Introduction
Journalistic accounts of the crisis in Sri Lanka refer to it as an ‘ethnic conflict’ between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority, and there is an element of truth in this perception: the war that broke out in 1983 and has continued ever since, despite periods of ceasefire, is primarily between the armed forces of a state dominated by a Sinhala nationalist agenda and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighting for a separate Tamil state. Yet this description is inadequate to capture the complexity of the situation in Sri Lanka. It simply cannot account for episodes like the following:
Norms of civilisation and humanity today seem assailed from all quarters, leaving one sickened, bewildered and despairing as never before. The actors in this grim scenario include the forces of the state, violent forces opposed to the state, shadowy vigilante groups…The gruesome tally of deaths mounts daily.
Those killed during the past three months include Kandy District MP Anura Daniel, shot in his office by men in military type unforms; General Secretary of the LSSP Trade Union Federation, P.D. Wimalasena, shot by gunmen who stormed his headquarters and set fire to its press; lawyer Charita Lankapura shot in his residence;..Chairman and Director-General of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation and Competent Authority of the Independent Television Network, Thevis Guruge, shot on his morning walk; television and radio announcer Premkeerthi de Alwis, abducted from his home and killed; the Ven. Kotikawatte Saddhaissa Nayake Thera killed in his temple at Kolonnawa; Chief News Editor of Rupavahini, Kulasiri Ameratunga, shot in his home by unidentified gunmen; the Ven. Soragune Pannatissa Thera, taken out of his temple in Haputale and shot; young lawyer Kanchana Abhayapala shot at his home by an unidentified gunman; seventy-five-year-old Wellatota Pannadassi Nayake Thera shot when returning to his home in Kamburupitiya, and burnt; SLFP organiser in Kurunegala, H.P.Wijesekera, shot in Dompe; Rubber Research Board Chairman and former Deputy Minister Merril Kariyawasam shot in his office at Ratmalana; seventy-five-year-old Kahawe Wimalasiri Thera shot by an unidentified gang in his temple at Kala Oya, Anuradhapura; Moratuwa University Vice-Chancellor Prof. C. Patuwathavithana and Chief Security Officer P.A.K.Ranaweera, slain on the campus premises at Katubedde; State Pharmaceuticals Corporation Chairman Dr. Gladys Jayawardene, shot in her car at Slave Island on her way home from office.
These are some of the names that made the newspaper headlines in recent times. The fact and manner of these deaths is at least known. In addition there are the eyewitness accounts of unidentified corpses, of headless bodies floating down waterways, of numerous bodies – sometimes singly, sometimes in heaps, often hideously mutilated – burning on the roadsides. (Civil Rights Movement 1989)
This is an account of what was happening in the rest of Sri Lanka when the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) occupied the North and East after the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. While the total death toll has never been established, it amounted to tens of thousands – some estimates say 60,000, including disappearances – so the carnage was on a scale comparable to the loss of life in the war between the government and the LTTE. But this was not an ethnic conflict; it was a conflict between the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or People’s Liberation Front) and the government, with both sides killing others who did not belong to either side, like the 32 schoolchildren of Embilipitiya killed by the state. It was a case of Sinhalese, including Buddhist monks, being killed by Sinhalese. Both sides used shadowy death squads: several squads in the case of the state, with names like the ‘Black Cats,’ ‘Yellow Cats,’ ‘Eagles of the Central Hills’ and ‘Scorpions,’ while the JVP used the Deshapremi Janatha Viyaparaya (DJV or Patriotic People’s Movement).[i]
In the case of Tamils, the killing spree started earlier, continued into 2008, and included the internationally recognised war crime of conscripting children and sending them to the battle front:
The LTTE took on the TELO at the end of that month [April 1986]…The manner in which the TELO members were killed shocked Tamil people everywhere. Many died without knowing what hit them. Twelve were killed near Manipay while they were asleep. Several were caught unawares, shot and burnt at junctions at Thirunelvely, Mallakam and Tellipallai. Eight persons were killed at the camp behind St John’s principal’s bungalow…The people were so terrified that few had the courage to give shelter to the fugitives…Some went home saying things such as: “We have produced our own Hitlers”. (Hoole et al. 1990, pp.81-82)
In the early 1990s, very young children from poor families taken by the LTTE in Jaffna were corralled in camps…In July 1991, most of the thousand or so killed in the LTTE’s desperate bid to overrun Elephant Pass were women and children…A woman in the Vanni regularly met young members of the LTTE fighting cadre who told her about their gruelling life…They told her, “Once you come into this organisation, there is no alternative. You must make up your mind to die. When volunteers are called for a dangerous job, we all raise our hands”. (Hoole 2001: 404, 415, 416)
These aspects of the LTTE’s politics have aptly been described as ‘the political culture of auto-genocide,’ (Hoole 2001: 403), and this epithet could apply equally to the politics of the state and JVP in the late 1980s. A characterisation of the crisis in Sri Lanka must account for these phenomena as well as the fighting between the state and the LTTE.
Identity and Politics
Ethnic 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, and even earlier as Serendip and Taprobane) 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 (a father’s brother’s children or mother’s sister’s children) regarded as brothers and sisters, and therefore marriage with them being forbidden, whereas cross cousins (a father’s sister’s children or mother’s brother’s children) are encouraged to marry. This contrasts with the Indo-European kinship system, which prohibits marriage between cross cousins as well as parallel cousins. Along with other anthropological and textual evidence, this suggests that both Sinhalese and Tamils come from the same stock (Guneratne 2002). Furthermore, immigrants often adopted the language of the area where they settled, so that identities based on language could and did change.
‘[A]t the 1891 Census, the total population was 3,007,800. Of this,
2,044,762 (67.3 per cent) were Sinhalese
488,644 (16 per cent) were Sri Lanka or ‘homeborn’ Tamils
197,381 (6.5 per cent) were Moors [Muslims]
21,289 (0.7 per cent) were Burghers
10,120 (0.3 per cent) were Malays [Muslims of South-East Asian origin]
235,109 (9 per cent) were ‘Indian Tamil’ immigrants
6,356 (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), a fitting illustration of the Buddha’s vision of universal human identity:
Behold the grasses and the trees;
They do possess the mark of birth
And species each from other distinct.
Then behold the beetles, moths and ants…
And four-footed creatures, big and small;
The reptiles, snakes and long-backed animals,
The fishes and creatures of the water,
And birds that cross the sky on wings.
Consider them, they possess the mark of birth
And species each from other distinct.
As in these kinds of creatures there is
The distinction based on birth,
So there is not, among human beings
The distinction based on birth…
A distinct mark in human bodies there is none,
It is just convention that speaks of difference in human beings…
Habitual views of ignorant beings
Lying deeply hidden from ancient times.
(Speech to Vasettha, quoted in Palihawadana 1989: 4-6)
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 (‘Indian’) 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.[ii] Two of the stories central to the construction of a Sinhala Buddhist identity are those of Vijaya and Dutugemunu. According to the first, Vijaya – the grandson of a lion (sinha) – is exiled from the kingdom of his father in India for bad conduct, and arrives in Sri Lanka, which is inhabited by yakkhas. He marries a yakkhini, Kuveni, and establishes a kingdom there. But he needs a wife of kshatriya birth before he can be consecrated king, so 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. ‘The myth synchronises the arrival in the island of Vijaya and his retinue with the death of the Buddha’ (Gunawardena 1984: 17). The second story is that of Dutugemunu, who defeated the Northern Tamil king Elara. Even the account in the Mahavamsa (6th Century AD) has Dutugemunu erecting a tomb for Elara, because he was such a good king. 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). Nor was this development 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….The militants were not the initiators; they were the continuation of this history. The ideology in its totality goes to the credit of the “moderate” and “middle of the road” nationalists, who were the initiators of this narrowness. (Hoole et al. 1990: 339)
A highly 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, and it has been argued that this explains its authoritarian character:
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 Sinhalse 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. This authoritarianism resides unchallenged behind all the rhetoric of egalitarianism, social harmony, tolerance and benevolence that are supposed to have characterised the pre-colonial socio-political order of Sinhalese society. (Uyangoda 1988)
Tamil nationalism, similarly, harks back to a past characterised by an absolute monarchy. In other words, despite paying lip-service to human rights and democracy, Sinhala and Tamil nationalists both derive their politics from models of society that rule out democracy, and can – depending on the ruler – be guilty of terrible cruelty. What makes them incompatible with modern democracy is not just their ethnic exclusiveness but also their inherent authoritarianism. The ‘national identity’ defined by the supreme leader not only excludes minority communities, but is also so narrow that it has to be imposed on the majority of its ‘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. A closer examination of each will help to establish this.
Sinhala Nationalism and the Undermining of Democracy
At Sri Lanka’s Independence in February 1948, its 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 initial attack on the rights of minorities occurred with the passage of the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, and Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act of 1949, which stipulated stringent conditions for recognition of citizenship by descent or registration. The Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act of 1949 made citizenship mandatory for having the franchise (Wickramasinghe 2006: 171-72). The immediate 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.[iii]
Ethnicity, class and electoral expediency all worked against the plantation workers. In the 1947 elections, they had voted 7 members of the Ceylon Indian Congress into parliament, and it was thought that their vote had also been decisive in another 14 electorates which had returned Left candidates. The United National Party (UNP) led by D.S.Senanayake obtained only 42 out of 95 seats, and did not want this situation to arise in future. While Tamil MPs were divided on the citizenship issue, 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 voted by 27 votes to 2 to recommend that both Sinhla 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, were won over to 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 (B-C) 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 for settlement schemes – would be established. A year later, in response to a militant agitation by Buddhist monks, Bandaranaike tore up the Pact. Tamils protested in Jaffna by blacking out the Sinhala letter ‘sri’ which had been substituted for the English letters on vehicle number-plates, and this was followed by an orgy of arson and murder against Tamils by Sinhalese hoodlums in other parts of the country, including Colombo. Banadaranaike at first refused to intervene; then, when the violence appeared to 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, an organisation of Buddhist monks, the Eksath Bhikku Peramuna (EBP), hatched a plot to eliminate him, and one of its members 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 for Sinhala and Tamil. Just as earlier the UNP had opposed the B-C Pact, all these parties now opposed a similar pact between UNP leader Senanayake and Chelvanayakam. 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.
In 1970, the UF government introduced a measure which made a significant contribution to the growth of a militant movement of Tamil youth. This was the ‘standardisation’ system, whereby the minimum university entrance marks for a Tamil medium student were higher than those for a Sinhala medium student. This formula, and subsequent modifications of it, were rationalised as an attempt to improve opportunities for educationally underprivileged sections of the population, but these sections would hardly have been affected, since less than 1 per cent of all students entering Grade 1 went on to enter university, and the overwhelming majority of the latter would have been from middle- and upper-class strata (Bastian 1984). 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 all these attacks on equality aimed at giving Sinhalese privileges at the expense of Tamils, it is paradoxical that the first large-scale violence of Sinhalese against Sinhalese was during the JVP insurrection of 1971, in which an estimated 5-10,000 people were killed (Wickramasinghe 2006: 237). The JVP drew its membership and supporters precisely from the strata that were supposed to benefit from the Sinhala Only policies; the depth of dissatisfaction among these sections 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 simply went further along the same trajectory. In the name of nationalising the plantations – which might have been a progressive measure had it been carried out differently – 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, omitted the protection of minority rights in Section 29, and declared Sri Lanka to be a unitary state, effectively making it a Sinhala-Buddhist state (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 judicary), 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.
Thereafter, attacks on democracy followed thick and fast. SLFP politicians had used lumpen gangs, but these had no institutionalised status. After 1977, Jayawardene set up the Jatika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS), which carried out similar functions, but on a larger scale, and as an organised and centralised force: ‘After the massive election victory of the UNP, several political leaders emerged who had access to, and control over, the slums and anomic areas of the city…[J]obs in the working class sector were increasingly given to members of this lumpen proletariat who swelled the ranks of the JSS. Soon members of other unions were intimidated into joining it…They were now organised and they effectively controlled government offices and wielded enough power to transfer and intimidate even high officials…MPs have created through the JSS and other local groups in small market towns a complex, powerful network of organisations that can be put to political use. (Obeyesekere 1984: 160-62).
These gangs were used to intimidate voters in the October 1982 presidential elections, from which Jayawardene’s main rival, Mrs Bandaranaike, was barred; when despite this he got only 52.91 of the votes cast, he enacted the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution in December, evicting TULF MPs from their seats in Parliament, and simultaneously used massive violence in a referendum in which the citizens of Sri Lanka supposedly voted to deprive themselves of the right to vote in the general elections due in 1983 (Perera 1989)! The JSS was used to intimidate and kill opposition supporters and judges who gave verdicts against violent offences by UNP supporters (Senewiratne 1986: 30, 83). It was used repeatedly against workers and trade unions, breaking strikes, assaulting and killing trade unionists, getting members of existing unions dismissed, and even abusing and assaulting management personnel who attempted to discipline them. That its members had protection from the very top was made obvious from the fact that the police never acted against them, while around 80,000 public employees who opposed them and went on strike lost their jobs (Civil Rights Movement 1981; Nadesan 1981). It has been suggested that ‘the totalitarian power of this extremist group can be compared with the stormtroopers in Hitler’s Germany’ (Senewiratne 1986: 84), and it certainly appears that in its mode of operation vis-à-vis the labour movement and opposition parties as well as its relationship to the ruling party and police, the JSS resembled an amalgam of the fascist storm-troops and ‘unions’ of Hitler and Mussolini (see Guerin 1973: 104-05; 132-34; 179; 185-86).
The parallel with fascist storm-troops is perhaps most striking in the way the JSS was used to assault and kill Tamils, loot and burn their shops and homes, and drive them out of the areas where they had been living. 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: ‘On 24 May, a UNP candidate was assassinated, and the army went on a rampage of looting and torture. And then, on 31 May, an unidentified gunman fired some shots at an election meeting, and the tense atmosphere exploded into state-sponsored mayhem. 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).
However, all these exploits of the JSS were overshadowed by their role in the pogroms of 1983, which gathered strength from March onwards. Then 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 …The General Secretary of the government ‘union’, the Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS), was identified as the leader of the gangs which wrought destruction and death all over Colombo…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. We are convinced that this massacre could not have been carried out without government and National Security Council authorisation…
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. This time 18 were killed…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 again and again. 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. (The aftermath of this ‘experiment’ will be described in the next section.) 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). Along with the pogroms and other means by which Tamils were driven out, these ‘colonisation’ schemes, which continued into the 21st century, constituted government programmes of population transfer, defined in international law as a crime against humanity.
By 1983, the character of the state security forces had changed too. With the introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1979, and invocation of provisions of the Public Security Act to allow the security forces to dispose of dead bodies without inquest, torture, disappearances and extrajudicial executions became routine. Amnesty International documented the grim record of sadism and murder, including rape and other forms of sexual torture, in the North and East. The Special Task Force (STF), created in 1984 by the president’s son Ravi Jayawardene, was responsible for even more atrocities than the regular armed forces. Armed Home Guard units were created, supposedly for self-defence, yet, ‘during the entire history of the homeguard units, they have hardly been of any use in preventing massacres. Their claim to fame rests on their use in reprisal killings under cover provided by the army’ (UTHR-J 1990: 5).
This was the background against which the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed by Rajiv Gandhi and J.R.Jayawardene in July 1987. 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 Contingent to guarantee and enforce the cessation of hostilities. According to J.N.Dixit, who was India’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka at the time, Jayawardene requested that the Indian army be deployed in the North and East so that Sri Lankan troops could be redeployed to maintain law and order in the South (Rediff.com 2000).
The Accord was opposed by powerful sections within the government, including Prime Minister R. Premadasa. He succeeded Jayawardene after the presidential elections of December 1988, in which fraud and violence exceeded anything Sri Lanka had seen before ( Perera 1989). 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 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).
The ideology of the JVP was a mixture of socialist and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Its leader Wijeweera chose the pseudonym ‘Rohana’ to evoke the province (Ruhuna) from which Dutugemunu waged his campaigns. Prior to the formation of the JVP, he had been in the Ceylon Communist Party (Peking Wing) led by N.Shanmugathasan, and in 1966 was disciplined by the party 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 took the position that the plantation workers were an arm of Indian expansionism, and should all be repatriated to India. The putchist conception of revolution and authoritarian structure of the party were also notable. After the 1971 insurrection was defeated, many survivors engaged in a critique of the authoritarian and chauvinist elements in the JVP’s ideology, and left the party (Ismail 1983).
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 massive death toll during the second JVP insurgency, which ended with the execution of Wijeweera in November 1989.
Tamil Nationalism: A Parallel Trajectory
The course of Tamil nationalist politics was set by the murder of Alfred Duraiappah in July 1975. 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 1960-65, several times mayor of Jaffna and a popular figure, aligned himself with the SLFP. ‘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…Did you see that statue of a tough looking youth with a hand to his mouth?..That’s the villain who booby-trapped my car. When he was to be captured by the Police he swallowed cyanide. These shameless MPs call him a hero and put up a statue. Is it to this hero worship of murderers that our MPs want to lead the poor Tamil people? My vision is different’ (Devendra 2008).
This incident encapsulates many of the themes that come up again and again in the history of Tamil nationalism. One is the worship of violence, which was extolled even by the supposedly non-violent leadership of the TULF. Making a fetish of violence could only end in self-destruction. 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 (Ibid 420). While the brutality of the Sri Lankan state and IPKF cannot be excused, it is also significant that the LTTE deliberately provoked such reprisals, knowing that Tamil civilians would suffer. Its only strategy for retaining the support of the people it claimed to represent was to maximise the overall level of violence.
A second theme is the assassination of Tamil civilians who dissent from the LTTE, especially those who reject the goal of a separate Tamil state. 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). This theme is linked to another: complete subjection to the totalitarian rule of the leader, V.Prabakaran, and the stamping out of dissent or competition of any kind. Anyone who disagrees with the leader is 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. Thirteen of them, including Thileepan, committed suicide on orders from the Leader. 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, Prabakaran overreached himself when he tried to liquidate Karuna Amman, his Eastern commander, who expressed dissatisfaction with LTTE policies in 2004. Despite a confrontation in which hundreds of Karuna supporters were killed, he failed to destroy Karuna, who then formed the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP) and teamed up with the government of Sri Lanka to defeat Prabakaran’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 illustrates another feature of Tamil nationalism: 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. Although Chelvanayakam did support the demand for citizenship and franchise of the Hill-country Tamils, this demand was dropped in the B-C Pact of 1957. In 1964, Mrs Bandaranaike came 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 and the rights associated with this status were 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 (opposed by Tamil politician Ponnambalam Ramanathan), 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.’[iv]
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’s response to this refusal was brutal in the extreme: 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...Today they live in over-crowded settlements in the impoverished district of Puttalam’ (Haniffa 2007: 16).
It appears that Tamil nationalism is as exclusive and totalitarian as Sinhala Buddhist nationalism; the only adequate embodiment of either would be a fascist state.
Human Rights and Democracy as the Alternative to Ethno-Nationalism
When the government of Sri Lanka is accused of violating human rights, the usual reply is that it is fighting terrorism and defending its sovereignty against a separatist threat. The LTTE, on the other hand, claims that everything it has done is in pursuance of the goal of self-determination for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. Since the UN Charter supports both ‘self-determination of peoples’ and ‘the sovereign equality of all its Members,’ both these apparently contradictory goals seem to have validity. How can this dilemma be resolved?
The dilemma arises only because of the way in which ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self-determination’ have been defined by the two protagonists. The notion of sovereignty originally referred to the power of the ruler in an absolute monarchy. It has been adapted to modern democracy by stipulating that in a democracy, sovereignty resides in the people, yet this definition immediately runs into difficulties. If the ‘people’ are divided by age, sex, class, caste, language, religion, etc., how can they constitute a single ruler? It appears that ‘this mandate of political thought that only the one can rule undermines and negates the concept of democracy’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 328). Indeed, state sovereignty is compatible with the denial of democratic rights to all the people and the rule of a totalitarian state or single individual.
The ‘right of nations to self-determination’ has also been contested. In the early 20th century, Lenin supported the right of neighbouring nations which had been annexed by Russia to form separate states, but Luxemburg asked, who determines the will of the nation? It was a valid question. Self-determination of an individual is easy to understand, but who defines the ‘self’ of a nation divided by age, sex, class, caste, language, religion, etc.? Again, this formula is compatible with totalitarian rule by a group or individual who is seen as embodying the nation. So long as the clash is between a Sinhala Buddhist totalitarian state fighting for sovereignty over the whole of Sri Lanka and the self-determination of an equally totalitarian Tamil nation fighting to control a large part of Sri Lanka, there is no solution to the crisis in Sri Lanka.
Clearly, the UN was defending neither of these definitions; the Charter itself, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which followed in 1948, made it very clear that both sovereignty and self-determination were defined in terms of fundamental human and democratic rights. If we define sovereignty as genuinely residing in all the people of a nation, they must have all the human rights and democratic freedoms that enable them to control their own lives, including the right to life, freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or arbitrary detention, the right to information and peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of association, equality of treatment and opportunity, and the right to self-government either directly or through the election of representatives in free and fair elections. And if we define self-determination as self-determination of the people, it must mean that they too have all the rights and freedoms enumerated above. Redefined in this way, there is absolutely no contradiction between the sovereignty of all the people of Sri Lanka and self-determination for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka.
In other words, the only solution to the crisis in Sri Lanka is democracy, and to their credit, many people in Sri Lanka have been working towards this end. Unfortunately, they are confronted by two ruthless totalitarian entities, and this accounts for the fact that every two steps forward seem to be followed by at least one step back.
After Premadasa was killed by an LTTE suicide bomber in 1993, the parliamentary and presidential elections of 1994 brought Chandrika Kumaratunga and her People’s Alliance (PA) to power with a landslide victory on a peace platform. She reintroduced democratic rights in the South, acknowledged long-standing Tamil grievances, and made a genuine attempt to protect human rights in the North and East, although there were still lapses. She initiated a ceasefire and talks with the LTTE, but the LTTE soon broke the ceasefire, and fighting resumed. Assisted by Neelan Thiruchelvam, her government drafted a new constitution entailing substantial devolution of power to the North and East and citizenship for the remaining Hill-country Tamils who had resisted deportation to India. She continued these efforts after getting re-elected in 1999, having surviving an LTTE bombing with the loss of an eye. But when a watered-down draft was presented to parliament in 2000, it faced opposition not only from Sinhala and Tamil nationalists, but also from the UNP. Realising that it would not get the two-thirds majority needed to make a constitutional amendment, the PA withdrew it.
Kumaratunga faced formidable obstacles to her agenda. By forcing a resumption of the war, the LTTE made her dependent on military personnel who ought to have been punished for massacres and disappearances, so human rights violations continued, albeit on a much smaller scale. These, along with the failure of constitutional reform, disappointed Tamil supporters, while the continuation of the war disappointed Sinhalese supporters and encouraged Sinhala nationalists. Yet it could still be argued that she could have done more, both to clamp down on human rights violations and to counter Sinhala nationalism (Hoole 2001: 454-63).
The PA was the largest party in the 2000 parliamentary elections, but lacked an absolute majority, and had to rely on minority parties to form a government. When one of these withdrew support, the PA government first turned to the JVP for support, and then fell, leading to the election of a coalition led by the UNP at the end of 2001, with Ranil Wickremasinghe as Prime Minister. This was the context in which the ceasefire agreement (CFA) of 2002 was signed between the government and LTTE with Norwegian mediation, and a Nordic Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) moved in to monitor it. The high point of this peace process was the agreement by both sides, in Oslo in December 2002, to explore a federal solution within a united Sri Lanka, but Prabakaran swiftly contradicted his negotiator, and pulled out of the talks in April 2003.
The fatal flaw in the CFA was its lack of human rights guarantees, which right from the beginning allowed the LTTE to murder critics, even in government-controlled areas, and conscript children with impunity. ‘The SLMM and UNP remained silent as abductions and killings of persons opposed to the LTTE accelerated…Amidst murder and the abduction of children for use as combatants, the Government and Norway got the rest of the world to praise the peace process. When confronted with violations by the LTTE, they simply said that there was no evidence - evidence for which they never looked…To the Norwegians, those insisting on building and preserving democratic norms were a nuisance’ (UTHR-J 2003). The breakdown of such a ceasefire was inevitable. Although it was formally in place until the government abrogated it in January 2008, the murder of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar (representing one party to the ceasefire) by the LTTE (representing the other party to it) in August 2005 could be considered to be the first shot in the new war.
After parliamentary elections in 2004, the PA formed a government with support from the JVP and an extremist Buddhist monk party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU); these parties were also instrumental in getting Mahinda Rajapaksa of the SLFP elected President in November 2005. Thus the new government was much more explicitly tilted towards Sinhala nationalism. Nonetheless, it made some initial moves which stirred up hope, including the formation of the All-Party Representative Committee (APRC) in mid-2006 to deliberate on constitutional reform. The Majority Report of the panel of experts in December, authored by six Sinhalese, four Tamils and one Muslim, went a long way towards satisfying the aspirations of minority communities, and could have formed the basis of a political solution. However, the ruling SLFP and President Rajapaksa proceeded to sabotage the APRC process, finally relegating it to the dustbin when the President proclaimed in his Independence Day speech in 2008 that a solution to Sri Lanka’s problems would have to be found within the framework of the existing constitution. Meanwhile, the war raged on, with ugly human rights abuses being committed by both sides with impunity.
Conclusion
What emerges from this account is that the conflict in Sri Lanka is primarily between fascism and democracy, and only secondarily between Sinhala and Tamil fascism. The solution, therefore, is the restoration of democracy and human rights. One reason for hoping that this will occur is that there are strong traditions of non-violence, compassion and humanitarianism in Sri Lanka, and people have displayed these qualities in their relationships with people of other communities even in the most ghastly situations. Thus Tamil survivors of the 1983 pogrom and other massacres spoke movingly of Sinhalese friends, neighbours and even total strangers who saved and sheltered them, while Muslim refugees from Jaffna spoke with affection of their Tamil neighbours, who were like brothers and sisters, and wept while pleading with the LTTE not to evict them (Hensman 1993). The vast majority of people in Sri Lanka have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose from a continuation of the war, which has brought death, injury and bereavement to many, and falling living standards to all but a small elite. The desire for peace with justice and democracy is strong, and at some point will surely prevail over the totalitarianism of the war-mongers.
(This was written in 2009 before the war, and published in Democratic Process, Foreign Policy and Human Rights in South Asia, ed. Joseph Benjamin, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2010, pp. 261-295.)
Notes
[i] Rather than clutter up the text with too many references, I would like to refer readers to human rights reports covering the period from the late 1980s to the present by Amnesty International, University Teachers for Human Rights – Jaffna (UTHR-J) and Human Rights Watch, all of which are available on the internet.
[ii] 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)
[iii] 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).
[iv] http://www.thuuuu.net/dalite.htm
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