Medidas de control de la plaga

The contemporary relationship between insecurity and development in Malaiyaha Tamil politics and community building in Sri Lanka finds its underpinnings in the question of the minority representation in colonial Ceylon and postcolonial Sri Lanka. Marked events of minoritization dating from the early 1900s to early 2000s significantly shape the articulated interests and demands of today’s Malaiyaha Tamil political and community leaders. The following section details key political moments that gesture to the question of minority representation and work through its definitions and place in Sri Lanka.

When independence became an actualized possibility in the early 1920s, Ceylon nationals began contemplating the role that minorities would play in a newly representative Ceylonese state. In 1919, the Ceylon National Congress (CNC) took shape as a political association of elite Ceylonese individuals from various backgrounds to advocate for their political stakes in the British colony. Though initially multiethnic by composition, CNC had, by 1922, become increasingly dominated by Sinhala majoritarian

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interests. Ceylon Tamil Congress member, Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the CNC’s inaugural President and staunch supporter of a multiethnic, cooperative Ceylon polity, had withdrawn from leadership, and the unofficial minority interests of the Legislative Council17 _{had began to manifest in weak political alliances that were subjected to the}

manipulations of British colonial administrators holding official members. In August 1922, the CNC sent a telling Memorial to the Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, in which they expressed their collective concern over the question of minority representation in Ceylon:

In regard to the minorities, the Congress has repeatedly put the question as to what their separate interests are as distinct from the interests of the country generally. This question still remains unanswered and will never be answered for the obvious reason that they [the minorities] have no separate interests . . . having secured all they wanted and even more, the minorities are now asked to sit in judgment on the form and strength of the representation to be given to the country generally of which they are comparatively a negligible factor (Bandaranaike 1928:421).

The statement, made twenty-six years before Ceylon’s independence, eerily finds mutual language with the following excerpt from the speech that President Mahinda Rajapakse gave in Parliament immediately following the killing of LTTE leader Prabhakaran and the end of the thirty-year civil war in May 2009, which I first discussed in the Introduction and repeat here for emphasis:

We have removed the word minorities from our vocabulary three years ago. No longer are the Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and any others minorities. There are only two peoples in this country. One is the people that love this

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17 _{The Legislative Council was established in 1833 by recommendation of the Colebrooke-Cameron}

Commission and is considered the first legal form of representative government in Ceylon, but whose official members were only British (unofficial members included some Ceylonese elites)

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country. The other comprises the small groups that have no love for the land of their birth. Those who do not love the country are now a lesser group.18

What had happened to minority interests in colonial and postcolonial Sri Lanka between 1922 and 2009 such that the language of exclusion could persist and function in the name of national interests? What conditions allowed Ceylonese colonial subjects, looking up to the horizon of sovereignty, to pivot their desires for the nation on the denial of distinctive minority interests? Why was and, in many ways, is the minority considered a threat to the nation’s survival and strength?

Between 1912 and 1949, minorities in Ceylon provided multiple and often dissenting evidence to the assertions of the CNC and proved that they, as “negligible” groups, in fact, had interests that were distinct from the general interests of the future Ceylon nation. As independent Ceylon became an emerging possibility, the pressures imposed on Ceylon nationals to conform ideas of “representation” with the logic of

representativeness or a “politics of statistics” (Appadurai 1993:332, Chatterjee 1993:203,

Krishna 1999:51) became increasingly clear. The CNC’s claim of the minority “negligibility” in relation to the greater nation’s interests suggested that enumerations of community would triumph over communal interests. This precondition of “representativeness” in colonial Ceylon would later provide a fertile yet disciplined economy of words and deeds in which majority and minority groups were compelled to vie for their social standing and recognition in the political sphere.

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18 _{English translation of speech provided by the following website:}

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/shrilanka/document/papers/president_speech_parliament_defeatof LTTE.htm

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With Ceylon politicians and colonial administrators abandoning the ideal sense of “representation,” minorities readily engaged in the politics of representativeness, a way of communicating that provided a terminology of representation that could be of use and circulate in the political climate of nation-building. In the next section of this chapter, I will explore the social history of the concept, “minority representation,” in the political economy of Ceylon between 1912 and 1949. In doing so, I will use key moments in which the concept manifest in the debates and discussions on state-building that serve as a foundation for the eventual marginalization and disenfranchisement of Malaiyaha Tamils on the eve of independence. What were the circumstances in which the concept of minority representation became available for circulation? What political and economic forces enabled this concept to gain currency in the years leading up to Ceylon’s independence? While this colonial period may seem distant to the state of minority politics in Sri Lanka during the immediate aftermath of civil war in mid-2009, it shares an shared existential sense of uncertainty as to possibilities and impossibilities of building and rebuilding the state. This shared ground, I believe, directly impacted the formation of minority politics for Malaiyaha Tamils and the social possibilities that they were afforded under such terms of representation.