Hector Abhayavardhana

In August 1992 Abhayavardhana, along with Vivienne Goonewardena and Bernard Soysa was a guest of honour at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Quit India movement in New Delhi.

Abhayavardhana started The Nation as an English organ of the United Front, serving as its editor. When the United Front formed a government in 1970 Hector served as Chairman of the People's Bank under Dr. N.M. Perera, the Finance Minister. After the front broke up in 1975, he founded the Socialist Nation. He also served on the Educational Bureau of the LSSP and was a long-standing member of the Politburo.

Abhayavardhana is credited with formulating the classification of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) as a petty bourgeois party, which was the ideological and theoretical foundation of the LSSP Coalition with that party in 1964. After this, he promoted an alliance with the SLFP and the Communist Party, which finally emerged with the signing of the Common Programme of the United Front in 1968.

In 1959 Abhayavardhana married Kusala Fernando and returned to Sri Lanka in 1960.

He worked on the fortnightly New Spark in Bombay, later moving to Chennai. He became General Secretary of the Socialist Party which was created by the fusion in 1948 of the BLPI with the Congress Socialist Party. He moved to New Delhi where he was editor of the Socialist Appeal and contributor to the Hindustan Standard. He spent two years in Hyderabad editing Mankind before returning to New Delhi where he began the critical journal Maral.

Abhayavardhana was recruited to the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in 1940 by Esmond Wickremesinghe (later to be father of Ranil Wickremasinghe). He became part of the clandestine section of the LSSP that was established, in anticipation of its proscription, to work underground. After the party leaders were imprisoned and escaped to India he joined them in exile there (disguised as an Anglican priest) and worked in the Independence movement.

Abhayavardhana's first exposure to radical politics was the Bracegirdle incident, in which the Colonial Government sought to deport an Australian labour activist. He attended a mass meeting at Galle Face Green on 5 May 1937 at Bracegirdle made a dramatic appearance and a stirring speech before being whisked away into hiding. At the time, his father was the Chief Clerk in the office of Governor Reginald Stubbs, who sought the deportation and against whom this meeting was directed.

At fifteen he renounced Christianity and became an atheist. In 1936 he joined University College, Colombo where he read liberal arts and came under the influence of E.F.C. Ludowyk and Doric de Souza, who had Marxist sympathies. He went on to complete his colonial education at the Colombo Law College.

Hector Abhayavardhana (5 January 1919 – 22 September 2012) was a Sri Lankan Trotskyist theoretician, a long-standing member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and a founder-member of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma.