This week, 49 years ago recorded an unprecedented event in the political history of Sri Lanka. The removal of several Cabinet ministers unceremoniously by the Prime Minister happened in December 1959. Wijayananada Dahanayake, a seasoned politician by then, was serving as Minister of Education in the 1956 S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike government, at the time Prime Minister Bandaranaike was
assassinated in September 1959. Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) senior minister and Leader of the House C. P. de Silva being away on medical treatment at the time, Dahanayake was elected Prime Minister. It was something he had never dreamed of.

The simple man from the South assumed power under emergency rule proclaimed immediately after the Prime Minister's killing. Declaring that 'D' in his name stood for 'Discipline,' he set about his task by first imposing a rigid censorship on the Press thereby silencing any opposition to him. Soon there was dissension within the Cabinet coupled with the Opposition demanding a general election on the ground that the government had no moral right to continue without a mandate from the people. However, he managed to survive no confidence motions in Parliament.

On December 3, 1959, he removed the state of emergency and two days later dissolved Parliament and fixed the general election for March 19, 1960. On December 7, Dahanayake resigned from the SLFP but the party refused to accept the resignation and expelled him. The following day, five ministers and a deputy minister learnt from the newspapers that they were no longer members of the Cabinet. The Prime Minister had removed them. During the next four weeks he removed the SLFP ministers one by one. By January 6, 1960, there weren't any.

Meanwhile, Dahanayake had formed a new party – the Lanka Prajatantravadi Pakshaya (LPP) and five of its members were taken in to the Caretaker Cabinet. At the general election, the LPP put forward 101 candidates, second only to the United National Party (UNP) which had 127 candidates. Only four LPP members won. Dahanayake himself was defeated by 483 votes – the first time that a ruling Prime Minister got defeated at a general election while in office. A very popular Member of Parliament lost his seat. He resigned on March 20, a day after the election and left Temple Trees, the official residence of the Prime Minister, carrying with him two suitcases which had his sole possessions. He went back to his home in Galle.

As the saying 'you can't keep a good man down,' his absence from Parliament lasted only three months. When the Dudley Senanayake government fell, he came back as a member of the LPP in the July 1960 general election and sat in the Opposition. After winning the 1965 general election, he joined the UNP as Minister of Home Affairs.

Early days

Dahanayake was arguably the most colourful politician in the country's legislature from mid 1940s – from the days of the State Council. He was a trained teacher but was soon attracted to politics and became a member of the Galle Municipal Council in 1939. He was the first elected Mayor of Galle for three years by which time his was a well known name in the whole country.

When the Bibile seat (it was then one of the remotest areas in Sri Lanka) in the second State Council fell vacant in October 1944, he contested and won. A strong critic of the British administration of the day, he soon made a name for himself as a common man's representative. He set up a record when he spoke for 13 hours once during a Budget debate, thereby earning the name 'Voice from Bibile.' Possibly this is still the longest speech made in Sri Lanka's legislature.

Joining the Bolshevik Leninist Party (BLP) formed by Dr. Colvin R. de Silva after leaving the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) around 1945, Dahanayake contested the first parliamentary general election in 1947 and won. Following the merger of the BLP and LSSP, he was the LSSP candidate for Galle at the 1952 election which he won again. He lost party membership when as an opposition MP he
garlanded the UNP Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake.

Thereafter he sat in the Opposition as a leftwing Independent MP. Nearing the 1956 general election, with the cry of 'Sinhala Only,' he formed the Bhasha Peramuna and merged with the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) led by Bandaranaike for the election. He became Minister of Education in the Bandaranaike government which portfolio he held until 1960, even when he was Prime Minister.

A popular Education Minister, he was fondly called 'bunis mama' when he introduced the free
mid-day meal for school children. He was lauded for his effort in elevating the two Buddhist institutes of learning – Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara Pirivenas – to university status, for which act he was awarded a
honorary doctorate.

His last stint as a minister was in the J. R. Jayewardene Cabinet when he served as Minister of Cooperatives 1986 – 88. Having remained a bachelor all his life, clad in a simple white national dress, he died on May 4, 1997, at the age of 95. The only visible change in his last years was a full grown beard. A stamp was released on October 22, 2002 to commemorate his birth centenary.