Democracy and Civil War in Sri Lanka

PRIAD Research Paper December 2012

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Democracy & Civil War in Sri Lanka

José Luengo-Cabrera

Abstract

This paper attempts to demonstrate how the Westminster-Style of democracy adopted at independence instigated the spiral of polarization that led to the Sri Lankan civil war. The underlying analysis will focus on political entrepreneurship and how the majoritarian system of democratic governance incentivized the Sinhalese majority to promulgate sectarian policies and exclude the Tamil minority from access to political power. The paper will seek to rationalize the failure of inter-ethnic co-existence and elucidate the radicalization of the Tamil minority through the lens of the relative deprivation theory.


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“When majoritarian democracy becomes ethnically exclusive, the political system is less likely to be stable over the long term – threatening the

survival of both peace and democracy”

Roeder & Rothchild (2005:8)

“Where a territorially-based ethnic minority is politically out of step with other groups, uncompromising centralism in the guise of democratic majoritarianism will inevitably suppress that minority and provoke a reaction”

Horowitz (1991:224)

Introduction Sri Lanka offers a paradigmatic case to illustrate the

perverse effect that democratic politics can have in an

ethnically divided society. In the wake of

independence, the state island witnessed a progressive

escalation in inter-ethnic violence that led to a

protracted civil war lasting over two decades and

costing the lives of an estimated 60,000 people (Reilly

2001). Although a multifaceted and convoluted

conflict, the political system bequeathed to Sri Lanka

by the British can be said to have had “a crucial

impact on the exacerbation of the conflict” (Bose

1994:28). The inherited Westminster-style democracy,

with its highly centralized and unitary state structure,

proved to be a destructive institutional configuration

as its “First-Past-The-Post” (FPTP) electoral system

allowed political parties to single-handedly govern by

plurality majority. With an ethnic composition

comprising a numerically dominant ethnic group, Sri

Lanka’s experience demonstrates how the

Westminster-style democracy catalyzed the conflict by

enabling the majority ethnic group to gain, retain and

exercise exclusive political power in a hegemonic and

discriminatory manner.

This paper will endeavour to demonstrate how the

Westminster-Style democracy instigated the spiral of

polarization that led to the Sri Lankan civil war. The

underlying analysis will focus on political

entrepreneurship and how the majoritarian system of

democratic governance increased the political salience

of ethnicity by incentivizing the majority ethnic group

to promulgate sectarian policies and exclude the

minority from access to political power. The paper

will primarily give a theoretical exploration of

democracy in ethnically divided societies by exploring

the potential for majoritarian forms of democracy to

promote instability and inter-ethnic violence. It will

then explore Sri Lanka’s history to reveal how the

colonial experience created the conditions for the

accentuation of ethnic enmity that materialized with

independence. Subsequently, it will evaluate how the

institutional configuration adopted at independence

laid the ground for the conflict as the Westminster-

style democracy incentivized Sinhalese parties to

engage in “competitive chauvinism” and adopt

nepotistic policies devoted to disempower the Tamil

minority, whose resort to a secessionist armed

struggle sparked the civil war. Finally, it will offer a

synthesized analysis to rationalize the failure of inter-

ethnic co-existence and attempt to elucidate the

radicalization of the Tamil minority through the lens

of Gurr’s (1968) “relative deprivation” theory. The

paper will conclude by evaluating how Sri Lanka’s

experience exemplifies the disparaging effects that

majoritarian forms of democracy can have in a society

where a single ethnic group is empowered to

legitimately implement a tyranny of the majority.


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Democracy, Ethnicity and Conflict

Democracy is generally conceived as an inclusive

system of competition and participation for political

power (Diamond et al. 1995). It can be described as

an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political

decisions in which individuals acquire the power to

decide by means of a competitive struggle for the

people’s vote” (Schumpeter 1947:269). Democracy is

therefore perceived as a system of government in

which the polity is empowered to determine its

political representatives and stability should ensue as

a result of the political accommodation of the

electorate’s demands. A crucial caveat however

emerges from the empirical reality that not all

democracies are stable; many transitions to

democracy across the globe have been accompanied

by inter-communal conflict (De Nevers 1993). One

of the foremost propositions to explain this

phenomenon has been the idea that democracy can

exacerbate conflict in societies divided by deep ethnic

cleavages (Rabushka & Shepsle 1972, Horowitz

1985).

The underlying assertion for this claim is that

democracy tends to increase the political salience of

ethnicity. It is argued that politicians in ethnically

divided societies are incentivized to campaign along

narrow sectarian lines because it constitutes a

dominant strategy for the mobilisation of the

electorate (Reilly 2001). A resulting outcome is the

creation of ethnic parties competing on the basis of

sectarian appeals that entrench ethnic differences by

exacerbating communal antagonisms in the political

arena. As such, democratic mechanisms designed to

promote competition for popular vote shares become

mere ethnic contestations as politicians are solely

devoted to obtaining the votes of their ethnic

brethren. Consequently, little or no voting takes place

across ethnic lines and the chances for centripetal

politics are minimized as ethnic parties campaign

along increasingly polarizing platforms.

Of crucial importance is the democratic configuration

that is implemented in a particular society. Lijphart

(1984) warned against the dangers of adopting

majoritarian forms of democracy in heterogeneous

societies as they allow “winner-take-all” outcomes

that can permanently exclude minority groups from

political power. Empirical democratic theory posits

that permanent exclusion strongly undermines the

stability and survival of democracies (Dahl 1971,

Przeworski 1991). In particular, democracies in which

ethnicity is politically salient are said to be prone to

permanently exclude groups from power and are

therefore inherently unstable (Rabushka & Shepsle

1972). In Sri Lanka, with an imbalanced ethnic

composition, the combination of a majoritarian

democracy with an ethnicized party system was a

prime instigator for instability as the minority’s

perpetuated exclusion from political power led to its

radicalization and eventual resort to armed struggle.

This indicates that a possible result in ethnically

divided societies under a majoritarian democratic

configuration is the prevalence of identity politics

such that what is electorally optimal for a majority

ethnic group will be sub-optimal for the minority

group (Olson 1971).


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Ethnic groups are collectivities with real or putative

common ancestry, language, religion, kinship or

physical appearance (Bulmer 1986). Given the

ascriptive character of ethnic identity, “attachment to

an ongoing ethnic party may not be as susceptible to

change at the level of the individual voter as

attachment to a party that has the flavour of a

voluntary association” (Horowitz 1985:294). Ethnicity

therefore becomes a “promise of secure support” for

political leaders as ethnic loyalties are enforced to the

point that few voters “float” across the ethnic

cleavage (Ibid). In the absence of “floating” voters,

ethnic parties have no incentive to cut across ethnic

lines; in fact, they are encouraged to adopt

increasingly polarising appeals to maximize their

share of votes. This is the infamous “bankruptcy of

moderation” (Rabushka & Shepsle 1972:86). In a

majoritarian democratic system composed of two

main ethnic groups, ethnic parties from each group

will find it electorally optimal to appeal solely to its

sectarian electorate. In this sense, electoral

competition takes place predominantly within rather

than across ethnic parties. This is the “outbidding”

phenomenon modelled by Rabushka & Shepsle

(1972) and further developed by Horowitz (1985).

In an ethnic party system like Sri Lanka’s in which

group preferences are predominantly fixed and little

or no cross-cutting cleavages exist, any party across

each group will be incentivized to appeal exclusively

to its own community for votes by engaging in

emotive and exclusive ethnic appeals (Horowitz

1985). Essentially, intra-ethnic parties compete by

outbidding each other on the political spectrum and

any attempt to moderate their political stance or

engage in inter-ethnic pacts will render them

vulnerable to electorally detrimental accusations of

treachery. This creates a centrifugal spiral in which

extremist positions become electorally rewarding and

the prospects for multi-ethnic coalitions unlikely.

Under a demographic configuration whereby one

group is numerically superior to the other, an

outcome of instability and violence is likely to occur.

The party bidding for the support of the majority

group wins every election by plurality and is able to

“subvert the democratic process by stripping the

minority group of its rights” (Chandra 2005: 237). As

a result, the minority group engages in destabilizing

violence as a pre-emption or reaction to its exclusion

(Ibid). This, in essence, is what happened in Sri Lanka

following the adoption of the Westminster-style

democracy. Its idiosyncratic ethnic composition

guaranteed that the Sinhalese parties could

incontestably win all elections by ensuring that they

gained the votes of the numerically superior Sinhalese

electorate. Given the presence of two main Sinhalese

parties, “competitive chauvinism” dominated the

electoral process as they both competed to campaign

on sectarian platforms that promised to legislate

policies destined to empower the Sinhalese

community whilst simultaneously disenfranchising

and marginalizing the Tamil minority.

The following sections will seek to offer a

comprehensive and historically-informed analysis of

why the Westminster-style democracy acted as a

prime instigator in the outbreak of the Sri Lankan

Civil War. The principal argument will focus on how

colonial policies and the political system installed at

independence critically transformed latent ethnic

differences into politically salient antagonisms. The

adoption of a plurality electoral system in a society


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characterized by the territorial concentration of its

ethnic groups proved to be a critical factor. The

FPTP system, with its territorially designated electoral

districts, ensured that Sinhalese parties could

permanently gain a plurality majority of votes due to

the fact that Tamils constituted less than 10% of the

electorate in 81% of the nation-wide constituencies

(Bose 1994). In addition, this system had the

particularity of creating “huge manufactured

majorities” (Bastian 2005: 204) as it magnified

“relatively slender pluralities of the national vote into

disproportionately large majority of seats” in

parliament (Bose 2007:22). Recurrently, the

alternating Sinhalese parties gained super majorities

and allowed them to practically deprive Tamil parties

from any legislative leverage to contest the

discriminatory policies being implemented. Critical to

the understanding of Sri Lanka’s failure to create the

conditions for inter-ethnic coexistence is its colonial

experience. Colonial policies fundamentally

transformed inter-ethnic relations by creating a

ranked system of stratification that set the ground for

the accentuation of ethnic enmities at the dawn of

independence.

Colonial Rule: The Systematic Stratification of

Ethnic Identities

Sri Lanka in the pre-colonial era was characterized by

an “unranked system of ethnic stratification” as

Tamils and Sinhalese “coexisted as two separate and

relatively autonomous social systems” (Mason

2003:94). The two communities lived in separate

kingdoms with Tamils occupying the north-eastern

provinces of the Jaffna peninsula and the Sinhalese

predominantly inhabiting the south-western coastal

provinces of the island. Prior to the arrival of the

colonizers, little other than language and religion

differentiated these two ethnic groups that co-habited

in relative peace (Spencer 1990). With the advent of

colonization the “divide and rule” strategy came to

favour the Tamil population to the detriment of the

Sinhalese.

The British colonial administration was preoccupied

with developing the large tea plantations in the

southern regions of the island. The colonial approach

adopted set to subordinate the Sinhalese population

that inhabited the plantation areas and imported

British-educated Tamils from the north to assist the

colonial administration. As a result, a cohort of the

Tamil community was predominantly being trained to

occupy positions in the civil service and their western

education allowed them to engage in industrial and

commercial activities. This had the effect of

economically empowering a Tamil elite that began to

spread across the island and occupy a

disproportionate share of posts in the administration.

Soon enough, the colonial policies that favoured the

economic and political empowerment of Tamils led

to a fundamental transformation in the stratification

of the two ethnic communities. The previously

unranked system in which ethnic identity was solely

differentiated by cultural differences had now become

a ranked system in which ethnic identity was primarily

differentiated by socio-economic status (Mason

2003). This fabricated stratification essentially laid the

ground for the subsequent resentment that prevailed

amongst the Sinhalese community as it propagated

the belief that this arbitrary and unjust favouritism

had to be reversed. In essence, the colonial rule


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sowed the seeds of ethnic enmity through the

subjective stratification of ethnic identity as it induced

a post-colonial Sinhalese ruling majority to callously

overturn this perceived injustice.

Westminster-Style Democracy at Independence

In the lead up to the de-colonization process, there

was an evident need to create a constitutional

arrangement that would set up a political system

capable of accommodating the ethnic groups under

an independent government. Although an inter-ethnic

coalition under the Ceylonese National Congress

(CNC) had previously constituted the Legislative

Council, the Sinhalese demand for a territory-wide

electoral majority system led to the dissolution of the

coalition and sparked a prolonged dispute over the

post-colonial constitutional configuration of Ceylon.

Whilst the Sinhalese embraced a constitution based

on a majoritarian system with a government

concentrating power in a unicameral legislature,

Tamils desired a federal system based on communal

representation and minority safeguards. The British

however envisaged communal representation as

“retrogressive” because it was thought to undermine

the prospects of creating a unitary Ceylonese national

identity (Nissan & Stirrat 1990). This vision was

highly myopic to the reality on the ground. Whilst the

Donoughmore Commission discarded the possibility

of a power-sharing constitutional arrangement, the

Soulbury Commission proposed a highly centralized

state structure with “statuory, legislative and fiscal

powers concentrated in the institutions of the central

government” (Bose 2007:14).

Manifestly, the British constitutional commissions

were in line with the institutional preferences of the

Sinhalese political leaders. In foresight of the

possibility for minority discrimination under a

majoritarian system dominated by the Sinhalese, the

Soulbury Commission acknowledged the necessity to

institutionalize constitutional safeguards in order to

“prohibit discriminatory treatment” (Navaratna-

Bandara 2002:59). Section 29 of the dubbed Soulbury

Constitution outlawed the legislature from enacting

discriminatory legislation but the Tamil elite of the

All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) was sceptical of

these safeguards. They proposed the “50:50” scheme

for balanced representation of guaranteed

parliamentary seats for minorities whilst demanding

that no more than half of the cabinet be appointed by

a single ethnic group. However, the commission

refuted the Tamil’s demands and argued that the

minority safeguards would suffice to preclude

minority discrimination. This proved all too wrong as

the assumption that the newly independent state

would seek to accommodate the minority’s political

interests was practically dismantled by an institutional

structure that incentivized just the opposite.

The Soulbury Constitution was eventually approved

and instituted the Westminster model of democracy

characterized by its unitary and centralised

government concentrating legislative power in a

unicameral legislature (Lijphart 1999). Its FPTP

electoral system - based mainly on territorially

designated single-member constituencies, permitted

the possibility that a single party could govern by

plurality majority. The system had the particularity of

generating a “high degree of disproportionality”

(Lijphart 1999:157) as the party gaining a simple


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majority could “be overrepresented in terms of

parliamentary seats” (1999:143). This ensured that the

Sinhalese parties could dominate the parliament and

single-handedly enact and amend legislations at their

discretion. Given the negligible proportion of Tamils

throughout the national electoral districts, Sinhalese

politicians had no incentive to appeal to Tamil voters

and it was actually electorally rewarding to take anti-

Tamil positions (Horowitz 1989). With parliament as

the central governmental institution, the plurality

electoral system ensured that the “principle of checks

and balances with regard to the legislature would not

operate” (Coomaraswamy 2003:148). As such “in

every election between 1947 and 1977, except in

1965, the winning party always obtained a landslide in

terms of seats because of the FPTP system” (Bose

1994:65).

As the first post-colonial parliament was constituted,

the hunger for the Sinhalese politicians to assert their

dominance in the new independent political system

was evidenced. Once the first government was

formed by the United National Party (UNP),

Sinhalese leaders “made an explicit attempt to reduce

the political strength of Tamil leaders” by approving a

set of discriminatory laws (Coomaraswamy 2003: 60).

The passage of the Citizenship Act No. 18 (1948) and

the Ceylon Parliamentary Elections Act No. 48 (1949)

had the objective to disenfranchise Indian Tamils,

whose allegiance to the Sri Lankan Tamils were seen

as a threat to the electoral fortunes of the Sinhalese

(Navaratna-Bandara 2002). As a result, the Tamil

electorate was reduced by half and Sinhalese

candidates “gained an additional five seats in

parliament in the 1952 elections, the first following

the Indian disenfranchisement” (Rabushka & Shepsle

1972:140). This symbolized the complete disregard by

the ruling Sinhalese elite for the minority safeguard

legislation and was immediately condemned by the

Tamil elite as discriminatory. This would mark the

inception of a series of discriminatory policies that

the Sinhalese governing parties would impose and

lead to the progressive radicalization of a Tamil

minority under an ethnicized political system of

perpetuated subordination.

Sinhalese Hegemony: Competitive Chauvinism,

Discrimination and Repression

The independence period was marked by the rise of a

vehement Sinhalese nationalism. Led by an

accentuated dissatisfaction at the social disparities

created during colonialism, particularly in terms of

higher education and public service employment, a

Sinhalese nationalist platform was initiated to liberate

“an underprivileged majority from its

disadvantageous position” (Kearney 1973:165). In the

lead up to the 1956 elections, coinciding with the

“Buddha Jayanti” celebrations, the breakaway,

Bandaranaike-led Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP)

campaigned on a “Sinhala-Only” platform destined to

mobilize the highly disadvantaged and disgruntled

Sinhalese rural electorate that had become the arbiter

of the country’s politics (De Silva 1981). With the

promise to make Sinhalese the sole official language

of Ceylon, this policy would unequivocally increase

the advantage of state-sector employment for the

Sinhalese population. Due to its recalcitrance and

opposition to the “Sinhala Only” campaign, the UNP

was essentially punished at the polls as the SLFP-led

People’s United Front won a landslide victory in the

1956 elections.


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With the state being the largest employer, the Tamil

community perceived this policy to be discriminative

as it disadvantaged them from state-sector

employment. Upon the enactment of the policy,

Tamils resorted to non-violent protests outside

parliament that were violently attacked by Sinhalese

mobs. This subsequently sparked a heightened desire

by the Tamil Federalist Party to claim their right to

political autonomy through a devolutionary

arrangement that would allow their language to

remain dominant in the Tamil regions (DeVotta

2002). As the Tamil campaign intensified,

Bandaranaike was “compelled to make several

conciliatory efforts to accommodate Tamil demands

through devolution of power” (Navaratna-Bandara

2002:64). The Bandaranayake-Chelvanayakam pact of

1957 sought to set up regional councils that would

devolve powers to the Tamil regions in the areas of

education, health and regional development. Most

importantly, it would allow Tamil to be the official

language in the Tamil-administered regions. This pact

was however abrogated following Jayewardene’s

retaliatory move to convince and mobilize Sinhalese

public opinion of Bandaranaike’s capitulation to

Tamil demands and attempted treachery against the

interests of the Sinhalese community. This was the

beginning of the spiralling phenomenon of “ethnic

chauvinism” that would characterize Ceylonese

politics for the following decades as the competing

Sinhalese parties practiced the electorally

advantageous strategy of adopting anti-Tamil policies

given it “ensured that whichever Sinhalese party won

out in the deadly game of competitive chauvinism

also won handsomely at the polls” (Bose 1994:65).

The Tamil community, led by Chelvanayakam’s

Federal Party, sustained a civil disobedience campaign

in protest of the abrogation of the pact. Their pacifist

protests were however met with repression by

Sinhalese police forces and pogrom-like riots began in

1958; marking the first “gruesome, orchestrated mob

violence that would recur and intensify” in the

following decades and “play a catalytic role” in the

escalation of the conflict into a full-fledged civil war

(Bose 2007:19). As such, the Sri Lankan state had

practically become a system of repressive ethnic

dominance. The “demos” had now become the

“ethnos” as one ethnic group was institutionally

empowered to exclusively control the machinations

of political decision-making and ruled punitively by

repressing pacifist movements of protest. Following

the short-lived Sinhalese-Tamil coalition of 1965 that

ended with the unsurprising abrogation of the

Dudley-Chelvanayakam pact, the subsequent

approval of increasingly discriminatory and

marginalizing policies would spark the intensification

of separatist demands by Tamils who were becoming

aware of the Federal Party’s futile constitutional

advocacy for an autonomous status under a shared

Federal system of political co-existence. Aware of the

imminent Sinhalisation of the state, the Tamil

community progressively began to unite on what

would later become an ultimately irrevocable

nationalistic platform advocating the right to self-

determination.

With the approval of a new constitution in 1972, a

“virtually prime ministerial autocracy” was established

with centralized legislative powers in the executive

(Navaratna-Bandara 2002:66). With the return of the

SLFP to power, the Sinhalese now “monopolized the


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control of the parliament, the prime ministership and

the cabinet” (Mason 2003:101). The most significant

manifestation of the Sinhalese endeavour to redress

the colonially crafted ethnic imbalance was the

introduction of university quotas and standardisation

for university admissions. This system required Tamil

students to obtain scores substantially higher than the

average Sinhalese to gain admission to university

courses, particularly medicine and engineering. By

fundamentally reducing the prospects to enter higher

education, the Tamil youth became acutely frustrated

at the persistent attempts of the Sinhalese

governments to disempower them. With the

subsequent implementation of a discriminatory policy

for hiring in the civil service, the share of Tamils in

the administration was being drastically reduced and

began to alienate the very same young and educated

cohort of the Tamil urban population with the power

to collectively organize “dissident collective action”

(Mason 2003: 97). Pro-Sinhalese policies were directly

mirrored as anti-Tamil and the increasingly

embittered Tamil youth became rapidly convinced

that the only viable solution to their collective

salvation was secession and the creation of a

sovereign “Tamil Eelam” nation-state.

In essence, the electoral incentives provided by the

Westminster system accentuated the rewards to

promoting the empowerment of the Sinhalese

community at the expense of the Tamil. The

guaranteed control over the state enabled the

Sinhalese parties to enact discriminatory policies that

progressively disempowered the Tamils to the extent

that exclusionary governance generated severe Tamil

grievances and laid the ground for the emergence of

Tamil “ethno-centrism” (Little 1993). This process

fits in with Tilly’s assertion that “top-down politics of

state-led nationalism” by the Sinhalese “activated the

formation and mobilization of state-seeking

nationalism” by the Tamils (1994:142). Due to the

fact that the Sinhalese “advanced the idea of a

monolithic, unitary sovereignty, but without a

corresponding development of equal citizenship over

the exclusive rights of the majority community” (Bose

1994:46), the progressive alienation and

discrimination of the Tamils as a political community

generated an acute sense of grief towards the

repressive majority and an irreversible disillusionment

with the prospect of gaining political emancipation

through peaceful means.

Tamil Radicalization and Civil War Outbreak

The 1977 elections were marked by the Tamil United

Liberation Front’s (TULF) political advocacy for the

creation of an independent state in the Jaffna

peninsula. Their loss however marked the onset of

inter-ethnic tensions as Jayewardene’s UNP failed to

accommodate the TULF’s demands for devolution

and led to the outbreak of nation-wide Tamil

protests. These protests were severely repressed by

Sinhalese security forces and the military. Once again,

anti-Tamil, pogrom-like riots spread across the

nation, particularly between 1977 and 1981. 1978 was

marked by a constitutional reform that installed a

system of proportional representation to eliminate the

disproportionate vote/seat effects of the FPTP

system. However, following a “fraudulent

referendum” in 1982, parliamentary elections would

not be held again until 1989; years after the

intensification of the conflict (DeVotta 2002:91).

With the sporadic violence that had escalated in the


10

1970s as a result of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s policies

and Jayewardene’s repressive actions, the deprivation

experienced by the Tamils and their political elites’

inability to secure any significant devolution of

powers led to the galvanization of a Tamil

secessionist armed insurgency. The Liberation Tigers

for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) began a violent campaign of

assassinations against Sinhalese officials and security

forces. The Sinhalese authorities reacted with an

indiscriminate counterinsurgency campaign that

targeted Tamil populations with no links to the LTTE

as well as being complacent to the Sinhalese citizens’

violent assaults on Tamils. In 1979, the draconian

Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) gave security

forces blanket powers to fight the Tamil insurgency

and allowed authorities to retain “terrorist” suspects

for up to 18 months without trial. The northern

peninsula was practically being subjugated to martial

law and with the burning of the Jaffna library in 1982,

Tamils became convinced that their “culture was

being annihilated” (DeVotta 2002: 90). The 1983

LTTE ambush against 13 Sinhalese soldiers sparked a

nation-wide massacre campaign that led to the death

of up to 3,000 Tamils. The abusive and repressive

actions of the Sinhalese government had by now

created massive Tamil refugee flows and a radicalized

Tamil youth that rapidly began to fill the ranks of the

LTTE. With the support of India, the LTTE was

progressively becoming a large, well-trained armed

guerrilla organization. By the mid-1980s, the LTTE

had begun to launch attacks on government forces

and a fully-fledged civil war began to unfold.

Rationalizing the Failure of Inter-Ethnic Co-

Existence and Tamil Radicalization

As it has been explored, the failure to promote an

environment of inter-ethnic co-existence led to the

radicalization of the Tamil minority. The Westminster

system incentivized Sinhalese parties to competitively

adopt discriminatory policies destined to exclude the

Tamils from access to political power. The

established system of “majoritarian discrimination”

(Krishna 1997:322) was characterized by a fervent

desire to promote the exclusive interests of the

Sinhalese population as this was electorally rewarding.

The “Sinhala-Only” policies that were implemented

led to the increasing alienation of the Tamil

population as they were being politically

disenfranchised and economically disempowered. The

exclusionary endeavours of the alternating Sinhalese

governments created a Tamil sense of frustration as it

became evident that there were no political channels

within the existing political configuration to attenuate

the hegemonic power of the Sinhalese governments.

The evident gap between the Tamil community’s

perceived entitlements as citizens and their actual

opportunities to partake in political decision-making

became progressively accentuated. This “relative

deprivation” (Gurr 1968) sowed the seeds for a Tamil

secessionist movement as the prospects for inter-

ethnic co-existence had been shattered by the

electoral incentives of the Westminster system that

made inter-ethnic coalitions politically unviable. With

a single ethnic group dominating the political

apparatus, their deliberate policies to marginalize and

repress the Tamil minority led to the creation of an

aggrieved Tamil cohort. Their basis for an armed

struggle emanated from the indignities suffered at the


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hands of a subjugating ethnic group. As a result, the

relative deprivation experienced by Tamils fomented

an aggregated sense of common struggle against an

ethnically nepotistic state. The cohesion generated by

a shared sense of grievance and the pursuit of a

common self-determination endeavour facilitated the

mobilization of the LTTE as it became an

increasingly well-organized rebel movement sustained

by Indian and diaspora financing. In sum, we can

understand how the radicalization of the Tamil

minority was generated through the political

manipulations of the Sinhalese majority under a

system of governance that incentivized the latter to

democratically subjugate the former.

Conclusion

The failure of Sri Lanka’s two main ethnic groups to

sustain affable relations of co-existence can be said to

emanate from the inadequacy of installing a

majoritarian form of democracy in a society

guaranteeing an electoral advantage to a numerically

superior ethnic group. The British legacy created an

explosive situation as it fomented a ranked system of

stratified socio-economic inequality and installed an

institutional configuration that enabled mono-ethnic

domination in a multi-ethnic polity. As the ethnic

party system developed, political entrepreneurs found

it electorally optimal to adopt sectarian policies as

attempts to make inter-ethnic appeals of

accommodation were politically amputating. The

unequivocal desire for political parties to maximize

their share of votes made it politically irrational to

promulgate policies of inter-ethnic co-existence as

evidenced by the abrogation of the two Sinhalese-

Tamil pacts. In essence, the Westminster-style

democracy politically empowered an indignant

majority ethnic group to acquire hegemonic power

and use it to install a system of governance that gave

primacy to the interests of the Sinhalese community.

The post-colonial state-building project was therefore

fundamentally characterized by a fervent necessity to

empower the Sinhalese community through the

imposition of electorally rewarding nepotistic policies.

Subsequently, Sri Lanka’s democracy became a

system of ethnic supremacy in which the actions of

recurrently repressive sectarian governments led to

the rise of a minority secessionist movement

searching to bifurcate the farcical political unity of the

island through an armed struggle for national self-

determination.

In short, the abusive exploitation of the Westminster-

style democracy by the Sinhalese majority actively

incentivized and enabled it to exclude the Tamil

minority from access to political power. Democracy

was procedural rather than substantive as it reduced

the locus of political competition to one side. Sri

Lanka therefore demonstrates the power of

majoritarian forms of democracy to induce conflict in

an ethnically divided society whose colonial legacy

and institutional configuration combined with its

idiosyncratic demographic composition made it

politically unrewarding to promote inter-ethnic co-

existence.


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