A Tamil public servant, C Kodeeswaran, a senior officer in the executive grade of the Government Clerical service and President of the newly formed trade union – Arasanka Eluthu Vinaignar Sangam – refused to sit the Sinhala proficiency examinations which resulted in his losing his annual salary increments. In 1962, Kodeeswaran sued the Government in the Colombo District Court on the grounds that the regulation under which his increment was stopped was illegal and unreasonable. His argument was that the Official Language Act of 1956 which made Sinhala the sole official language was in violation of Section 29 of the constitution which prohibited discrimination. The trial judge, O.L. de Kretser, upheld the plea and ruled that the Official Language Act and the regulation was ultra vires and contravened Section 29 of the Constitution. In 1967, the government appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court set aside the judgement on the ground that a government servant had no right to sue the government in a court of law for salary or increment; the Supreme Court did not address the constitutional issue and state that if it became necessary to consider it, the matter would be placed by the Chief Justice before a bench of five judges of the Supreme Court. Kodeeswaran subsequently appealed to the Privy Council which set aside the Supreme Court’s decision and directed that the Supreme Court should rule on the constitutional question.

Sources
Attorney-General of Ceylon v Kodeeswaran, Supreme Court S C. 408/64-D. C. Colombo, 1026/Z, Lawnet, Sri Lanka; Kodeeswaran v Attorney-General of Ceylon, Privy Council Appeal No. 38 of 1968, Lawnet, Sri Lanka.

Extract from the judgement of the Supreme Court
“A public servant in Ceylon has no right of redress by action in the Courts for a breach of any of the covenants and rules governing the salaries and conditions of service of public officers. This principle is operative except in respect of terms laid down by statute, and is unaffected, either expressly or by implication, by the provisions of the Ceylon Constitution.” Source: Supreme Court S. C. 408/64-D. C. Colombo, 1026/Z, Lawnet, Sri Lanka.

Extract from the judgement of the Privy Council
“A civil servant in Ceylon is entitled to sue the Crown for arrears of salary which, have accrued due, by the terms of his appointment, in respect of services which he has rendered during the currency of his employment. In such a case the fact that his appointment as a Crown servant is terminable at will, unless it is expressly otherwise provided by legislation, is not relevant. …

“Although in their Lordships’ opinion a civil servant in Ceylon does have a right of action against the Crown for arrears of salary which accrued due during the currency of his employment, this answer to the preliminary issue does not dispose of the Crown’s appeal to the Supreme Court from the judgment of the District Judge. There are the other important constitutional issues to be decided upon which neither the Supreme Court nor their Lordships have heard argument. As already indicated, their Lordships would think it inappropriate to enter upon any of these matters without the benefit of the considered opinion of the Supreme Court of Ceylon thereon. They accordingly express no opinion upon any of the other issues as to the constitutionality of the Official Language Act or the effect of Treasury Circular No. 560 of 4th December 1961, or of any other material facts upon the plaintiff’s contract of employment. The case should be remitted to the Supreme Court for further consideration of these other issues and their Lordships will humbly advise Her Majesty accordingly.”

Source
Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka, Neil DeVotta (2004), Stanford University Press.

Extracts from the Official Language Act, No. 33 of 1956
An Act to prescribe the Sinhala Language as the One Official Language of Ceylon and to enable transitory provisions to be made.

1. This Act may be cited as the Official Language Act, No. 33 of 1956. Sinhala Language to Be the One Official Language.
2. The Sinhala language shall be the one official language of Ceylon Provided that where the Minister considers it impracticable on the coming into force of this Act, the language or languages hithereto used for that purpose may be continued to be so used until the necessary change is effected as early as possible before the expiry of the thirty-first of December, 1960, and, if such change cannot be effected by administrative order, regulations may be made under this Act to effect such change.

Regulations
3. (1) The Minister may make regulations in respect of all matters which regulations are authrorized by this Act to be made and generally for the purpose of giving effect to the principles and provisions of this Act. …

Quotations

“We are completing by this [Sinhala Only] Bill an important phase in our national struggle. The restoration of the Sinhala language to the position it occupied before the occupation of this country by foreign powers marks an important stage in the history of the development of this island.” Phillip Gunawardene, Sri Lankan Cabinet Minister, Hansard, 14 June 1956.

“I pointed out that the result of forcing Sinhalese as the sole state language for official purposes on an unwilling minority brought with it great dangers. … If a minority feels deeply that an injustice and a great injustice has been done it is likely to embark upon forms of resistance and protests. The possibility of communal riots is not the only danger I am referring to. There is the graver danger of the division of the country. We must remember that the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Ceylon are inhabited principally by Tamil speaking people and if those people feel that a grave and irreparable injustice is done to them, there is a possibility of their deciding even to break away from the rest of the country.” Leslie Gunawardene, Opposition Member of Parliament, Hansard, 8 June 1956.

“Do you want two languages and one nation or one language and two nations? Parity Mr. Speaker, we believe is the road to freedom of our nation and the unity of its components. Otherwise two torn little bleeding states may arise from one little state. … Do we want a single state or do we want two? Do we want one Ceylon or do we want two? … These are the issues that in fact we have been discussing under the form and appearance of the language issue. … If you mistreat the [Tamils], if you ill treat them … if you oppress and harass them, in the process you may cause to emerge in Ceylon, from that particular racial stock with its own language and tradition, a new nationality to which we will have to concede more claims than it puts forward now. … If we come to the stage where instead of parity, we through needless insularity, get into the position of suppressing the Tamil [federal demand] there may emerge separatism.” Dr Colvin R de Silva, Opposition Member of Parliament, Hansard, June 1956.

“[By passing the 'Sinhala Only' Bill] against the unanimous opposition of the entire Tamil people who wanted a place of honour for their own language, [this] Government has struck a grievous blow at the unity of this country, which stands divided today. The members of this Government on the other hand have charged the Federal Party with endeavouring to divide the country/. … A federal solution within proper limits, and subject to proper safeguards, far from dividing a country which is already divided, is one of the best known methods of bringing about unity in a divided country. If democracy means anything, if human rights mean anything, no national minority proud of its language and culture can ever subscribe to the proposition that it should in respect of matters affecting its vital interest accept the dictates of a majority nationality merely because it is a majority. If this were so, it would amount to the tyranny of an impersonal majority … since this question affects the Tamil nationality vitally – I do not say the Tamil-speaking nationality – the Government cannot seek to impose anything, which is the result of a unilateral decision by the representatives of the Sinhalese people, on the Tamil people without doing violence to the elementary principles of democracy.” Senator S. Nadesan QC, Sri Lanka Senate Hansard, 26 June 1957.

Related events
5 June 1956
25 July 1957
9 April 1958
4 August 1958
24 March 1965

“I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people. We being the majority of the country, 75%, we will never give in and we have the right to protect this country. … They can live in this country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things,” Army Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, in an interview with Stewart Bell of the National Post newspaper of Canada, 23 September 2008.

PACT’s overall purpose is to examine the root causes and contributory factors of conflict in Sri Lanka and to promote discussion on these themes. In the coming months, the PACT team will invite various individuals, including academics, journalists and historians, to give their perspectives on these topics and in turn we’ll ask you to give your reactions.

PACT’s overall purpose is to examine the root causes and contributory factors of conflict in Sri Lanka and to promote discussion on these themes. Many commentators are calling for the root causes of conflict to be addressed in a meaningful way. They argue that even if the LTTE is defeated militarily, the underlying conflict will continue until the addressal of these critical issues. Indeed, these issues existed long before the LTTE emerged as an armed militant group.

What are these root causes, are they still relevant and what should be done about them? This feature seeks to unpack some of these issues.

The controversial statement above made by Army Commander Lt. General Sarath Fonseka raises issues of origin and a supremacist ideology that has roots, according to our first commentator Lakshman Gunesekara, going back some 500 or even 1,000 years. The former editor of the Sunday Observer talks to the PACT team about his views on the historical and contemporary causes of conflict in Sri Lanka and about racism in Sri Lanka, past and present.

Dr. Farzana Haniffa is an anthropologist and senior lecturer at the University of Colombo. She talks to the PACT team about how the roots of conflict in Sri Lanka have impacted upon the Muslim polity, and on Muslim nationalism and identity.

Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan is a social anthropologist whose research interests range from subaltern nationalism, to the perpetration of violence and its survival. He has published extensively on these subjects. The second edition of Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka (1995) ), which he co-edited with Qadri Ismail, was published in April, 2009. Dr. Jeganathan has held professorial appointments and fellowships at the Universities of Chicago and Minnesota, The New School’s Graduate Faculty, Delhi University and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies. He talks about the importance of examining Sri Lanka’s colonial past when looking at the roots of conflict in Sri Lanka.

Sunil Bastian is principally a researcher whose central focus of study is political economy, with a broad interest in the political economy of the state. Sunil also works as a consultant for various donors, more recently on their programmes on conflict. In our interview with him, he examines Sri Lanka’s conflict through the lens of the nature of the state.

Earlier features
Feature: Assassination of an activist
Feature: 18th anniversary of expulsion of northern Muslims by LTTE
Feature: “Black July”, 1983