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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.
The current ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has caused scholars to analyse past developments in an effort to discover the roots of the present crisis. Several studies have focused on the sectarian nature of the Sinhalese nationalist ideology and politics that developed in the late l9th and early 20lh century and which was targeted against the minorities. This essay examines a neglected aspect of this ideology and its consequent policy-the particularly conservative illiberal bent it acquired in relation to the Estate Tamil population.
This orientation was most evident in the citizenship and franchise laws that were passed on the heels of the transfer of power to the local elite. One of the first laws passed was the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 which deprived the Estate Tamil population, constituting 12% of the population, of their citizenship. This was followed by another law that made it possible for those with property or education within the community to get citizenship. A third law deprived those without citizenship from having the right to vote. As a result, the large majority of the Estate Tamils, who had been crucially important in putting up Ceylon's famed tea plantations, had participated in the island's politics in the late pre-independence...