Origins of the Sri Lankan civil war

The origins of the Sri Lankan civil war lie in the continuous political rancor between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Sri Lankan Tamils. The war has been described by social anthropologist Jonathan Spencer as an outcome of how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period, with the political struggle between minority Tamils and the Sinhalese-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place name etymologies, and the political use of the national past.

Colonial period

The roots of the conflict have been traced back to Sri Lanka's colonial era. Tamils became overrepresented in the civil service jobs due to the advantage of English language educational resources being allegedly disproportionately allocated to them. However, English language schools were established in the Tamil-majority Jaffna by American missionaries since the British wanted to prevent conflict with the English missions in the south. Since Jaffna soil was economically unproductive unlike the south, Tamils there invested more heavily in education to secure government jobs. A small section of the Jaffna society benefited from this while most of the Tamil areas remained uneducated. The British selected their candidates for the civil service on a merit basis through civil service examination without an ethnic quota. Therefore, historian E. F. C. Ludowyk explained the Tamil overrepresentation in civil service in terms of "their greater industry and thrift". S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the fourth Prime Minister of the Dominion of Ceylon, stated that the Tamils gained a "dominant position in the public services" due to their hard work and merit in passing the qualifying examinations. By 1946, 33% of clerical jobs in Ceylon were held by Sri Lankan Tamils, although they were 11% of the country's population. Moreover, the British pushed for the dominance of Christianity and the removal of privileging Buddhism in the state government, the main religion followed by the Sinhalese. Upon independence, the ruling Sinhalese elite would vilify Tamils as having been favoured by the British to justify discriminatory policies against them. Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism sparked by the grievances of the majority against the domination of a Westernized elite would lead to ethnic polarization.

Year	Total	Sinhalese	Tamil	Burgher
1870	81	7	not recorded	not recorded
1907	95	4	2	6
1925	135	17	8	14
1946	160	69	31	-

	Sinhalese	Tamil
1946 Civil Service	44.5%	20%
1946 Judicial Service	46.7%	28.9%
1980 Civil Service	85%	11%
2004 Civil Service	90%	8.5%

Missionary education and demand for equal representation

A primary contributor to the development of political awareness amongst Tamils during the European colonial rule was the advent of Protestant missionaries on a large scale from 1814. Missionary activities by missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Methodists, and Anglican churches, led to a revival amongst Hindu Tamils, who built their own schools, temples, societies and published literature to counter the missionary activities. The success of this effort led the Tamils to think confidently of themselves as a community and prepared the way for self-consciousness as a cultural, religious and linguistic community in the mid-19th century.
Great Britain, which had come to control the whole of the island in 1815, instituted a legislative council in 1833 with three Europeans and one each for Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamils and Burghers. This council's primary requirement was to play an advisory role to the Governor. These positions eventually came to be elected. From the introduction of the advisory council to the Donoughmore Commission in 1931 until the Soulbury Commission in 1947, the main dispute between the Sinhalese and Tamils elites was over the question of representation and not on the structure of the government. The issue of power sharing was used by the nationalists of both communities to create an escalating inter-ethnic rivalry which has continually gained momentum ever since.
There was initially little tension amongst Sri Lanka's two largest ethnic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamils, when Ponnambalam Arunachalam, a Tamil, was appointed representative of the Sinhalese as well the Tamils in the national legislative council. However, the British Governor William Manning actively encouraged the concept of "communal representation" and created the Colombo seat which alternated between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
Subsequently, the Donoughmore Commission strongly rejected communal representation, and brought in universal franchise. The decision was strongly opposed by the Tamil political leadership, who realized that they would be reduced to a minority in parliament, according to the proportion of the population they make up. G. G. Ponnambalam, a leader of the Tamil community, proposed to the Soulbury Commission that there should be 50–50 representation in the proposed independent Ceylon – a proposal that was rejected. In 1936, a Pan-Sinhala Board of Ministers was created which excluded non-Sinhala members, and further divided the Sinhala and Tamil elites. The Second World War served as an interregnum where the adroit politics of D. S. Senanayake successfully balancing the polarising tendencies of the Sinhalese as well as Tamil nationalists.

1948 - Independence

Following independence in 1948, G. G. Ponnambalam and the party he founded, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, joined D. S. Senanayake's moderate, Western-oriented, United National Party Government. This Government pass the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, which denied citizenship to Sri Lankans of Indian origin and resulted in Sri Lanka becoming a majoritanian state. Sri Lanka's government represented only the majority community, the Sinhalese community, and had marginalized the minorities, causing a "severe degree of alienation" among the minority communities. When this Act was passed, the Tamil Congress was strongly criticized by the opposition Marxist groups and the newly formed Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist Federal Party. S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the leader of this new party, contested the citizenship act before the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, and then in the Privy council in England, on grounds of discrimination towards minorities, but he did not prevail in overturning it. The FP took two seats in the 1952 election, against the Tamil Congress' four, but in the 1956 election, it became the dominant party in the Tamil districts and remained so for two decades. The FP's came to be known for its uncompromising stand on Tamil rights. In response to the parliamentary act that made Sinhala the sole official language in 1956, Federal MPs staged a non violent sit in protest, but it was broken up by a nationalist mob. The police and other state authorities present at the location failed to take action to stop the violence. The FP was cast as scapegoats and were briefly banned after the 1958 riots, in which many were killed and thousands of Tamils forced to flee their homes.

State sponsored colonisation schemes

Another point of conflict between the communities was state sponsored colonization schemes that changed the demographic balance in the Eastern province in favor of majority Sinhalese that the Tamil nationalists considered to be their traditional homeland. It has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence.

Denial of citizenship to Indian Tamils

There is a sizable population of Tamils in the Central Province, plantation laborers brought down from India by the British colonial authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries. These Indian Tamils, as they are called, still work mainly in Sri Lanka's tea plantations. They have been locked in poverty for generations and continue to experience poor living conditions. Although they speak dialects of the same language, they are usually considered a separate community from the Sri Lankan Tamils of the North and East.
The government of D.S. Senanayake passed legislation stripping the estate Tamils of their citizenship in 1949, leaving them stateless.
The effect was to tilt the island's political balance away from the Tamils. In 1948, at independence, the Tamils had 33% of the voting power in Parliament.. Upon the disenfranchisement of the estate Tamils, however, this proportion dropped to 20%. The Sinhalese could and did obtain more than a 2/3 majority in Parliament, making it impossible for Tamils to exercise an effective opposition to Sinhalese policies affecting them. The main reason for the imbalance was that several multi-member constituencies elected a Tamil member of Parliament in a majority Sinhalese electorate. The idea in having multi-member constituencies was to prevent domination of minorities by a future nationalist government.
Not content with stripping their citizenship, successive governments tried to remove the estate Tamils from the country entirely. In 1964, Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike signed an agreement with Indian Prime Minister L.B. Shastri. A second agreement was signed three years later with Indira Gandhi. These provided that 600,000 of the estate Tamils would be expelled and sent to India over a 15-year period, and 375,000 would be restored their Sri Lankan citizenship. Not all of the former group actually returned to India, and remained in Sri Lanka without the ability to vote, travel abroad, or participate fully in Sri Lankan life. It was not until 2003 that full citizenship rights were restored to the remaining Tamils in the hill country.