Published: In Statement of Ten Central Committee Members of the Ceylon Communist Party, Peking, 1964.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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This declaration was signed by 116 Marxist-Leninists of the Ceylon Communist Party. They include ten Full Members and Alternate Members of the Central Committee of the Ceylon Communist Party (Premalal Kumarasiri, Member of the Political Bureau, N. Sanmugathasan, Member of the Political Bureau and General Secretary of the Ceylon Trade Union Federation, D. N. Nadunge, Member of the Central Committee, and others), A. D. Charleshamy and H. Jayawardena, Vice-Presidents of the Ceylon Trade Union Federation; Watson Fernando, Secretary of the Ratmalana District Committee; Victor Silva, Secretary of the former Kotte District Committee; Menike Kumarasiri, Joint Secretary of the Progressive Women’s Front; H. P. Amarapala, President of the Ceylon Federation of the Communist and Progressive Youth Leagues; W. A. Dharmadasa, General Secretary of the Ceylon Federation of the Communist and Progressive Youth Leagues; H. M. P. Mohideen, Editor of Tholilali; Sarath Cooray, Assistant Editor of Kamkaruwa, other leaders of district committees, trade unions, youth and women’s organizations and other Communist Party members. – Ed.
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We, the undersigned Marxist-Leninists inside the Ceylon Communist Party, do hereby accuse the present majority of the Central Committee of the Ceylon Communist Party of having destroyed the unity of the Party and brought it to the verge of a split and of undermining its influence by the following actions: –
(1) Failure to hold the 7th Congress of the Party within two years of the previous Congress i.e. before December 1962, as demanded by the Party Constitution.
(2) Abandoning the genuine Marxist-Leninist standpoints as embodied in the Moscow Declaration of 1957 and the Moscow Statement of 1960 and adopting the false positions of modern revisionism.
(3) Taking disciplinary actions against Premalal Kumarasiri, N. Sanmugathasan and E. T. Moorthy for having advocated revolutionary policies in full conformity with Marxism-Leninism.
(4) Refusal to heed the request of the majority of the District Committees of the Party and a written requisition by more than half the membership of the Party to summon an immediate Congress of the Party to settle the present dispute in the Party.
(5) Failure to build a strong and powerful Communist Party; suspending of recruitment to the Party at a time when the most favourable circumstances existed for the boldest recruitment to the Party; reducing the number of Party members to a paltry figure never reached even under the difficult days of the UNP – thus, objectively, placing the Party organisationally disarmed and weakened so that it loses its independence and identity.
(6) Opposition to and refusal to lead workers’ struggle, particularly the betrayal of the CTB strike of January-February 1963 and the present reluctance to organise a national struggle around the 21 demands approved by the All-Island Congress of Trade Unions.
(7) Exclusive reliance on the parliamentary method as the means of winning power peacefully for the working class and a refusal to prepare the working class and gather all revolutionary forces for a possibility of the non-peaceful transition to socialism.
(8) Failure to organise the peasantry.
(9) Failure to provide Party members and the working class with Marxist education; failure to translate sufficient number of Marxist classics into Sinhalese.
(10) Failure to produce a daily working-class newspaper.
(11) Attempting to disrupt mass organisations and fronts under the leadership of the Party.
(12) Resorting to communal propaganda to discredit and isolate comrades fighting for revolutionary principles.
We, hereby, declare that these charges are sufficiently serious to warrant a loss of confidence by the rank and file in the leadership of the Party. We, further, declare that the present Central Committee is unconstitutional in as much as it has outlived its constitutional span of life and that it has no right to speak on behalf of the Party.
Desirous of rectifying the mistakes of the present leadership of the Party and of ridding the Party of the deadweight of revisionism; deeply conscious of the necessity to give a new leadership to the revolutionary and genuinely Marxist-Leninist elements inside the Party, who are in a majority and thereby provide a revolutionary leadership to the proletarian movement in our country and, convinced that the present leadership will never convene a democratically constituted Congress, we hereby decide to convoke the 7th Congress of the Ceylon Communist Party at an early date. We call upon all genuine Marxist-Leninist groups inside the Ceylon Communist Party to accept this invitation and to nominate delegates to this Congress and also to give us their full support for the summoning of this Congress.
We hereby appoint an Organising Committee consisting of Premalal Kumarasiri, N. Sanmugathasan, D. N. Nadunge, D. K. D. Jinendrapala, Higgoda Dharmasena, K. Manickavasagar, N. L. Perera, K. Wimalapala, K. Kulaveerasingham, W. S. de Siriwardene, A. D. Charleshamy, Watson Fernando, W. A. Dharmadasa, S. M. Wickremasinghe, A. Jayasuriya, D. A. Gunasekera, Cyril Kulatunge, Victor Silva, K. A. Subramaniam, Susima, K. V. Krishnakutty, S. Janapriya, Kanti Abeyasekere, E. T. Moorthy, Dharmadasa Jayakoddy, H. G. A. de Silva, S. M. P. de Silva, H. M. P. Mohideen, D. M. J. Abeyagunewardene, O. A. Ramiah, D. B. Alwis, C. S. Manohar, S. Sivadasan, Samarasiri de Silva, P. Wijayatileke with Comrade Premalal Kumarasiri as Secretary to make the necessary organisational and political preparations for summoning such a Congress.
We hereby affix our signatures to this declaration to signify our complete support for these proposals.
November 17, 1963