Nationalistic and cultural movement and the language issue
Two years before the Indian plantation workers were disenfranchised, a Select Committee chaired by J.R. Jayewardene endorsed in 1945 the establishment of the two local languages as official languages but suggested that English should be replaced over a period of 10 years. However, the United National Party’s (UNP) policy of gradual transition did not materialise due to a lack of interest and English remained the official language.
V. Nalliah proposed an amendment seconded by R.S.S. Gunewardene that Sinhala and Tamil should be the official languages and that both languages should be mediums of instruction in schools, examination for public services, and courts. This was approved by a Sinhalese-dominated Parliament, 27 to 2, showing a lack of ethnic overtones on the issue of language.
In July 1951, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike left the UNP and attacked the party for not adopting the language policy. Bandaranaike organised forces supporting the ‘Swabhasha’ movement, which advocated the replacement of the English language by Sinhala and Tamil as the official language. This was supported by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) too.
The three-member Language Commission appointed by the Governor-General to oversee the progress towards Sinhala and Tamil as official languages in 1951, observed in its final report written by its Chairman: “In my opinion, replacement of English by Swabhasha would have been very much easier if, instead of two Swabhasha languages as official languages, one alone had been accepted as proposed by J.R. Jayewardene in the State Council on 22 June 1943.”
Soon after the 1952 General Elections, the Federal Party (FP) fought three expensive legal battles against the Government challenging the Citizenship Act No.18 of 1948 and Parliamentary Elections Amendment Act No.48 of 1949. The party challenged the assurance of good spirit, intent, and faith when D.S. Senanayake persuaded others to accept the independence of the Constitution and Section 29 within it, while discriminating against Indian residents of Ceylon, who had earlier enjoyed the right to vote.
Kegalle District Court (DC) Judge N. Sivagnanasundaram ruled the case in favour of the plaintiff but the Supreme Court (SC) (Mudannayake vs. Sivagnanasundaram, 53 NLR 25, 1952) quashed the DC decision on the basis that the acts were not discriminatory and applied to all communities. The appeal to the Privy Council confirmed the SC decision.
While the acts independently read were not discriminatory, everybody knew the intended victims were the Indian Tamil labour and the Privy Council could not have been ignorant of the fact that the Indian workers were employees in tea plantations, all owned by the British.
The UNP Government showed a lack of interest in the stance of the Swabhasha movement. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) manifesto confronted the UNP by stating: “It is most essential that Sinhalese and Tamil be adopted as official languages immediately so that people of this country may cease to be aliens in their own land.” In response, Jayewardene in 1954 moved Parliament to declare “Sinhalese the official language of Ceylon within a reasonable number of years”.
The UNP Government stood exposed by postponing the implementation of the two-language policy, enabling English to continue as the official language. Because of the inability of the UNP to see the fast-moving nationalistic tendencies and the cultural revival, some sections within the Sinhalese community, seeing an opportunity with the 1956 General Elections approaching, wanted Bandaranaike to distance himself from the UNP and the colonial past. He struck a chord with the people when he articulated that social mobility and economic success depended on literacy and stressed that the “Sinhalese should be first united” to bring about national unity.
An uneasy Sinhalese population, alive to the emerging trend, now began to preach that the Sinhalese divided on the lines of caste and religion should first unite to create a secure future for a marginalised community and ethnic amity in Ceylon. Bandaranaike’s political vision changed. The Swabhasha movement, which advocated that the official languages of the nation should be Sinhala and Tamil, turned to a policy of ‘Sinhala only’.
In the run up to the change of policy by Bandaranaike, the majority community was fed with information by many Sinhalese nationalists that the Tamil community held 30% of positions in the Ceylon Administrative Service (CAS), 50% in clerical services, 60% in engineering, and 40% in the armed forces (source: Pratyush Pradhan, NALSAR University) and how the British used English as ‘the weapon’ to control the majority Sinhalese community.
Even the LSSP, which called for parity of status, was lost in the political movement that had emerged by 1956. Come the 1956 General Elections, the Bandaranaike-led SLFP began raising the ‘Sinhala only’ cry.
The Sinhala Only Act
The historic 1956 General Election victory resulted in a deep polarisation between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. While Bandaranaike swept the polls in the south, the FP won six out of nine seats in the north and four out of seven seats in the east.
On 5 June 1956, peaceful Tamil protesters at Galle Face were beaten up by thugs while the Police watched. On 15 June 1956, Sinhala was made the official language of the country by a margin of 56 to 29 votes in Parliament.
1957 dawned with the Sinhala letter ‘Sri’ on the number plate of vehicles instead of English letters of the country’s name such as CE, CL, CN, EY, EN etc. On 19 January 1957, Tamil politicians began an anti-‘Sri’ campaign in the north by replacing it with the Sanskrit/Tamil ‘Shree’. In retaliation in the south, Tamil name boards and street name boards were tar-brushed. The FP called and implemented a boycott of ministers coming to the north and east.
In response to Tamil grievances, Bandaranaike first introduced the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act of 1958 for the use of Tamil as a medium of instruction and examination for public service, and for special purposes in the north and east.
However, Tamil politicians were displeased that the Tamil language was not recognised as a national language. In fact, Government officials who lacked proficiency in Sinhala were denied bonuses and salary increases, and public servants hired after 1956 were given three years to become proficient in Sinhala.
Proposed Regional Councils
Due to increasing communal tensions, Prime Minister Bandaranaike realised that a bloodbath was imminent and had to be stopped. He responded again by presenting a bill for regional autonomy on 17 May 1957 and the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam (B-C) Pact in July 1957.
On the personal initiative of Bandaranaike, P. Navaratnarajah, QC (a personal friend of the Prime Minister) and SLFP Vice President A.C. Nadarajah, with the active support of Finance Minister Stanley de Zoysa, arranged for the first meeting with Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK)/FP Leader S.J.V. Chelvanayakam in Horagolla.
In reply to the FP’s demand for federalism as originally envisaged by Bandaranaike, the Prime Minister replied that decades had passed since then and the FP’s propaganda had caused the Sinhalese people to associate federalism with secession, and therefore he had changed his policy. He said that in any event, he had no mandate to introduce federalism.
The intellectual giant in Bandaranaike wanted the FP to propose an alternative. The FP understood the Prime Minister clearly and agreed not to press for federalism. Both parties agreed to power-sharing on the parameters set out in the Choksy Commission report on decentralisation.
FP leaders C. Vanniasingam and V. Navaratnam (former Members of Parliament [MPs] for Kopay and Kayts) drafted the Regional Council Bill and handed it over to the Prime Minister through Navaratnarajah. However, the draft regional council presented by the FP envisaged a subordinate state for the northeast with a unicameral legislature and cabinet with police powers while external affairs, defence, currency, stamps, customs, and inter-regional transport and a Cabinet Minister of State for Tamil Affairs were in the hands of the State. Subordinate taxation as supplementary revenue was proposed to the subordinate state of the northeast.
A second round of discussions took place at Rosmead Place. Bandaranaike shot down the proposals and suggested the scheme should emphasise ‘administrative decentralisation’ and objected to words like ‘parliament’ and ‘cabinet’ being mentioned, as they appeared to be provisions akin to a separate state.
The final decisive meeting took place on 25 July 1957 at the old Senate building with several Cabinet Ministers and FP leaders participating. The facilitator Navaratnarajah was also present.
After tough negotiations, with Philip Gunawardena refusing to delegate any of his ministerial powers, it was finally agreed to devolve powers to regional councils, and the FP consented to Bandaranaike’s insistence that the north should be one council and the east be divided into two councils.
The excitable press was given the good news at 2.30 a.m. as they withheld printing to break the momentous news. The evening news had more sensational news that Navaratnam had pointed out there was no agreement on paper.
B-C Pact to establish Regional Councils
On 26 July 1957, Chelvanayakam signed the B-C Pact, which consisted of two parts – a summary of the discussions and the agreement reached about the structure, powers, and composition of the proposed Regional Councils. Quite understandably, both parties kept the press away from the Prime Minister’s office.
It was agreed that while the position of the national language would remain as it was, the language of administration in the northeast would be Tamil and that necessary provisions would be made for the Sinhala people in the northeast.
The FP called off its Satyagraha campaign on being satisfied by the agreement between Bandaranaike and Chelvanayakam.
Unfortunately, the ‘Banda-Chelva’ Pact was never allowed to work because of extremists in the south, consisting of hardliners in the Government, opportunists in the Opposition, and Buddhist priests.
In October 1957, Jayewardene, who quietly bided his time in the UNP (which had only eight seats and was in the doldrums, with Sir John Kotelawala a mere figurehead and Dudley Senanayake inactive in politics), seized on the B-C Pact and began to whip up a communal frenzy against the pact and the SLFP-led Government, organising a much-publicised 72 mile march to Kandy.
This involved dramatic performances staged to invoke blessings at the Dalada Maligawa and invite divine retribution against those seeking to make provisions against the Sinhalese through the creation of Regional Councils.
On 9 April 1958, about 100 Buddhist monks and approximately 300 activists congregated at the Bandaranaike residence at Rosmead Place and extracted an undertaking from the Prime Minister to abrogate the B-C pact. All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) Leader G.G. Ponnambalam, who was opposed to the ITAK, also decided to oppose the B-C pact for political gain.
It was more than a coincidence when Bandaranaike’s deputy C.P. de Silva was poisoned in an attempt to allegedly poison the Prime Minister in Cabinet on 25 August 1959. Bandaranaike himself was shot at his residence exactly one month later on 25 September, by a Buddhist monk who had undergone training in Bandarawela, and died on 26 September 1959.
Bandaranaike’s death at the hands of an assassin, trained to commit an unpardonable crime by a businessman dressed in robes, shocked the world and a nation striving to become a model democracy. With it died the greatest opportunity that Ceylon had under an astute leader who could have amended the Sinhala Only Act in his stated objective of uniting the nation on the complex issue of language.
The standardisation policy
With Bandaranaike’s death, old divisions surfaced among the Sinhalese based on religion and caste. The first political casualty was C.P. de Silva, who was denied the chance to become the Prime Minister after the General Election results in March 1960 because his caste was not acceptable to Governor-General Sir Oliver Goonetilleke. (Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe and S.L. Gunasekara)
De Silva subsequently resigned from his leadership of the SLFP in favour of Sirimavo Bandaranaike in order to give a sociopolitical advantage to the party in time for the July 1960 General Elections. During the tenure of Sirimavo’s leadership, family politics erupted within the SLFP, overtaking that of the UNP which had been laughed at as the Uncle Nephew Party.
However, the most destabilising aspect of the nation’s ethnic relations were the laws passed allowing minority rights to be undermined by majority preferences.
The Language of the Courts Act No.3 of 1961 was passed to allow Sinhalese to replace English in all court proceedings, including in Tamil areas. A standardisation policy was adopted in 1971, resulting in the curtailing of Tamil students being selected for certain faculties in universities. Later in 1972, a district quota was added as a parameter within each language in selecting entrants to universities.
Apologists for the standardisation policy argued that during British times, the majority Sinhalese population lived outside urban areas and since the State language was English, English-speaking Sinhalese urban children benefited, whereas the vast majority did not belong to the social elite. In the meantime, the Tamil-dominated population in Jaffna had access to missionary schools providing English education.
As a result, a large proportion of English-speaking Tamil and Sinhalese students entered universities from urban areas like Colombo and Jaffna, and that too, to study Medicine and Engineering.
The Government policy of standardisation in 1971 was in real terms discriminatory, as university selection was based on the language in which applicants sat for the examination.
K.M. de Silva described it as follows: “The qualifying mark for admission to medical faculties was 250 out of 400 for Tamil students, whereas it was only 229 for Sinhalese students. Worst still, this same pattern of a lower qualifying mark was applicable when Sinhalese and Tamil students sat in English. In short, students sitting for exams in the same language but belonging to two ethnic groups had different qualifying marks.”
The 1972 district quota system for university entrance was described by historian C.R. de Silva as follows: “By 1977, the issue of university entrance had become a focal point of the conflict between the Government and Tamil leaders. Tamil youth, embittered by what they considered discrimination against them, formed the radical wing of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). Many advocated the use of violence to establish a separate Tamil state of Eelam. It was an object lesson of how inept policy measures and insensitivity to minority interests can exacerbate ethnic tensions.”
As a result, the Sirimavo Bandaranaike-led United Front Government did great harm to ethnic relations.
Constitutional experiments
The language-based standardisation of university entrance was abandoned by the UNP Government in 1977. The new Government led by Jayewardene introduced a standardisation policy based on merit and a district quota system. 80% of university placements were filled according to raw marks and the remaining 20% was allocated to districts with inadequate educational facilities.
Ad hoc tinkering with the quality of the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS) – established in 1833, developed during the colonial and post-independence eras, held by well-trained and experienced men selected after open competitive examinations from amongst graduates with first-class honours degrees, and abolished in May 1963 resulted in a gradual drop in standards. This did further damage to the country’s civil service and advice received by politicians entering the country’s legislature.
In a background of growing distrust and disunity, Sri Lanka’s first Constitution after independence was enacted in 1972, which made Sri Lanka a republic. It made Sinhala “the Official Language of the State” and incorporated regulations under the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act of 1958 as subordinate legislation, which could be amended by ordinary legislation.
Thereafter, another Constitution was enacted in 1978 introducing the presidential form of government. The new Constitution made Sinhalese and Tamil “National Languages” but maintained Sinhalese as an official language.
Subsequently, the 13th Amendment (arising from the Indo-Lanka Accord) made Tamil an official language while the 16th Amendment in 1988 gave Tamil-speaking people anywhere in the island the right to communicate with a Government office or officer in their own language and receive communications in their language.
Despite all the-constitution making, the complaint of Tamil leaders was that access to non-discriminatory treatment within the public service was poor despite legislation to the contrary. It was evident that hostility or disinterest on the part of the bureaucracy had hindered enforcement of Tamil as an official language. There was an absence of compelling reasons for Sinhala-speaking officials to become proficient in the Tamil language.
Former Chairman of the Official Languages Commission Raja Collure stated in 2006 as follows: “Successive governments have failed to implement constitutional provisions in regard to the use of Tamil as the second official language.”
In 2011, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), led by the well-respected former Attorney General C.R. De Silva, noted that many people still could not transact business in their own language, and did not understand the instructions and contravened them several times. (Pratyush Pradhan, ‘A brief overview of the language rights legislation in Sri Lanka’ 1 April 2021)
At the Independence Day in 2016, the new ‘Yahapalana’ Government ensured that the National Anthem was sung in Sinhala and Tamil. This was challenged as unconstitutional, but the court verdict declared that it was not so.
The hostility towards minorities by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa Government was stopped in its tracks by the ‘Aragalaya,’ which helped to end its arrogance and mismanagement.
Conclusion
Sri Lankans tend to personalise their politics. Peaceful protesters of all races, religions, and political colours gathered on the Galle Face Green in 2022 to call for the resignation of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa regime that did little or nothing towards reconciliation and the management of the country’s economy. Instead, his Government, which consisted of present-day ministers and several other MPs, careered on a path of Sinhalese supremacist arrogance.
During the ‘Aragalaya,’ we saw the statue of SWRD blindfolded with a sign reading ‘Wake up’. Social media selectively cited that it was SWRD who was the sole architect of the “disastrous Sinhala-only policy – the first step towards an inward-looking nationalistic Sri Lanka that drove minorities away – much of them highly-qualified public sector professionals and the colourful burgher community”.
As reported by Devika Brendon on 15 May 2022, several other activists called SWRD a “Bloody Banda” and said perhaps a noose should have been more apt for a man whose racist actions paved the way to brutal Tamil pogroms and a 30-year war.
The demand during the successful ‘Aragalaya’ was to overthrow structures and governance rather than retribution against individuals.
Majoritarian politics have been played since independence by opportunistic politicians and their subservient supporters with no tangible results for the nation and the people at large. SWRD is the name associated with one piece of legislation as if it was the sum total of all his life’s contribution to the nation and which brought disaster.
On the contrary, no politician or political party who criticised SWRD have submitted any amendments to correct the wrong or pass fairer legislation to resolve the language and ethnic conflicts except to profit from what Bandaranaike proposed.
A close look at the prevailing context in which the Sinhala Only Act was passed as referred in the foregoing Parts I and II will challenge the view that it was SWRD who was responsible for Sri Lanka’s ethnic tensions.
In fact, political leaders who led the country for the last 50 years and continue to lead us today, engage in cynicism and spin in their statecraft with persistent disregard for truth and facts. When national leaders conflate compliance with competence or patronage, propaganda, and deceitfulness, it will extract a great cost from its institutions. It is not surprising that those failures inevitably bring a human toll as well.
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatism was defeated in 2009 after a 30-year brutal civil war. If the country is to achieve prosperity and improve its happiness index, people must rally to take the initiative to eliminate corruption and bring about genuine reconciliation by disregarding politicians who try to garner political power by attempting to distribute political patronage, like what happened during the last 15 years after the war victory.
Provincial Councils
The full implementation of the Provincial Council system, subject to regulatory authority in the hands of the Government and established without political party participation in its electoral process, should be executed instead of the President merely making lofty promises.
A new president with a people’s mandate will be obliged to fully implement the same, since all political parties have agreed to establish it, as constitutionally provided, after the next Presidential Election this year.
If Sri Lanka wishes to re-emerge as a model democratic state and economically self-reliant without being a pawn in the hands of powerful nations and unsympathetic lending agencies, our politicians and the people should at least now think outside the box and jettison corruption in mind and body.
(Part I of this article was published in The Sunday Morning on 14 July and can be seen at https://www.themorning.lk/articles/KdfpBTTRcHkw3krLJwf9. Part II was published on 21 July and can be seen at https://www.themorning.lk/articles/26giKFTWtynRUVQsFHPF)
(The writer is an Attorney-at-Law)