OUR WISHES FOR A HAPPY 75 TH BIRTHDAY
Dear Comrade Wickramasinghe,
Our association started towards the end of the 1970s and in that long passage of time we became comrades and friends. It is with immense pleasure that we are sending our best wishes on the occasion of your 75th birthday, three-quarters of a century of a life filled with incredible memories and experiences.
We went through a lot when we were young and survived many perilous moments. Our unforgettable political journey, started during days of communal living, spent at the JVP Head Office; located in a single small room at the Weerasinghe Sawmills in K Cyril Perera Mawatha, Colombo–13. All of us were holding on to a firm belief in progressive politics that we believed was and is essential for building a better Sri Lanka for all communities, where justice and fairness will prevail. It remains a dream yet to be achieved, even though we have no assurance whether we would be able to realise that dream during our lifetimes.
In the 1970s, you joined the movement that campaigned for the release of political prisoners led by comrade Prins Gunasekera and others. I vividly remember the days you spent at the Virakesari Newspapers working long hours and then coming to the party office to spend the rest of the day with us discussing the socio-economic and political issues that were prevailing at the time. We knew you then as Matale Chelva and you assisted in many of the media matters at the JVP’s Shakthi Printing Press in Kohilawatta, Angoda.
I recollect your involvement in matters such as proof-reading Tamil articles published in the JVP’s Tamil organ, ‘Sen Shakthi’, and the Tamil translation of “A Marxist Analysis of the National Question”, which I had written while in Magazine Prison in 1973. Most of the prominent leaders of the JVP stopped by at your parent’s house in Matale and enjoyed your late mother’s hospitality.
The Black July pogrom and the proscription of the JVP in July 1983, changed everything. I had to bid farewell to the JVP due to many factors, the main one being the position the JVP adopted towards the national question in Sri Lankan since mid-1983. Afterwards, we had to fight for our own survival and to do it in our own ways. Despite this situation you continued to assist comrades of the JVP such as Ragama Some and Somawansa Amerasinghe, who sought your financial and material help. Comrades Ranjitham Gunaratnam of Kegalle and Periyakarippu Thangarajah of Matale would have survived, if they listened to your advice not to go to the farm in Piliyandala they maintained. They went there without heeding your advice and on the same day they were killed.
You risked your life in 1990, to secure the lives of the Somawansa Amerasinghe family, by making arrangements to send them to India so that they could escape certain death that awaited them in Sri Lanka. An army captain drove Somawansa to Kochchikade and then he had been taken to Subramaniya Swamy Temple in Tiruchendur, Tamil Nadu, India by boat. Meanwhile comrade Amerasinghe’s wife and son flew to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) from Katunayake and caught a local flight to Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum), Kerala.
Meanwhile you flew Katunayake to India and brought Somawansa from Tiruchendur to Thiruvananthapuram, where you rented a house from one of your friends and made arrangements for the Amerasinghe family to stay there. Afterwards the Amerasinghe family flew from Trivandrum to London. All travel expenses were borne by a comrade called Ranasinghe from Dubai.
You personally managed many of the arrangements, even travelling to India and then arranging for them to leave India safely. This was an indicator of the strength of your commitment, your personality, your character, and your devotion to a cause to which you had been committed to. Both of us survived threats to our lives that were posed towards the end of the 1980s. You were taken into custody in October 1990 and released sometime in 1992.
In search of survival during and after those difficult days, we have moved in different pathways. Despite the difficulties you had to overcome, you served your community and the people of Sri Lanka in the best way you possibly could. I am grateful for the trust you had placed in me, when you discussed very personal aspects of your life and in choosing ways of surviving at a challenging time, when none of us were able to help.
However, since we left Sri Lanka in 1989, we made it a habit to visit each other whenever we visited Sri Lanka, or when you visited Australia. Since those days, the children of our families whom we met, have grown up to become professionals, with their own families, with several grandchildren. It is a pleasure to see them doing well. They may not have exactly followed our footsteps in life, not that we expected them to. They are endeavouring to find their own ways of adopting and surviving in this complex world. We need to be appreciative of the fact that they are contributing to building a better world in their own ways.
Our personal as well as political friendship have survived almost close to five decades and will survive for the rest of our lives. Almost always, our birthday wishes to friends have had something in common, being appreciative of the contributions they made during their lives without harming broader conceptualisations of a fair go and social justice. We have always wished them a happy, healthy, peaceful, and constructive lives. Yet, each person with whom we have associated with are different, and have their own special characteristics associated with their personalities and politics. Still, our wishes to the people we love, should not only be resonant, but also true.
In that context, we wish you good health, happiness, success, and in anything else that you wish to do. We have proven through our actions and conversations, and whatever the difficulties we confront in our lives, that we will always try to help and care for others who are in need, in our lives and society.
So, we sincerely wish you all the best in all your future endeavours and that you will achieve everything that you wished to achieve in your lifetime.
May your day be adorned with the sweet memories of seventy-five remarkable years well spent! In life, there are beautiful moments yet to arrive.
Happy 75th Birthday, dear comrade!
Lionel and Chitra Bopage
Melbourne, Australia
22 June 2024
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