The first JVP 'hand bomb' casualty, from Dambadeniya, in 1971

            I was a Resident Surgeon at the General Hospital Kandy in 1970, leading up to the elections, at a time when The Right Hon.Dudley Senanayake (Yes those days the Prime Ministers were called The Right Honourable), was in power. There was a build up of the newly arrived, JVP (The Jana Vimukthi Peramuna of Rohana Wijeweera, the ex student of Patrice Lumumba University of Moscow). A large gathering was present at the Bogambara stadium, in Kandy, when Rohana Wijeweera the then rising orator, addressed the large crowd. He seemed to make quite an impression among the younger crowd.

    One night, a few months later, they brought a male youth, in his late teens, with severe blast injuries on the hands and face, to the surgical casualty ward. He had been transferred from Nittambuwa. The story given by the police who were guarding him was, that he had been manufacturing a hand bomb, which had accidentally exploded. This was in Dudley's electorate and the patient was suspected to be a member of the JVP. This boded ill for the days to come, but the police were confident that this could be easily contained.

            The patient had a regular wound toilet done, of a mangled hand, but became very restless. He kept on repeating "Mang kiwwa, meka keranda epa kiyala" (I said not to do this). He kept on repeating this in a loud voice, over and over, in his delirium, to the moment of his death, in the recovery area of the operating theatre.

        This type of death in casualty was a rare occurrence for us those days. A few months later, one afternoon, when as Resident Surgeon, I went to do my casualty round, I found a youngster chained to the bed post, with police guarding him, with 303 Enfield rifles on the ready. They told me that this youngster had attempted to attack a police station. The police had shot him in the attempt. I remarked that he was  mad to attack a police station. Those days this was unheard of. I took him to the operating theatre and at laparotomy found that the rifle bullet, had entered anterior and superior to the tip of the right trochanter, and traversed the abdomen without injuring bowel. It had traversed between the left internal and external iliac arteries, just scraping the external iliac posteriorly and exited by the left side of the hip, drilling a hole through the pelvic bone. He had escaped death by 'a bush hair', as we would have said at Medical College. He recovered and went into custody.    

       The 'days of wine and roses', in Ceylon, was coming to an end.