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A HISTORICAL TURNING-POINT

(FROM CHAPTER 74)

Sri Lanka’s system of electoral delimitation, carefully designed to favour rural conservatives over urban radicals, had always tended to produce large majorities for the winning party. In the general election of 1977, the distortions it produced were near-absurd. The UNP won about 53 per cent of the vote, giving it the first absolute majority any party in Lankan history had yet obtained at the polls; yet even as solid a popular mandate as this hardly justified the capture of an extraordinary 140 seats out of the 168 in contention. The SLFP suffered the corresponding loser’s penalty: despite obtaining almost thirty per cent of the vote, it was reduced to a pitiful eight seats. For the first time in the history of the country, an ethnic minority party, the Tamil United Liberation Front, became the main opposition. It managed this feat by winning a mere 6.75 per cent of the popular vote, which was enough to allow it to gain no less than eighteen seats in its sparsely-populated northern and eastern heartlands.

       The TULF was a political formation born of despair. Ever since 1956, Tamil demands for equal treatment as citizens and redress for communal grievances had been ignored or repudiated by Sinhalese-dominated governments, which, rather than address these demands, had ‘encouraged and fostered the aggressive nationalism of the Sinhalese people and…used their political power to the detriment of the Tamils’ (this, at least, was how Tamil leaders viewed the disappointments of the past twenty years). The Federal Party had walked out of Mrs Bandaranaike’s constituent assembly after its demand that Tamil be accorded equal official status with Sinhala under the new constitution was decisively rejected; when the draft bill with its clauses conferring privileged status on Buddhism and Sinhala was debated in the National State Assembly, Federal Party and Tamil Congress parliamentarians had not only repudiated the bill but boycotted the May 22 session at which the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka was formally constituted. Under this new Constitution, its leaders argued, the last hopes of achieving Tamil aspirations within a Sinhalese-majority Sri Lanka had been lost.

       Thus it came to pass that, at Vaddukoddai near the north-western tip of the Jaffna Peninsula on 14 May 1976, representatives of the two established ‘Ceylon Tamil’ parties came together to settle their old quarrels and form a new coalition, the Tamil United Liberation Front. Unlike its political predecessors, the TULF did not intend to pursue communal goals through the existing order. Rather, it would dedicate itself to

 

[the] restoration and reconstitution of the Free, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam, based on

the right of self-determination inherent to every nation, [which] has become inevitable in order to safeguard

the very existence of the Tamil Nation in this Country.

 

Separation was a radical step indeed. Sinhalese (and, indeed, many others, including a large segment of Ceylon Tamils living outside the north and east of the country) were variously shocked, incredulous, derisive or outraged. It was a step too far for S. Thondaman and his Ceylon Workers’ Congress, which had earlier formed part of a short-lived Tamil United Front with ITAK and the Tamil Congress; they now left that grouping to find what allies they could among the Sinhalese-dominated parties.

       The death of S.J.V. Chelvanayakam on 26 April deprived Tamils of a unifying leader who might have been able to wield the separatist demand as a negotiating tool rather than an ultimatum. Cynical observers scoffed that the TULF had overreached itself, predicting that the majority of Tamil voters would not support separation at the polls. They were spectacularly proved wrong by the results of the 1977 election, in which the northern electorates saw voter turnout of over eighty per cent and all but unanimous mandates for TULF candidates. The message was clear, the portents ominous.

© 2023 / Richard Simon. 

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