1960: Ceylon elects world's first woman PM
Mrs
Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow of Ceylon's assassinated prime minister Solomon
Bandaranaike, has been elected the world's first woman prime minister.
Her Sri Lanka Freedom Party won a resounding victory in the general election
taking 75 out of 150 seats.
Mrs Bandaranaike only entered politics after her husband was shot by an
extremist Buddhist on 26 September 1959.
She has become known as the "weeping widow" for frequently bursting into
tears during the election campaign and vowing to continue her late husband's
socialist policies.
This week's election was called after Dudley Senanavake's United National
Party failed to produce a working majority after winning elections in March.
Aristocratic by birth
Mrs Bandaranaike was born into the Ceylon aristocracy and her husband was a
landowner. She was educated by Roman Catholic nuns at St Bridget's school in
the capital, Colombo, and is a practising Buddhist.
She married in 1940 aged 24 and has three children - and until her husband's
death seemed content in her role as mother and retiring wife.
Her SLFP aims to represent the "little man" although its policies during the
campaign were not clear.
Mr Bandaranaike attributed her success to the "people's love and respect"
for her late husband and urged her supporters to practise "simple living,
decorum and dignity".
Her husband came to power in 1955, eight years after independence, and
declared himself a Buddhist which appealed to nationalists. But his
government was wracked by infighting among Sinhalese and Tamils and lacked
direction.
Mrs Bandaranaike inherits a country in a state of flux and her party's
proposed programme of nationalisation may bring her into conflict with
foreign interests in commodities like tea, rubber and oil.
The New York
Times
October 11, 2000
Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri
Lanka, the first woman in the world to serve as a prime minister, died
yesterday shortly after voting in Sri Lanka's elections. She was 84.
Mrs. Bandaranaike's final act was to vote in a parliamentary election she
hoped would return the family's party to power leading a governing coalition
known as the People's Alliance. Her death from a heart attack on Election
Day seemed poetically timed for a woman whose family business is politics
and whose political career spanned four decades.
Mrs. Bandaranaike rose to power in 1960 as a bereaved wife and mother of
three, just a year after her husband, Solomon, then prime minister, was
assassinated by a Buddhist monk. She quickly established herself as the
undisputed leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party — founded by her husband —
and a formidable politician in her own right.
She also became the matriarch of a political dynasty. In the final years of
her life, her daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, succeeded her as the standard
bearer of the family party and has served as president of the country since
1994. The father, mother and daughter have led Sri Lanka for 21 of the 52
years since it gained its independence from the British.
"Mrs. Bandaranaike's legacy is this: After her husband died, there was so
much confusion and the party was almost collapsing," said K. M. de Silva, a
Sri Lankan historian. "She was an untried leader. But she not only survived,
she sustained the party and the family in politics."
Her body was taken to her stately home on Rosemead Place in the Cinnamon
Gardens section of Colombo, the capital. State radio canceled regular
programs to play elegiac music and state television looked back on her life.
She will be buried alongside her husband on Saturday in a state funeral at
the family's ancestral home in Horagulla. Friday and Saturday have been
declared days of national mourning. All liquor shops, bars, cinemas and
slaughterhouses have been ordered to close.
"She was a heroic mother of the nation," the Sri Lanka Freedom Party said in
a statement.
But the Sri Lanka Freedom Party has come to stand for very different
policies and values than it had in her day.
Mrs. Kumaratunga firmly repudiated her mother's brand of Sinhalese
nationalism, which had inflamed ethnic tensions between the mostly Buddhist
Sinhalese majority and the predominantly Hindu Tamil minority. The
daughter's years in office have been dominated by her as-yet-fruitless
efforts to end a 17-year-old war with separatist Tamil rebels. Mrs.
Kumaratunga also steered the party toward a more open, market-oriented
economy and away from the centralized, state-dominated socialism that had
been her mother's trademark.
Mrs. Bandaranaike was born Sirimavo Ratwatte on April 17, 1916, into one of
the island nation's wealthy feudal families, one that was at the pinnacle of
Sri Lanka's social hierarchy. In 1940 — 60 years ago today — she married S.
W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the scion of an elite, feudal clan that had thrived
for generations with the patronage of the British Empire.
Mr. Bandaranaike made the transition from his Anglicized, upper- class
background to become a populist and a nationalist. And his wife carried
forward his passions with even greater decisiveness and vigor, historians
say. She was a shrewd political leader with a wide base in the Sinhalese
majority.
In a recent interview, Anura, the Bandaranaike's youngest child and only
son, said their father had been the affectionate, demonstrative parent while
their mother was aloof.
Mrs. Bandaranaike — known simply as Mrs. B — served twice as head of state,
from 1960 to 1965 and again from 1970 to 1977. She nationalized many foreign
and local enterprises and left Sri Lanka's economy into one that was heavily
state dominated.
She also zealously pursued efforts to make Sinhalese the sole national
language, a stance that deeply alienated the country's Tamil speakers. And
she changed the university admissions policy to benefit the Sinhalese,
disadvantaging the Tamils.
During five years of her daughter's presidency, Mrs. Bandaranaike served as
prime minister, which had become a largely ceremonial role under the
Constitution adopted in 1978. Increasingly feeble and unable to speak
clearly, she resigned as prime minister in August, though she retained her
seat in Parliament.
She lived on Rosemead Place with her elder daughter, Sunethra, a
philanthropist who is 57 and never got involved in politics.
But the political family she had nurtured splintered in her later years. Her
son, Anura, 51, who lives next to his mother's home in the family compound,
went over to the family's despised rival, the United National Party, after
his sister, now 55, won the right to succeed their mother. But both the son,
as a leader of the opposition, and the daughter, as president, have carried
on the family's political tradition.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company