N. Shanmugathasan

Nagalingam Shanmugathasan (Tamil: நாகலிங்கம் சண்முகதாசன், 1920 – 8 February 1993) was a trade unionist and Maoist revolutionary leader in Sri Lanka. He was the founding General Secretary of the Ceylon Communist Party.

Shanmugathasan hailed from a family of modest means in the town of Manipay in Jaffna District. He began studying history at the University College Colombo in 1938, where he first came into contact with communist ideas and met supporters of the Communist Party of Great Britain who had returned from studying at Cambridge University. In 1939 he and two fellow students were suspended, but soon reinstated, from the university for distributing anti-imperialist flyers after the outbreak of World War II. Shanmugathasan gained notoriety among the students after this action and in 1940 won in the student election to become General Secretary of the University Union Society. The next year he was elected President of the Society. In the meantime, he was organising a group of Communists among the students that opposed both British imperialism and the Trotskyists of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party.

After graduating from the university in 1943, Shanmugathasan joined the trade union movement, and became a full-time activist of the Ceylon Communist Party. He became the head of the Ceylon Trade Union Federation and led several strikes, including the general strike of 1947, the Hartal (general strike) of 1953, and a transport strike in 1955.

In the aftermath of the Soviet-Chinese split of the Communist movement, he was expelled from the Ceylon Communist Party in 1963 for pro-Mao views. In 1964 he became the general secretary of the Ceylon Communist Party (Peking Wing) (later CCP(Maoist)). He contested the 1965 general election as a Communist Party (Peking Wing) candidate, but was unsuccessful: he won only 0.5% of the vote. The party at its ninth Congress held in 1969 upheld Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Shanmugathasan visited China twice during the Cultural Revolution and was important enough to have addressed thousands of Red Guards.

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