Early Years

The Early Years in Politics

Dr. Kodituwakku first became involved with United National Party politics as a university student in the 1960’s. He joined the All Ceylon UNP Youth League in 1964 and took part in the election work of the successful campaign of 1965. Two years later, he was elected to the Youth League’s Working Committee. In this capacity, he was vigorously involved in the 1970 elections, mainly canvassing in Colombo and its suburbs and doing a lot of politics with the late MDH Jayewardene. At the time, Dr. Kodituwakku was a lecturer in Economics at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and was one of the few university academics on the UNP platform.

The elections relegated the UNP to the opposition benches, but Dr. Kodituwakku continued to work closely with the party. In 1971, the then UNP leader, Dudley Senanayake, who is respected as a role model by many aspiring politicians in Sri Lanka, appointed Dr. Kodituwakku as the Acting General Secretary of the All Ceylon UNP Youth League. In 1973, he was elected its General Secretary.

Learning from Dudley

These early years in politics set the foundation for Dr. Kodituwakku’s ideals and vision in his politics. He worked closely with Dudley Senanayake and took the former Prime Minister as his foremost role model. He learned from Dudley’s honesty, his simple and down-to-earth qualities, his far-sightedness, and his constant pulling away from narrow-mindedness around him to always be a true gentleman and democrat. Dr. Kodituwakku, with Dudley’s nephew Rukman, was one of the last people to see Dudley alive when he visited the latter a few minutes before he passed away at Durdan’s Hospital. Dr. Kodituwakku still holds high what he learned from Dudley, and continues to work to keep his memory alive, as a Council member of the Dudley Senanayake Foundation.

In 1974, Dr. Kodituwakku was appointed to the UNP’s Working Committee by the party’s new leader, J.R. Jayewardene, who became the first Executive President of Sri Lanka in 1978. In this capacity, he became a member of the party’s Policy and Program Committee under the chairmanship of Ranasinghe Premadasa as its three member representatives from the youth league with Ranil Wickramasinghe and Rukman Senanayake. The committee’s recommendations and eventual report became the base document for the UNP’s 1977 manifesto, which introduced radical political and economic reforms in Sri Lanka.

Dr. Kodituwakku’s first appointment to the Working Committee in 1974, thirty-five years ago, makes him one of the few most senior members of the UNP Working Committee at present.

During these years, when J.R. Jayewardene was doing a lot of reorganizing of the party machinery, Dr. Kodituwakku worked in parallel reorganization within the youth movement. Political suppression was rife in the mid 1970s so J.R. Jayewardene organized Satyagraha campaigns to protest the situation and Dr. Kodituwakku played a major role in their organization. Eventually when public political meetings were banned, Dr. Kodituwakku started to organize youth seminars as a tool of education on politics and the need for change. Eventually even J.R. Jayewardene began to come to these meetings because the ban on political meetings made these educational seminars the only way to communicate with the masses.

After the UNP’s eventual victory in the 1977 elections, Dr. Kodituwakku continued to work closely with the new government in various capacities, as noted in other sections of this site.