Travails of a publisher
M.D. Sepala Gunasena was born on September 22nd 1923, the eldest son of M. D. Gunasena the well known book publisher, book seller and printer. After his father’s death in 1959, he became the Chairman of the M.D. Gunasena Group of Companies.
In 1960, Sepala Gunasena founded Independent Newspapers Ltd. and on the 14th of August 1961, the first issue of the Sinhala daily the DAVASA rolled out from the presses. It was soon followed by an English daily the SUN and a Tamil daily the Thinapathy. On Sundays the Company published the Sinhala Sunday newspaper the RIVIRASA, the English Sunday the WEEKEND and the Tamil Sunday the Chinthamanie. It also published a host of weekly magazines.
But during the course of the company’s chequered history, Sepala Gunasena had to wage a valiant battle to safeguard the independence of his newspapers and to defend the freedom of the press in Lanka. In April 1974, the company’s presses were sealed by the Sirimavo government on the urgings of its leftist coalition partners. It was only unsealed when the emergency regulations under which it had been sealed lapsed in early 1977 when Parliament was dissolved to hold elections. Thus automatically freed from bondage, the newspapers started publishing again from the 31st of March that same year.
In 1990 when government institutions withdrew their advertising, when state banks recalled the loans given to the company immediately and followed it up by publishing an ex parate notice in the papers to sell by public auction the properties the company had mortgaged as collateral for the loans, the sun began to set for the man and his newspapers. And on December 26th Sepala Gunasena, unable to publish his newspapers whilst maintaining an independent stance, preferred to let the sun go down on his newspapers rather than compromise on his principle of press independence.
He passed away on June 10th 1993. As the Sunday Times editorial stated on June 13th 1993: “Though he did not live to see it, the Sunday Times today honours him with editorial tribute and a pledge that the ideals of press freedom he lived for and died for, would be carried by us and all independent journalists into the future pages of our history.”
Today the Sunday Times reproduces an article it published the day after Sepala Gunasena’s funeral as a tribute to this knight defender of the freedom of the press on his 96th birth anniversary.