(4) The principal cause of the war - An outsider's comments on the Sri Lankan conflict

The principal driving force that led to conflict was Sinhalese nationalism.

Ceylon’s first prime minister, DS Senanayake, died in a riding accident and his party, the United National Party (UNP), was soon challenged and defeated by the Sinhala nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Thereafter, in election after election, both parties played the race card shamelessly, whipping up nationalist sentiment and struggling to out-do each other to win the Sinhalese vote.

In so doing, they exacerbated racist sentiments among the Sinhalese, and marred Sinhalese cultural nationalism, giving it a dark edge it need not have had.

Whenever a party in power tried to compromise with the island’s minority communities, the party in opposition would raise a nationalist hullabaloo. The monks joined in. Step by step, nationalist and racist mores became ratcheted into the body politic and culture of Sinhalese Ceylon.

Indeed, from an early stage, the nationalist demon became a cultural force the political parties could not always control, and yet felt obliged to accommodate – in much the same way that militant Islam was first used, then feared, but nonetheless still accommodated and still used, by Muslim governments today, such as those of Pakistan and Malaysia.

Religion in the form of Buddhism is a major component of Sinhalese nationalism, and extreme nationalist Buddhist monks have played a major role in fanning the flames of conflict.

Driven on by ethno-religious nationalism, in part riding and in part being driven by the wave they helped create, successive Lankan governments enacted numerous pieces of legislation to bolster the rights of the Sinhalese at the expense of the Tamils.

A few examples: The 1956 Sinhala Only Act made Sinhala the sole official language of the country. Imagine the cultural and psychological effects of that on all sides. Moreover, Tamils in the civil service who could not speak Sinhala lost their jobs.

Over several decades, the state organised Sinhalese colonization of traditional Tamil areas. Imagine the cultural and psychological effects of that.

Other examples: the importing of Tamil language films, books and magazines from India was banned. Examinations for external degrees from the University of London, from which the Tamils had benefited, were abolished. Funding for Tamil students going to India for university education was stopped. Affirmative action schemes were introduced to make it easier for Sinhalese students to get into higher education, but harder for Tamils.

And along with legislative action came more general, communal racism. The worst of it was the pogroms of 1958, 1977 and 1983 in which thousands of Tamils had their homes and livelihoods destroyed, or were beaten, raped or killed. Tamilian cultural treasures were also systematically destroyed, most notoriously in the burning of the public library in Jaffna, which was one of the finest in South Asia and housed numerous unique manuscripts, now lost forever; but such spasms were just sudden, violent expressions of growing anti-Tamil sensibilities, spearheaded by right-wing zealots but spreading through the wider Sinhalese populace.

Even the renaming of Ceylon as Sri Lanka was a Sinhala nationalist step; “Sri” in this context means venerable in the Buddhist tradition. Indeed, the 1972 constitution which changed the state’s name also declared that the state should “give to Buddhism the foremost place and accordingly, it shall be the duty of the state to protect and foster Buddhism.”