Introduction
Almost immediately after Independence, the government of Sri Lanka enacted legislation depriving Hill-country Tamils of their citizenship and franchise; subsequent governments enacted laws and carried out policies discriminating against and persecuting all Tamil-speaking citizens, with the avowed intention of making Sri Lanka a ‘Sinhala-Buddhist’ nation-state. In response, Tamil militant groups set out to establish a Tamil state in the Northeast, resulting in a civil war that lasted twenty-six years. Even after the war ended in 2009, practices that had engendered it continued.
This paper looks at the issues of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationality’ as well as ‘culture’ and ‘community’ as they have been studied in various disciplines, and attempts to explore alternative ways of accommodating different linguistic, religious and cultural communities within Sri Lanka, or indeed any nation-state, without either suppressing minorities or leading to conflict and separation.
Sinhala Nationalism and the Undermining of Democracy
Assaults on the fundamental rights of minorities started soon after Sri Lanka’s Independence in February 1948. The Constitution decreed in Section 29(2) that no law shall (b) ‘make persons of any community or religion liable to disabilities or restrictions to which persons of other communities or religions are not made liable’, or (c) ‘confer on persons of any community or religion any privilege or advantage which is not conferred on persons of other communities and religions’. It did not, however, define citizenship, nor spell out a Bill of Rights. The Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act of 1949 stipulated stringent conditions for recognition of citizenship by descent or registration, and the Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act of 1949 made citizenship mandatory for having the franchise (Wickramasinghe 2006: 171-72). The consequence was to render stateless and disenfranchise the overwhelming majority of Hill-Country Tamils – descendents of indentured plantation workers brought over from India by the British – who were poor, illiterate, and lacked documents which could prove their right to citizenship.[1] They had voted against the ruling United National Party (UNP) in the elections, thus denying it an absolute majority, and this stratagem eliminated them from the electorate. The Left parties – the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Bolshevik Leninist Party and Communist Party (CP) – voted en masse against the laws, which they denounced as racist, anti-working class, and an attack on democracy (Jayawardena 2003: 52-62).
Language became the next battleground. In 1944, the Ceylon Legislative Council had voted by 27 votes to 2 recommending that both Sinhala and Tamil be made the official languages for school instruction, public service examinations and legislative proceedings. In 1956, S.W.R.D. Banadaranaike, who had broken away from the UNP to form the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and a coalition, the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP or People’s United Front), fought the elections on the slogan of ‘Sinhala Only’, and won an absolute majority. A large part of the Sinhalese petty bourgeoisie, including Buddhist monks, supported this agenda in the belief that it would provide Sinhalese with jobs by reducing employment opportunities for Tamils. The Official Language Act was passed, making Sinhala the only official language. Both the UNP and MEP, along with a breakaway Left party, the Viplavakari (Revolutionary) LSSP of Philip Gunawardena, voted for the bill. The minority parties and the rest of the Left voted against it, warning that it could lead to the division of the country (Jayawardena 2003: 66-79).
This led directly to the first large-scale post-Independence outbreak of communal violence. Faced with the threat of a satyagraha organised by the Federal Party (FP) led by S.J.V.Chelvanayakam, which advocated a federal form of government with equal status for Tamil as a national language, Bandaranaike signed the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact in 1957, recognising Tamil as the language of a national minority and of administration in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, where regional councils with limited powers over administration – including education and the allotment of land – would be established. A year later, in response to a militant agitation by Buddhist monks, Bandaranaike tore up the Pact. Tamils protested in Jaffna, and this was followed by an orgy of arson and murder against Tamils by Sinhalese hoodlums in other parts of the country. Bandaranaike at first refused to intervene; then, when the violence appeared to be getting out of control, he handed over authority to the Governor-General, who declared an Emergency (Vittachi 1958). It has been suggested that stopping the riots would inevitably involve shooting at Sinhalese gangs, and Bandaranaike wanted to avoid the unpopularity which would follow (Vittachi 1958: 77). If so, he failed. In 1959, a member of an organisation of Buddhist monks, the Eksath Bhikku Peramuna (EBP), assassinated him (Samarasinghe 2007).
By 1964, the LSSP and CP were allied with the SLFP (now led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike), and abandoned their support for the rights of Hill-country Tamils and parity between Sinhala and Tamil. Breakaway groups from the LSSP and CP stood by their earlier positions; yet the fact that the only major non-minority parties which had supported minority rights now abandoned that cause exacerbated the communal polarisation. In 1968, the SLFP, LSSP and CP formed a United Front (UF) which was elected to power in 1970. The UF government introduced the ‘standardisation’ system, whereby the minimum university entrance marks for a Tamil medium student were higher than those for a Sinhala medium student. The new system put Tamil students at a disadvantage by comparison with Sinhalese students from the same social strata, creating a group of frustrated and embittered Tamil youth, especially among Jaffna Tamils, whose university entrance results had traditionally been very good (Hyndman 1988: 171).
Given these attacks on equality aimed at giving Sinhalese privileges at the expense of Tamils, it is paradoxical that in 1971 the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which drew its membership and supporters precisely from the strata that were supposed to benefit from these policies, launched an insurrection. The ideology of the JVP was a mixture of socialism and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Prior to the formation of the JVP, its leader Wijeweera had been in the Ceylon Communist Party (Peking Wing), and in 1966 was disciplined for his participation in demonstrations against the Senanayake-Chelvanayakam pact that provided for the reasonable use of Tamil and regional devolution of power. Later, one of the five lectures by means of which the JVP propagated its ideology proclaimed that the plantation workers were an arm of Indian expansionism, and should be repatriated to India. The putchist conception of revolution and authoritarian structure of the party were also notable. After the defeat of the 1971 insurrection, in which an estimated 5-10,000 people were killed (Wickramasinghe 2006: 237), many survivors engaged in a critique of the authoritarian and chauvinist elements in the JVP’s ideology, and left the party (Ismail 1983).
The depth of dissatisfaction among Sinhalese youth should have alerted the UF government to the fact that discrimination against Tamils did not benefit the majority of Sinhalese, and other policies to address issues of poverty and unemployment were needed. Instead, it went further along the same trajectory. In the name of nationalisation, plantation land was distributed to Sinhalese supporters under the Land Reform Law No.1 of 1972 and the amendment to it in 1975. Tamil plantation workers and their families were physically assaulted and driven out, their dwellings looted and burned; some were killed and others were left to starve (Vije 1987: 60-63).
The 1972 Republican Constitution – presided over, ironically, by Minister of Constitutional Affairs Colvin R. de Silva, who had earlier predicted that Sinhala Only could lead to the creation of ‘two torn little bleeding states’ – not only gave constitutional status to Sinhala as the sole official language, but also provided a special place to Buddhism and omitted the protection of minority rights in Section 29 (Hyndman 1988: 72). It also omitted the second chamber, the independent Public Service Commission (intended to guarantee impartiality in public service appointments), and the Judicial Service Commission (intended to guarantee the independence and integrity of the judiciary), and prohibited judicial review of legislation (Jayawickrama 2008). Thus, in addition to further depriving minorities of their rights, it centralised power in a manner that could be used against the majority. The 1978 Constitution enacted under J.R.Jayawardene, leader of the UNP which came to power in 1977, further centralised power in the hands of one person – the Executive President – and omitted the fundamental right to life.
The anti-Tamil pogroms of 1977 started just a month after the UNP took office: ‘Violence spread through the entire country. Plantation areas were widely affected, including estates, towns and villages. Tamils were massacred in their hundreds and their property was looted, burnt or otherwise destroyed. It was estimated that between 5000 and 7000 families, besides being subject to bodily injury and in some cases rape and murder, lost all or nearly all the goods they possessed’ (Vije 1987: 64).
In May 1981, violence broke out in Jaffna on the eve of the District Development Council elections: ‘With several high-ranking Sinhalese security officers and two Cabinet Ministers… present in the town, uniformed security men and plainsclothes thugs carried out some well-organised acts of destruction. They burned to the ground certain chosen targets – including the Jaffna Public Library, with its 95,000 volumes and priceless manuscripts, a Hindu temple, the office and machinery of the independent Tamil newspaper Eelanadu, the house of the MP for Jaffna, the head quarters of the TULF, and more than 100 shops and markets’ (Murray 1984). This was followed by islandwide violence: ‘It is clear that subsequent violence in July and August, which was directed against Sri Lankan Tamils in the east and south of the country, and Indian tea estate workers in the central region, was not random. It was stimulated, and in some cases organised, by members of the ruling UNP, among them intimates of the President. In all 25 people died, scores of women were raped, and thousands were made homeless, losing all their meagre belongings’ (Eads 1981).
These pogroms were overshadowed by the carnage of 1983, which gathered strength from March onwards. On 25 July,
Organised action against Tamils in the streets and in buildings and against Tamil establishments was being taken by squads which had taken up their positions and armed themselves with hit-lists and weapons… One of the most remarkable exploits of the ‘heroes’ was the massacre, that day, in Welikade Prison (Sri Lanka’s most important) of 35 people,.. most either on remand or arbitrarily detained by the military. All were Sri Lanka Tamils…
The pogrom continued less intensely in Greater Colombo for three more days, in spite of the curfew. On Tuesday, 26 July, some of the action squad were transported to Kandy, some 70 miles away, and that afternoon there was a similar sharp and quick action there… It then moved further up-country, past towns like Matale (devastated) and Nawalapitiya towards Badulla and Nuwara Eliya. Hindu temples had been added to the hit list. Army action had resulted in over 60 per cent of Badulla city being reduced to rubble. On the 27th, incredibly, the second massacre of Tamil political detainees and remand prisoners was successfully carried out… By the end of the week, the majority of the some 600,000 Sri Lanka Tamil children, men and women in the predominantly Sinhala-speaking areas and in Colombo, and many of the 800,000 ‘Indian Tamils’ had been driven out or fled from their homes and places of work… (Piyadasa 1988: 89-91)
Many of these refugees were displaced repeatedly. For example, Hill-country Tamils who had fled the plantations in 1977 and 1981 were settled on Kent and Dollar farms near Vavuniya in the Northern Province, which had been donated by a wealthy Tamil landowner. In 1984, ‘On the plea that these had become “terrorist-infested” areas, government troops launched search-and-destroy missions and literally chased these hapless plantation Tamils from the areas, making them refugees on the run again’ (Saturday Review 1987). The government then took over the farms and settled Sinhalese ex-convicts and their families on them. An account of the attempt to settle 45,000 Sinhalese villagers in Batticaloa District in the Eastern Province showed very clearly that this was not spontaneous migration by the villagers, but an attempt by Sinhalese politicians and Buddhist monks to bribe them with the offer of free land (Gunaratna 1988). Alongside the pogroms and other means by which Tamils were driven out, these ‘colonisation’ schemes constituted government programmes of population transfer, defined in international law as a crime against humanity.
The Indo-Lanka Accord signed by Rajiv Gandhi and J.R.Jayawardene in July 1987 attempted to bring about a political solution to end the war. While recognising the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka, it also affirmed the country’s multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious character; the Northern and Eastern Provinces were termed ‘areas of historical habitation of Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking peoples’ and were merged, subject to a referendum on or before 31 December 1988, when the people of the Eastern Province could decide by a simple majority whether to remain merged or to de-merge. The Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment made Tamil an official language and provided for limited devolution of power to Provincial Councils. In an Annexure to the agreement, provision was made for the president to invite an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to guarantee and enforce the cessation of hostilities, and the IPKF was subsequently stationed in the North-East.
The Accord was opposed by powerful sections within the government, including Prime Minister R. Premadasa, who succeeded Jayawardene after the presidential elections of December 1988. His opposition to the Accord explains Premadasa’s support to the LTTE, which had started fighting the IPKF in October 1987 (UTHR-J 1990a: 1; Jayaweera 1990: 11, 24). The Accord was also opposed by the JVP, which had re-emerged as a political force and had started killing opponents in 1986. Daya Pathirana, leader of the Independent Students’ Union which supported the rights of Tamils, was one victim (Hoole 2001: 220-21); there is also a great deal of evidence that in February 1988 the JVP assassinated Vijaya Kumaratunga, a rising political star who was popular among Sinhalese and supported the Accord, although he opposed the presence of Indian troops (Hoole 2001: 294-305).
In 1986, those who remained in the JVP, still led by Wijeweera, were the hardliners. The response of the leadership to those who opposed them inside or outside the organisation was simple: kill them. The state, controlled by the UNP, was equally ruthless and far more powerful. This is what resulted in the gruesome atrocities and tens of thousands of deaths during the second JVP insurgency, which started in 1987 and ended shortly after the execution of Wijeweera in November 1989.
It is evident that political leaders of various parties stoked Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in an effort to gain or remain in power, thereby unleashing forces intent on transforming Sri Lanka from the multi-lingual, multi-religious country it had been for centuries into a Sinhala-Buddhist nation where minorities would be deprived of all rights.
Tamil Nationalism: A Parallel Trajectory
Soon after the 1972 constitution was enacted, various Tamil parties, including the FP (led by S.J.V.Chelvanayakam and A.Amirthalingam), Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC, representing Hill-country Tamils) and Tamil Congress, came together in the Tamil United Front (TUF). The TUF became the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in May 1976, after adopting a resolution calling for a separate state at its Vaddukottai Conference. However Alfred Duraiappah, independent MP from 1960 to 1965, several times mayor of Jaffna and a popular figure, disagreed. ‘He had a vote bank in the significant business, Muslim and Sinhalese communities and the urban poor. This popularity of Duraiappah irked the nationalists… From 1972, the TUF (FP) launched vicious attacks on Duraiappah, calling him a traitor worthy of death… On 27th July 1975, Duraiappah was shot dead when he arrived by car in the Ponnalai Varadaraja Perumal Temple with two companions, as was his custom on Friday evenings. Prabhakaran was among the group of assassins who formed the incipient Tiger Movement… We may say that the TULF pointed a pistol at Duraiappah and looked the other side, knowing that someone would pull the trigger’ (Hoole 2001: 17-19). According to a former Government Agent of Jaffna, Duraiappah told him of an earlier attempt on his life which failed, adding, ‘The extremists hate and fear me as a politician who believes in unity between Tamils and Sinhalese people’ (Devendra 2008).
This incident encapsulates many of the themes that recur in the history of Tamil nationalism. One is the cult of violence, which was extolled even by the supposedly non-violent leadership of the TULF. The murder of TULF leaders Amirthalingam and Yogeswaran by the LTTE in Colombo in 1989 was strongly reminiscent of the murder of Bandaranaike by the EBP; like Bandaranaike, the TULF leaders created a Frankenstein’s monster which eventually destroyed them. It also destroyed many others supposedly fighting for the same goal of Tamil Eelam. ‘Able members of other groups were marked by the LTTE and “switched off” when opportunity arose… It was in May 1986 that the LTTE revealed its intentions openly by attacking the TELO when there was a split in its leadership and likewise the EPRLF in December 1986. The PLOTE had already destroyed itself by its internal killings’ (Hoole 2001: 423). The Indian government made no small contribution to this violence by its policy of arming and training Tamil militants after July 1983: ‘Several militant leaders and expatriate Tamils have been frank about the links the Indian government and its intelligence agency R.A.W. had with the militant groups’ (Hoole et al. 1990: 199-200). The murder of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE in 1991 was a classic case of ‘blowback’ resulting from this sponsorship of militancy, yet the policy was justified by the Jain Commission enquiry into the assassination (Koshy 1997).
The cult of violence also found expression in attacks on Sinhalese and Muslim civilians. One of the earliest was the massacre of ex-convicts and their families settled in the Kent and Dollar farms in 1984; among other major attacks were the massacre of Buddhist pilgrims at Anuradhapura in 1985; the Kattankudi mosque massacre in 1990; the massacre of Muslims in Eravur in 1990; the Central Bank bombing in 1996; the bombing of a commuter train in Dehiwela in 1996; and the Kebithigollewa massacre in 2006. These are only the worst of hundreds of attacks on civilians. An obvious purpose of the attacks in the North and East was to drive out Sinhalese and Muslims: i.e., transfer of population.
Given that in almost every case the state and Home Guards reacted by inflicting even greater violence on Tamil civilians, it has been suggested that another purpose of these massacres was to ‘keep the Tamils in a state of insecurity, subjecting them to contrived reprisals – a state in which the LTTE appears as their champion’ (Hoole 2001: 346). A similar strategy was adopted with the IPKF; thus in October 1987, the LTTE fired at the Indian army from Jaffna hospital, as a consequence of which the IPKF stormed the hospital and seventy civilians were killed; then it fired at the IPKF from Kokkuvil Hindu College, which was being used as a refugee camp, and the IPKF retaliated by killing over 30 civilians (Hoole 2001: 420).
Tamil civilians who dissented from the LTTE, especially those who rejected the goal of a separate Tamil state, were systematically assassinated. The list of those who shared Duraiappah’s fate is far too long to enumerate, but the LTTE’s murders include those of Rajani Thiranagama (1989), Sarojini Yogeswaran (1998), Neelan Thiruchelvam (1999), T.Subathiran (2003), Lakshman Kadirgamar (2005) and Kethesh Loganathan (2006). Complete subjection to the totalitarian rule of the leader, V. Prabhakaran, was ensured by stamping out dissent or competition of any kind. Anyone who disagreed with the leader was branded a traitor worthy of death and killed, sometimes after being incarcerated and tortured. This treatment was meted out even to LTTE members. ‘Dissidents in the North-East… place the total number of Tamils killed by the LTTE at 20,000…Apart from Prabhakaran, nearly all those from the 1987 leadership are dead… Several top leaders were killed or suffered an unknown fate like Mahattaya… Every leader feared the “Uzi Group” – an internal spy group whose members were known only to Prabhakaran’ (Hoole 2001: 424, 428).
However, when Prabhakaran tried to liquidate Karuna Amman, his Eastern commander, who expressed dissatisfaction with LTTE policies in 2004, he failed. Despite a confrontation in which hundreds of his supporters were killed, Karuna survived and formed the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP), which teamed up with the government to defeat Prabhakaran’s forces in the East. In fact, ‘Karuna’s challenge to Prabhakaran’s authority was more than a personal matter. It was driven by more deeply rooted historical, cultural and regional differences and political-economic inequities between Tamils of the north and the east’ (Bandarage 2008).
The LTTE split was one consequence of its marginalisation and exclusion of large sections of Tamil-speaking people. The CWC, representing Tamils from the central hills of Sri Lanka, left the TUF when the TULF was formed, since it had no interest in a separate state in the North-East. In 1964, Mrs Bandaranaike had come to an agreement with Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri that 525,000 of the Hill-country Tamils would be accepted as Indian citizens within fifteen years, and in 1974 the Sirimavo-Indira Pact was agreed upon, by which 75,000 more were to be deported to India, ‘and yet, by mid-1984, only 445,000 persons in all have been repatriated to India, most of them against their will’ (Daniel 1996: 115). The persistent demand of Hill-country Tamils for citizenship of Sri Lanka was ignored by the Tamil nationalists, because it did not fit in with their demand for a separate state in the North-East.
A partially overlapping exclusion was that of Tamil Dalits. The Sri Lankan Dalit Development Front was set up in 2006 to fight for their rights, and held its second meeting in London in 2008. Its Dalit Declaration chronicled the untouchability, caste discrimination and violence inflicted on Dalits by upper-caste Tamils, as well as struggles by Dalits for access to temples, tea-shops, water, franchise, education and political representation. It stated that ‘Political power, if any, earned in the name of Tamil nationalism would in no way serve the interests of the Dalits, who are denied their due social respect and basic human rights.’
Another section excluded by Tamil nationalism were the Muslims of Sri Lanka. At first the attempt was to deny their specificity by including them in the category of ‘Tamil-speaking people,’ but this was rejected by Muslims (Ismail 2005: 123). The LTTE responded to this refusal with massacres of Muslims in the East and the wholesale expulsion of Muslims from the North, a clear case of ethnic cleansing. ‘In October 1990, all over the Northern Province, close to 75,000 Muslims were compelled to vacate their homes at gun point, hand over their belongings, and leave… These people lost their homes, possessions, livelihoods, communities and personal histories in one day’ (Haniffa 2007: 16).
Thus Tamil nationalism, like Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, attempted to destroy the plural character of the North-East and convert it into an exclusively Tamil nation-state where even Tamil-speaking minorities would have no rights.
The Construction of Sinhala and Tamil Identities
Cultural identities in Sri Lanka are neither as clear-cut nor as rigid as they are often assumed to be. As an important entrepot in ancient times, Sri Lanka (previously known as Ceylon) attracted traders and settlers, mostly from India but also from West and East Asia, who mingled with the indigenous Väddas – rather than exterminating or subordinating them (Obeyesekere 2002) – and with one another. Most of the major religions of the world were represented among these settlers, including Christianity, which was present in Sri Lanka long before it became a European colony. From the early 16th century onwards, with successive conquests by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, settlers from Europe as well as European colonies in Africa and elsewhere added to the mixture. Both intermarriage and non-marital unions were common at all levels of society, producing large numbers of children of mixed ethnicity (Jayawardena 2007). Most Sri Lankans with European ancestry eventually came to be called ‘Burghers’.
Initially, there were Tamil-speaking as well as Sinhala-speaking Buddhists, and close links between Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Tamil Buddhists in South India (Bandaranayake 1984: A.xvii). The kinship system among both Sinhalese and Tamils resembles that of South India, with parallel cousins regarded as brothers and sisters and marriage with them being forbidden, whereas cross cousins are encouraged to marry. Along with other anthropological and textual evidence, this suggests that both Sinhalese and Tamils come from the same stock (Guneratne 2002). Furthermore, migrants often adopted the language of the area where they settled, so that identities based on language could and did change.
At the 1891 Census, the total population was 3,007,800, of which 67.3 per cent were Sinhalese, 16 per cent were Sri Lanka Tamils, 9 per cent were Hill-country Tamils, 6.8 per cent were Muslims, 0.7 per cent were Burghers, and 0.2 per cent were Europeans.
Colombo’s population then was 127,836. Colombo was already then a truly multi-communal, multi-religious city. By 1946 its population had ‘naturally’ grown to 362,074, of which 38.5 per cent were Buddhists, 18.1 Hindus, 20.5 Muslims and 22.7 Christians… Of those in it who were 3 years and over, 38 per cent could speak both Sinhala and Tamil, 28 per cent could speak English, and 14.4 per cent could speak all three languages. 47 per cent could speak Tamil, but that was partly because 40 per cent of its population had Tamil as their first language (Piyadasa 1988: 21).
Prior to Independence, therefore, Sri Lanka could have been described as a ‘melting pot’ or ‘hybrid island’ (Silva 2002). Even the foundation-myth of the Sinhalese has Vijaya, the grandson of a lion (sinha), first having a liaison with an indigenous yakkhini, Kuveni; but needing a wife of kshatriya caste before he can be consecrated king, he asks for the hand of the daughter of the Pandya king, who sends his daughter and many other maidens. Vijaya dumps Kuveni, marries the princess, and members of his retinue marry the other maidens. Thus the same myth which establishes the origin of the Sinhalese as the people of the lion also has the founder of the kingdom having a liaison with an indigenous woman and then marrying a Tamil princess.
If on the one hand linguistic communities had boundaries that were blurred and fluid, on the other, they were divided internally – in some cases deeply so – by caste, class, religion and region. Distinctions between Sinhalese Goyigama and lower castes, Tamil Vellala and lower castes, employers and workers, Sinhala-speaking Buddhists and Christians, Tamil-speaking Hindus and Muslims, Kandyan and Low-Country Sinhalese, or Jaffna and Eastern or Hill-Country Tamils were often more important markers of identity than language (Daniel 15-19). Conversely, there were instances in the labour movement when class solidarity trumped other elements of identity, bringing workers together across linguistic, religious and caste boundaries in common struggle (Jayawardena 2003: 18-19).
This was not a promising scenario for communal politics, which could take off only by constructing monolithic and mutually exclusive ethnic identities.[2] One of the stories central to the construction of a Sinhala Buddhist identity is that of Dutugemunu, who defeated the Northern Tamil king Elara. The historical evidence suggests that Elara was one of several rulers defeated by Dutugemunu, who was probably ‘a powerful military leader who unified the island for the first time after fighting against several different principalities. His campaigns do not appear to represent a Sinhala-Tamil confrontation’ (Gunawardena 1984: 19).
The construction of a ‘pure’ Sinhala-Buddhist identity gathered strength with the development of racist ideologies in the late 19th century, which later culminated in fascism. Thus ‘Buddhist revivalists in Sri Lanka… adopted the doctrine of racial superiority, glorified an idyllic past and associated the Sinhala people with the chosen “Aryan race” and the chosen Buddhist faith. The Aryan concept occurs in the writings of the Buddhist leaders of the period such as Anagarika Dharmapala, who consistently maintained that “the Sinhalese… in whose veins no savage blood is found… stand as the representatives of Aryan civilization”’ (Jayawardena 1984: 88). The influence of European anti-Semitism comes out in Dharmapala’s contribution to the Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon, published in 1908, where he speaks of ‘the glorious inheritance of Aryan ancestors, uncontaminated by Semitic and savage ideas’ (quoted in Gunawardena 1984: 42). This constructed identity became the basis for Sinhala nationalism.
A homogeneous Tamil identity was similarly in need of construction. The stereotypical Tamil was seen as coming from Jaffna, where the 13th century Tamil kingdom was based, being upper-caste, speaking the purest form of Tamil, and adhering to the Saiva Siddhanta sect of Hinduism taught by Arumuga Navalar in the 19th century (cf. Sivathamby 1984; Coomaraswamy 1987). This development was not simply a reaction to the rise of Sinhala nationalism:
It would be wrong to view Tamil nationalism… as defensive in every aspect... Tamil nationalists, like their counterparts, had a sense of superiority. Their historical build-up from the feudal past was equally mythical and romantic. They were feeding their electorates and the youth with images of valour, preservation of race and language, and history heavily loaded with anti-Sinhalese, pro-Indian ingredients. Tamil politicians often drew images from history harking back to the “glorious” days of the Tamil kings and the days of the Chola empire in South India. They contrasted the antiquity and purity of the Tamil language with the more recent development of the Sinhalese language, scoffing at the latter as a derivative of other Indian languages. They attributed the high levels of literacy and education among Tamils to their superior intelligence as opposed to the Sinhalese who, they claimed, were lazy and less intellectually inclined. (Hoole et al. 1990: 339)
A significant feature of Sinhala nationalism is that its conception of an ideal society harks back to a period when absolute power resided in the monarch:
This is a vision of the state in which absolute power is theoretically vested with the ruler who assumes power by virtue of his birth to the royal family… In that master image of the Sinhalese Buddhist polity, the sovereign’s absolute power is controlled by the Sangha, and not by the subjects. And one must read Professor Leslie Gunawardhana’s Robe and the Plough to learn that even those monks who had a “controlling influence over the sovereign” were not just proletarian monks but those who were endowed with landed estates.
What I want to suggest is that the dominant Sinhalese Buddhist intellectual tradition and even its contemporary militant variants have demonstrated a fundamental incapacity to formulate a concept of politics by breaking away from the image of a benevolent monarchy and positing the problem of political power in a vision of a competitive, pluralistic and truly democratic political system. Hence the inherently authoritarian character of the Sinhalese Buddhist tradition. (Uyangoda 1988)
Tamil nationalism, similarly, harks back to a past characterised by an absolute monarchy. In other words, Sinhala and Tamil nationalists both derive their politics from models of society which ruled out democracy, and could – depending on the ruler – be guilty of terrible cruelty. Their ‘national identities’ not only exclude minority communities, but are also so narrow that they have to be imposed on the majority of their ‘own’ people, who can be punished with incarceration, torture, disappearance and death if they fail to comply. This is what explains the appalling atrocities Sinhala and Tamil nationalists have inflicted on their own communities.
An inability to learn from history?
Post-war, there has been a disturbing tendency to return to the very same ideologies and policies that led to the war in the first place. A couple of examples will suffice to illustrate the state’s treatment of minorities.
There were persistent efforts to ‘Sinhalise’ Trincomalee, an extremely mixed town in the Eastern Province. These included rewriting the history of Trincomalee to conceal the role of minorities in its past; changing the original signboard at the Kanniya Hot Springs, which linked it to the legend of Ravana in Tamil, Sinhala and English, to a signboard in only Sinhala and English linking it to a Buddhist monastery; setting up a new Buddhist temple at the site while allowing the old Hindu temple to be neglected and ruined; setting up a long line of Sinhalese traders’ stalls on either side of the access road to the ancient Koneswaram Hindu temple; displacing Tamil and Muslim families from their land in the name of High Security Zones and Special Economic Zones, leading to their loss of both homes and livelihoods; settling Sinhalese in such land with the support of the government and police; and above all, appointing as Government Agent of Trincomalee a retired military man who repeatedly declared that Sri Lanka was a ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ nation, who spoke to largely Tamil-speaking audiences in Sinhala without an interpreter, and whose decisions were biased against minorities (Hoole 2014).
The other example is from Southern Sri Lanka, where an extremist Buddhist monk organisation, the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), embarked on attacks on Muslims from 2012 onwards, reaching an orgy of violence in June 2014. The regime’s backing for the perpetrators was clear from the behaviour of the police, who allowed the thugs to wreak violence on helpless Muslims with impunity but arrested the moderate monk Wataraka Vijitha Thero, who had spoken up for the rights of minorities, after he was severely assaulted and left tied up on the road by the BBS. As one observer pointed out, ‘Mobs on the streets, houses being burnt, people being attacked due to their race or religion, some being killed, the law enforcement and security services unable or unwilling to arrest the situation, that describes the streets of Colombo and the rest of the country in July 1983 and thirty years later, after a bloody civil conflict was brought to an end, we were at it again as a nation. Back then it was the Tamils, with a UNP President and administration, this time around it was the Muslims and the President and administration was SLFP. We seem to have a bi partisan problem with justice and social harmony’ (Peiris 2014).
On the other side, the Tamil National Alliance, which had earlier acted at the behest of the LTTE, abandoned the goal of a separate Tamil state, but diaspora organisations like the Global Tamil Forum and (even more emphatically) the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam kept alive the goal of working for a Tamil nation-state. Given the military defeat of the LTTE, they adopted the strategy of calling for the indictment of the Sri Lanka government for war crimes and genocide. While the charge of genocide was not taken seriously by anyone familiar with international law, the demand for a war crimes investigation into the last phase of the civil war was taken up by the UN Human Rights Council in three resolutions.
The Report of the UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka (UN 2011) is a valuable document. It includes information about the background to the civil war, a comprehensive list of war crimes by both sides in the conflict, and recommendations for protecting the human rights of survivors and detainees and restoring freedom of movement, assembly and expression, apart from a wealth of references. The resolutions of the UNHRC on Sri Lanka have also emphasised the need to end ongoing attacks on human rights in the North and East of Sri Lanka as well as the the rest of the island. Yet most other reports focus almost exclusively on war crimes by the government of Sri Lanka in the last stages of the war.
Accountability is important, and establishing the truth even more so. However, there is reason to doubt that such reports can lead to either. One problem is their failure to give due weight to the contribution of war crimes committed by the LTTE to the massive death toll during the whole war and especially the last stages of it, suggesting that such reporting is driven by the agenda of the pro-LTTE diaspora. Another characteristic is the failure to highlight ongoing violations of human rights by the government after the war, including sexual abuse of Tamils by Sinhalese security force personnel. This would be a priority for human rights defenders, since there is a chance that campaigns over these issues could end violations and save lives. For LTTE supporters, however, this was never the priority. As the award-winning University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) observed, ‘The pro-LTTE lobby never protested when the LTTE abused peace processes in the past and spurned opportunities for a political settlement, applauding it as part of a Machiavellian strategy to acquire Eelam. This made their recent cry of genocide a sham. They and the LTTE must bear principal responsibility for the fate of the civilians’ (UTHR-J 2009, 2.1).
Thus Sinhala nationalism on one side and Tamil nationalism on the other, with their constructed, mutually-exclusive and internally-homogeneous identities, were still being promoted after the end of a war, despite ample evidence that they had been responsible for the carnage.
Ethnicity, nationality, culture and community
There have been various attempts to chalk out a political solution to the conflict in Sri Lanka, but the question I wish to ask is: does the way in which we define the problem and use the terms ‘ethnicity’, ‘nationality’, ‘culture’ and ‘community’ make it impossible to find such a solution?
Liberals and left-wingers in the early 20th century rightly rejected the concept of ‘race’ as being ideological and unscientific, but they still needed language to characterise the groups which were subjected to various forms of exclusion or oppression. One solution, used especially in Eastern Europe, was the term ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’. Otto Bauer refers to ‘national character’ as being shaped historically, distinguishing the literature, philosophy, and even science and workers’ movement of one country from those of another (Bauer 2000: 9). In ‘multinational’ countries, he supported suggestions that they could be divided up into cantons, with monolingual cantons having a canton council which would ‘take responsibility for all tasks pertaining to both public administration and national administration’; in ‘dual’ cantons like Budweis ‘on the other hand, the canton council would have responsibility only for administrative tasks which were of a nationally neutral character, whereas national cultural tasks would be the responsibility of German and Czech canton delegations’ (Bauer 2000: 285).
For those national minorities who were too small or too scattered to form canton delegations of their own, it was suggested, national associations or concurrences would be formed to provide legal assistance when dealing with the authorities if they had problems with the language, and to maintain elementary schools in which their own language would be the medium of instruction (Bauer 2000: 286). This suggests that the most important ‘national cultural tasks’ pertained to language rights. However religion (for example with respect to Jews) and the broader notion of culture referred to above would also be relevant in defining ‘nationality’.
Fragmenting administration – including taxation – along these lines would inevitably create problems, as Bauer himself recognised in cases where, say, a German employer in a predominantly German canton exploited mainly Czech workers but paid taxes only to the German ‘nation’; moreover, it created categories of people whose rights would be different depending on whether they were the majority, a large minority, or a small one. These problems were compounded by Stalin's definition of a nation as a ‘historically-constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture,’ with a right to a state of their own (Stalin 1954: 303). In the debate between V.I. Lenin (1972, 1974) and Rosa Luxemburg (1976) on the right of nations to self-determination, the rights of colonies and of minorities became thoroughly entangled, partly because imperial powers in Eastern Europe colonised adjacent territories rather than overseas ones. Lenin’s position endorsing the right to separate states was absolutely correct for colonies but disastrous for minorities scattered across a country or countries, while Luxemburg’s support for minority rights but opposition to separate states was absolutely right for minorities but sidestepped the right of colonies to independence from imperial powers.
The meaning of ‘nationality’ in this context, as a cultural community based on some combination of common language, religion, history and country of origin, is almost the same as what has come to be called ‘ethnicity’ in the West. Hannah Arendt (2004) bemoaned the coming together of nation and state because it resulted in the denial of rights to minorities who had previously enjoyed the protection of the state:
Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people, the state was forced to recognise only “nationals” as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation’ (p.296).
The distinction Arendt draws here is between the state as the guarantor of equality before the law and the state as an instrument of the majority community, which can refuse full civil and political rights to minority communities. This is precisely the distinction that needs to be drawn in Sri Lanka. The tragedy of Tamil nationalism is that by defining its goal as an exclusively ‘Tamil’ state rather than fighting for a state in which all individuals are equal before the law, it reinforced the Sinhala nationalist discourse defining Sri Lanka as an exclusively Sinhala-Buddhist state; it accepted the notion of a majoritarian state, thus legitimising ethnic cleansing, rather than fighting for a constitutional democracy with equal rights for all. Changing our language would help to reverse this development: ‘nation’ should only be used to mean nation-state, and ‘nationality’ to refer to the country of the individual’s citizenship, regardless of community.
Some of the ways in which ‘ethnicity’ has come to be used also pose serious problems. The trouble with the notion of ‘race’ is that it postulates such fundamental and immutable differences between people of different ‘races’ that it amounts to a denial of their shared humanity. As the institution of apartheid – literally ‘separate development’ – made clear, segregation was at the heart of this particular practice of racism. The denial of shared humanity is what allows people of one ‘race’ to enslave, colonise or massacre people of another without feeling that they are committing crimes against humanity. In theory, the term ‘ethnicity’ does not share this drawback, if it is understood to be based on culture and history, which are constantly changing. Yet ‘the notion of “ethnicity”… has increasingly become a substitute for “race”, a coded way of reinventing racial categories without making skin colour the key issue… First, the emphasis on culture is not related to biology in the sense of indicating that some human beings are genetically superior or inferior to others, but in the sense that human beings are naturally hostile to those with different cultures… Second, and more important, we are seeing the naturalisation of “ethnic” characteristics. Attributes or properties like religion or language that were once regarded as socially acquired and consequently amenable to change are increasingly being treated as if they were naturally occurring and permanent’ (Davidson 1999).
Many well-intentioned advocates of the rights of Tamils use ‘ethnicity’ in precisely this sense, ignoring the hybrid character of Sri Lankan society, which survived even in the midst of the war. Interviews with refugees and internally displaced people in 1989-90 evoked many expressions of warmth and affection for people of other communities, as well as stories in which Sinhalese friends, neighbours and even strangers saved the lives of Tamils. Among the most tragic stories were those of three Tamil sisters, all married to Sinhalese men, whose husbands had been hacked to death by the LTTE while fleeing from Batticaloa, and who were afraid to go back because their children spoke Sinhala (Hensman 56-57). It is precisely because of the intermingling of these supposedly separate ethnic groups that such brutality is required to tear them apart; in a world where separation is enforced, there is no place for these families.
The use of ‘ethnicity’ as a fundamental and immutable characteristic creates two linked problems: it simultaneously suggests that people of different ethnic groups have nothing in common, and that there is homogeneity within each group. Nothing could be further from the truth. Gender, class, caste, region and politics divide all ethnic groups, in some cases bitterly. If the ultimate act of ‘othering’ is to kill someone, the tens of thousands of Sinhalese killed by Sinhalese and Tamils killed by Tamils during the 26 years of the war bear witness to the lack of even basic solidarity, leave alone homogeneity, within these groups. Speaking the same language does not exclude such violent ‘othering’, and even the same religion can be interpreted in diametrically opposite ways, as in the case of those Buddhists who perpetrate violent attacks on civilians while other Buddhists believe they are forbidden to use violence at all. On the other hand, sections within one community may share much more with the same section within another community than their common humanity. Workers of different communities have come together to fight for labour rights, women have cooperated to combat gender-based violence, and so on. Even in terms of shared suffering, Tamils and Muslims have experienced large-scale displacement, while tens of thousands of Tamils and Sinhalese have been subjected to torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions and the grief of premature bereavement.
Finally, the submerging of individual identities into an overriding ethnic identity and culture creates serious issues for the individual’s moral autonomy. As Seyla Benhabib observes, ‘It is both theoretically wrong and politically dangerous to conflate the individual’s search for the expression of his/her unique identity with politics of identity/difference. The theoretical mistake comes from the homology drawn between individual and collective claims, a homology facilitated by the ambiguities of the term recognition. Politically such a move is dangerous because it subordinates moral autonomy to movements of collective identity’ (Benhabib 2002: 52). Even in its benevolent form of multiculturalism, ‘with culture often being associated with tradition and history…, there is the very real danger of instituting and perpetuating a conservative politics through the sedimentation of undemocratic relations internal to the group’ (Bhambra 2006: 36), at the cost of sections like women, girls, sexual minorities and subordinate castes. At its worst, it creates space for the barbaric practice of collective punishment, where an entire community is ‘punished’ for a real or imagined crime committed by one or a few of its members. From the massacre of Tamils in 1983 to ‘punish’ them for the LTTE’s killing of 13 soldiers to the LTTE’s massacres of Sinhalese and Muslim civilians including children, collective punishment has been rampant in Sri Lanka, and indeed throughout the world.
Faulty premises
The predominant usage of the terms ‘nationality/nation’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ are based on a series of faulty premises. First, the presumption of national/ethnic and cultural purity, whereas in reality ‘“true nations,” “pure” linguistic groups, and unsullied ethnic identities are truly “imagined” communities’ (Benhabib 2002: 33). A malevolent fallout of subscribing to the fiction of purity is that it strengthens patriarchal, authoritarian elements in a community who strive to stamp out the right to love and live with the person of one’s choice.
Second, the presumption of pre-existing distinct ethnicities and cultures. This has been challenged by Gupta and Ferguson (1997), who say, ‘We are less interested in establishing a dialogic relation between distinct societies than in exploring the processes of production of difference in a world of culturally, socially and economically interconnected and interdependent spaces’ (p.43). Just as in Bosnia the supposedly essential nature of the Islamic identity of Bosnian Muslims arose only with the break-up of Yugoslavia (Davidson 1999), prior to which they had lived and intermarried with Serbs and Croats, in Sri Lanka too the supposedly essential character of linguistic and religious identity was posited relatively recently for political reasons. Rather than ‘starting from the premise of a world originally constituted by culturally separate and distinct entities,.. notions of community and belonging have to be understood as categorical identities brought into being through the processes of exclusion, inclusion and construction of otherness. Yet, we see that, in the main, social theory has addressed issues of cultural difference, heterogeneity and otherness by assuming difference to pre-exist the processes by which it is produced’ (Bhambra 2006: 37).
Third, the presumption that cultures based on ethnicity are unified or monolithic. Countering this, Benhabib (2002: 25) ‘pleads for a recognition of the radical hybridity and polyvocality of all cultures; cultures themselves, as well as societies, are not holistic but polyvocal, multilayered, decentred, and fractured systems of action and signification’. Indeed in Sri Lanka, supposed markers of ethnic identity cut across each other constantly: for example, Sinhala speakers can be Buddhists or Christians, Tamil speakers can be Hindu, Muslim or Christian, and so on. Assuming that cultures are homogeneous makes it impossible ‘to account sociologically for the fact that the “distance” between the rich in Bombay and those in London may be much shorter than that between different classes in “the same” city’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 50).
Fourth, the idea that people belong exclusively or predominantly to an ethnic cultural community, thus ‘restricting possibilities of identity and group construction other than those associated with cultural identities. By privileging a particular identity, that of culture, other identities that could be argued to be as important, such as those based around understandings of gender, sexual orientation and labour relations, are excluded’ (Bhambra 2006: 36). Many writers have referred to individuals having ‘multiple identities’; I prefer to think of their having a unique identity, but one which is multi-layered, multi-faceted and complex, thus allowing them to belong to a multiplicity of collectives, communities or groups. In many cases, linguistic or religious identities are imposed on them forcibly by groups seeking to persecute them on these grounds, but they can also be imposed by power elites who share these characteristics and wish to control members of the group by restricting their access to other collectives in which they might feel a stronger sense of belonging.
Conclusion
Political beliefs are often embedded in our language, and the racist belief in fundamental and immutable differences between people, which make it impossible for them to live together, has become embedded in the language of ‘ethnicity,’ ‘nationality,’ and ‘nation’. Davidson (1999) has suggested that ‘most uses of the word “ethnic” are in place of some other word (like “communities, localities, territories, languages, religions or cultures”), the use of which would give far greater precision of meaning.’ This makes sense, and the same would be true of the terms ‘nationality’ and ‘nation’ when they do not apply to citizenship. We could retain the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to refer to attempts to drive people out of a given territory on the grounds of their supposed ethnicity, just as we retain the term ‘racism’ to refer to the oppression of people on the grounds of their supposed race; but when talking about rights, it would be better to be more precise.
‘Ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic group’ could be replaced by ‘culture’ and ‘cultural community,’ but with the proviso that the state must protect the right of members of such communities to challenge dominant norms and have relationships outside them. Minority rights should certainly include the right to equality before the law and thus to freedom from discrimination and persecution, and the freedom to use and develop one’s own language and practice one’s faith. They certainly should not include the ‘right’ to exclude, discriminate against or persecute either members of local linguistic and religious minorities or sections like women, girls, sexual minorities and dissidents within the linguistic or religious group claiming minority rights; the aim should be ‘to overcome the divisions which are increasingly described as “ethnic” by removing the oppressions that give them significance, not to perpetuate or add to them’ (Davidson 1999).
As Paul Gilroy puts it, ‘This is not anti-racism of the type that says we must learn to love and value human differences rather than fear and misrecognise them. It is a new project… It seeks to turn the tables on purity-seekers whoever they may be, to force them to account for their phobia about otherness and their violent hostility in the face of the clanging, self-evident sameness of suffering humankind’ (2002: 7). While defending the right of individuals to belong to cultural communities with which they feel they have an affinity, it would also recognise that ‘It is individuals and groups who determine, through their activities, the value of such cultural allegiances. So the goal of any public policy for the preservation of cultures must be the empowerment of the members of cultural groups to appropriate, enrich and even subvert the terms of their own culture as they may decide. Therefore, the right to cultural membership entails the right to say no to the various cultural offers made to one by one’s upbringing, one’s nation, one’s religious or familial community’ (Benhabib 2002: 66, emphasis added).
The fact that Sri Lankans could unite to oust the corrupt and brutal Rajapaksa regime in the presidential election of January 2015 shows they are capable of exploring the path not taken: a Sri Lanka in which neither the island as a whole nor any part of it is designated as ‘Sinhala’ or Tamil’; Sinhala, Tamil and English are official languages, the public has the right to communicate with the state in any one of them, and signs and forms are in all three; children get schooling in the medium of their choice, but also learn the other two languages from an early age; simultaneous translation allows elected representatives to speak in the language of their choice in parliament or provincial councils and be understood by everyone else; no religion is linked to the state; and people of all religions and none can practise their beliefs freely without fear of persecution or discrimination. This, in turn, creates the possibility of people uniting to abolish militarism and the all-powerful executive presidency, reintroduce parliamentary democracy, and achieve devolution of power that will allow provincial councils to control provincial matters; combat violence and discrimination against women; eliminate caste oppression; and fight for the right to information, freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, workers’ rights, and the restoration and expansion of social security and welfare, which have been so badly eroded by neoliberalism and the war (Zackariya and Hensman 2015). The path of racist oppression has led to totalitarianism and war; it is time to take the alternative path of solidarity and equality before the law in the search for democracy and peace.
(This paper was published in Dialectical Anthropology 39, pp. 273-293.)
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[1] For many years these people were called ‘Indian Tamils’, then ‘Tamils of Indian Origin’ or ‘Tamils of Recent Indian Origin’. However, the name by which they refer to themselves (Malaiyaha Tamirar) can be translated as ‘Hill-country Tamils’ (see Daniel 1996: 23).
[2] The classificatory zeal of the colonisers, especially the British, played a part in making communities fixed where they had been fluid before. However, the numerous identities they recognised were neither clear-cut nor mutually exclusive but vague and overlapping. Of these, only two were selected and further elaborated by the Sinhala and Tamil nationalists, who therefore have the main responsibility for constructing these identities. (See Wickramasinghe 2006: 44-50).