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Estate Tamils, the Ceylon citizenshipact of 1948 and Sri Lankan politicsAmita Shastri aa Department of Political Science , San Francisco StateUniversity , 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA,94132–4155, USAPublished online: 11 Apr 2007.

To cite this article: Amita Shastri (1999) Estate Tamils, the Ceylon citizenship act of 1948 andSri Lankan politics, Contemporary South Asia, 8:1, 65-86, DOI: 10.1080/09584939908719856

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Contemporary South Asia (1999), 8(1), 65-86

Estate Tamils, the CeylonCitizenship Act of 1948 and SriLankan politics

AMITA SHASTRI

ABSTRACT This article explores the contribution made by the conservative, illiberal orien-tation of Sri Lankan nationalist ideology towards the Estate Tamil population to the presentethnic conflict on the island. This orientation was made evident in the citizenship andfranchise laws Sri Lanka passed soon after independence to exclude the plantation Tamilworkers from the political nation. I argue that the actions of the Sinhalese elite led by D.S.Senanayake were loaded with an anti-working class and ethnically divisive content that hasbeen neglected in previous studies. The new laws distorted the pattern of political incentives,alignments and party competition in the emerging system, and systematically skewed it tofavour the most traditional segment of the Sinhalese electorate. This created an intractabledynamic of ethnic outbidding between the two major Sinhalese-dominated parties to attractthe Sinhalese voting base, at the expense of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority. This directlycontributed to the latter's alienation, support for secessionism, and the outbreak of ethnicviolence and civil war in the 1970s and 1980s.

The current ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has caused scholars to analyse pastdevelopments in an effort to discover the roots of the present crisis. Severalstudies have focused on the sectarian nature of the Sinhalese nationalist ideologyand politics that developed in the late 19th and early 20th century and which wastargeted against the minorities. This essay examines a neglected aspect of thisideology and its consequent policy—the particularly conservative illiberal bentit acquired in relation to the Estate Tamil population.

This orientation was most evident in the citizenship and franchise laws thatwere passed on the heels of the transfer of power to the local elite. One of thefirst laws passed was the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 which deprived theEstate Tamil population, constituting 12% of the population, of their citizenship.This was followed by another law that made it possible for those with property

Correspondence: Amita Shastri, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University, 1600 HollowayAvenue, San Francisco, CA 94132-4155, USA. My thanks to C.R. de Silva, Patrick Peebles andA. Jeyaratnam Wilson for discussion on specific points. I wish to acknowledge excellent research assistanceby Tiffany Norman.

0958-4935/99/010065-22 © 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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or education within the community to get citizenship. A third law deprived thosewithout citizenship from having the right to vote. As a result, the large majorityof the Estate Tamils, who had been crucially important in putting up Ceylon'sfamed tea plantations, had participated in the island's politics in the latepre-independence period, and elected representatives to the first independentlegislature, were excluded from participating in the post-independence polity.

The action was justified by the Ceylonese leadership on various grounds. Itwas argued that the Estate Tamils, or 'Indian Tamils' as they were then called,were an unassimilated alien population with no long-term interest in theisland—they were 'birds of passage' in the words of the first Ceylonese PrimeMinister, Don Stephen Senanayake. It was feared that they would swamp theindigenous population, especially in the central parts of the island. They werealso alleged to be a population with foreign loyalties to India, the island's largeneighbour, a fact the new leadership found particularly threatening.

What lay behind this position? The liberal bonafides of the conservative elitewho assumed power at independence have been commented on by numerousscholars of Lankan politics, but the regressive character of their actions towardsthe Estate Tamils has not been adequately examined for its class and ethno-nationalist content. In the nationalist pantheon of leaders, D.S. Senanayake hascommonly been portrayed as a bluff, genial, westernised, liberal figure. Incontrast, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike is depicted as an inconsistent opportunisticleader who unleashed the genie of Sinhalese chauvinism by his advocacy ofSinhala as the only official language in 1955. It is my argument that in thecomplex 'nested' calculations of high politics, the actions of Senanayake and hiscolleagues were rife with economic and political calculations which were loadedwith ethnically divisive connotations; just as much, I would contend, as were themore explicitly articulated ethnic policies of Bandaranaike.

As I argue, the deprivation of the Estate Tamils of their citizenship rights hadimportant repercussions for the long-term workings of the political system set upat the time of independence. It has been observed that the distortion of therepresentational system caused by the deprivation of the franchise of the Tamilminority, worked to systematically favor the Sinhalese majority.1 What has notbeen commonly observed is that this action, in effect, kicked the bottom out ofthe tentative checks and balances that had been included in the system during thenegotiations for independence to address minority concerns and to protect theirinterests. The new citizenship and franchise laws critically altered the electoralweightages between the various ethnic groups on the island. This had a crucialbearing on the political and electoral possibilities for coming to power in thefollowing period, with fateful consequences for ethnic relations within the polityas a whole, ultimately contributing to the tragic civil war of the 1980s whichcontinues to this day.

It is often asserted that no significant political links existed between the EstateTamil population and the left parties representing the Sinhalese working class,as well as between the two Tamil groups on the island (the Sri Lankan Tamilsand the Estate Tamils). Given the benefits to be forged by such links, their lack

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seems puzzling indeed. Was Sri Lankan society peculiarly destined to divideitself along ethnic lines, ignoring the benefits to be gained by broader rationalinter-ethnic and class-based political coalitions? As this essay highlights, linksalong these lines were clearly being forged in the period before independence,to the deep concern of the conservative Sinhalese elite. The deliberate anddeeply communalist action of the Sinhalese leadership of defining the Tamillabour as foreigners and disfranchising them, ruptured the possibilities ofstronger inter-ethnic and class alliances emerging within the opposition. Part ofthe responsibility for this turn of events lies with the departing colonial power,the British, who left the issue of citizenship unresolved, even though therepresentational system they had approved and introduced at the time ofindependence had been designed and calibrated to maintain a delicate balancebetween the various ethnic groups.

More broadly, this essay underlines the importance of legal rules and institu-tions in providing a structure which shapes the political calculations, opportuni-ties, and alliances of competing forces in society. In doing so, the articlesimultaneously emphasises the critical role of leadership—of its orientations andactions—at founding moments of a particular political order. Such a review isparticularly appropriate as this South Asian state evaluates its experience andachievements over half a century of independence.

A fair understanding of the injustice done to the Estate Tamils has remainedobfuscated by nationalist rhetoric and ideology in Sri Lanka. It has also, in largepart, fallen into the divide that the event of independence constitutes between thedisciplines of history and political science. An adequate appreciation of theimpact of the legislation requires one to understand the historical background ofthe ethnic and class politics served by the legislation. I first examine thecharacteristics of the Estate Tamil population. The next section traces the reasonsfor the growth of hostility towards the Tamils and the political mobilisation thatoccurred in the late colonial period along ethnic lines. I then focus on the risingethnic and class challenge that the Tamils posed to the conservative nationalistelite in the lead up to independence. The following section explicates thestrategies the leadership adopted to contain this challenge. In closing, I discussthe longer-term impact of the measures.

'Birds of Passage'?

As a newly immigrant community, the Estate Tamils were denounced bySinhalese leaders as a transient population with no abiding interest in the island.The facts are to the contrary. It is pertinent to note that they had already emergedas the largest minority group by the turn of the century. In the 1911 census,when they were ennumerated separately from the Ceylon Tamils for the firsttime, they outnumbered the latter: they were 530,983 to 528,024 respectively.2

The former reached their highest proportion in the population around the end of1929. Plantation labourers formed the most numerous and stable segment of thecommunity, with many of them being second or third generation residents on the

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island. Like other diaspora groups with continuing links to the country of origin,a small segment of the community were recent migrants, temporary workers inthe urban areas, or businessmen who travelled back and forth between themainland and Ceylon. I.X. Pereira, the first Indian member of the LegislativeCouncil, stated in 1927 that of the 820,000 persons of Indian origin on theisland; 666,931 (or 81% of the total) were immigrant labourers, and 153,069were in trade and other occupations.3

The Tamil workers formed 85% of the total estate population. Due to thevalue of female and child labour on the tea plantations, there was an almostequal component of men to women workers, and a large proportion of children.In 1929, there were 243,000 men, 234,000 women, and 265,000 children.4 Mostof them lived in family units in the barrack-like housing on the plantations. TheDonoughmore Commission estimated in 1927 that 40-50% of Estate Tamilscould be regarded as permanent residents of Ceylon.5 The Jackson Report onImmigration stated a decade later that 70-80% passed the five-year residencytest and 60% could be considered as permanently settled.6 In any case, with theIndian government banning emigration to Ceylon in 1939, the overwhelmingmajority of the 900,000 persons counted as of Indian origin at independence in1948 had been there for ten years or more—as required by the post-indepen-dence legislation.

With large numbers of plantation Tamils effectively settled in Ceylon, theybegan to participate in and stake their claim to political power as co-participantsin the island's affairs as early as the 1920s. They formed part of a small butunited multi-ethnic working class movement which gathered momentum inColombo in the 1920s. This movement included within its ambit some of thebest known Ceylon and Estate Tamil political figures who worked closely withthe well-known Sinhalese labour activist, A.E. Goonesinha.7 As early as 1927,the two nominated Estate Tamil representatives in the Legislative Council,Pereira and K. Natesan Iyer, charged before the Donoughmore Commission thatEstate Tamils were a discriminated group of people despite their contributionsto the economy. They denounced the view that the interests of Tamil labour werebest represented by the Government of Madras through its Agent resident inCeylon, and asked that the number of Ceylon Indian representatives be increasedfrom two to five.8

Rising hostility

The status of persons of Indian origin was politicised by the colonial andnationalist context in which the migration took place. This created an ambigu-ousness in the position of the community which was seized on and played up inpopulist rhetoric by members of the local elite who used the ideology andrhetoric of nationalism to isolate them while strengthening their own position.The pattern of politics in this period laid the basis for the post-independencelegislation.

The hostility towards the Estate Tamils initially began as a reaction of the

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planters and colonial authorities in Ceylon to the active interventions made bythe Government of India on behalf of the emigrant labour. After 1920, theBritish government in India was pressed by the rising nationalist movement,represented by the Indian National Congress, with the demand that Indians sentoverseas in the British empire not be discriminated against vis-a-vis other Britishsubjects in the host colony. This demand was shaped by the personal andpolitical experiences of Mahatma Gandhi with racial discrimination in SouthAfrica. As a British colony, Ceylon accepted the resolution passed at theImperial Conference held in London in 1921, that the rights of British Indianslawfully domiciled in other parts of the Empire would be recognised. Ceylonwas thus agreeable to granting full Ceylonese citizenship rights to its immigrantpopulation. In a follow-up, the Indian Emigration Act No.7 was passed in Indiain 1922 that would prohibit emigration to destinations which denied Indiansequal rights with the local population. This formed the basis of India's agree-ments with Ceylon for reforms in the exploitative treatment of Indian workersif emigration to the island was to continue.

The interests of the plantation economy were soon caught up in the class andelectoral politics of the time. The upsurge of labour and trade union activities inthe 1920s created a feeling of urgency for constitutional reform in the Britishauthorities. The Donoughmore Commission for Constitutional Reform, ap-pointed in 1927, received submissions from a large number of political andethnic associations. While the mainstream of the Ceylon National Congress(CNC), representing the dominant low-country Sinhalese interests, pressed forresponsible self-government with a cabinet-style political system; the minoritygroups advocated various schemes of communal representation. Most membersof the elite, with the notable exception of Goonesinha, argued against universalfranchise and pressed for a restricted male franchise based on property andliteracy qualifications. Members of the Kandyan elite argued for a federalstructure of government consisting of three provinces, in one of which theywould implicitly be in a position of control. Their proposal highlighted theirstrong feeling of political disadvantage vis-a-vis the more active and influentiallow-country Sinhalese elite and the European planters in the central highlands.

Unexpectedly, the Donoughmore Commission proposed a British county-stylecommittee system and the award of universal franchise to all adults. It washoped by the liberal Commissioners, appointed by the Labour government inBritain, that universal franchise, with its inclusion of the working classes and theminority communities, would lead to less communalism and greater sociallegislation even while it helped to channel the growing mobilisation of labourinto electoral politics. The right to franchise would include Estate Tamils whohad completed five years' residence on the island (with no more than eightmonths' total absence from the island in that period).

The proposals advocating a grant of the franchise to Tamils led to anethnicising of the issue of franchise. The Sinhalese elite implicitly abandoned the1921 Resolution recognising the rights of Indians lawfully domiciled in Ceylonand sought to exclude the largest possible number of them from getting the

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franchise. They refused to accept that five years' residence on the islandconstituted a sufficient basis for permanent settlement or of having developed anabiding interest in the island. Specifically, it was the Kandyan Sinhalese elitebelonging to the radala families who were the most strongly opposed to givingthe vote to the large majority of Tamils, while the minority elites supported it.The Kandyan position got a boost from the personal competition that hademerged in the late 1920s between the low-country Sinhalese leaders,Senanayake and Bandaranaike, for the leadership of the nationalist movement,for which the support of the Kandyan Sinhalese was perceived as critical. Eachof them sought to win Kandyan support using the Estate Tamils as 'bait'.9

Discussions lauding the introduction of 'universal franchise' in Ceylon com-monly fail to note that the Donoughmore proposals were critically restructured inan attempt to appease the emerging upper-class Sinhalese alliance. On the onehand, the number of nominated members in the Council (expected to be drawnfrom under-represented minority groups) was reduced from 15 to eight. On theother, new provisions regarding domicile were drafted by the Ceylonese Board ofMinisters in the following period, and domicile had to be established before anyrights could accrue. In 1931, through a measure initiated by Senanayake, a newand narrow legal definition of a Ceylonese—as being 'a person domiciled inCeylon and having a domicile of origin'—was coined. According to the CeylonState Council (Elections) Order in Council (1931), those who did not have adomicile of origin in Ceylon could, as British subjects, be considered to haveestablished a domicile of choice after five years of residence (Article 7). Alterna-tively, they could seek to get a Certificate of Permanent Settlement after five yearsof residence and a signed declaration of intention to settle permanently (Article 9).In doing the latter, a person would give up any privileges or rights not bestowedby Ceylonese law on all British subjects resident on the island. This provision wasobviously targeted at the Tamil labourers and the protections they were affordedby India. At the same time, property and literacy qualifications in the Act freed themore wealthy segments of the Ceylon Indian population and those of Europeandescent from the restriction relating to residence.

The franchise debate created a strong sense of alienation in the leadingminority representatives which was reflected in the final vote on the Donough-more Report which was passed by the unofficial members of the LegislativeCouncil with the narrow margin of 19 for and 17 against. The Ceylon Tamilleader, P. Ramanathan, denounced the compromise that had been struck by theCommissioners at the expense of the Tamil labourers. He criticised the lack ofbalance in representation and the lack of checks on the powers of a majority inthe proposed State Council. The issue of the 'floating' Estate Tamil populationwas also raised by Ceylon Tamils from the Northern province. They pointed tothe fact that the counting of non-voting adults in the demarcation of constituen-cies for the 50 elected seats would benefit Sinhalese in the Kandyan areas byincreasing their overall representation.

In the following period, even though significant numbers of Ceylon Indianswere registered as voters, they remained sharply under-represented relative to

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their proportion in the population. Between January and July 1931, 100,574Indians were registered, which was equivalent to one-fifth of the adult EstateTamil population. By 1936, 143,000 had been registered; and by 1939, 235,000or close to half the adult population. Even this level of registration was objectedto by the Sinhalese politicians, and in the following period the number wasbrought down. Not surprisingly, given the hostile climate, virtually all of theTamils opted to register as voters under Article 7—a trend that was sharplycriticised by the Sinhalese elite.10 The Estate Tamils were able to elect only twoout of 50 representatives in each election under the Donoughmore Constitution.

The discordant debate over franchise converged with the efforts of theSinhalese elite to mobilise and maintain the support of their constituents in thecontext of a growing economic crisis. Scape-goating the Estate Tamil com-munity provided an easy means for displacing popular anger. The process beganin the Kandyan areas where the rising population, fragmentation of land, andunemployment by the late 1920s increased the attractiveness of estate employ-ment. The Sinhalese political leadership began to channel the growing resent-ment among the Kandyan lower classes in a xenophobic direction against theIndian plantation workers. As early as 1926, in one speech, Senanayake calledthe Indian plantation labourers 'hewers of wood and drawers of water for thewhite capitalist' who were brought in 'to compete with the native and crush thenative', and feared that 'this country will soon be swamped by Indian immi-grants, mainly unskilled labourers'.11 Bandaranaike advocated their compulsoryrepatriation back to India. Because of its obvious negative economic implica-tions for the plantation economy, the demand was not implemented.

Economic arguments against the Tamils gained a new salience in the contextof the Great Depression. With unemployment rising, native anti-immigrantsentiments spread to the urban working class led by Goonesinha and assumed anew virulence when targeted against Malayalee workers who were hired orimported by the British to work on industrial and service sites affected by unionstrike activity. Xenophobic hostility was also targeted at the competition posedto local businessmen by Ceylon Indian traders, who dominated the trade ingoods from India. Thus, all three segments of the Indian community becametargets of hostility.

Ethnic calculations

The restructured Donoughmore Constitution began a period of dominance of theSinhalese elite in the legislature and an active manipulation of ethnic identitiesand alignments. The issue of the transfer of power gained prominence at the endof the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s, but fundamental differences on theissues of representation, franchise and citizenship continued to bedevil efforts toreach a consensus regarding a new political structure. Implicit in all discussionswas the question of what safeguards would be provided for the minorities.Initially, the minority members were united in their opposition to the demand fora cabinet government and decreased powers for the British. Instead, they asked

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for 'balanced representation' on a 'fifty-fifty' basis between the majority andminority communities.

With the British insisting that any new scheme must have the agreement of theminorities, the low-country Sinhalese elite feared an alliance emerging betweenthe minorities and the colonial authorities. They worked to strategically consol-idate their position and split the minority alliance. They deliberately sought towin over the Kandyan elite and the Muslims and to remedy their marginalisationand 'backwardness'. Various measures which would improve the religious,cultural, educational and employment opportunities of the Kandyans and Mus-lims were approved by the second State Council. Sections of the Muslimleadership, including T.B. Jayah and M.H. Macan-Markar, found it beneficial topull away from the minority coalition and to co-operate with Senanayake.12

The Sinhalese leadership also proceeded to woo the more moderate CeylonTamils, and to isolate and weaken the recalcitrant ones. The debate on the futurelanguage of government in 1943 was settled by a vote of 29 to nine in favourof an eventual change from English to both Sinhalese and Tamil as officallanguages. The moderate Ceylon Tamil leader, Arunachalam Mahadeva, wasdrafted into the Board of Ministers at the end of 1943 in response to the criticismthat no minority members were part of the constitutional deliberations of theexecutive Board of Ministers. However, Senanayake failed to win over the moreindependent-minded segment of the Ceylon Tamil community represented byG.G. Ponnambalam and the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (TC). Ponnambalamcontinued to demand balanced representation in the legislature and the executive,as well as citizenship rights for the Europeans and Estate Tamils.

In contrast to their accomodationist attitude to other minorities, the CNCpoliticians worked to exclude and marginalise the Estate Tamils. They dislikedthe Tamil representatives, Peri Sunderam, S.P. Vythilingam and Natesa Iyer,whom they considered 'Indian carpetbaggers' and 'communists' who werebound to create trouble with plantation labour.13 The 'domicile of origin'provisions sponsored by Senanayake were used to exclude the Indian plantationlabour from gaining benefits such as grants of land in village expansion andcolonisation schemes under the Land Development Ordinance No.19 of 1935.Other ordinances were framed to exclude Indian workers from becominglegitimate political participants, while the well-to-do planting population ofEuropeans and Burghers were included. One such was the amendment in 1937to the Village Committees Act of 1889 initiated by Bandaranaike. Mattersultimately came to a head in 1939 when Senanayake's protege, John Kotelawala,the Ceylonese Minister of Communication and Works, arbitrarily dismissed2,517 of 6,624 daily-paid Ceylon Indian workers.14 In response, the Indiangovernment finally enforced the clause of the Indian Emigration Act of 1922 thatpermitted it to prohibit emigration of unskilled labour if they were discriminatedagainst in the host country.

This action by India did not, however, resolve the real issue agitating theminds of the Sinhalese elite, especially the Kandyans, as to how to politicallyand economically neutralise the Indian community that had already settled on

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the island and become its largest minority group. The all-Sinhalese Board ofMinisters supported the view that the immigrant population should be sent back.Irreconcilable differences on the issue between Ceylon and India led to a failureof talks in Delhi and Colombo in 1940 and 1941.15 Pressure from Sinhalesepoliticians pushed the administration to introduce new and tighter proceduresregarding the registration of Indians as permanent residents and voters on theisland. These resulted, as they were intended to, in a large number of plantationlabourers losing their status as voters. Their numbers on the electoral rollsdeclined from 235,000 in 1939 to 168,000 (or about 40% of the adult EstateTamil population) in 1943, and virtually all of them qualified under the domicileof choice clause rather than the certificate of permanent settlement. This still leftmembers of the Sinhalese elite dissatisfied and Bandaranaike continued tocomplain about the large numbers who had been registered.

As a result of the hostile social climate, there was a net outflow of EstateTamils from the island after 1931. The net annual outflow averaged 9000persons in the 1931-1940 period. In the early years of the war, it totalled185,000 persons. By 1946, there were 857,329 persons of recent Indian origincounted on the island.16

Transfer of power and the class divide

In this and the following period, the issues pertaining to the Estate Tamils gotcaught up in the maelstrom of larger events. The Second World War weakenedthe position of the colonial power and provided political leverage to thenationalist elite in Ceylon. The latter offered co-operation to the British in returnfor political concessions and used the power that had already been devolved tothem to consolidate their position. Interested in gaining the co-operation of theCeylonese leadership in fighting the war, the British conceded the issue ofregistration and citizenship as an 'internal matter' to the Sinhalese leadership in1940. The Board of Ministers was thus given the right to negotiate for thecountry on the question of the status of the Indian workers—which they did atthe talks in Delhi and Colombo. In 1943, the British promised to grant 'fullresponsibility for government under the Crown in all matters of civil administra-tion' after the war, with only defence and external affairs being retained asreserve powers. They called for the drafting of a constitution that they promisedto accept if it was accepted by three-quarters of the full State Council. The'Ministers' Memorandum' of 1944, prepared by the Board of Ministers led bySenanayake, presented the draft of a constitution asking for a cabinet system.The devices of area weightage and appointed members were employed to boostthe representation of under-represented or unrepresented groups, on the basis ofwhich it was expected that minority representation would approximate 38% ofthe seats in the legislature.17 With the provision that any constitutional amend-ment required a two-thirds majority in the legislature, it was argued that ifminority representatives were unitedly against a measure supported by the

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majority community, they could block it. In addition, a specific clause, whichlater became Section 29(2) in the 1946 Constitution, explicitly prohibited lawsdiscriminating against any community or religious group. However, a closer lookat the materials reveals that power to legislate on the issues of immigration andcitizenship was kept firmly within the ambit of the elected legislature, and astudied ambiguity was maintained as far as the position of the Estate Tamils wasconcerned.

The Draft Constitution and the procedure adopted for its acceptance becamethe subject of serious dispute between the majority and minority representatives.As a consequence, it was denounced by all the minority members of thelegislature (led by Ponnambalam), except Mahadeva and two nominated mem-bers, Razik and Pereira. The minority members opposed the representationalscheme suggested, argued for a continuance of the existing executive committeesystem, wanted a second chamber with significant minority representation, anddemanded that the citizenship status of Indians and Europeans who were residentin Ceylon be guaranteed. The result was increasing political antagonism alongethnic lines.

The accelerating end game in the negotiations for independence was met withactive manoevering by the various participants attempting to shape the finalsettlement to their advantage. In an effort to avoid a compromise or a deadlockwith its minority opponents in the Council, Senanayake strategically sought toget the British approval of the Draft Constitution first before seeking theCouncil's vote. The British, however, chose to raise the issue of minoritynon-participation in the framing of the proposals along with the issue of EstateTamil citizenship, and sent the Soulbury Commission to make its recommenda-tions in December 1944. Even though the Ceylon Tamil and Ceylon Indiancommunities sharply criticised the ministers' proposals before the SoulburyCommission, the latter basically adopted the ministers' proposals, as becameclear later from its report.18 Following Soulbury's visit, Senanayake visitedLondon and, conscious of British strategic concerns, argued for the British togrant dominion status to Ceylon at the earliest through an order-in-council, aftera mutually satisfactory defence and external affairs agreement had been con-cluded between the UK and Ceylon—a course of action followed in 1948.19 Inthe same visit, Senanayake obtained the concession that all issues relating tocitizenship would be decided on by the government elected under the newConstitution.20

The Soulbury Report, made public in late 1945, treated the problems of theIndian community in a perfunctory manner. It explicitly recommended that theexisting system of franchise be continued. It also stated that at least 80% ofIndians on the preliminary lists for electoral districts other than Colombo, hadbeen either born in Ceylon or resided there for 10 years and more, and so werequalified for the franchise. In addition, it recommended the establishment ofmulti-member constituencies to boost the representation of inadequately repre-sented minorities. Altogether, the Commission expected that seven or eight seatswould be won by Estate Tamils. It also placed its faith on the non-discrimination

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clause to be included in the proposed Constitution. Thus, it offered no solutionof its own on the citizenship question and had clearly chosen to ignore the pleasof the Ceylon Indian representatives that the British settle the issue before theyleft. Instead, turning a Nelsonian eye to the track record of the Sinhaleseleadership on the issue, the Commission blandly averred that under the newConstitution, 'The Government of Ceylon ... will have the ability, as we feel italready has the desire, to assimilate the Indian community and to make it partand parcel of a single nation'.21

In this critical phase of the negotiations for reform, while the British attemptedto maintain an outward semblance of non-partisanship towards the variouscontending groups, they accepted Senanayake as the sole representative of theCeylonese people and found co-operation with him to mutual benefit the mostattractive option. They chose to unquestioningly accept his assurances that theminorities would be treated in a liberal manner and, based on the availableevidence, it is arguable that they tacitly traded control over the issue of EstateTamil citizenship to the new nationalist leadership in return for favourableguarantees for their strategic and economic interests.

The British support for Senanayake eventually caused his detractors to fall inline behind him. The White Paper on Constitutional Reform, based on theSoulbury Report, was accepted by the Ceylonese legislature at the urging ofSenanayake that it be accepted in the interest of a speedy change to self-govern-ment. There was a majority of 51 votes to three with four absent. In the debate,Senanayake pointed to the safeguards included in the Ministers' scheme asevidence of their concern and goodwill towards the minority communities. Hespecifically asserted in his speech, ' . . . that the interests of one community arethe interests of all. We are one of another, whatever race or creed.'22 Since noone wanted to be seen as obstructing the 'attainment of maximum freedom' thathe was calling for, virtually all the members except those of the Ceylon Indiancommunity fell in behind the proposed reforms. Five out of eight Ceylon Tamilcouncillors reluctantly voted for the proposal, while three (including Ponnam-balam) were absent.

The lack of any guarantees regarding citizenship raised the worst fears of theCeylon Indian leadership that an agreement had been forged once again at theirexpense by the colonial power and the conservative Sinhalese elite. Natesa Iyeraccused the British of a betrayal of the promises made to Indians and the Indianlabourers.23 The President of the Ceylon Indian Congress (CIC), S. Thondaman,denounced the Sinhalese leaders for joining in 'a conspiracy with Whitehall' inorder 'to oppress the Ceylon Indians'—a condition imposed on them since1930.24 During the debate, the Estate Tamil representatives asked that a five (orsimilar) number of years' residence, to be ascertained through simple means, beall that was required for citizenship, and they would support the Constitution.They pleaded in vain with Senanayake to use his power and influence to resolvethe issue before the new Constitution went into effect and brought a Sinhalese-dominated legislature to power. Ultimately, the two Estate Tamil members voted

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against the reforms, and one was absent. The White Paper—with a fewchanges—became the Independence Constitution in 1948.

From the perspective of the elite, the need for an agreement in the consti-tutional negotiations was accentuated by the rising militancy of labour from theearly 1940s. The end of the war caused serious economic hardship to theworkers due to the fall in the prices of tea and rubber and a rise in unemploy-ment. Along with a spate of trade union and strike activity, the left partiesopposed the political reforms being negotiated, demanding complete indepen-dence instead. In September 1946, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP)-ledGovernment Trade Union Federation (GTUF) demanded various measures forthe daily paid workers, and launched a strike the following month. From 10,000civil service workers, the numbers of those on strike swelled to 24,000 workersin the various essential services, such as the harbour, railways, power, gas,electrical, telegraph and engineering services. At the beginning of 1947, anotheragitation was launched by the daily-paid government workers, spread to theskilled workers in the motor and engineering firms, and even to clerical workers.They demanded an increase in wages and trade union rights. By officialestimates, 9,000 workers were part of this action that lasted for a month.25 Policepowers had to be used to break the strikes.

A far greater challenge was posed by the Tamil plantation workers. Thegrowing restrictions on their economic and political freedoms, as well as the lackof any assurances regarding citizenship in the reform proposals, provokedwide-ranging protests from the Ceylon Indian community. In February 1946,virtually all Indian businesses stopped work and 93,000 Indian labourers,members of 23 district labour unions affiliated to the CIC, went on strike. InApril, discriminatory measures against Indian plantation workers started off theKnavesmire estate dispute. By the twenty-second day of the strike, a phenomenal350,000 workers were involved in the hartal (or stoppage of work).26 The Tamilworkers posed the greater threat and were, therefore, targeted for a sharperreprisal.

There was a growing bitterness and polarisation between the conservative andradical political forces on the island. While the latter were not successful inousting the colonial authority or the Board of Ministers, their actions underminedthe position of the UNP politicians who developed an acute hostility towards theleft.

In the 1947 elections, the Estate Tamils co-operated with both the TC and theleft to their mutual advantage. A few months before the 1947 elections, despitethe political dangers it posed for his group, Ponnambalam signed a pledge to theCIC that the TC would back citizenship rights for the Indians.27 The electionsshowed that Ponnambalam had strong support in the more independently-in-clined Northern Province and parts of the Eastern Province. The CIC won sevenIndian plantation labour seats, and helped swing the results in favour of the leftparties in seven to 14 others. The election results strengthened the hostility of theconservative Kandyan and low-country elite towards the Estate Tamils and theleft for their growing organisation, radicalism, and political clout.

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The Citizenship and Franchise Acts

A last effort was made to resolve the tortured citizenship question throughdiscussions held between prime ministers Nehru and Senanayake in December1947, after India became independent and Ceylon was due to become so.Consistent with their divergent ideologies and past positions on the issue, Nehruargued for the acceptance by Ceylon of a simple and inexpensive procedure forthe attainment of citizenship requiring residence of seven years in Ceylonpreceding 1 January 1948 uniformly for virtually all persons of Indian originwho voluntarily declared the desire and intention to settle in Ceylon. As hepointed out, if considered necessary for the welfare of the society, morerestrictive provisions could be made to control the entry of future immigrants.Senanayake insisted on a more complicated set of conditions: these involved aresidence qualification of seven years for married and ten years for unmarriedadults, residence which should have been completed by the retroactive limitingdate of 31 December 1945, with all applications being made by persons within2 years of the date of legislation. Applicants had to show that they had anadequate means of livelihood, and conformed to Ceylonese marriage laws.28

The differences between the two governments were swept aside by the unilat-eral passage of the citizenship and franchise acts by Ceylon on gaining indepen-dence. The Ceylon Citizenship Act No. 18 of 1948 was rushed through as anurgent bill and made operative from 15 November the same year. The law createdtwo types of citizenship—citizenship by descent and by registration, both of whichwere highly restrictive and served to strip persons of Indian origin of citizenship.Citizenship by descent was restricted to persons who could prove that at least twogenerations or more (primarily on the male side of the family) had been born onthe island. Citizenship by registration would be available to those residents whocould prove that either parent had been a citizen by descent, and if the individualhad been a resident of Ceylon for seven years, if married, or ten years, ifunmarried. The only provision for naturalisation under the Act was the discretion-ary power given to the Minister in charge to register 25 persons a year fordistinguished public service. It was rightly denounced by opposition membersbelonging to the left and both Tamil parties in stringent terms as being a bill witha clear racial and class bias since it required documentary proof which simply didnot exist for the overwhelming majority of Tamil workers.29

The Indian and Pakistani Residents' (Citizenship) Act No.3 of 1949 in effectturned Senanayake's proposals at the December 1947 negotiations into law (withthe exception that the qualifying date for residence to have been completed wasmade 1 January 1948). As events were to demonstrate, the law provided amplescope for rejection of large numbers of applications on technical grounds: suchas an illegible signature by an official, the failure to prove virtually uninterruptedresidence, lack of proof of an assured income of reasonable amount, or questionsregarding the legality of a marriage.

The Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act No.48 of 1949 madethe status of citizenship mandatory for having the right of franchise. This

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deprived the overwhelming majority of Indian immigrants who were not citizensfrom voting in elections or running as candidates.

The tensions that the citizenship and franchise acts generated in the oppositionand for the alliances being forged by them can be gauged from the pattern ofvotes cast for the bills in the parliament. Though voting was mostly on classlines, the new laws were successful in breaking the coalition that had beenestablished between the Ceylon Tamils and Ceylon Indians. The vote was 53 forand 35 against for the Citizenship Act of 1948. The left and Ceylon Indianlegislators were joined by the Tamil Congress, led by Ponnambalam, and severalindependents in voting against the bill. The two independent Ceylon Tamilcabinet ministers, C. Suntheralingam and C. Sittampalam, voted for the bill butdid not participate in the debate. Suntheralingam, who had reservations about thebill, resigned soon after. However, Senanayake was successful in wooingPonnambalam to join the Cabinet as Minister of Industries soon afterwards,causing disagreement and a split within the TC. The voting on the Indian andPakistani Residents Act in December 1948 was 52 in favour and 32 against, withPonnambalam voting in favour of the Bill. Highlighting the split within the TC,three of its seven members (led by S.J.V. Chelvanayagam) voted against the bill,resigned from the Tamil Congress, and formed the Federal Party soon after.30

Chelvanayagam denounced the measure as discriminatory and exclusionary, andpresciently feared that other groups would be similarly targeted in the future.31

The citizenship and franchise acts can be legitimately viewed as the culmi-nation of Senanayake's efforts to secure his own position by cementing analliance with the Kandyan elite and consolidating the conservative upper classbasis of United Nations Party (UNP) rule. Despite his efforts to create a trulyUNP, the organisation he had created continued to be a conglomeration ofconservative associations, groups, and individuals who formed a loose, undisci-plined, and faction-ridden whole.32 Within the UNP, the major challenge toSenanayake continued to be posed by Bandaranaike who was perceived as bothambitious and vacillatory, showing an inclination to nurture the Kandyan,Sinhalese-Buddhist constituency on the one hand (through the Sabha), whilethrowing out feelers for possible co-operation with Senanayake's chief oppo-nents, the left parties and even the recalcitrant Ceylon Tamils, on the other. TheUNP had won a minority of seats in the 1947 election—42 of 95 seats.Senanayake had to depend on independents and nominated members to attain amajority in the legislature. And, in the longer run, the growing strength andmilitance of the left and the Estate Tamil working class posed a political and aneconomic threat to the propertied, conservative forces the UNP represented.

The citizenship and franchise laws helped Senanayake solve all these prob-lems simultaneously. They allowed him to consolidate his personal positionwithin the UNP leadership by smoothly outbidding Bandaranaike as a protectorof Kandyan interests. The measures opened up the constituencies won orinfluenced by the Tamils to takeover by UNP candidates in the next election.33

They shattered the co-operation that was emerging between the two largestethnic minority groups, both Tamil, and the cross-ethnic coalition along class

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lines emerging within the working class. In short, they constituted part of theSinhalese elite's efforts to divide and rule.

The action taken by the UNP against the Estate Tamils in defining them as analien and marginal group, had a punitive class character to it. In excluding themfrom the political nation, it was designed to destroy the Estate Tamils' collectivepower. It was unlike the policy adopted towards any other ostensibly aliengroup: not merely the Burghers, but even the Europeans whose representationwas augmented through the mechanism of nominated seats in the legislature.Instead, the new citizenship and franchise laws can be seen as part of a seriesof repressive legislation targeted at the working class as a whole. The PublicSecurity Act of 1947 and the Industrial Disputes Act of 1950 were promulgatedaround the same time to deal with any challenge to the social order posed by theleft.

Thus, the belief that there were no explicit political expressions of ethnicityand racism in the policies of Senanayake and the UNP elite in power during thefirst decade of independence is seriously problematic. The nationalist politiciansconstructed a conception of the 'Ceylonese nation' which was rife with partisanethnic and class calculations. Through it, they were over-solicitous of theKandyan Sinhalese interest to the benefit of all Sinhalese, even while they soughtto exclude over one-tenth of the population having different national origins andclass orientation from being considered a legitimate part of it.

In view of his decisive actions against the Estate Tamils so soon afterindependence, it can be argued that Senanayake shrewdly and strategicallymaintained a liberal visage and gave all the right assurances to the SoulburyCommissioners and the British authorities when he saw that minority demandscould make it difficult for negotiations to be concluded by him with the British.At the same time, it would be accurate to say that the British preferred tocynically turn a blind eye to the implications that the exclusion of even a partof the Estate Tamil voting population from citizenship and the franchise wouldhave on the elaborate electoral weightage scheme they had evolved to quietminority fears of being dominated by the Sinhalese. In effect, Soulbury's schemewas critically flawed in resting as it did on a chimera of citizenship and franchiserights.

The long-term impact

The above developments proved to have fateful long-term consequences for thepolity as a whole. The dramatic upsurge and potency of ethnicity in politics inthe 1950s was made possible by the flawed independence settlement. Thepassage of the citizenship laws soon after opened the sluice gates for a series ofactions that cumulatively exacerbated the role of ethnicity in politics.

The sole bulwark on which the edifice of constitutional rights rested, thenon-discrimination clause, proved too weak in the face of tacit collusion from onhigh. The citizenship acts were followed in 1953 by the opinion of the PrivyCouncil that the acts were well within the sovereign authority of the duly elected

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government to pass, and did not conflict with the non-discrimination clause,Section 29(2), of the Independence Constitution. The lordships in their wisdomopined that the Estate Tamils did not constitute a 'community', which accordingto them was a category defined by race or religion. The Estate Tamils, thus,could not claim the protection guaranteed by the section.34 This understandingwas obviously contrary to the treatment of Estate Tamils as a community and a'race' for all official purposes since the census of 1911. Indeed, the nomencla-ture of 'race' was replaced with that of 'ethnic group' only in the 1963 census.According to Wilson, 'The view in sections of Ceylonese legal circles at the timewas that the Judicial Committee had not wished to embarrass the laws of ayoung dominion'.35

The compulsive exclusionary intent of the new legislation became amplyevident in the following years. After protests by the Ceylon Indian communityproved futile, applications covering 824,430 persons of Indian origin were filedbefore the closing date in August 1951. However, when all these applicationswere processed by November 1964, only 140,185 persons (or 13% of EstateTamils) had been accepted as citizens by registration and 975,000 remainedstateless.36 Pressed repeatedly on the issue by the Ceylonese government, Indiareluctantly stepped away from Nehru's position that Indians who had settledabroad were for all purposes citizens of the country of their settlement unlessthey voluntarily chose Indian citizenship. Under the Sirima-Shastri Pact of 1964,it was decided that Ceylon would accept 300,000 persons and their naturalincrease and India 525,000 persons with their increase; with the status of theremaining 150,000 to be decided later. The agreement itself was negotiated withno consultation with the only Estate Tamil representative in Parliament, S.Thondaman. In direct contradiction to the numbers negotiated, over 630,000Ceylon Indians applied for Ceylonese citizenship by the end of 1974. Less than439,000 applied for Indian citizenship, many of them reluctantly or after havingbeen rejected for Ceylonese citizenship. A later agreement in 1974, recognisingthe non-viability of the proportions in the earlier agreement, decided that eachcountry would accept half of the remaining 150,000, but this agreement re-mained a non-starter. At the end of the period of the 1964 Pact in October 1981,only 162,000 Estate Tamils had been registered as citizens of Ceylon, while373,900 had been given Indian citizenship (of whom 284,300 had been repatri-ated to India).37 The rest remained stateless, vote-less and with few individual orpolitical rights.

The vulnerability of the Estate Tamils was manifest in the deterioration oftheir political and economic status. As stateless individuals, they lived inpermanent fear of the law, the police and their employers. Not surprisingly, theywithdrew to depend on and trust only their own unions to protect them from thelarger society. According to one study, while the per capita income of theKandyan and Low-country Sinhalese increased by 24% and 18% between 1963and 1973 alone, that of the Estate Tamils and Ceylon Tamils fell by 1% and 28%respectively. While the decline of the Ceylon Tamils probably represented amovement towards greater equality as they had a somewhat higher income as a

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group to begin with, the deterioration in the low earnings of the Estate Tamilswas a loss they could ill afford, since the median income for Estate Tamils washalf that of all other communities.38

The action of the UNP elite had the political effect of increasing theimportance of the Sinhalese in the political system, especially in the Kandyanareas. Estate Tamils were removed from the voter's rolls while they continuedto be counted in the population for the demarcation of the constituencies. Thiscreated a significant distortion in the value of an individual vote in different partsof the country. In the 1952 election, a constituency in the most populous WesternProvince had an average of 45,850 registered voters, while the sparsely popu-lated Uva and North-Central Provinces had 15,228 and 15,280 respectively.39

The Kandyan constituencies from which large numbers of Tamils had beendisfranchised had electorates ranging to figures as low as 2.912!40 After the 1959Delimitation of constituencies, the largest electorate in the March 1960 election,Dehiwala in the Western Province, had 43,172 voters in contrast to 10,344 votersin the smallest constituency, of Haputale in Uva Province.41 On a purelypopulation basis, in 1947 the low-country Sinhalese would have occupied 44%of the seats in Parliament and the Kandyan Sinhalese 26%. With the partialexclusion of Tamils and with area weightage, at independence the situation had,in effect, been reversed to give the low-country Sinhalese 32% seats and theKandyans 36%. With the virtual elimination of the Estate Tamils from theelectoral rolls, the 1959 Delimitation allocated 37% of the seats to the low-country Sinhalese and 44% to the Kandyans!42 Overall, the weight of theSinhalese (who formed around 70% of the population) increased to account for80% of the seats in Parliament by 1960—a situation which effectively prevailedtill 1988, when elections were conducted under new a proportional representa-tion system.

This not only constituted a blatant deprivation of the democratic rights of theworkers of Indian origin, and a broken pledge to the island's minorities; but alsolaid the basis for increased Sinhalese chauvinism and racism as the dominantpolitical ideology in the following period. In my view, the inconsistencies in thebehaviour of Bandaranaike over the 1950s, that have been pointed out by somany authors, become more comprehensible when viewed against the incentivescreated by the structure of the electoral system and its weightages whichprivileged the Kandyan Sinhalese region. Scholars have put down Ban-daranaike's switch to the 'Sinhala only' official language policy in 1955 to pureopportunism on his part to ride the rising tide of Sinhalese-Buddhism in thelead-up to the Buddha Jayanti and the 1956 general election. Yet, it is useful toremember that he had also taken more reasonable stands. He had advocated thetwo official languages formula in 1944, proclaimed adherence to it in the firstmanifesto of the SLFP in 1951, and adhered to that position till 1955. He evencontinued attempts to provide for a 'reasonable use' of Tamil provisions after heswitched to 'Sinhala only' and rode to power in 1956, but proved unable tocontain the chauvinists in the majority community once in power. To my mind,his controversial switch to 'Sinhala only' was a desperate gambit on his part to

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attract the attention and support of the electorally important rural KandyanSinhalese middle-class and lower middle-class voters towards a party andprogramme which offered them more than did the established UNP. He hadalready fought the 1952 elections on a broadly secular, mildly socialist platformand won only nine seats. The same unspoken calculations, it can be argued, laybehind the rapid switch that was made within a few months by the UNP,now led by the highly westernised John Kotelawala who had been in keencompetition with Bandaranaike for the leadership stakes for almost two decades.The success of Bandaranaike's strategy in the extant plurality system wasevident in the results of the 1956 elections, when a critical shift in votes of16.2% of the total electorate in favour of his Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP)coalition from 1952 to 1956 resulted in the percentage of seats he won rising by43.2%! It was only after making this switch that his coalition was able to wina majority of 51 out of the total of 95 seats—a bare excess of three seats overthe majority. Soon after the elections, the 'Sinhala only' bill was passed by MPsbelonging entirely to the MEP and UNP, indicating the new 'consensus' that hadeffectively emerged and was being supported by the two major parties. TheUNP leader J.R. Jayawardene's 'March to Kandy' to oppose the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact in October 1957, just as cynically sought to attractthe pro-Sinhalese Buddhist forces to his side and thereby tilt the skewedelectoral system in his favour. This caused Bandaranaike to abrogate thePact against his better judgement. From then on, a pattern of 'outbidding'developed between the two major parties for the vote of the Sinhalese majority,especially its Kandyan component, which determined a disproportionatenumber of seats in parliament and which dominated politics in the followingdecades.

Despite efforts by the left parties to gain the political initiative in the 1950sthrough actions such as the hartal in 1954, they remained hobbled politically.The electoral weightages had been deliberately structured against them and theirdensely populated constituencies on the southwestern coast at the time ofindependence. Half the working class (the Estate Tamils) had been excised outof the political nation soon after, a step that was accompanied by a dispropor-tional increase in the weight of the traditionalist Sinhalese-Buddhist constituen-cies. The left attempted in vain to carve out an independent secular politicalspace in the developing politics and discourse in the ensuing period. Even whilethey combated the UNP, the LSSP and Communist Party (CP) providedissue-based support to other political parties. They entered no-contest agree-ments with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1956 and supported it onissues related to economic and land reform, while supporting the minorities onissues important to them—citizenship rights for the Estate Tamils and parity oflanguage for the Ceylon Tamils. Failing to make satisfactory advances in the twoelections of 1960, and with the conclusion of the Sirima-Shastri Pact of 1964,the left leadership ultimately accepted their subordinate political status, andsuccumbed to the lure of political office offered by partnership with the SLFPafter 1964. By the late 1960s the Sinhalese working class led by the two left

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parties, and even the radical youth led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP),had been deeply influenced by the dominant chauvinist Sinhalese ideology.

Thus, the practical logic of politics and search for electoral success and powerdictated that there was no significant party after 1966 that competed on anexplicitly rational, secular, multi-ethnic, and anti-chauvinist platform. Instead,politics between the ethnic groups took on the character of a zero-sum game.Promises and benefits to the Sinhalese majority by each of the major parties weremost easily fulfilled in Ceylon's resource-scarce context at the expense of or bythe marginalisation of the largest and seemingly most 'affluent' minoritycommunity of the Ceylon Tamils. The 1956 'Sinhala only' language policy, thechannelling of funds and patronage to Sinhalese regions and population, theuniversity admissions policy of the early 1970s were the most infamous in thisregard. The dominance of the Sinhalese was constitutionally formalised in the1972 Constitution which provided for a highly centralised unitary politicalsystem, an enhanced status for the Buddhist religion and Sinhalese language, anda continuation of the skewed electoral system. Though efforts were made toimprove the situation by changing the electoral system in the 1978 Constitution,it was not operationalised till a decade later due to political manipulation. All thewhile, ethnic divisions got exacerbated, and the depredation of the majorityprovoked the rise of minority secessionism in the 1970s and civil war in the1980s.

With the above dynamic in motion, ethnic divisions acquired an intractablecharacter. Sri Lankan Tamil representatives repeatedly negotiated agreements togain formal recognition for their language and a devolution of powers to theirregion with the major party in government. These were repeatedly reversed orundermined under pressure from the other major party in opposition as well assections of the support-base of the ruling party—as happened with the Ban-daranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact of 1957, the Dudley-Chelvanayagam Agree-ment of 1966, the District Development Councils (DDC) Act of 1981, and theIndo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987. When the proportional representation systemcame into effect in 1989, it reduced the weight of the Kandyan constituencies inthe polity, but the legacy of the previous system in the form of the bitterdivisions it has spawned in the form of separatism, majoritarianism, and hostilitybetween the two major parties has prevented reconciliation from taking place.

It might be claimed that with the final award of citizenship to the remainingpersons of Indian origin in the late 1980s, a Hegelian dialectic has come about.In a reversal of its previous positions, the Sri Lankan government enactedlegislation on 11 November 1988 which granted citizenship to all remainingEstate Tamils who had not applied for Indian citizenship. This benefited 231,849stateless persons.43 The irony of this measure lay in the fact that it was supportedby the UNP government in order to get the Tamil vote in the 1982 and 1988presidential and parliamentary elections—the opposite of its 1948 policy andreasons. While ostensibly the situation has come full circle, it is important tonote the critical changes that have occurred in the meantime. With a policy thatamounted to forced repatriation, the Estate Tamil population has been cut to

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between half to two-thirds of its previous proportion. This has not onlyweakened them as a group, but it has weakened the collective position of allminorities on the island. More importantly perhaps, it succeeded in irrevocablyundermining the mobilisation and radicalisation of political forces which wasbeginning to take place at a critical juncture of the country's history when itspattern of party politics was taking shape.

Thus, Senanayake's partisan and short-sighted efforts to consolidate an advan-tageous coalition with the Kandyan elite at the expense of the Estate Tamilimmigrant workers, had the longer-term consequence of increasing the import-ance of and resort to racism in political rhetoric and mobilisation in thefollowing period. In a broader historical perspective, the action of the post-independence UNP regime was equivalent to the introduction of a 'restricteddemocracy', somewhat similar to earlier liberal regimes in Europe andNorth America which had property and literacy qualifications to exclude theworking class, women, and minorities. With the world-wide spread of thenorms of democracy and universal franchise in the late colonial and post-colonial context of Sri Lanka, the exclusion of persons on property, literacy,and gender lines had not proved possible. Instead, the conservative Sinhaleseelite used ethno-nationalist criteria to divide the working class and class criteriato weaken the most vulnerable and recently immigrant minority groupthe Estate Tamils—to its own advantage. The ensuing electoral frameworkobstructed the possibility of the consolidation of a viable and cohesivesecular multi-ethnic left of centre coalition in Sri Lankan politics. Sri Lanka'speculiar ethnically-biased plurality electoral system propelled the left partiesand the Sinhalese working class to ally themselves with the larger rulingclass parties and sectarian ideologies if they were to remain electorally relevantat all.

In the course of the negotiations for independence, it would have beendesirable if there had been an explicit insistence by the nationalist leadership onthe inclusion of the interests of all groups, grounded in a fundamental respect forindividual rights. The framework sponsored by Senanayake at independence,imperfect as it was, had incipient in it the possibilities for a national consensusto emerge based on the veto power the minorities could exercise, if united.However, it fell far short of its promise due to his lack of commitment to suchprinciples and even to his own proposals. Instead, the conservative Ceyloneseleadership, epitomised by Senanayake, sought to consolidate their positionthrough any means available. They looked on the creation of nationhood as a'piecemeal' process, to be put together by partisan deals and bargains within theelite, with segments of agreements jettisoned when inconvenient. In theirscramble for power, they found it to their benefit to define attachment to theisland narrowly and to argue technicalities which would discriminate againstpoor working class immigrants who had contributed critically to the well-beingof the society as a whole. In this, they betrayed the lack of a larger nationalist,collective and moral vision that was to have fateful consequences for the societythey left behind.

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Notes and references1. Calvin Woodward, The Growth of a Party System in Ceylon (Providence: Brown University Press, 1969),

pp 257-262.2. Ceylon, Census 1946, Vol 1 part 2, table 28.3. The Ceylon Indian, Vol 1, No 4, 6 November 1927; cited in Nira Wickramasinghe, Ethnic Politics in

Colonial Sri Lanka, 1927-1947 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995), p 65.4. Administration Report of Agent of Government of India 1929, p. 4; cited in Patrick Peebles, 'The

Government of India and emigration to Ceylon, 1922-1939', unpublished paper 1996, p 1.5. UK, Report of the Special Commission on the Ceylon Constitution (or Donoughmore Report), 1928, Vol

7, Cmd 3131, pp 96-97.6. Ceylon, Report of a Commission on Immigration into Ceylon (Sessional Paper 3 of 1938), p 26.7. For details see Kumari Jayawardena, Ethnic and Class Conflicts in Sri Lanka (Dehiwala: Center for Social

Analysis, 1985), pp 30-35.8. Wickramasinghe, op cit, Ref 3.9. An apt metaphor used by Jane Russell, 'Communal politics under the Donoughmore constitution', Ceylon

Historical Journal, Vol 26, 1982, p 235.10. H.P. Chattopadhyaya, Indians in Sri Lanka (Calcutta: K. Bannerjee, 1979), p 209; and Great Britain,

Colonial Office, Report of the Commission on Constitutional Reform in Ceylon (or Soulbury Report), Cmd6677, 1945, pp 77-80.

11. H.A.J. Hullugalle, The Life and Times of Don Stephen Senanayake (Colombo: Gunasena, 1975), pp209-216.

12. For details see Wickramasinghe, op cit, Ref 3, pp 129-33, 246.13. Ibid, pp 113-114.14. Wickramasinghe, op cit, Ref 3, pp 191-192; and Chattopadhyaya, op cit, Ref 10, p 210.15. For details, see Chattopadhyaya, ibid, pp 211-217.16. W. Howard Wriggins, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University

Press, 1960), p 215; Census of Ceylon, 1946, Vol 1 part 1, table 99.17. Dudley Senanayake before the Soulbury Commission: Ceylon, State Council, Debates (or Hansard), 19

January 1945, col 339.18. Though formally boycotted by the Board of Ministers who withdrew their proposals, the Commissioners

were informally escorted and hosted throughout their visit to the island by the Sinhalese politicians, andsought to be won over by various blandishments. Soulbury was to become the first Governor-General ofindependent Ceylon. See Charles Jeffries, Ceylon: The Path to Independence (London: Pall Mall Press,1962), pp 95-96; and Hugh Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the BritishCommonwealth, 1920-1950 (London: C. Hurst, 1976), p 259.

19. K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp 456-459.20. D.S. Senanayake, Hansard, 8 November 1945, col 6926.21. Soulbury Report, pp 63, 80.22. Hansard, 8 November 1945, col 6922.23. For his bitter speech on the occasion, see Hansard 9 November 1945, cols 7078-7093.24. Tinker, op cit, Ref 18, p 286.25. Wickramasinghe, op cit, Ref 16, pp 222-224, 227.26. Wickramasinghe, ibid, p 227; Wriggins, op cit, Ref 16, p 222. The former book has a typographical error

with '850,000' printed instead.27. Wickramasinghe, ibid, p 236.28. Chattopadhyaya, op cit, Ref 10, pp 218-225.29. See Ceylon, House of Representatives, Debates, 19 August 1948, cols 1684-1790.30. Jayawardena, op cit, Ref 7, pp 75-76.31. Debates, op cit, Ref 29, cols 1760-1767.32. James Manor, The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989), pp 164ff, 179-180.33. Six of the seven constituencies in the Kandyan areas won by the CIC in 1947 were won by the UNP in

1952. The UNP picked up a number of left constituencies as well, so that it won 54 seats in 1952.34. Kodakan Pillai vs. Mudanayake et al, 1953, 2 All ER833.35. A.J. Wilson, The Break-up of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict (London: C.Hurst, 1988), p 103.36. P. Sahadevan, India and Overseas Indians: The Case of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Kalinga, 1995), pp 142, 144.37. Chattopadhyaya, op cit, Ref 10, pp 258-264; and Sahadevan, ibid, p 195.38. E.L.H. Lee, 'Rural poverty in Sri Lanka, 1963-1973', in International Labor Organization, Poverty and

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Landlessness in Rural Asia (Geneva, 1977), p 163; Central Bank of Ceylon, Survey of Sri Lanka'sConsumer Finances, 1973 (Colombo, 1974), pp 83-85.

39. Woodward, op cit, Ref 1, p 260, table 12.40. Manor, op cit, Ref 32, p 215.41. Chandra R. de Silva in K.M. de Silva, Universal Franchise 1931-1981: The Sri Lankan Experience

(Colombo: Ministry of State, Department of Information, 1981), pp 117-119.42. Woodward, op cit, Ref 1, p 264.43. For details see Sahadevan, op cit, Ref 36, pp 209-223, 229.

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