ඔව් බන් lee kuwan yew ගේ speech එකක තිබ්බා බණ්ඩගේ ඔය වැඩේ තාමා ලංකාවට කෙලවෙන්න පටන් ගත්ත තැන කියලා. අනික් එක ceylon තිබ්බ එක srilanka කරපු එක. තාම අපේ තේ යන්නේ ceylon tea කියලානේ.
"LKY says that Bandaranaike was elated to have won the election mandate from a Sinhala majority and he had promised to make Sinhalese the official language and Buddhism the state religion and did not seem troubled by the disadvantage caused by the minorities as a result of it, during his conversations with him he felt that Bandaranaike spoke to him as if he had still been a member of the Oxford Union debating society, despite all his effort to be a champion of the Sinhalese Language, he states that three years later he was not surprised to hear about his assassination by a Buddhist monk
LKY’s second visit to Sri Lanka was in 1966, when Dudley Senanayake was the prime minister of the Country, who he refers as a gentle, resigned and a fatalistic elderly man. He felt that Senanayake was a weak leader and did not have control over the citizens of the country.
When he visited Sri Lanka for the third time in 1970, the prime minister of Sri Lanka was Sirimavo Bandaranaike, whom he believed had won due to a sympathy vote but he describes her as a tougher, determined and less voluble leader than her husband S.W.R.D Bandaranaike. LKY further states the futility of Mrs Bandaranaike’s decision to change the name of the country from ‘Ceylon’ to ‘Sri Lanka’ and making the country a republic as it did not improve the fortunes of the country, the best example he takes here is that Sri Lankan Tea was still been sold as Ceylon Tea as a matter of fact even to this day Sri Lankan Tea is known as Ceylon Tea. He further states that by changing names sometimes you could deceive gods, but you can’t deceive the people who live in it.
His meeting with President J R Jayewardene took place outside Sri Lanka, which was at the CHOGRM Conference held in Sydney. He says that during this meeting Jayewardene wanted Sri Lanka to move away from socialist policies which had bankrupted the country and wanted Singapore to get involved in the development of Sri Lanka; he says that he was impressed by his practical approach which made him visit Sri Lanka for the fourth time in 1978. Despite the positive outlook LKY had on President Jayewardene, as time went by he started seeing his drawbacks, the former thought that the latter’s decision to start a national airline as a symbol of progress and employ a pilot as a chairman of the newly built airline as a weakness. He finally states Jayewardene retired as a tired man who had run out of solutions, which indicates that his opinion of Jayewardene had changed.
.
He calls Ranasingha Premadasa, who succeeded him a ‘Sinhala Chauvinist’. He did not have a positive attitude towards Ranasinghe Premadasa.
A few years before his death in an interview he had given to the American journalist Tom Plate he gives his views on the former President and the incumbent Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa as follows: “He thinks he has finished the war, I have read his speeches, I knew he was a Sinhalese extremist and I cannot change his mind”, he felt that Rajapaksa was an obstinate leader and extremist."
