Estate Tamils, the Ceylon citizenship act of 1948 and Sri Lankan politics

Abstract

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