> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict Was Not an Elite Invention, and It Will Not Wait for Trust
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/sri-lankas-ethnic-conflict-was-not-an-elite-invention-and-it-will-not-wait-for-trust/
- Published: 2026-11-02T13:59:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-02T14:11:49.000Z
- Author: Aruliniyan Mahalingam
- Tags: JM Exclusive, November 2026

**By Aruliniyan Mahalingam**

In the second week of July 1983, about thirty members of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna's Central Committee met at a house in Vitharandeniya, outside Tangalle. The agenda had one item. For a decade the party had accepted the Tamil people's right to decide their own political future. The party had written the position into its policy declaration in a prison cell, and its leader, Rohana Wijeweera, had defended it on public platforms, including in Jaffna.

Then came the presidential election of October 1982\. Wijeweera polled about 273,000 votes, far fewer than his party expected. "Afterwards an argument spread through the membership," Lionel Bopage, the JVP's General Secretary at the time, told Jaffna Monitor. Sinhala voters, the argument ran, had punished the party for its stand on self-determination, and Tamils had not voted for it anyway, "so the policy should go."

At Vitharandeniya, Wijeweera moved to drop it. Somawansa Amarasinghe, who would lead the party after Wijeweera's death, seconded. Bopage and one other member, A.D.P. Rathnayaka, voted against. Everyone else voted with the leader. About two weeks later, the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 began.

Forty-three years on, the movement built around the JVP is in power. On 31 October, the National Intellectuals' Organisation, which is affiliated with the National People's Power, marked its tenth anniversary with a convention at the P.D. Sirisena Grounds in Maligawatte. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake addressed it and credited the NIO with a leading role in bringing the NPP to office. Speaking for the Northern and Eastern Provinces was Dr. S. Arivalzahan, a Senior Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Jaffna.

His argument was historical. "The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka does not have a long history," he said. "There were no Sinhala-Tamil riots before or at the time of our independence. Our ethnic conflict was artificially created by the rulers of that era." Those rulers were elite UNP leaders who had sacrificed little for freedom and "brought in the sensitive ethnic question and used it to win votes." Then came the claim that gives the speech its political weight: "Had a government like the present NPP government been in power at the time of independence in 1948, there would be no ethnic problem in our country today."

Devolution, the Tamil parties' demand, "alone cannot be the solution," he said; reconciliation must come first.

Some of this deserves a hearing. The UNP and the SLFP did use ethnicity to win power, and spent decades signing agreements with Tamil leaders and then abandoning them. A shared civic identity is a legitimate goal.

But the history he offered is wrong at almost every point that matters, and the meeting in Vitharandeniya is only one of the reasons.

## Before 1948

Dr. Arivalzahan set his own test: there were no Sinhala-Tamil riots before independence. The test fails on its own terms. In 1939, after G.G. Ponnambalam gave a speech at Navalapitiya attacking the Sinhala-Buddhist account of the island's past, Sinhala crowds turned on Tamils there and in other towns. The riot was small, partly provoked by Ponnambalam's own rhetoric, and quickly contained. It is still recorded as the first Sinhala-Tamil riot, and it happened nine years before independence.

Riots are the wrong measure anyway. This conflict ran for decades before it turned violent, and it began in 1921\. Two years earlier, the Ceylon National Congress had been founded with Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam as its first president. Its Sinhalese leaders had promised the Jaffna Association their support for a reserved Tamil seat in the Western Province. They broke the promise. Arunachalam resigned, and most Tamil members walked out with him. The historian K.M. de Silva called the departure "the climacteric event" in the Congress's disarray; after it, the island's leading nationalist body could no longer claim to speak for all its communities.

Universal franchise arrived in 1931, and with it the arithmetic of majority rule. After the 1936 State Council election, every one of the seven ministers was Sinhalese. Ponnambalam answered with his "fifty-fifty" demand for balanced representation, which the Soulbury Commission rejected. In 1943, J.R. Jayewardene moved that Sinhala become the official language; the motion was amended to "Sinhala and Tamil" only after D.S. Senanayake intervened. Ponnambalam and the Communist Party warned that Section 29, the independence constitution's main minority safeguard, was too weak. It was tested almost immediately.

In November 1948, 285 days after independence, the Ceylon Citizenship Act denied citizenship to most up-country Tamils. Some 700,000 people were affected, and many of them had voted in the State Council elections of 1931 and 1936\. Some Ceylon Tamil MPs voted for the Act, so this is not a simple story of Sinhalese against Tamils. Still, the fight over who would count as a citizen of the new state had started before the state existed.

None of this meant civil war was coming. But the questions behind the later conflict were already being fought over in the State Council before the UNP ever formed a government: who gets represented, which language the state speaks, who counts as a citizen, and how far a majority can go.

## The revolution of the common man

Dr. Arivalzahan says the elite used ethnicity to win votes. But votes have to come from somewhere. An appeal to ethnicity works only if voters respond to it, and in 1956 a great many of them did.

Bandaranaike himself was the son of a Maha Mudaliyar. The people who put him in power were not. The *Pancha Maha Balavegaya*, the “five great forces” of Buddhist monks, Ayurvedic physicians, Sinhala-medium teachers, farmers and workers, carried his campaign. These were village leaders and a new rural educated class who had been kept out of jobs and influence by the English-speaking establishment. What they wanted, and what the coalition promised them, was “Sinhala only within 24 hours.”

The 1956 campaign was sold as the revolt of ordinary people against a Westernised class that did not travel on their buses or use their hospitals, almost the words Dr. Arivalzahan used about the NPP. The government of the common man passed the Official Language Act in June 1956\. Two years later came the riots of 1958, the first full-scale race riot in the country in more than forty years.

If class politics were the cure for ethnic politics, the Left should have held the line. It did, briefly. In the 1956 debate, Colvin R. de Silva of the LSSP warned that one official language would produce two nations. Ten years later, the LSSP and the Communist Party joined the SLFP in opposing the Dudley Senanayake government's regulations for the reasonable use of Tamil. In 1968, the same alliance led the campaign that forced Senanayake to abandon the district councils at the heart of his pact with S.J.V. Chelvanayakam.

In 1970, the Left returned to government with Sirimavo Bandaranaike. De Silva, now minister for constitutional affairs, presided over the 1972 Republican Constitution. It gave Buddhism "the foremost place", dropped Section 29 and set aside the Federal Party's proposals. The constitutional lawyer Rohan Edrisinha records the reasoning of the time: in a socialist society, it was said, the ethnic conflict would wither away. The Tamil leadership walked out of the Constituent Assembly. The same government introduced language-wise standardisation of university entry; in 1971 a Tamil-medium student needed 250 marks for medicine, a Sinhala-medium student 229\. In 1976 the main Tamil parties adopted the Vaddukoddai Resolution calling for a separate state.

## The party that would have saved us

His counterfactual is about a government "like the NPP". The NPP is the JVP's coalition, and Dissanayake has led the JVP since 2014\. The NPP of 2026 is not the JVP of 1987, and it would be unfair to treat them as the same. But the JVP has existed since the late 1960s, and its record is the only real evidence of how such a movement behaves when the national question is on the table.

The party recruited its first cadres through five lectures, one of them on "Indian expansionism," which critics say cast up-country Tamil plantation workers as instruments of Indian influence. Then, in prison after the failed 1971 insurrection, something changed. Bopage says he met Tamil students from the Moratuwa campus who had been held without charge for raising black flags against the 1972 Constitution. He went back to Wijeweera and argued that if the party spoke for Sinhala grievances it had to speak for Tamil ones too. The declaration they drafted in 1972 and 1973 accepted the Tamil people's right to decide their future democratically and opposed both separation and centralisation imposed from above. By the early 1980s, Bopage says, the party had members across the Jaffna peninsula and as far as Mannar, often one or two to a village.

That is the history Dr. Arivalzahan's argument cannot absorb. Here was a party of the rural Sinhala Buddhist south, as far from the old elite as Sri Lankan politics went, with a principled position on Tamil rights and Tamil members in the North. In July 1983 it gave the position up for exactly the reason he attributes only to the elite: the belief that it was costing Sinhala votes.

From 1987 to 1989, the JVP waged an armed campaign against the Indo-Lanka Accord and the 13th Amendment, which created the Provincial Councils, and denounced the Accord as a "Second Kandyan Convention." Bopage, who supported the Accord, blames the JVP for the murders of its supporters, while placing the main responsibility for the southern bloodshed on the Jayewardene government, whose counter-insurgency killed far more. In 2014, Dissanayake publicly expressed regret for the killings his party carried out.

In 2005, the JVP left Chandrika Kumaratunga's government over the post-tsunami joint mechanism with the LTTE, then backed Mahinda Rajapaksa on an agreement that rejected federalism and promised to revise the ceasefire. Bopage calls it "a terrible mistake" that the party "brought those nationalist and chauvinist forces together." In 2006, three JVP members went to the Supreme Court and won the demerger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. A JVP MP later called it the party's greatest achievement. As recently as April 2024, Dissanayake told a Jaffna audience he had not come to bargain for Tamil votes with promises of "13-plus" or federalism.

## Trust first, power later

Dr. Arivalzahan is right that devolution by itself will not end the conflict. The trouble is the order he wants things done in: Tamils are to wait for trust, and only then get a share of power.

Sri Lanka has tried this. The Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957 promised regional councils; on 9 April 1958, with some 200 monks outside his residence, Bandaranaike tore it up. The Dudley Senanayake-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1965 promised district councils; the bill was abandoned in 1968\. The 13th Amendment has been in the Constitution since 1987, and no government has implemented its land and police powers. Each time, Tamil leaders were asked to wait while Sinhala opinion was prepared, and each time the commitment lapsed. What destroyed trust was the breaking of agreements.

The India Dr. Arivalzahan held up as a model did the reverse. Its leaders built a national identity on top of linguistic states created in 1956, and when Tamil Nadu rose against Hindi in 1965, Delhi guaranteed English for as long as the non-Hindi states wanted it. India has its own failures, beginning with Partition, but it shared power first. In 1956, the year India redrew its map around language, Ceylon passed Sinhala Only.

The test of that sequencing is the institution the government already has. The Northern Provincial Council's term ended in October 2018\. The nine councils have gone seven to nine years without elections, run by governors the President appoints. The NPP promised elections within a year of taking office. A select committee has had its term extended to December, and in May the JVP's General Secretary, Tilvin Silva, said the polls could not be held this year.

Bopage, who still supports the 13th Amendment, described the leadership's thinking from his own conversations with them. They do not favour the amendment or the councils and are looking for an alternative, without having found one. "Some JVP leaders say openly that Tamils have no specific problems, only the same problems as everyone else," he said. That is very close to what Dr. Arivalzahan told the convention. Bopage would not call them racist. He used the Sinhala word *hangeema*, perception, for what is missing: they do not feel the problem.

## The Singapore story

Ceylon's per capita income "second in Asia, after Japan" comes from J.R. Jayewardene's 1948 budget speech, which ranked Ceylon against the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, Malaya and Burma. It was a comparison among poor countries, and Ceylon was one of them. In 1950, the economist B. Das Gupta called the country extremely underdeveloped.

The story that Lee Kuan Yew wanted to build Singapore in Colombo's image is harder to source. What Lee actually said is on the record. In his memoir, he dated Ceylon's unravelling to the 1956 decision to make Sinhala the national language. In a 2007 interview with the International Herald Tribune, preserved by the National Archives of Singapore, he said that in 1965 Singapore's leaders had twenty years of failed states to study and "knew what to avoid": racial conflict, linguistic strife, religious conflict. He named Ceylon, and cited the switch from English to Sinhala and the disenfranchisement of Tamils.

## What the government owes

Many Tamils voted for the NPP because they saw it as less corrupt than the established parties, and because they had grown tired of the failures and infighting of their own political leaders. The NPP also promised devolution. I believe in a common Sri Lankan identity myself. But it cannot be built at the expense of Tamil political rights, and it has to make room for those rights in the Constitution. If Tamil claims are treated as invented, or as something to be dealt with later, Tamils are being asked to accept a nation defined by the majority, on a schedule the majority sets.

Sri Lanka has heard versions of this before. In 1972, the drafters of the Republican Constitution said socialism would make the ethnic question wither away. In 1983, the JVP decided Tamil rights were costing it Sinhala votes. On 31 October, the claim was that good governance and a shared economy would make the national question go away.

There are simple ways to tell whether the government means what it promised. It can hold the Provincial Council elections its manifesto pledged. It can implement the devolution provisions already in the Constitution. It can publish a draft constitution that Tamil parties can read and argue over. And it can repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act without rebuilding it under other names.

On the last of these, the early signs are poor. In September and October the government gazetted the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill to replace the PTA, together with two companion bills, one on foreign terrorist fighters and one on organised crime. The organised crime bill would allow suspects to be held for up to two years without trial and would make statements to senior police officers admissible in court. Amnesty International says it reproduces many elements of the PTA and has called for it to be withdrawn. The bills would divide the PTA’s powers among three laws, where they would be harder to spot. For more than four decades, Tamils bore the brunt of those powers, and nothing in the new bills suggests they will be kept for drug gangs.

Dr. Arivalzahan had the chance to put these questions to the party that now governs. He told the audience instead that the ethnic problem was artificial and that devolution could wait.

Bopage heard much the same argument in Vitharandeniya in 1983, and voted against it. The following year he gave up the post of General Secretary over the same question. When he spoke to Jaffna Monitor, he gave the government a deadline. It is going into its third year, he said, and “this year it has to show that it is genuinely committed.” If it does not act this year, he said, “it will be hard for it to do anything at all.”