Sunday Times 2
The S.L. Gunasekara that I knew
View(s):
- ‘To be yourself in a world that is consistently trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.’
- - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The 11th death anniversary of Suneetha Lakshman Gunasekara, known to his family, his contemporaries at S. Thomas’ College-Mount Lavinia, his friends and his peers at the Sri Lankan Bar as SL, fell on January 8, 2026. This is not an appreciation of S.L. Gunasekara. He despised flattery and servility. Rather, it is intended to reflect the personality of S.L. Gunasekara.
S.L. Gunasekara was a man who did not mince his words, either in conversation with his friends or with clients. A client had come to retain him in a divorce matter involving adultery as well as another cause of action. He had advised the client a number of times to drop the adultery matter, but the client was insistent. The client’s daughter at the relevant time was studying in a leading private school in Colombo 7. Finally, he had told the client that when she gets married someday, to use his own words, ‘those snobbish Colombo 7 B… will say her mother is a whore, and the best evidence of that is your affidavit.’ The client had immediately agreed to drop the adultery matter.
S.L. Gunasekara: A man of principles
On another occasion, he was critical of the appointment of a judge to a high diplomatic post. His view was that if a person is not competent in the vocation that he was trained in, then he cannot be competent in an area that he was not trained in. I interjected to state that he is a nice person. He replied that his dog too is nice and that it should never be a part of the criteria to hold high public office.
He had a great sense of humour. It was an impish sense of humour. One day I was walking with him to the entrance of the Supreme Court complex in the morning. He had with him some books with his files. On a couple of previous occasions, I had asked him whether I could carry his books. He had shrugged it aside. My contemporary and friend, Priyadharshani Dias, was seated near the entrance of the Supreme Court complex, waiting for her senior, Mr Ranjith Abeysuriya, P.C., to arrive. When she saw Mr Gunasekara, she said, ‘Sir, why don’t you get Indra to carry the books?’ The repartee was quintessential S.L. Gunasekera: ‘Juniors are not porters!’
He was punctilious in the use of the English language. Whenever I used the term ‘Affirmant’ in an affidavit, he used to strike it out and insert the word ‘deponent’. His reasoning was that there is no such word in the English language. I was curious. I had seen the word used in many affidavits drafted by other leading lawyers in Colombo. I perused the Oxford, Cambridge and Collins dictionaries. Naturally, the verb ‘to affirm’ was there in the dictionaries, but the noun ‘affirmant’ was absent. However, the American Webster’s dictionary did contain the word. Basically, it is an American legal term. On the next occasion when he struck out the word ‘Affirmant’, I casually mentioned to him that the word is in the dictionary. With a quizzical look, he asked me which dictionary I was referring to, and when I gave the answer, his reply was typical of his wit: ‘That is not English.’
Mr Gunasekera was no respecter of persons. He was fearless when he felt he was wrongly targeted. He had been appearing before a certain district judge. The judge had been increasingly rude to him for the reason that he was addressing him as ‘Sir’ and not as ‘Your Honour’. Mr Gunasekara belonged to the ‘Old School’ and was well versed in the traditions of the Sri Lankan Bar. His father, E.H.T. Gunasekara, was Solicitor-General and thereafter a highly respected judge of the Supreme Court. The tradition was that you refer in court to magistrates and district judges as ‘Sir’, High Court judges as ‘Your Honour’ and Court of Appeal and Supreme Court judges as ‘Your Lordships’. Mr Gunasekera had taken on the district judge and told him in no uncertain terms that for forty years he had addressed people like him as ‘Sir’ and that he will not change it to ingratiate himself with a district judge. Needless to state that these traditions are now a thing of the past.
Mr Gunasekara was extremely nice to his juniors. He treated them with the utmost cordiality and always kept their interests at heart. I know of an instance where a fee memo was sent to a client to pay one half of Mr Gunasekara’s fee to his junior, which is the usual case when the junior has over ten years in practice. The instructing attorney called him and said the client was not willing to pay the one-half fee to the junior and was only willing to pay the usual one-third junior’s fee. Mr Gunasekera gave the solution to the issue immediately. He told the instructing attorney to inform the client to pay the junior the one-half fee and reduced the difference from his fee. This was typical of S.L. Gunasekara.
In the murky world of politics, he was a failure. He lacked the necessary attributes to be a successful Sri Lankan politician: ruthlessness, expediency and the patience to wait for the opportune moment to strike. His entry to active politics was in 1989 when he was appointed by Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranayake to Parliament as a National List member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. Thereafter, he was one of the founding members of the Sinhala Urumaya party. The betrayal from within, which he felt after the 2000 General Election, made him leave active politics. His honesty and forthright views were not conducive to success in a Sri Lankan political landscape.
Thimpu Talks
The vicissitudes of life did not escape him. He was a resilient man. In 1985, President J.R. Jayewardene nominated H.W. Jayawardena Q.C., H.L. de Silva P.C., Chandra Seneviratne P.C., Mark Fernando P.C. and S.L. Gunasekara to represent the Government of Sri Lanka at what is now termed the Thimphu Talks to negotiate with the LTTE. During the negotiations, Mr H.L. de Silva and Mr Gunasekara walked out of the negotiating table, unable to tolerate the intransigent demands of the LTTE. This infuriated the then government. At that time Mr Gunasekara’s practice had been predominantly confined to criminal and industrial law-related matters. At that time, he was handling most of the work of the Sri Lanka State Plantations Corporation, the Janatha Estates Development Board and Sri Lankan Airlines. He once told me that when you handle most of the work of these three institutions, you hardly have time to take other work. All these institutions were wholly owned and controlled by the State. When he came back to Sri Lanka from Thimphu, he had immediately returned the briefs before they requested him to do so, as he believed would be the case. It had been a difficult time for S.L. Gunasekara. From an extensive practice, he had suddenly become a briefless lawyer. It was only then, as he told me, that he had opened the Civil Procedure Code after he left the Sri Lanka Law College. He had a very good grasp of the first principles of law, which he believed were fundamental to the success of a lawyer. This, coupled with his incisive mind, readily enabled him to steadily build a lucrative practice in the civil law sphere. He was also fortunate. His brother-in-law had started a law firm in 1987, and he was regularly retained in many cases involving civil law by that firm. This gave him the opportunity to demonstrate that he was equally competent in civil law matters as well as other areas of the law. I believe that Paul Ratnayake played a contributory role in the rise of S.L. Gunasekara as one of
Sri Lanka’s leading civil law lawyers.
The honorific of ‘President’s Counsel’ did not attract him. He did not apply for the position. He believed that with the 8th amendment to the Constitution, the position had been diluted and compromised. Initially, the first batch of President’s Counsel (referred to then as Senior Counsel) was selected by Chief Justice Neville Samarakoon in consultation with the other Supreme Court judges in 1981. The story doing the rounds at that time had been that a powerful minister of the Jayewardene government had applied for the position and had been rejected by Chief Justice Neville Samarakoon. The minister concerned was arguably one of the finest ministers that Sri Lanka has seen in the last forty years. However, Chief Justice Neville Samarakoon had felt that the minister concerned did not have the same standing in the legal profession comparable to the others who were appointed in the said batch. The following batch of senior counsel included men who had reached undoubted eminence and who commanded tremendous respect in the legal profession: S. Pasupati, C.V. Gunatilaka, Eardley Perera, A.C. de Zoysa, G.F. Sethukavalar, Eric Amarasinghe, Nimal Senanayake, J.W. Subasinghe, H.L. de Silva, K.N. Choksy and Daya Perera. The 8th amendment to the Constitution (which came into being in 1984) amended article 33 of the Constitution and gave the President the unfettered discretion to appoint President’s Counsels as an exercise of his/her prerogative power. It is said that the 8th amendment to the Constitution was orchestrated by the said powerful minister to make it a certainty that he would be appointed in a subsequent batch. This opened the floodgates for some persons who are wholly unsuitable for such a title being conferred purely on their political patronage.
The ability to be objective in judging a person irrespective of differences of opinion was a remarkable trait he demonstrated in life. When Justice C.V. Wigneswaran was elevated to the Supreme Court, he made a controversial speech at the Ceremonial Court held to welcome him. The speech revolved around his perceived grievances of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka. S.L. Gunasekara took him on openly in the press, criticising his speech and its contents. Nevertheless, he always had the highest regard for Justice C.V. Wigneswaran. He was of the view that Justice Wigneswaran, the judge, was a man of stature. A man of tremendous integrity, a man of impartiality with a keen sense to act in the furtherance of justice.
Controversial views
Controversy was not alien to S.L. Gunasekara. His views were sometimes not in accordance with the norm. For example, he was of the view that the so-called ‘Independent Commissions’ were a waste of time and a waste of state resources. According to him, you cannot find twenty-five ‘independent’ persons to sit in these commissions, and the commissions will become a rubber stamp to endorse the decisions of the executive president. The coming years will determine whether this view is correct or not.
‘Necessary delay’, he believed, was integral to a just legal system. It means that a litigant must be given a fair opportunity to exercise his legal rights and that any delay caused by this fact is a necessity that has to be tolerated. It is especially important in the criminal law sphere, as Article 13(3) of the Constitution confers a fundamental right on an accused to obtain a fair trial. Any attempt to override or curtail such a right will be repugnant to any system that values the Rule of Law. However, this does not mean that an inordinate delay to conclude a case can be condoned, like a partition action taking fifteen years to be concluded.
He also believed that the competence of the middle tier of the Sri Lankan Criminal Bar is poor and that consequently many innocent persons may be languishing in Sri Lankan jails. Ours is an adversarial legal system. Judges are not meant to go on a voyage of discovery to ascertain the truth. They have to act on the evidence placed before them. In a system where it is not very difficult to fabricate evidence, it is necessary to have proper legal representation to expose the deficiencies of the evidence (if any) presented to court.
Similarly, his views regarding
Sri Lankan society also deviated from the conventional. He believed that within some sections of Sri Lankan society, honesty may be a disqualification. Not only will the person who is honest not be taken seriously, but a further step may also come into being. The person will be looked down upon with contempt, a fool, a misfit who has gone against the tide. A harsh view.
Ingratitude was another area in which his views were not entirely conventional. Although ingratitude is part of the human psyche in general and not confined to Sri Lankans, he was of the view that with some Sri Lankans, it took a different turn. According to him, the person whom you have helped may be the very person who will harm you subsequently. Another harsh view. However, this happens in politics all the time, all over the world. In politics, as the reworded saying of Lord Palmerston states, ‘There are no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.’
S.L. Gunasekara was a devoted family man. In later years, he became very attached to his two grandchildren living with him at Model Farm Road, Borella. The normally strong-minded, aggressive S.L. Gunasekara displayed a different personality when it related to his grandchildren. An example: His grandson Saliya was in the rowing team at S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, and the team was scheduled to go, of all places, to Pakistan to take part in a competition. The trip was cancelled at the last moment. He was upset. As he put it, schoolboys look forward eagerly to foreign trips. I was pleasantly surprised that this seemingly trivial matter had struck a sensitive chord in the man. A little-known aspect of the personality of S.L. Gunasekara.
In a Sri Lankan society plagued with hypocrisy, sycophancy, and corruption, Suneetha Lakshman Gunasekara stood tall; true to himself, true to his values, true to his ideals. That may be his greatest accomplishment. Such men are rare in contemporary Sri Lanka. I consider it a pleasure to have known such a man. I consider it a pleasure to have worked under such a man.
Indra Ladduwahetty