Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: an Ethnohistorical Narrative 36

Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: An Ethnohistorical Narrative 36 Premakumara de Silva, Farzana Haniffa, and Rohan Bastin Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 634 Historical Emergence of Ethnic Identities ...................................................... 635 Ethnicization of the Sri Lankan State and the Emergence of the Ethnic War: Colonial Impact .................................................................................. 636 The “Ethnic Riot” as a Political Instrument of Majoritarianism ............................ 639 The Ethnic Riot in Contemporary Sri Lankan History ..................................... 640 Postwar Violence: Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka Today ................................ 650 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 652 References ....................................................................................... 653 Abstract The ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka have many root causes and consequences that are closely interconnected. Given the nature and the complexity of root causes and consequences of these highly contested concepts, it should not be treated as a part of linear historical processes where one event led to another. Sri Lanka presents case of how intersecting not only ethnicity and violence but also religion, caste, class, linguistic, and cultural mosaics have been and might be billeted within the borders of a nation-state. However, state building in Sri Lanka has been riddled with paradoxes. The curious notion of numerically dominant ethnic group, Sinhala manifesting a “minority complex” or anxieties about minority groups, Tamil and Muslims, is evident in the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism during the nine- teenth and the twentieth century of the country. Since state building has often meant P. de Silva (*) · F. Haniffa Department of Sociology, University of Colombo, Colombo, Sri Lanka e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] R. Bastin School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 633 S. Ratuva (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2898-5_47 634 P. de Silva et al. centralization and a single ethnic group dominating the symbolic framework of the nation, there has been the tendency by minority groups such as Tamil and Muslims who have felt marginalized by the process to reinvent new collective ethnic identities. Moreover, cultural-religious minorities have responded to such hegemonic state-building process through mobilization of both non-violence and violent means. A complicated coming together of anti-minority sentiment at the level of the state, permissive politics that made violence a possibility, and the utilizing of this permissive violent politics for working out various class and caste enmities resulted in an extremely difficult political time for Sri Lanka in the 1980s. However, the central narrative through which the prevalence of violence was understood was the ethnic conflict. This paper too shall lay out the important historical moments where disadvantages toward minorities were institutionalized at state level while calling attention to ways in which ethnic politics were utilized for a multiplicity of ends. Keywords Sri Lanka · Ethnicity · Violence · War and Peace Introduction Ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka are understood in Sri Lanka using two primary frameworks. In the first instance, given that Sri Lanka experienced a violent conflict primarily based on the politicization of ethnic difference and the claim for a separate state on the basis of ethnicity, we have retraced the historical antecedents to the ethnic conflict to the manner in which first Sinhala nationalism and later sustained minority marginalization were institutionalized into the state. Secondly we have traced the manner in which the cultivated nationalism of the state and majorit- aritarian politics created the possibility for mobilizing violence within communities based on ethnic difference for different political and economic needs. This second form of violence often played out along class cleavages as well and was instrument- alized in the service of a variety of political interests that were not merely ethnic. In the early 1980s, Sri Lankan scholarship shifted to the study of the nature of violence in Sri Lankan society. Understanding communal violence was considered a matter of increasing urgency as outbreaks of violence between ethnic minority groups and the majority Sinhala became more and more frequent. Concomitantly the insurgent activity in the north of the Island also became more prominent. The violence provoked several anthropologists into analyses of the underlying political, economic, and ideological factors of ethno-religious violence (e.g., Obeyesekere 1984; Gunasinghe 1986; Tambiah 1986, 1992;Kapferer1988;Rogers1987; Spencer 1990; Roberts 1994; Abeysekara 2002;Ismail2005, and more recently Udalagama and de Silva 2014;Haniffa2016; Nagaraj and Haniffa 2018; Venugopal 2018). Further, given the escalation of the conflict since 1983, the question of ethno-religious nationalism and violence has informed most anthropological and sociological work on Sri Lanka. Today the emphasis has shifted to understanding processes of postwar reconciliation and, to an extent, the reemergence of violence targeting minority communities – this time Evangelical Christians and Muslim communities in the country. 36 Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: An Ethnohistorical Narrative 635 Historical Emergence of Ethnic Identities Though Sri Lanka entered its period of political independence from Britain with a strong pluralist orientation, ethnic thinking had been developed through colonial experiments with ethnic representation in the early 1900s, and with increasing state centralization, ethnicity became a dominant category in the postcolonial period. In response to the majoritarian politics and violence, the Tamil minority responded by demands for self-determination either within or outside the existing bounds of the nation-state. Since state building has often meant centralization and a single ethnic group dominating the symbolic framework of the nation, there has been a tendency by minority groups such as Tamil and Muslims who have felt marginalized by the process to reinvent new collective ethnic identities. Moreover, cultural-religious minorities have responded to such hegemonic state-building process through mobilization of both non-violence and violent means. For example, segments of the moderate Tamil elites dug their heels in for a political battle that culminated in a demand for a separate state in the north and east of Sri Lanka, where Tamils constitute a majority and the less privileged Tamil youth minority groups and castes were mobilized into armed factions such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In relation to the Muslims, Haniffa has argued that the success of the religious reform movements can also be traced to Muslims’ feeling of marginalization within the majoritarian polity and, more specifically, to the wartime polarization of the Sinhala and Tamil communities (Haniffa 2013). Research into the internal politics within Sri Lanka’sminoritized communities was sometimes submerged in the overarching narrative of Sinhala state enmity toward the Tamil ethnic group as a whole. Brian Pfaffenberger points out the manner in which the northern politicians themselves overemphasized Sinhala Tamil enmity to detract from the prevalence of caste politics in their own communities in Jaffna (Pfaffenberger 1990). A complicated coming together of anti-minority sentiment at the level of the state, permissive politics that made violence a possibility, and the utilizing of this permissive violent politics for working out various class and caste enmities resulted in an extremely difficult political time for Sri Lanka in the 1980s. However, the central narrative through which the prevalence of violence was understood was the ethnic conflict. This paper too shall lay out the important historical moments where disadvantages toward minorities were institutionalized at state level while calling attention to ways in which ethnic politics were utilized for a multiplicity of ends. Further, the war – the most sustained period of ethnic violence in the country since independence – requires its own framing. From independence in 1948 to the beginning of the civil war in 1983, Tamil demands changed from peaceful attempts to gain language equality to violent demands for a distinct Tamil nation and complete secession from Sri Lanka. Arguably, it is the cultivation of the cultural and political hegemony of the Sinhala Buddhists in an increasingly centralized nation-state that has been the greatest irritant to the ethnic minorities including Muslim. The failure of the Tamil leadership’s attempts to work through government institutions and the Sinhala majority governments’ repeated failure to respect attempts at non-violent protest have led to the violent means eventually used by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. 636 P. de Silva et al. Ethnicization of the Sri Lankan State and the Emergence of the Ethnic War: Colonial Impact The efforts of the colonial rulers to manage the problem of ethnicity and pluralism in the colony fall roughly

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