20 comments for “Feature: Historical roots and contemporary causes of conflict in Sri Lanka”

• PACT team said,

  In the first part of our interview with journalist Lakshman Gunesekara, he gives his perspectives on the historical root causes of conflict in Sri Lanka.

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  When you say historical roots of the conflict, I can go back five hundred or even a thousand years. It is necessary to do so because it is a mix of the ethnicity consciousness that has emerged as a result of nation state formation on the one side, and the tradition of warfare between polities within the island and the adjacent sub-continent. [There is a] long history of various political entities, in north Sri Lanka or south Sri Lanka or northwestern Sri Lanka as well as south India – what is Tamil Nadu today – interacting across the Palk Strait in various ways; with Sri Lankan based kingdoms invading South Tamil Nadu and vice versa – more the other way – so that history is there.

  When the Sri Lankan island was transformed into a so-called nation state there became a perception that the early history of political and military interaction between different political entities this side of the Palk Strait and the other side as being a history of Indo-Sri Lanka conflict, especially Indian Tamil and Sri Lankan Sinhalese conflicts. This historical memory has got congealed into [a retrospective - that is looking backwards - perception and perspective by the Sinhala ideologues and intelligentsia of ethnicised political entities historically continuously functioning on the island whereas it is possible to argue that even 500 years ago there were actually no such ethnicised polities]. That is, what arose from the nation state formation process was the manipulation of the emerging nation state by the majority ethnic culture to revive their culture to the detriment of other ethnic cultures. So if you want a concise history of the ethnic conflict I would perhaps put it like that.

  So in a sense it is accurate to say that, for example, a Tamil nationalism preceded the Sri Lankan state in independence terms; in the 1930s and even 1920s there was an emerging Tamil nationalism, parallel to what was already an established and much more strong and vocal Sinhala nationalism. And as far as I can remember, whereas the Sinhala nationalism was in my view what I call ultranationalistic because there was the element of supremacy and domination inherent in the discourse of Sinhala nationalism, that is domination of the Sri Lankan geographical and political entity, the Tamil nationalism did not presume to make such a claim, to dominate the Sri Lankan entity, but rather was arguing for a share.

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• PACT team said,

  Lakshman Gunesekara comments on whether the four issues that are widely accepted as root causes of the Sri Lankan state vs Tamil conflict – namely the language issue, employment, Sinhala ‘colonisation’ and education – can be distilled down to ‘discrimination’?

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  Yes, but I would put it in more explicit political terms. I would think that in the post-independence period the root cause is the Sri Lankan ethno-supremacist state. That is the root cause. [Since then] there has been a build up of ethno-supremacy – I first used that term immediately in the months after July 1983. 1947 saw the discrimination against the hill country Tamils; it was an ethnic discrmination but also it was a kind of caste based discrimination, because the Tamil language majority of the other castes and of a different lineage in terms of being Jaffna and Batticoloa, they all ganged up with the Sinhalese and the elites to virtually throw them out, whereas they physically remained as slave labour. They were thrown out.

  Then 1956 was the language legislation. From 1956 onwards there has been a mix of [causes] – it’s not simply ethnicity and the ethnic dimension, I don’t simplify things to either this or that – there is also a socio-economic class dimension. Post-independence capitalism necessarily requires concentration of power in the ruling class, the capitalist class, irrespective of ethnicity. So there was the classic metropoilitan-centred concentration of power both political as well as social and economic. In Sri Lanka due to certain populist welfare policies it was slow, so we didn’t see the heightened urbanisation in Colombo as we saw in Seoul in Korea or Manilla or in Bangalore and Mumbai, but it began. Post 1977, with the liberalised, more direct market based economy that further exacerbated. So today we have this stark gap between the Western Province and the rest of the country. So it was a concentration of economic, social and political power. 1972 saw further centralisation of power and 1978 was the worst centralisation of power. It was an irony that the very UNP which was the first Sinhala led party to explicitly recognise the specific problems of the Tamil people in their 1977 manifesto – which brought them a large Tamil vote – was also at the same time advocating a centralisation of power in an executive presidency. They proceeded to do so virtually counter to the need to devolve power for ethnic reasons. So there were both these dynamics there: the need to maintain a centralised economy and a centralised polity which is the basic dynamic of a capitalist political economic formation feeding into the Sinhala supremacist cause very conveniently and they complemented each other. We have this dynamic still continuing.

  A certain period in the late 1980s and 1990s saw the first reaction – or perhaps the only reaction – to the preceding years of ethnic conflict, war and successive anti-Tamil pogroms, by some of the Sinhala intelligentsia and by some of the political leadership. It was a pragmatic and perhaps also a moral conscience based reaction. Chandrika and Vijaya Kumaratunga stand very much at the head of it and I’m sure as a young person, I was influenced by that. We saw the acceptance in the 1980s and early 1990s of some things we had been pushing for since 1975 and 1976: the right to self-determination, the need to recognise that there are differences in culture here, the need for equality, and the need for devolution in a serious, structural way. They began to become acceptable. At one time we had been hooted and chased and laughed at, but it became fashionable to talk about devolution. Soon provincial councils were talked about at a time when provincial councils were too late. The Chandrika Kumaratunga regime started as the only little period of recognition of different ethnicities and the possibilty of a more pluralistic, multi-ethnic polity. However, again the compulsions of the nation state – and the state remained a capitalist, centralised state and that dynamic remains – overruled Chandrika and of course the compulsions of a feudal political culture I think also retained Chandrika in its fold. So we finally saw a war for peace.

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• PACT team said,

  Anthropologist and senior lecturer at Colombo University Dr Farzana Haniffa responds to the assertion made by some Tamil and Sinhala writers on the conflict that Muslims in Sri Lanka have been “playing both sides”.

  The ‘Sinhala Only’ legislation not only impacted on the Tamil and Burgher communities, but also the Muslims, they being traditionally Tamil speaking. But Muslims in Sri Lanka seem to have made a choice to adapt to the policy. Could you comment on the response by the Muslims?

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  One of the classic examples of how Muslims have played both sides, cited by Tamil writers writing on the Tamil perspective of the conflict as well as a lot of the Sinhala writers writing on the general perspective of the conflict – that’s how it is has been posited – is the manner in which Sir Raziq Farid responded to the Sinhala legislation. He said that he was all for it and as one country we should have one language and that language should be Sinhala. That is seen as the classic Muslim response – that whoever is in power, you go with that position. What doesn’t generally get articulated in that kind of statement is that Raziq Farid was not the most prominent Muslim politicians of that time and there were a large number of Muslim politicians from the Eastern Province who were vehemently in opposition to the Sinhala legislation. They considered themselves to be Tamil speaking, because Sir Raziq Farid said something like Muslims don’t have a language of their own. The Eastern Province Muslims really resisted this and said, no we are Tamil speaking, we take great pride in our Tamil language, and this legislation shouldn’t be passed because for all of the reasons that we are aware of. The analysis with regard to the Muslim polity is that this was a very particular southern Muslim perspective that Sir Raziq Farid represented. Even more than the southern Muslim perspective I would go as far as to say that it was a particular Colombo elite perspective and not necessarily only Muslim. I think Farid’s position was based more on a polity that spoke mostly English, rather than even thinking that Sinhala would be so prominent; he didn’t think that English would lose its place. So that was the way in which Muslims addressed the problem. I turn now to what has been the response consequently. The Muslim community that is mostly Tamil speaking – 30% of the Muslim community lives in the north and east, well not so much in the north because they were expelled in 1990 – but that represented the northern and eastern Muslim community and 70% lived outside. There was a lot of interaction with those who were “outside” of the Muslim community and the Sinhala communities that they lived among. So while there was a large emphasis on speaking Tamil, there was a necessity to have a sort of a link language to be able to communicate with the Sinhalese communities. Since there was not a political platform based on language around which Muslims rallied, a kind of pragmatism influenced their choice as to what language to follow. Now there are large numbers of Muslims who speak Tamil, but who’ve been educated in Sinhala – they don’t read and write Tamil. To an extent that’s seen as a real loss to the community because Muslims have also taken pride in their contribution to literary Tamil – no one really talks about the Muslim contribution to Tamil literature, but there is a huge contribution – and that people fear might be affected.

  Do you think that pragmatism, essentially being practical about a situation, in retrospect, has lead to the Muslim community being perceived as trying to exploit the situation?

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  The simplest answer to that question is yes, but I’ve been struggling to think about what does this pragmatism mean politically. What is the place of political idealisms that are appearing among the Muslims and what is the progressive potential of those? And one wonders about the Muslim nationalism that is emerging and whether that is really a better thing than the pragmatism of politicians of the past. And how do we define that? In terms of the material consequences to the people? So I think it is a bit of a complex question there. Yes, they were pragmatic and there were consequences, but I’m not comfortable with leaving it there.

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• PACT team said,

  Farzana Haniffa comments on whether Sri Lanka could be described as a racist society.

  I think racism is a slightly stronger word; I don’t think I would use the word. But the polarisation between the communities clearly exists. The 1915 riots had a huge impact on a generation of Muslim politicians. They inculcated among their followers to a large extent this sense that the community could be under threat from the majority, and so there was a generation of Muslim leadership that was really aware that we need to be careful. If you live among the majority and you have experienced violence from then you need to be careful so there is that sensibility or it existed within a certain generation of politicians. I don’t know if that is dying out now because there is a new generation and there is an influx of eastern political ideas. So that whole thing is getting shaken up a little up, but I used to feel very strongly when i used to interview politicians for my research 5 years ago. So that’s there. Then there is a sense by a lot of Muslim business people that their territory is precarious, that it is not firm, that it could be undermined, that the access that they have to certain kind of contracts, certain kinds of licences is very dicey. So you have to be careful. There is another sense in which this inter-ethnic polorisation takes place and that has to do with the Muslim piety movements that has emerged more recently with a history of some 20 some years. Within that there is a perception and I encounter that quite frequently when we have discussions about Islamic dress, as thought about today because this is not traditional Islamic dress for Sri Lankan Muslims, it’s not. So there is a certain kind of othering that is taking place due to the new practices of dress that are being followed by some Muslims. There is a way in which Muslims are thought to be really peculiar, their ways of living, things that they consider to be important are strange. Then of course women are oppressed because they wear all this garb so there is that kind of sensibility which is a little distressing. One of the things I try to do with my students is to try to unpack that and say that these are certain kinds of choices that people make and there is a history to this whole movement and in my analysis it is a manifestation of the response to the polarisation in the society. Two communities are fighting each other and the third community that is articulating its distress is through these kinds of movements. So that exists.

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• PACT team said,

  Farzana Haniffa reflects on the emergence of a Muslim political and national consciousness and on Sri Lankan Muslim identities.

  You mentioned the 1915 Muslim-Sinhala riots, was it the start of Muslim nationalism?

  I would not connect 1915 riots as the start of Muslim nationalism, but I would see it as being used by a Muslim nationalist position today as the beginning of a Muslim national consciousness. My recollection is from a conversation that I had some time ago in the Eastern Province. I have a sense that in some sort of future Muslim nationalist manifesto, it could appear. But as a social scientist, I don’t see that as the beginning of a Muslim nationalist consciousness. I see it as a particular Muslim political consciousness, but I wouldn’t see it as a Muslim nationalism. Although it did influence a generation of politicians, that was not in terms of a particular Muslim nationalism. They saw their politics as very much a part of a Sri Lankan polity and seeing themselves as part of that was the struggle, to position themselves to have enough power, enough access so that the Muslim community would prosper and not be subject to violence again. So that was the way in which it defined itself.

  So when did Muslim nationalism emerge?

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  I am not sure about the political discussion in the Eastern Province right now. The Oluvil Declaration* was in response to the violence in the Eastern Province after the CFA. There was a real sense that the Muslims were kind of hung out to dry by the whole peace process; I agree with that position. As a response to that there was this declaration that was made at a rally of some 30,00 Muslims in Oluvil. I think to a large extent it mirrored the Vaddukodai Declaration; much of the same language was used and it called for the recognition of a Muslim nationhood for the Muslims of the north and east. To an extent, we could even talk about that as the start of a Muslim nationalism, largely in response to the manner in which Tamil and Sinhala nationalism was marginalising Muslim rights and aspirations.

  Can you comment on Muslim identity or identities in Sri Lanka?

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  Even though the Oluvil Declaration talked about the Muslims of the north and east, the northern Muslims are to a large extent a little bit hesitant to identify themselves too much with this Muslim nationalism and this polity of northern and eastern Muslims for a number of reasons. I think historically the engagement between the north and east wasn’t that extensive and some of the early political ideas for instance the SLMC had regarding a settlement for the Muslims, the northern Muslims were not really supportive of. For instance, not many northern Muslims were supportive of the non-contiguous areas because for reasons of practicability – they were really distant polities – how would you connect them? Also, the relationship between say the Muslims and the Tamils in the north – there was a relationship until 1990 – and the relationship between Muslims and Tamils in the east now, are two very different things. The Muslims of the north still hark back to a time of great harmony between the two communities, whereas the polarisation between the Muslims and Tamils in the east is legendary now. So the northern Muslims consider themselves to be very different from the eastern Muslims so that is something that one needs to be mindful of. But clearly the Muslim politics is not one; you have the northern Muslims, you have the Eastern Muslims and you have the southern Muslims or Muslims in the rest of the country who have very different political allegiances. In fact a lot of southern Muslims were very resistant to the emergence of the SLMC in the late 1980s because they felt it did not reflect their political reality.

  * The ‘Oluvil Declaration’ was signed on 23 January 2003 by students and activists in the eastern town of Oluvil, was the first public endorsement of internal self-determination by eastern Muslims. It came at a time of high-profile peace negotiations between the government and LTTE (Source:
  Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province: Land, Development, Conflict; International Crisis Group; Asia Report N° 159, 15 October 2008)

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• Ived Amos said,

  How does understanding this history help us develop a society that is more inclusive? I guess what I am looking for is, given that we are at another historical turning point, what do we need to do? At the track one level, but also at the level of civil society.

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• prashan said,

  To respond to Ived Amos- I firmly believe that understanding the different perspectives that make up our shared history may help us develop a more nuanced understanding of conflicting points of view. It helps move away from the majoritarian view of history. Perspectives such as Farzana’s help broaden the discussion of what must be considered when we are moving towards significant changes in the conflict dynamic of Sri Lanka.

  I think we need to continue to engage new people in this conversation, allow their diversities and points of view to emerge, and challenge the imposition of biased and damaging political solutions.

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• issun said,

  PACT seem to be focusing too much about the complex and convoluted history of the conflict than the present situation. Sri Lanka’s multi ethnic population, cultural differences, languages, practice of different political ideologies and so on, makes the needs of Sri Lanka dynamic and ever changing.

  For example, the vast majority of Sri Lanka were ecstatic about a peaceful solution with the LTTE back in 2002 but within a few years that attitude changed completely. Another example is Banda – Chelva Pact in 1957. Although many silently wanted the problems to end with the pact, a small number of people including hardliner monks and politicians managed to change the tide.

  All these events are now lost in time and obsolete. Even though the LTTE had reasons for their uprising, their actions in the last 25 years have hurt Tamil community and destroyed prospects of a peaceful solution with them as an entity. Therefore I think looking for the roots of the conflict is a lost cause as the original reasons are now redundant.

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• prashan said,

  In response to Issun- if it is indeed a lost cause I’m surprised you took the trouble to comment. Fortunately others who both work on and use the site don’t share this view.

  The convoluted history of the conflict gives rise to many of the misunderstandings we experience today. It channels the conversation about a political solution firmly down the majoritarian political path despite its own convolutedness and ignores the myriad other views and opinions that emerge from history.

  If you took the trouble to read Farzana’s comments in particular you would notice how valued the re-examining of historical issues such as the expulsion of the Muslims from the north is, and how much the examination of that historical event needs to contribute to the current discussions on minorities in Sri Lanka.

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• PACT team said,

  Journalist Lakshman Gunesekara talks about racism in Sri Lankan society.

  It’s in the mind – I mean it’s in my mind. Today I’m in the latter part of my life, I’m a little less subject to it, but even twenty years ago, forget it even ten years ago, I would mean to say Sri Lankan, but I say Sinhala or Sinhalese. In some conversations where I am meaning to refer to Sri Lankans, I would just like that say Sinhalese. Why is that? Because in my mind I have been grown up with and nurtured with the conception that Sri Lankan is Sinhala. For me that’s enough to indicate how institutionalised ethnic domination is, ethno-supremacy is. I use the word racism in a simplistic sense. Racism has been used in terms of colour bar based racism and even those elements are there. I grew up with and romanticised Duttagemunu for example. I’m a history romantic. And I grew up to love reading Dennis Clark’s Golden Island, which is a children’s book about Duttagemunu. I would still love my children to read that, although you can see the racism there. The Tamils were dark or black skinned and the Sinhalese were the golden-skinned race. I remember, as a boy Duttagemunu refused to think of himself as betrothed to the daughter of the Tamil king. Why? Because she was black! I don’t think that kind of thinking was there at all in pre-colonial Sri Lanka.

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• unionblack said,

  The writer and activist Arundhati Roy had this to say recently about conflict roots and the issue of racism in Sri Lanka: “Meanwhile, there are official reports that several ‘‘welfare villages’’ have been established to house displaced Tamils in Vavuniya and Mannar districts. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph (February 14, 2009), these villages ‘‘will be compulsory holding centres for all civilians fleeing the fighting’’. Is this a euphemism for concentration camps? The former foreign minister of Sri Lanka, Mangala Samaraveera, told the Daily Telegraph: ‘‘A few months ago the government started registering all Tamils in Colombo on the grounds that they could be a security threat, but this could be exploited for other purposes like the Nazis in the 1930s. They’re basically going to label the whole civilian Tamil population as potential terrorists.’’ …

  “Given its stated objective of ‘‘wiping out’’ the LTTE, this malevolent collapse of civilians and ‘‘terrorists’’ does seem to signal that the government of Sri Lanka is on the verge of committing what could end up being genocide. According to a UN estimate several thousand people have already been killed. Thousands more are critically wounded. The few eyewitness reports that have come out are descriptions of a nightmare from hell. What we are witnessing, or should we say, what is happening in Sri Lanka and is being so effectively hidden from public scrutiny, is a brazen, openly racist war. The impunity with which the Sri Lankan government is being able to commit these crimes actually unveils the deeply ingrained racist prejudice, which is precisely what led to the marginalization and alienation of the Tamils of Sri Lanka in the first place. That racism has a long history, of social ostracisation, economic blockades, pogroms and torture. The brutal nature of the decades-long civil war, which started as a peaceful, non-violent protest, has its roots in this.” The Silent Horror of the War in Sri Lanka, The Times of India, 30 March 2009.

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• Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan said,

  I’m commenting on Dr. Haniffa’s reply to the set of questions put to her about the origins of Muslim nationalism. Her answers puzzled me. Its been well established in the scholarly literature, I had thought, that the founding of newspapers, such as the ‘Muslim Nesan’ (1882), the arrival of ‘Arabi Pasha’ (1883), and the ‘Founding of Zahira’ (1894) in a positive way, and on the other hand, P. Ramanathan’s ‘The Ethnology of the “Moors” of Ceylon” (1888) in a negative way, all contributed to a growing Muslim political consciousness in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. If we understand nations to be ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson) that are imagined through print capitalism, and have there root ideas about kin, origin and place, the content of this political consciousness is incipiently nationalistic, surely. I don’t mean this pejoratively, after all, Sinhala and Tamil communities were being transformed in the same way, at the same time. So I remain puzzled as to why, in a discussion that is concerned with a ‘time line’, and invokes ‘research’ and ’social science’, all this remained unsaid.

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• Farzana Haniffa said,

  Dr. Jeganathan raises an important point regarding the historical antecedents of Muslim political consciousness. I agree that these historical moments that Dr. Jeganathan mentions indicate an incipient political consciousness – I think my statement in the interview also indicates this, but I hesitate to call this a Muslim nationalism. If nationalism is only about imagining community – then perhaps yes. However, I choose to use nationalism, especially within a conversation about Sri Lanka, as indicating a more developed political idea that calls for self determination for the group and with a position regarding
  territory. Further any history of Muslim politics must be cognizant of the very different developments of Eastern and Southern Muslim political consciousness – this too is quite evident in the literature. And the Oluvil declaration very clearly invokes ideas of territory and self determination and in fact limits its reach to the Muslims of the North and East recognizing the different political realities that the different Muslim communities of Sri Lanka have to contend with. Having said this, it is not clear if Muslim politics will travel in yet another direction in the future. Today, some Muslims feel that politically coming together is necessary today more than it has been under other historical circumstances. Muslim responses to the current political realities will decide the future of Muslim politics as well as the academic debates regarding the emergence of Muslim political/national consciousnesses.

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• PACT team said,

  Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan talks to the PACT team about why it is important to pay particular attention to Sri Lanka’s colonial past when looking at roots of conflict in Sri Lanka.

  Is it important to look back at Sri Lanka’s conflict history and its root causes?
  
  History is important in trying to trace out the structural determinants of any kind of conflict. I wouldn’t put much weight on history in the sense of ‘a blame game’. I don’t think it’s worthwhile unearthing the past to point a finger at one party or the other because if Sri Lanka is going to be a viable country at all, we need to move forward. But I don’t think we can move forward without understanding how we got here. And in doing that, while not appropriating blame, I think it is important in a dispassionate way and in a scholarly way to work out what really the structural elements are in our conflict.

  What are those structural elements?
  
  I think first we have to understand that we’ve been colonised for 450 years, roughly from the middle of the 16th century to the middle of the 20th century. I think it’s important to understand the last period of colonialism, the British period, to understand where we are, when we talk about the Sinhala, the Tamil and the Muslim communities. And, of course, even the Portuguese and the Dutch periods also are important, but less so, in many ways.

  Generally in discussions that proceed these days, about conflict resolution and peace building and so and so forth, I find that little attention is paid to the colonial period. And I think that’s unfortunate because we have to really try to understand what colonialism did to construct these communities in the way we see them now, really as enmeshed in conflict and often in violence. So I think one important thing to realise is that the social historical evidence, in my opinion at least, is that at the beginning of the 19th century, we didn’t have in Sri Lanka the kind of communities that today we call Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim. There were certainly differences and diversity in the polities such as it was, but the evidence says that compartmentalised communities, that had clearly defined and putatively watertight boundaries, that conceptualised themselves, internally, as imagined equalities, didn’t exist at all. I think what you had were overlapping population groups, with strong a sense of internal hierarchies that may well have not been able to answer clearly the question, are you Sinhala, are you Tamil, are you Muslim. They may have taken on different kinds of identities, possibly in relation to what constituted faith at the time, but not religion in the European sense, but also based very much on locality and region; kin, and hierarchy. So a person in answer to the question, “who are you?” may well have said “I am from the conglomeration of seven villages in this particular district and this particular sub-district,” or “the leader of kin group is x”, which is not an answer that would be couched in the kinds of ethnic terms that we see today.

  So what happens really through the 19th century and the 20th centuries is that these communities begin to solidify with putatively well-demarcated boundaries, internal coherence, arguments about internal homogeneity and equality. And the very content of those identities gets transformed radically; this is better known, and has been thought through more than my first point, which is a point about the lived texture of the ‘identity’ itself. There are several aspects of colonial rule that you have to understand in relation to the construction of what we see today as ethnic communities. One important one is the colonial project in representation, in what was called ‘native’ representation, in the various kinds of administrative and legislative councils that were created after the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms in demarcating representation according to community. So there were Sinhala members, Tamil members, and by the end of the 19th century, an argument about a Moor representation. By producing representation in relation to community, the colonial project did a lot to demarcate these boundary groups. In fact, the very construction of the idea of the ‘Moor’ can be traced to the Ramanathan-Aziz debate, which was, at bottom, about representation in the framework of ‘native’ representation in the colonial government.

  Another point of impact of colonial knowledge can be seen in the way that British colonialists, and then increasingly Sinhala and Tamil nationalists, began to understand their own history. While it’s very clear that Sri Lankans didn’t think of their history as an interconnected record that went back to a distant past in a linear timeline that stretches back 2,500 years, at the beginning of the 19th century, there is this idea that Sri Lanka does have such a history, and that it is the history of Tamil invasion and conquest and Sinhala defensiveness, and occasional reconquest, until a great decline sets in, and modern identities, very different from the ones I described earlier, are superimposed on this divisive history. There is very little historical evidence to really instantiate that overlapping kingdoms on the island, which is now called Sri Lanka, and South India, various ones in South India, and other surrounding kingdoms – if you think of Java and Burma and Thailand and so on – that those overlapping kingdoms that fought wars and battles of conquests, basically the shifting of imperial centers and power, can really be understood through the prism of modern ethnicity. In fact as I said before, these groups may not have so conceptualised themselves. There is clearly good research to show that they didn’t imagine themselves as Sinhala and Tamil and Muslim in the way we do today. But it is after the colonial translation of the Mahavamsa and the reconstruction of ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Pollonaruwa that we begin to imagine that these ancient sites, stupendous and marvelous as they are, were really a product of bitter Sinhala and Tamil quarrels that go back through time. So I think in that instance, what you have is a British colonial understanding of native community as compartmentalised and watertight and so on, being reinscribed on the landscape, in a totally divisive way. I would suggest that the interested reader take a look at my paper, “Authorizing History, Ordering Land: the Conquest of Anuradhapura” to get a more grounded sense of what I mean here. It’s this colonial history that I think was and has been to this day extremely divisive for the territory that is this island. Put another way, when that colonially constructed history is inscribed on the landscape, it produces a divided island of Ceylon.

  This interview segment is also available on Dr. Jeganathan’s blog, SouthPaw where it is contextualised, in relation to other posts. Dr Jeganathan wanted to make it clear that he does not endorse any other claims, implicit or explicit, made on the PACT site.

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• PACT team said,

  Dr. Jeganathan compares and contrasts Sri Lanka’s particular colonial experience with the experiences of other colonised countries, under Britain and France.

  It’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking about a number of territories that have difficulties integrating themselves as single countries. I think if I really work it out, I would give you six examples.

  Take the example of the sub-continent of India, that has been trifurcated into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – that was a British colony, ‘the jewel in the crown,’ its said – and it has gone through really three partitions. Take the case of what used to be called Malaya, that then became the Federated States of Malaya and has undergone one partition and is now Singapore and Malaysia. You take the island of Cyprus, which is a British colony, and very early on in the 1970s, it went through a partition which still exists really, into a Turkish side and a Greek supported Cypriot side. Even in Canada, the question of Quebec and Canada has to be understood in relation to the Canadian colony. Fiji would be another example of another British colony that has had enormous problems with integration. There has been continuous political instability and a lot of what I can clearly understand as ethnic tensions between native Fijians and Indians and so on. But the most stunning example is Israel and Palestine, which is the result of a British mandated partition. It is beyond any doubt, one of the most intractable partitions, that’s come out of British colonialism. But there is another example, the oldest, and really one of the deepest partitions, which now seems to have reached a still simmering resolution: Ireland and its northern Zone, Protestant and Catholic; Britain’s oldest colony. I think I’ve come up with 8 examples, really! I’ve lost count, but I hope its food for thought. Sri Lanka is just the last example, that’s what I want to underline.

  But there is more: in countries like Australia and Southern Africa, and certainly the United States in the British colonial period, and after, and again Canada, what you have is white settlor colonies, that also practiced partitions, in a far more violent, white supremacist way. In those territories, settlers, governed by the British Colonial office, and then dominion regimes, had no compulsion in decimating the native populations or confining them to small arid zones, or reservations, after expropriating land. This happened in all of Southern Africa; what used to be called Northern and Southern Rhodesia which is now partly Zambia and Zimbabwe, and in the southern half, now called South Africa. In Australia, for example, the entire population of Tasmania was decimated, and native inhabitants in other places, were placed in partitioned reservations, which can certainly be compared to what happened in Southern Africa. Now, as I said, I’m not trying to make a moral point here. What I am saying is, take a comparative look at the experience of French colonialism. If you look at Vietnam certainly it was partitioned, for some twenty years, but along ideological lines, not on ethnic lines. If you look at Algeria, another French colony, that fought a bitter war of independence, or if you look at West Africa, where there are a number of Francophone countries, including Senegal or Cameroon, you find nation unity, not partitions. Now I’m certainly not validating French colonialism, or making a moral point about it. I hope that’s clear. My point in making the comparison with French colonialism is to stress that unless we understand our own experience with British colonialism in a disciplined, comparative way, we will fail to surmount the enormous difficulties our country faces. That’s why a careful, measured understanding of colonialism is important; I’m sorry there isn’t enough discussion about it among Sri Lankans who care about radical democracy and diversity these days.

  There is a large body of literature that recounts how British colonial ideas about community, caste and difference, guide policy and produce violent difference, ‘communalism’ on the ground, in colonial India. But in relation to Sri Lanka, that strand of literature is much thinner. Not because similar socio-historical phenomena didn’t take place here, I don’t think, but because scholars, with some important exceptions, haven’t addressed it. A lot of nineteenth centuries histories were written in the ‘administrative history’ mould, and there are continue to be several British neo-colonial historians and anthropologists, who manage to keep studies about the effects of imperialism at bay.

  Again, this is unfortunate, because it’s not viable to think that we can begin to work out what’s happened in Sri Lanka over the last few decades if you simply start in 1948. And most analyses of the conflict start there, with the well-worn, vacuous clichéd ‘at independence Ceylon was prosperous and peaceful…’ sort of story. Or worse, the ‘model colony’ story. This is poor analysis, because by 1948, we already have the idea that there are these multiple ‘communities’ in Ceylon that cannot live in peace with each other, without some overarching constitutional guidance or a very heavy hand of law and order from above. That’s exactly the same in India, and at independence, and later in 1971, these ‘differences’ become the partition(s) I spoke of earlier. In the case of India it is widely recognised that divide and rule, between colonially constructed communities, was very much an ongoing strategy.

  But ultimately, ‘divide and rule’ is the wrong analytical tree to bark up. On the contrary, the first analytical issue to address should be the conditions that make these ‘divisions’ appear natural. That should be the problem in the first place, why these separate ‘communities’ of Sinhala (several kinds), Tamils (several kinds), Moors (several kinds), Burghers, Europeans made to represent themselves as such, and only as such, within the framework of British rule. As I pointed to earlier, this is a little understood feature of British colonial practice that has led to over half dozen partitions in former British colonies or administered territories.

  So that’s how we should understand the much discussed section 29 of the Soulbury Constitution. What the section says is that the legislature may not pass any kind of legislation that discriminates against one group or the other. The groups here are not taken to be poor people/rich people or tall/short people or people with long/short hair, but people who belong to these well-defined ‘communal’ groups that come into being in the 19th century. This is really a strategy of British rule – creating the groups and then saying, “we will oversee differences between them and see that the pie is shared equally”. That’s where section 29 comes from. It is part of the colonial project that says, ”you guys are always going to be divided, but we’ll balance it out for you”.

  So this is what we’ve been left with as a consequence of colonialism, and unless we pay sufficient attention to that, we’ll never get beyond it. I think that in some ways everything that has come after has remained within that frame of “yes we are all divided and now we have to have some sort of arrangement that holds the scales between those divisions evenly”. We’ve never managed, as a polity, to set that aside those ideas of ‘separate, but equal’ and try to work out what we have in common rather than what divides us as a polity. And then try to work form there and strengthen that. People have talked about it, but I don’t think we’ve ever done it as a people.

  In other British colonies, where such minority protections existed, did they continue there? Is Sri Lanka unique in getting rid of minority protections and causing the consequent fissures?

  As I’ve been saying, it is this idea of constructed difference that is at the root of the problem. That’s what has led to partitions through the examples I’ve given. And of course post-partition polities are left with the same problems, usually. Lets take one of the most successful examples of partition in the British post-imperial landscape there is, that of Malaysia and Singapore.

  If you look at Malaya, then the Federated States of Malaysia and now Singapore and Malaysia, what you have really is a de jure separation; it happened in the 1960s. Singapore really is the Chinese end of things, and what is called Malaysia today is the Malay end of things. The Indians, the ‘third group’, are in between in both cases. Singapore follows a very authoritative model, basically it was and continues to be a one party state. Very much like colonial rule, really, it wasn’t, we keep tending to forget, democratic. Nor is it concerned with undoing the colonial project of ‘racial’ demarcation at all. If you do the ‘hop on the bus’ tour of Singapore, the guide will tell you with no sense of irony at all that this is ‘Little India’ and so on. You’ll find that there is still a MRT station called dhobi ghat. The word dhobi actually I think would be unusable, in an official sense, in this country because of its profoundly negative human connotations. But Singapore hasn’t gone through such a postcolonial reconstruction, of knowledge, so I guess it’s useable there. If you are flying in one of their airplanes and are lucky enough to be upgraded, you will find that it is called ‘Raffles class’, and then you’ll find out that Sir Stamford Raffles was a colonial administrator. Singapore, as a polity, hasn’t changed colonial stratification or ‘communal’ divisions or separations. But they have taken forwards the notion that separated conglomeration ‘discrimination’ is wrong. Equal rights for all. Everyone is taught that no one is different and that race, as they call it, doesn’t really matter. This is of course, a continuation of the ‘heavy hand of colonial law and order’ I’ve been speaking of. But on the other hand, it is perfectly clear that Singapore has a Chinese dominated administration and a ruling class. And also that’s confined to a particular sliver of the Chinese population, a particular ‘ethnic’ group within the Chinese population. The technical word in the social science discourse for that is hegemony; and there is no better example than modern Singapore. Now the opposite is true in Malaysia, if you replace Chinese with Malay. And the state enforces significant affirmative action for Malays, in several spheres. So they haven’t really transcended the legacies of Empire at all, but they’ve worked within them. Economically, they’ve been far far more successful than Sri Lanka, and there have not been armed insurrections, in their postcolonial periods. So it’s been a particular kind of postcolonial journey.

  The case of India, taken as a remnant of partition, has within many failures on the score of minority and diversity, but one important success, which I will come to. By and large, even though it remains a secular state, religious and ethnic minorities have not had the best deal. Here too, at bottom, there is heavy colonial legacy of identify and divide that undergirds the whole process. There was massive ‘communal’ violence at the time of partition, and there have been many many anti-minority riots and pogroms after that. Quite similar to Sri Lanka in those respects. The most recent example is that of Gujarat, where thousands of Muslims were killed with impunity and the victims were offered no real justice. Muslims are often under suspicion for being terrorists or being part of treasonous activities by their very name. In the North-East of India, there are several states that have separatist movements, and draconian tactics are used by the state in response. But even worse off are so called ‘tribal’ groups, racialised by British colonial classification, that still undergo really untold hardships. All that having being said, India did manage to transcend this colonial legacy of ‘communal’, ‘racial’ classifications that I’ve been talking about in relation to some groups, by introducing linguistically demarcated states in the 1950s. Especially in the south, in relation to Tamil and Telegu, this move worked to reduce conflict with the centre. I think it’s an example Sri Lanka should have followed, and I’ll come to that in a moment.

  So I don’t think it’s a matter of should we or should we not have gotten rid of section 29 (c). I think the basis of that constitution was a flawed colonial logic. What we should have as a polity understood, by 1956, is that there had been a massive, but largely analytically noticed shift in the way identity was being constituted, between the later part of the nineteenth century, and middle of the twentieth. The colonial constructions I’ve been talking about were based on nineteenth century ideas of ‘race’. That is, phonotypical characteristics, and the idea of ‘blood’. That’s at bottom, how we were classified as ‘different’.

  By the 1950s, as it would be expected, anti-colonial linguistic identity had come to the fore. This identities grew up through colonial classifications, but were also very different. Modern communities imagine themselves, internally, through modern languages. That is how the idea of internal equality is imagined and produced in modern community. That’s really well known now, in the analysis of nationalism. In Ceylon, the languages of community were Sinhala and Tamil. Hence, by 1956, in ‘Ceylon’ you had two political parties deeply enmeshed in linguistic nationalism, Bandaranaike’s (Sinhala) MEP and Chelvanayagam’s (Tamil) FP. The way we usually tell this story is as a defensive response of the Tamil linguistic group, to the more powerful Sinhala party. That’s certainly correct, within the colonial frame, in which the story is told. But if you step back, and take seriously what I’ve been saying about colonially constructed divisions, what’s really going on is a struggle against anglicization, and colonialism as well. That’s part of what the demand for “Sinhala Only” and a “Tamil Speaking Nation” was about. This was the moment to seize and move beyond our colonial legacy, but we didn’t. The creation of linguistic, quasi-federal states in India was a successful Neruvian response to exactly this linguistic nationalism; Bandaranaike’s MEP produced an exclusivist response, and institutionalised “Sinhala Only”, and we’ve had to live with terrible violence and brutality because of that.

  This interview segment is also available on Dr. Jeganathan’s blog, SouthPaw where it is contextualised, in relation to other posts. Dr Jeganathan wanted to make it clear that he does not endorse any other claims, implicit or explicit, made on the PACT site.

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• Kannan Arunasalam said,

  In the third installment of our interview with Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan, he discusses the need for constitutional change, including a brief assessment of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, and examines the relevance of the historical set of ‘grievances of the Tamil people’ today.

  In 1972, Sinhala was made the official language of Sri Lanka, constitutionally. Since 1956, ‘Sinhala Only’ had been a legislative measure, it was leavened to some extent, since 1958, by the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act. But even this was not in fact implemented in the North and East in the 1960s; it was blocked by Mrs. Bandaranaike’s 1960-1965 regime. This meant that even the administrative language, the language of the courts, in the North and East was de jure Sinhala, and was so for some time, officially, but de facto English was used, to some extent. This was a horrible policy and led to peaceful civil disobedience movements that were responded to by state violence.

  But it’s also important to remember that, given the Constitution of the Second Republic, both Tamil and English were made national languages in 1978. And given the 13th amendment to the Constitution in 1987, Tamil is an official language of Sri Lanka. I think that we erred gravely as a polity from 1956 through 1978. Since 1987, constitutionally it’s been corrected, and that’s enormously important to remember, because it does show, that as a postcolonial polity, we’ve been able set wrongs right. But, very crucially, this constitutional provision has been poorly implemented, in most everyday situations. That’s really inexcusable. But in lots of formal, high level, ceremonial and symbolic occasions, Tamil is used now where it was not before. For example, I am gladdened that the President makes it a point to speak in Tamil, on public occasions. Some say this is superficial, but it means a lot to me, to listen, because I remember a time when it wasn’t even conceived of. That’s good, but hardly good enough, because in so many situations, a Tamil speaking person has to deal with state agencies – including the police and judiciary – in Sinhala. That’s wrong and it should be addressed. Soon.

  On the Constitution itself it is also really unfortunate, but again this is a product of a colonial legacy – the Kandyan Convention, that transferred power to the British in 1815, that it allows Buddhism to be referred to as the religion that would have the foremost place in Sri Lanka in our modern republic. It’s not the state religion, but its close. I would much rather live in a secular country, and I disagree with this. However, while India remains a secular country, of course it has got enormous problems with Hindu supremacy. So even that is no guarantee of equality. But what’s happened in Sri Lanka, again since 1978, is that there are ministries for the Buddhist Sasana, a ministry for Hindu Affairs, a ministry for Muslim affairs, and I believe one for Christian affairs. Many of these things have now been governmentalised. I don’t know whether that is a good thing, but on the other hand they followed that colonial logic of having someone look over everything. So one cannot say that the government only supports Buddhism. But of course Buddhism is supported much more strongly, and senior Buddhist clergy have a much bigger say, or appear to have a much bigger say, in state policy than senior clergy from other denominations; that is certainly true. My view is that the government should be out of the business of religion, period.

  When it comes to the whole question of the 13th Amendment, of devolution, of self-determination, I think you need to take a step back and ask what precisely the Tamil people and the Muslim people, of the North and East and the rest of the country also, want. The Federal Party for a long time used to simply have a political category, ‘the Tamil speaking people’. Now, however, Muslims, who speak Tamil, have now clearly indicated that they want to be thought of as a separate group. We had an election in 1977 and we haven’t really had a free and fair election in the North and East since. It’s very clear that in the 1977 election that there was a resounding mandate for a separate state Tamil state, or at least a federal state. This angered the Sinhala polity greatly and we’ve been on a spiral downwards ever since. Nevertheless, whether you are angered or not, if there is a population that has given such a mandate in an election, it has to be taken very seriously. The regime at the time did not take it very seriously and produced a military response to this vote, by focusing on a very small number of people who had taken to militancy at the time, and passing a draconian law, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which doesn’t serve the needs of justice at all. This exacerbated the situation. I hope that if a period of long, relative peace is returned to the North and East the electoral process can take root again. Certainly elections have already been held in the East under the 13th Amendment, and will held in the Northern province too, soon, and that will be a good first step, but its not one set of elections we need, we need a long term democratic process. But we have to ask the Tamil and Muslim people who live there, and in other provinces, what they want. And they have to have the time to decide and people have to the have the time and resources to campaign for their own platforms. Having done that, hopefully we can come to a democratic arrangement. Honestly, it is unclear to me anymore, having done fieldwork in the East, whether regular people there really want to be a part of a separate state or a federal set up, or a unitary country.

  For example, when I’ve talk to students in the University of the East at Chenkaladi, to sociology students, about what they thought were the grievances of the Tamil speaking people, they didn’t seem clear on them at all. Now these are students that are in many ways sympathetic to a very simplistic, nativistic Tamil nationalism, but they couldn’t articulate their views as a set of political principles.

  I mean when I was growing up, I knew the grievances of the Tamil people by heart. There are four. I’ll return to them later, but they were: education, employment, development, and colonisation. But the students said their biggest problem was security. What they meant by that was that they are body checked all the time by the army, and this was terrible. Clearly. But this was the time of the peace accord, so I said to them you might not be any more: the state is tired of fighting with the Tamils, they may just pack up and go. If they do and the Tamils had their own country, what would its constitution look like? But it seemed they’d never had a discussion on that, never even thought about it! That’s because the LTTE had completely closed off the vibrant space that existed in Tamil political discussion. So I think you need to return to that. I can’t really say what the people want; even if I lived in Jaffna, it’s not for me to say, is it? It’s for everyone else to decide. And there has to be political space to decide and fashioning that would take some time. Interestingly, it strikes me that students in the University of the East at Chenkalladi, don’t really see an ‘issue’ with not having Tamil as a language. They study and live in a campus, where their education is entirely in Tamil: everyone speaks it, lectures are held in it, and the government of Sri Lanka pays for it. And if they ‘pass out’, as we say in Sri Lanka, they could get jobs as teachers in Tamil schools. So there is a functioning linguistic system there. It may be important to keep that in mind, as a marker of how far we have come since 1956.

  Now when it comes to the ‘devolution of power’, the 13th Amendment is part of the constitution so we should implement it because it is the law, whether we like it or not. I think it is an enormous step forward that we’ve had elections under the amendment in the East – the first time under the amendment. The elections in the north will hopefully follow by the end of the year if relative peace returns, as it seems on the cards. It is inevitable that those councils that are just coming into being are going to be full of administrative snafus and be largely unproductive. This country is going through a financial crisis no doubt because of the global problem, but in any event the Provincial Councils have been underfunded. Their taxation authority is very limited and their scope of powers is in a certain sense also limited. Nevertheless, there are some important powers that the councils can administer that includes local police powers and authority over land, but which none of the 7 councils that I understand to have been already constituted have administered. There are three lists of subjects involved and, I understand from experts, that they are themselves somewhat confused. There is a reserve list, a concurrent list, and a devolved list; the reserve list is what the centre does, the concurrent list is shared and some subjects are on the two lists. It is a matter for the courts to work out, through a series of judgments, how these powers are going to be divided.

  An important case, that has already been decided in this vein, is the one pertaining to Local Authorities Elections (Amendment) Bill. This bill proposed a new electoral scheme for local elections in the provinces. Its too complicated to go into here, but the most difficult provision was that the minister of local government would be responsible for the delimitation of electoral boundaries, which could of course have led to political gerrymandering. This was a massive problem with this bill. Upon the presentation of the bill to Parliament, the Supreme Court was petitioned on the bill, and the court has held that it cannot be passed with a simple majority in parliament without the consent of all the Provincial Councils. The Eastern Provincial Council refused to pass it, and the vote was postponed. Now the bill has been withdrawn from Parliament. This is indeed an example of the system working; and an example the power of a province, however limited. So I am more than pleased to see that the judicial branch and the legislative branch have had to work together to formulate new law in relation to the provinces, and I am quite surprised that this landmark event hasn’t been more widely discussed by those concerned with devolution. Perhaps we shall hear from these specialist scholars and activists soon. This is a legal process that should have been going since 1987, since the 13th Amendment brought Provincial Councils into being, but since that time, we’ve not had been able to have Provincial Councils in the North and East, where the original demand for them actually seemed to exist in 1977; it doesn’t exist anywhere else, certainly not in Colombo as far as I know. These matters have not gone before the court because there has not really been an antagonistic relationship – in relation to the sharing of powers – between other (non-North East) provinces and the centre. So as some constitutional case law builds, I think we will understand better the actual contours of what the 13th amendment are. Because you cannot really know them before they are tested before the courts. Once we know that, and there is peaceful democratic political opinion, they can certainly raise their voices and say this is not working for us we need to do something else. And I hope we, as Sri Lankans, can practice a little give and take and work with it. We really must try. The time for tub-thumping is over.

  Also, we mustn’t get stuck in passed issues. Let’s go back to 1977, and ‘the grievances of the Tamil speaking people’. If you look at three of them, education, development and employment, I think the frame has changed so much, that may be non-issues. In the 1970-77 economic regime, and really through the ’60s and increasingly through the ’70s, the state and only the state, within a policy framework of self-sufficiency, import restrictions, commodity scarcity, was the only provider of these resources. Today, most of the lower middle class and middle class Tamils who would have been affected by the policy of media wise standardisation practised by the United Front government between and 1972 and 1977, (and restricted university admissions to the linguistic proportions of the candidates), would be able to really bypass Sri Lankan degree universities and take degrees at really any one of the international universities that have these locally based programmes in Sri Lanka. That’s a fact. Sri Lankan universities are still very important, but they are no longer subject to that kind of media-wise standardisation in the first place, and have not been since the late ‘70s. There is a system of quotas, for educationally under-privileged districts, but they are ethnically neutral. So on education, I think privatisation has really opened up opportunities. Similarly with employment, where the state is no longer the most sought after provider of jobs. Even with medicine and engineering. If the government is racist in not giving you jobs, there are lots of hospitals that will hire you with better salaries. So it doesn’t seem to me that it’s the kind of issue that it used to be, but it is not to condone anybody’s discriminatory hiring practices, and certainly the state sector should be watched on this.

  Similarly with the question of development in those days, 1960-1977, the private sector was not expanding. What remained from the colonial period remained, and there were very few light industries. The situation is not the same now. Sri Lanka has a massive light manufacturing sector; it’s much larger than the old plantation sector, from garments to biscuits, and none of these are really controlled by the government. Capital flows where it can make the most amount of profit: it’s flexible, it moves in and out, and there is much foreign capital in Sri Lanka. Dialog for example, the mobile phone company, is Malaysian. If there is relative peace in Mullaitivu, I have no doubt that there will be a Dialog signal there and they will employ people as they need to. Again that particular grievance has gone away. Right now, in the East, Cargills, Hayleys and Brandix have large-scale projects, and I understand more of the corporate sector will be going in soon. In fact, the government’s ‘Eastern awakening programme’ encourages this. So ‘development’, ‘education’ and ‘employment’ in the old sense of grievances may well have receded now. There are no doubt questions to be asked about wages and working conditions, and the environment as one always does with any kind of capitalist activity, but these may not be ‘Tamil’ or ‘Muslim’ questions.

  The main issue that remains from that old set of grievances is ‘colonisation’. That is the state aided settlements, on state land, in the Eastern and Northern Provinces. This is a real live issue, and it should be worked out between the Provinces and the centre and the courts, through the land provisions of the 13th Amendment. Again though, I think the economics of this has changed. Unlike in the past, where there were large numbers of poor or landless Sinhala peasants, who could be persuaded to move into new, far away, and potentially difficult locations on the promise of 5 acres of land, the present is different. Even if state aided colonisation becomes regime policy, it seems unlikely that significant numbers can be persuaded to move.

  This interview segment is also available on Dr. Jeganathan’s blog, SouthPaw where it is contextualised, in relation to other posts. Dr Jeganathan wanted to make it clear that he does not endorse any other claims, implicit or explicit, made on the PACT site.

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• pact team said,

  In the first part of our interview with Sunil Bastian, he introduces his ideas on the nature of the state as the central question when examining Sri Lanka’s conflict, and discusses the build up of Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka.

  Do you think it’s worthwhile looking back at history of conflict in Sri Lanka? What do we look for in order to inform how we as Sri Lankans can move forwards?

  There is no doubt that an understanding of history is extremely important. Basically, we are in the current situation today because of certain historical conditions. But what do we look for?

  A conflict like this is a very complex thing and there are various dimensions. So in my own analysis, I don’t talk about ‘root causes’ because there are so many dimensions to it. Fundamentally I am not really a believer in root causes of any social phenomenon. My focus has been on the nature of the state and for me that has been the central question in Sri Lanka’s conflict. And of course the formation of the modern state has been during the British period so the colonial history is important. Usually when you study about the state, you can identify the fundamental idea of the state: the institutions and the relationship with society. The basic ideas and institutions of the Sri Lankan state were formulated during the colonial period. If you look at the writings at that time and the kind of debates that went on, basically Sri Lanka’s decision to form a highly centralised state originated during the colonial period. But when I say that I am not looking to blame someone, because don’t forget our elite that inherited power continued with that. All constitutional reforms, both 1972 as well as in 1978, centralised power even more. The important thing is that on both these occasions, which was the time, you might say, we formed our own constitutions, there was very little done to address the Tamil grievances. And don’t forget the Tamil federal idea goes back to the 1950s. Actually it was a fallout of how modern independent Sri Lanka decided criteria for citizenship. When we decided on citizenship, we disenfranchised a large section of the Indian Tamil population, and the politics of that was one factor why the Federal Party was formed. History is important to understand the origin of ideas that underpinned how we organised our state.

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  Other commentators on this feature have talked about the rise of Sinhala nationalism. To begin our interview, could you trace briefly the historical build up of Sinhala nationalism?

  Sometimes people try to trace the nationalist idea we have now to some remote history. I don’t accept that. How we look at ourselves in the past can be very different. There were long periods in our history, there were regional governments, separate kingdoms, so we do not know much about identities that people had. The modern idea of Sinhala nationalism is something that started getting formulated during the nineteenth century with the nationalist struggles, and actually the people that articulated it absorbed some of the ideas that came from Europe. And even then at that time, there were a lot of other identities. For example, the villages from where my family came, caste identities were more important than a national identity. And for a long time, even among the Sinhalese, we had low country Sinhalese, up country Sinhalese identities. So identities have been constructed. What a lot of people don’t recognise is that these ideas were actually absorbed from Europe, of how a nation state has to be formed; they were absorbed by the elite and formulated.

  There were parallel developments in Tamil nationalism. The two personalities that people talk about are Arumugam Navalar in Jaffna and Anagarika Dhammapala in the south. So when you look at Tamil writings, there was also a formulation of a certain Tamil identity with the modern period. But the real issue is that we could never develop an idea where these two important identity groups could share this land. To some extent that idea was there in a very small way when at one time, before independence, there was an acceptance of both languages being official languages. For me, often this is discussed as a legal issue; but it’s much more than that. At the time when both languages were accepted as official languages, it implied that both communities had equal rights and Sri Lanka was formed of these two communities.

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• PACT team said,

  In the second part of our interview with Sunil Bastian, he responds to the idea that conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese was inevitable and that British colonialism precipitated it.

  When people discuss nationalisms, there is what social scientists sometimes call the primordialist view. This view believes identities have a continuous history going back to thousands of years. That they are inbuilt in our psyche and that the underlying base of conflicts is seen as hatreds that go back thousands of years. This is a popular view found not only in Sri Lanka. I don’t agree with this view. Identities are historically constructed. They change over time. Each one of us has multiple identities. Don’t forget that even in the middle of the conflict, in this country, so many different identity groups are living together. Just because we are focusing on the Tamil conflict, we tend to forget what is happening with other identity groups. For example in the plantation areas there is a fascinating process going on. For the first time we have a sizeable section of the population in plantations who are educated. More and more are getting out of the plantation system. There are lots of interactions between this population and Sinhalese. It is fascinating to look at towns like Talawakelle, where there is substantial inter-community interaction.

  But do you think colonialism precipitated conflict between identity groups in Sri Lanka?

  As I said earlier, we have to look at the colonial period to understand what is happening now. There is no doubt about that. But how do you interpret what happened then? There were political processes during the colonial period that contributed to the construction of identities currently prevailing. One example is what happened when we got the franchise and limited representation in the State Council. This representation was in terms of ethnic groups. There was even a separate representation for low country Sinhalese. So definitely this process contributed to the construction of identities that prevail even now and the politics of the conflict are articulated in terms of these identities.

  But don’t forget that the Sri Lanka elite was also a part of these processes. It was not simply that colonial powers imposed such a process. Our elite articulated political demands in these terms. These debates continued in other areas such as during designing the electoral system. In the post-colonial period the political elite, whether Sinhala or Tamil, continued to engage in policy debates through these identities. These elites were also a product of the colonial period.

  It is interesting to contrast this history with what happened in India. The Indian elite has been able to construct an all-Indian identity. Indian secularism has been important in this process. One of the things that worried me when the attacks in Mumbai took place was whether it will lead to a strengthening of Hindu chauvinism. There were Hindu nationalist forces calling these attacks India’s “9/11″ and urging India to go into Pakistan, like the Americans did in Afghanistan. Thank God that didn’t happen. And not only that, the Indian voters brought Congress back to power, which for me represents one of the positive developments in our part of the world. Congress represents to me the best we can expect in the current context – building an efficient capitalist economy that can make use of globalization; interventions for social justice and not believing that markets per se will solve our problems; and pluralistic values that ensure the rights of multiple identity groups constituting our societies.

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• pact team said,

  In the third installment of our interview with Sunil Bastian, he talks about the impact of intra-ethnic divisions and elite politics on finding a resolution to the conflict in Sri Lanka, assesses the potential of the 13th amendment and the need to go beyond it in terms of addressing state-society relations.

  How have the intra-ethnic conflicts affected the chances for a resolution to the conflict? Tamil groups came together in 1985 with the Thimbu talks; do you think that was the best opportunity for the Tamils?

  The ruling political class in the South was not able to come to an agreement on what the solution should be across party lines, and we began to play political football with what is sometimes called the ‘national question’. In the north, in addition to the struggle with the Sri Lankan state there was an intra-Tamil struggle. Ultimately the LTTE began to dominate Tamil politics through arms. These are the elements that made it difficult to find an answer.

  I think the best opportunity would have been the 1987 Indo-Lanka accord. Don’t forget India is another complication we had in our conflict. After 1983, for some reason, India under Mrs Gandhi, decided that it is difficult to expect much from the TULF, and started supporting the armed groups. By 1987, India managed to bring everyone together when the Indo-Lanka Accord was signed, and I think that was the best opportunity we had. I don’t give too much emphasis to the 2002 peace process; I give much more importance to 1987. The13th amendment, which came about because of Indian intervention, seems to be the only thing we have to work with. Even this government is basing its political solution on it.

  But was arriving at the 13th amendment an inclusive process?

  When you look at the history of politics in many parts of the world, in finding solutions to conflicts, elite politics is important. Sometimes this word “inclusiveness”, which a lot of people talk about, doesn’t take into account the class character of society. In societies there are classes, there are powerful groups; and politics happens within that. And that is the key. I think in politics, you don’t have idealistic models. Don’t forget the TULF was involved in the politics of the 13th amendment, although it might not have satisfied all the demands of the TULF.

  But once provincial councils were established most parties began to contest elections and therefore implicitly accepted them. People have also been voting in provincial council elections. In many societies you will find, at a particular historical juncture, institutions evolve, based on politics at that moment.

  Looking at the situation now what the other options do we have? Marx once said, “Men don’t make history in conditions of their own choosing”. When historical changes take place there is a certain context and it is within that context that you make history. And in the current situation, the most positive thing we can expect is the full implementation of the 13th amendment, which is what the government has also promised.

  Do you think the 13th amendment is a good starting point, to see how it fares?

  Constitutional lawyers have dominated much of the devolution debates. Politically it means handing over power to a section of the political class whose identity is Tamil and they are the ones who will get control of power in the Provincial Councils. Now if this happens, and it has to a certain extent happened in the East, it doesn’t mean our political debate is over. One of the most important things we need to do is include issues like social exclusion into the devolution debate. And this is an area that I am working on now, trying to expand the debate on state reform.

  In the current debate on state reform, there are two main discourses. One is reforming the state for a market economy; the other is the devolution debate. Both are about ‘institutional designing’. But these debates do not tackle the full complexity of state-society relations. Peace comes about by building legitimate states. In order to do that, it is important to tackle issues like social exclusion. This means we need to ask what does devolution means to people in their day-to-day lives. If we can get into this discussion you can find a lot of commonalities between poor people in the south and poor people in the north. Of course there are special issues for the North and East, because these areas have been devastated by war. But there are common issues that can be tackled if we begin to analyse the politics of social exclusion.

  This is how I approach the question of poverty and conflict. There is a version of the poverty and conflict debate that has ignored the state. This version is looking for reasons for conflicts arising from the poverty found in society. But it ignored that conflicts have a lot to do with state-society relations. Our conflict is also about the state and state-society relations. Since the main political response came from the Tamil community, the solution has been articulated as devolution of power. Of course this is an important element, but we need to push the debate beyond that.

  Fundamentally my argument is that peace is about building legitimate states and development issues have a very strong role to play in building such states. This is where I differ from the liberal argument. Liberal arguments focus only on procedures of the state. So if you have democratic elections, if the state operates with a certain rule of law it is considered to be legitimate. But states have to deliver services to people. For example states like Singapore are not classic liberal democratic states, but they are legitimate states.

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• pact team said,

  In the final part of our interview with Sunil Bastian, he comments on the continuing relevance of Tamil grievances that date back to the 60s and 70s, on engaging with the diaspora, and discusses the ‘liberal blueprints’ of the international community to resolving conflicts around the world, that have irked Sri Lankans.

  Now that we have a very different society, how relevant are the historical set of grievances of the Tamil speaking people?
  

  Certainly changes in the economy since 1977, when markets began to play a greater role, have reduced the role of the state in providing some of the services. Higher education is one example. Tamil people do not have to depend on the state to secure higher education. There are many students obtaining higher education in private institutions both here and abroad. To this extent these grievances have undergone changes. But we must remember that it is only the better off sections of the Tamil people who can access these private facilities. Therefore there is a class issue here. Children of poor Tamil families still have to depend on the state. And there are other grievances that are still valid. One example is the question of land rights. The land issue is still important today and is directly linked to the devolution discussion.

  This brings me to the issue of Sri Lanka’s development model and conflict. In the 1970s, Sri Lanka was seen as an interesting development model because we had high social development, although per capita income was low. Therefore the question is how can a country with high social development face such conflict? The answer lies in the centralised nature of the state through which these policies were implemented. The politics of this state had an impact on how these policies were implemented. Even today, this state has not been totally dismantled. Despite liberalization it continues to survive. Therefore similar discriminatory practices can continue.

  A lot of people are saying we need to engage with the Sri Lankan diaspora communities and they continue to be influential in Sri Lanka. How do we do that in the “post-LTTE” period?

  My hope is that that there won’t be a monolithic political opinion in the diaspora. The myth of the LTTE being able to resist or even defeat the Sri Lankan armed forces was one of the main reasons for the support base of the LTTE within the diaspora. But now that it is gone one can expect a much more diverse opinion within the diaspora and we need to find ways of engaging with them.

  Without doubt, the events of the last weeks have been a historical turning point. How do you feel about them?

  We have one of the best opportunities to move forwards on the political side. We have a government that has the confidence of the Sinhalese. Don’t forget that earlier, one of the reasons why there was no significant support in the south for a political process was that there was genuine insecurity amongst the Sinhalese. Just imagine an armed LTTE controlling the North East Provincial Council. Not only was there insecurity amongst the Sinhalese there were also worries in India. Now there is a situation where the Sinhalese don’t feel insecure in that way. The president in his first speech to the parliament did say that the final solution is political. So that is the key opportunity to move forwards.

  Something else the president said in the aftermath of the announcement of the victory over the Tigers, that a lot of people have picked up on, rightly or wrongly, was his reference to there not being any more minorities, and that either you are a patriot or a non-patriot. Should we be taking these sentiments seriously? And how should we interpret them?

  I don’t think so. For me, much more important was the fact that the president spoke in Tamil at the beginning. Why would he do that if there are no identity groups speaking different languages? It all depends on how you understand the word minorities.

  In my view the reference to patriots and non-patriots had a lot to do with Sri Lanka’s relationship with the international community. And here, I’d like to say something about the so-called international community. In certain circles of the west there is a belief that there is only one formula to solve the conflicts of the world. I call it ‘liberal blueprints’, that is that liberal markets and states organised on liberal principles can solve the world’s problems. This is the kind of idea that developed immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the west and they have been ready to intervene on the basis of this ideology in different parts of the world. There are criticisms of these notions within the west itself, and one of best criticisms I’ve read recently is by John Gray in his book Black Mass. By the way, John Gray is a liberal philosopher. What these approaches don’t take into account is how the people in developing countries, or the global south, interpret these interventions. They need to remember that the experience of colonisation is important to understand the perceptions of the global south. In Sri Lanka, western powers occupied parts of the country from the 16th century. That means we have had about 400 years of colonial experience. And how many years since independence? A little more than 60. Within this short period we have seen western troops once again on the South Asian border in Afghanistan.

  There is very little sensitivity to this history by those who try to intervene here to build liberal institutions. I’m not against the actual values represented by these institutions, but how we develop these institutions depend on our own historical processes. We can get outside support for this purpose, but there is no way you can impose it. That imposition is going to lead to huge negative reactions. This is the context in which I interpret President Rajapakse’s comment about patriots and non-patriots. Some sections that supported negotiations and were against the war, believed that we could find solutions through the so-called international community.

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