity. I cannot be quite certain with whom he was comparing Mervyn, but certainly that description is one that today's journalists would do well to study.

A few years later, there was great indignation about Mervyn among my acquaintance, the Bishop always accepted. He had become the Editor of the Daily News after it was taken over by Mrs. Bandaranaike's United Front Government, and it was argued that this had been his ambition from the start and that he had intrigued desperately for this position.

The aftermath however, suggested that this was too simplistic an explanation. The takeover was a sad move, but it is understandable in the context of the unscrupulous opposition of Lake House in the early sixties to the Bandaranaike Government, culminating in the bribery of several members of parliament to bring it down in 1964.

The answer was not of course a government controlled press, and it is ironic that Mrs Bandaranaike and the country suffered much worse from this in the dark days of Jayewardene, who had pledged to denationalise Lake House, but who made ruthless use of it in his total subversion of all democratic norms.

This type of chicanery was something Mrs Bandaranaike was incapable of, as was obvious inasmuch as she did not seek to keep the Davasa Group muzzled in the run up to the election.

But, sadly, she too allowed for abuse of the media, and for those around her to allege bias against when journalists like Mervyn tried to maintain a balance. He was then an early victim, despite his own initial assumption that a nationalised press could still be critical of the Government, of the monolithic control that less sophisticated votaries of government seek to impose.

But he took it all in good part, and after 1977 retreated to his own independent journal, The Lanka Guardian, the only sane voice in English in the entire media.

That is why I find it woefully ironic that now there are claims that the media is being muzzled, when in fact the country is full of strong critiques of the Government in all three languages.

This is just as it should be, though one feels that there should be greater regard for not only fact but also coherent rationales for opinion, and that in particular those who rely on the media should be aware that they need to consider what the evidence is for what is produced for their willing consumption.

The problem now is that the social bias of Colombo is against the Government, and this will naturally affect decision makers whose understanding of the country is limited to Colombo and the Internet. Thirty years ago the situation was very different.

Shortly after television was started, the Independent Television Network was taken over by the Government, along with Rupavahini which had two channels that were deliberately propagandist in outlook.

Those were the days in which the man who in effect ran the SLBC, Nimal Karunatilleke, said in stentorian tones at a workshop I had been asked to address on news production, when I dared to say that facts were not what people said were facts, that this was a government organisation and it had to present what the Government wanted.

In such a context Mervyn was a breath of fresh air, for his concern for accuracy and for balance, even while he made no secret of his own political predilections.

He was also uniquely able, given his wide reading and relentlessly inquiring mind, to understand the background to what was going on, which is why, when all others ignored the dangers, he well understood the chaos in which Jayewardene's preposterous foreign adventurism was plunging us.

Sadly, The Lanka Guardian had a limited audience. To give Jayewardene his cunning due, he would have it out on his coffee table and, when foreign interlocutors would hesitantly inquire about government control of the media, he would hand them the copy and virtuously claim that he allowed free criticism.

Many years later, this role was taken by The Liberal Review, when we produced more comprehensive critiques which were not however as regular as the slighter Guardian.

But, as we know, all that availed nothing. Despite Mervyn de Silva's trenchant analysis, the 1981 assaults on democracy were exacerbated with the referendum of 1982, the racist horrors of 1981 were multiplied in 1983.

Duplicity at negotiations, the trotting out when required of Cyril Mathew and brother Harry and even S.L. Gunasekera rather than the elected Opposition to tease the Indians and infuriate the Tigers, led to the catharsis of 1987, and then the even more relentless rise of extremism.

By the nineties, Mervyn was tired and the game was in any case by then in other hands. But I often wonder how different things would have been had Mrs. Bandaranaike in the seventies listened to what he was trying to tell her about the limits of governmental control; and had the international community, instead of feasting in self-celebration along with Jayewardene, listened even minimally to what the Guardian was trying to say, the values it claimed were universal, the standards of decency on which there should have been no compromise.