World's first woman PM bows out

By Nirupama Subramanian

COLOMBO, AUG. 10. Ms. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world's first woman Prime Minister, who once dreamed of turning Sri Lanka into a socialist state, today announced her retirement from politics after a record four decades in public life.

A government communique said the 84-year-old Ms. Bandaranaike resigned on Wednesday night for reasons of health from her third tenure in the office of the Prime Minister.

With just a few days to go before the announcement of general elections, her resignation enabled her daughter and President, Ms. Chandrika Kumaratunga, to appoint to the office an old soldier of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to consolidate the party's Sinhala-Buddhist vote base. Mr. Ratnasiri Wickremenayake's appointment as the new Prime Minister ahead of the general elections is seen as a conciliatory message to those sections of the majority community that were up in arms against Ms. Kumaratunga for trying to change the Constitution.

In the resignation letter addressed to the President, Ms. Bandaranaike said her health did not permit active participation in governmental activities or party politics. ``I have taken this decision to enable you to appoint a suitable person as Prime Minister in order that he may be able to actively campaign for the People's Alliance in the coming general elections.''

Ms. Bandaranaike said she would continue to be ``a source of encouragement to you, the party and the Government from behind the scenes''. Adding a personal touch, she wrote: ``May you be blessed with courage, strength and wisdom to successfully realise the dreams that your father and I have dreamt and partially realised for our peoples.''

Catapulted from the kitchen to the highest office of the land following the 1959 assassination of her husband, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, her succession prompted a London newspaper to coin the word ``stateswoman''. Arguably setting a trend in South Asian politics, she rode a sympathy wave in the tear-jerker election of July 1960 to a landslide victory.

Matriarch of the island's politics, Ms. Sirimavo Bandarnaike became Prime Minister for the third time after her daughter Chandrika was elected Executive President in 1994. By then, it had become a titular office.

Wheelchair-bound, Ms. Bandarnaike in her last tenure as Prime Minister was a picture in contrast to the first two times she occupied the office in the 60s and 70s after hard won elections. Those were momentous times for Sri Lanka, both on the domestic and international scene. Much to the surprise of her political rivals, Ms. Bandaranaike survived an attempted coup and an armed insurrection.

She also introduced the highly feudal country to a severe form of socialism for which the easy-going islanders handed her such a punishment at the hustings in 1977 that the SLFP was unable to recover from it for 17 long years.

But to her credit, Mrs. B, as she is popularly known, managed to hold together the highly-fractious SLFP, founded by her husband, through the long period of exile, and despite a politically crippling decision by Parliament to deprive her of her civil rights.

After those rights were restored, a shrill campaign against the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka accord, appealing to Sinhalese nationalism, and a promise to send back the Indian Peace Keeping Force failed to win her the presidency in the 1989 elections against Ranasinghe Premadasa of the UNP.

Mrs. B's dreams of seeing the SLFP back in power came true at long last, when the party and its coalition partners, called the People's Alliance, won the 1994 polls under the leadership of her daughter Chandrika.

By then, she had been laid low by a paralytic stroke. She reluctantly handed over the reins of the party before the elections to her second daughter Chandrika, a relatively new entrant to the party and one-time political opponent.

Mrs. B's decision to anoint Chandrika her successor angered son Anura, youngest of her three children. To her lasting bitterness, he walked out of the SLFP and joined the UNP. Till today, her efforts to reunite her warring children continue. Her eldest daughter Sunethra has kept out of politics.

A co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mrs. B built lasting ties with China and her deep personal friendship with Indira Gandhi saw the disputed island of Kachateevu being given to Sri Lanka.

It was also Ms. Bandaranaike who changed the island's name from the colonial Ceylon to the nationalistic Sri Lanka in 1972, enacting a republican Constitution in keeping with the times.

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