Senanayake, Dudley Shelton

He was educated at Cambridge College of Corpus Christi and licensed to practice law in Middle Temple, London . In 1937, he was elected to the State Council of Ceylon, and in 1946, his father, resigning to prepare for the independence of the country, handed him his post as Minister of Agriculture, which Senanayake also occupied in the first government of independent Ceylon under the leadership of his father. In 1952, Don Stephen Senanayake suddenly died shortly before the parliamentary elections, and Governor General Lord Salberi unexpectedly proposed the son of the deceased as prime minister. The United National Party agreed with this choice. Under the leadership of Senanayake Jr., they managed to win the elections, despite the emergence of a strong left-wing opposition represented by the Freedom Party led by Solomon Bandaranaike . However, already in 1953, the policy of the Minister of Finance Jayawardene to cut social benefits for the poor and increase the price of rice led to the resignation of not only Jayawardene, but Senanayake himself. This, however, did not save the party from defeat in the 1956 election , after which it was again headed by Senanayake. In 1960, he managed to slightly get ahead of the left and re-form a government, but only three months later he was forced to convene an early election, in which he was again defeated. In 1965, the Senanayaka managed to re-form the government with the support of a number of small parties, primarily Tamil nationalists. The Senanayake government has taken a number of measures to develop the national economy, primarily due to the tourism industry. At the same time, the contradictions between Senanayake, who advocated a populist reconciliation policy, and Jayawardene, who proposed switching to Sinhala nationalism and economic conservatism, intensified. The growth of interethnic contradictions led to the fact that in the 1970 elections , the Party of Freedom , which spoke from a radical Sinhala-nationalist position, won with a crushing margin. Senanayake remained the formal leader of the ONP until his death three years later, but due to health reasons he actually transferred the leadership of the opposition to Jayawardene.