Get complete information on the evolution of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka

The root of modern conflict goes back to British colonial rule when the country was known as Ceylon. A nationalist political movement from Sinhalese communities arose in the country in the early 20th century with the aim of obtaining political independence, which was eventually granted by the British after peaceful negotiations in 1948.

Disagreements between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic communities flared up when drawing up the country’s first post- independence constitution.

After their election to the State Council in 1936, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) members N.M. Perera and Philip Gunawardena demanded the replacement of English as the official language by Sinhala and Tamil. In November 1936, a motion that ‘in the Municipal and Police Courts of the Island the proceedings should be in the vernacular’ and that ‘entries in police stations should be recorded in the language in which they are originally stated’ were passed by the State Council and referred to the Legal Secretary.

However, in 1944, J.R. Jayawardene moved in the State Council that Sinhala should replace English as the official language. In 1956 Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s passage of the “Sinhala Only Act” led to ethnic riots. The civil war is a direct result of the escalation of the confrontational politics that followed. The formation of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) with its Vaddukkodei (Vattukottai) resolution of 1976 led to a hardening of attitudes.

In 1963, shortly after the nationalisation of petroleum by the Sri Lanka government, documents relating to a separate Tamil state of Tamil Eelam began to circulate. At this time, Anton Balasingham, an employee of the British High Commission in Colombo, began to participate in separatist activities. He later migrated to Britain, where he became the chief theoretician of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In the late 1960s, several Tamil youth, among them Velupillai Prabhakaran also became involved in these activities. These forces together formed the Tamil New Tigers in 1972.

This was formed around a racist ideology which looked back to the 1st Millennium Chola Empire {the Tiger was the emblem of that empire) and an action program based on the film persona of Clint Eastwood, who was Prabhakaran’s hero. A further movement, the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students, formed in Manchester and London; it became the backbone of the Eelamist movement in the diaspora, arranging passports and employment for immigrants.

It became the basis of the eelamist logistical organisation, later taken over entirely by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The TULF supported the armed actions of the young militants of the TNT who were dubbed “our boys.” These “boys” were the product of the post-war population explosion.

Many partially educated, unemployed Sinhala and Tamil youth fell for simplistic racist and violent revolutionary solutions to their problems. The leftist parties had remained “non-communal” for a long time, but the Federal Party (as well as its off-shoot, the TULF), deeply conservative and dominated by Vellala casteism, did not attempt to form a national alliance with the leftists in their fight for language rights.

The sweeping electoral victory of the UNP in July 1977, the TULF became the leading opposition party, with around one sixth of the total electoral vote winning on a party platform of secession from Sri Lanka. In August 1977, Junius Richard Jayawardene’s new UNP government followed its attack on the Left with a well organised pogrom against Tamils living in majority Sinhalese areas.

In August the government granted only the educational rights demanded by the Tamils. But to the Tamil leadership that was losing the control it had on the Tamil militants after not being able to follow through with the election promise of seceding from Sri Lanka to form Tamil, it was too little too late.

Tamil resurgence:

Sinhalese resurgence was matched by Tamil resurgence. It must not be confused with Hindu resurgence for the circumstances of Sri Lanka were different. Here Buddhism did not pose any threat to Hinduism. If at all, the latter faced any threat it was from the Christian missionaries. As a Hindu community the challenge that the Tamils faced from the Sinhalese Buddhists was only in the realm of social institutions.

Arumuga Navalar (1833- 1870), who was the pioneer of Tamil resurgence, emphasised on the return to orthodoxy which included the institution of un-touch ability. The preeminence of the Vellalas of Jaffna, who had for centuries dominated the political and economic affairs of the Tamils, was highlighted. This Vellala consciousness conceived the Sinhalese numerical dominance as a threat to its basic values because it tended to intervene into the Tamil Social system on the pretext of weeding out its undesirable features.

While Hinduism did not play a significant role in building the Tamil consciousness, the community’s historical image contributed considerably to its shaping. It drew its inspiration from concepts pertaining to territory, dynasty and language.

Ethnicity and the Nationalist Movement

Unlike the Indian nationalist movement under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, the Sri Lankan movement was essentially elitist which included both Sinhalese and Tamil elite. But this elitism was also marked by a strong presence of ethnicity in which one community considered its loss as the other’s gain and vice versa.

This distrust, which was noticeable during the formation of the Ceylon National Congress in 1919, deepened with the introduction of the universal adult suffrage in 193 1. Fearing marginalisation by the Sinhala majority, Tamils began to demand ‘balanced representation’ in the legislature, which meant 50 per cent reservation for the minorities and strived for a multiracial or multiethnic setup. The conception of corporate unity in the minds of the Sinhalese is in the nature of a merger, absorption, of the minorities in the major community. A just and more correct idea of a united Ceylon is that of a rich and gorgeous many-colored mosaic, set and studded with the diversities of communal consciousness within a glorious one-minded solidarity.