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British colonialism is often cited by many scholars to be the root cause of conflict. However, one endeavour to eschew a monocausal explanation of the conflict, and address the dynamics of Tamil militancy within the contested and multi-faceted socio-political space of Sri Lanka after 1948.
As they did throughout their empire, the British ruled Ceylon by creating an English-speaking elite from amongst the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Their favouritism engendered an opposition which took racial and religious overtones. The majority of those who had been left out of the elite spoke Sinhalese and were Buddhists, and they began to promote a racist notion of Sinhalese superiority as an ‘Aryan race’. After independence it was this Sinhalese-speaking group that gained control of the new state of Sri Lanka, and began to exclude Tamils from higher education, jobs and land mainly by making Sinhala the only official language. Not surprisingly, Tamils resented this discrimination. As the anthropologist Stanley Tambiah has argued, the island's violence is a late-twentieth-century response to colonial and postcolonial policies that relied on a hardened and artificial notion of ethnic boundaries.
The beginnings of terrorism in Sri Lanka are inextricably entwined with the activities of the State. In the 30 years from the mid-1940s, successive governments took measures to reduce the number of Tamils in the professions and the public sector. These measures interacted in diverse and complex ways with a potent Sinhala Buddhist exclusivism which gradually became the animating ideology of the Sri Lankan state. Particularly amongst the arriviste, lower caste Sinhalese, the spread of anti-Tamil chauvinism was soon perceived as a promising means of increasing economic opportunity. As time passed, the electoral promise of pandering to this chauvinism tempted even the most cosmopolitan of Sinhalese politicians.
Arguably, the most adverse legislation for Tamils came from the language policy of S.W.R.D Bandaranaike’s government. The introduction of the 1956 ‘Sinhala Only’ Act, which replaced English with Sinhala as the language of official government business, clearly disadvantaged large numbers of Tamils. Its effect was compounded by widespread protests in Tamil areas in which school principals would not allow the teaching of Sinhala while school children refused to study the language.
The final straw for Tamils, however, was the introduction in the early 1970s of communal quotas for university entrance. This led to the exclusion of merit-worthy Tamil students and it was this that set the ethnic powder keg alight. With 'standardisation', it became clear that the Tamils had lost the education and employment opportunities which had conditioned their commitment to a unitary Ceylon in the first place. Large numbers of young Tamils came to the conclusion that their socio-economic aspirations could only be fulfilled within a separate Tamil state.
The bloody terrorism that has ravaged Sri Lanka since 1983 is fuelled by the refusal of many Tamils to operate within a state system which denies them political power, employment and educational opportunities whilst engendering socio-economic disparity.
Distinction, however, has to be made between the terrorism of the LTTE and the aspirations of the Tamil people. The desire of the majority of Tamil people is to live with dignity and equality within a united Sri Lanka. The LTTE on the other hand believe a state of Eelam will best guarantee the equality and dignity of Tamils in the North-East. While the terrorism of the LTTE against the state is symptomatic of the chutzpah of the Sri Lankan state, which for decades ignored or undermined the aspirations of the Tamil people, it cannot be equated with the aspirations of the Tamil peoples, who whilst recognising the primacy of the LTTE in the North-East, do not support its modus operandi by rote.
State Religion and Conflict
Entwined with the political ideology and communitarian hagiography in Sri Lanka, is the problematic of Buddhism and its relations with the State. While Buddhist orthodoxy tends to promote the renunciation of all worldly concerns, there remains significant theological latitude for individual monks to engage in political activity which aims to reform society ‘for the good’. Since independence, Sri Lankan Buddhist leaders have been active in the political arena whenever they felt it appropriate, particularly on issues relating to the pre-eminence of the Buddhist faith and the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.
On these issues, and others such as language, the Buddhist clergy have exerted a particularly powerful influence in Sri Lankan political life. In 1951, resolutions of the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress to the Prime Minister included a statement that ‘the ... government is legally and morally bound to protect and maintain Buddhism and Buddhist institutions’. It also demanded the restoration of Buddhism to ‘the paramount position of prestige which rightfully belongs to it’. Since independence, all governments have jockeyed for the favour of Sinhala Buddhists.
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Sanjana
Sanjana Hattotuwa is a Rotary World Peace Scholar presently pursuing a Masters in International Studies from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The views expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at hatt@wow.lk.
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