Kumaratunga’s statement is irrelevant to a governmental response to the Tamil claim or to its meeting the violence with which the political claim is sought to be enforced since 1972 (the violence commenced before the TULF was formally established in 1976)

It was best ignored unless the Tamils rest their claim to a separate state or even regional autonomy on an assertion that they were the original people or at least a very ancient people in a land with a documented history which goes back 2500 years; in which case it fails in limine as we shall see. The Sri Lanka or Ceylon Tamils of today are not an ancient people by the standards of antiquity in a country with a history of 25 centuries.

Kumaratunga’s statement cannot mean that (not being original people in the island) Sri Lanka Tamils do not belong to this country: this is typical Tamil misrepresentation. This is as much as saying that people of European descent do not belong in the Americas or that people of Norman descent do not belong in England (the Queen herself is descended in the male line from a German and the last four kings to sit on the Sinhala throne were Telugus though they took Sinhala throne names and were staunch Buddhists). 

The Tamil obsession with antiquity is a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The claim of a right to an exclusive Tamil state (in “over and third” of the territory of the island) dates only from 1949 with the formation of the Ilankai Tamil Trasu Kadchi (“Lanka Tamil State Party” dishonestly miscalled “the Federal Party” by its founder S. J.V. Chelvanayakam, a Malayan Tamil by birth and a Christian by religious persuasion);  the claim was invented to coincide with the departure of the British and with the formation, in south India, also in 1949, of the Tamil separatist dravida Munnetra Kazagham under C.N.Annadurai.

Chelvanayakam and his associate E.M.V. Naganathan linked a territorial political claim to a claim of antiquity in the following terms:

“In asmuch as it is the inalienable right of every nation to enjoy full political freedom without which its spiritual, cultural and moral stature must degenerate, and inasmuch as the Tamil-speaking people in Ceylon constitute a nation distinct from that of the Sinhalese by every fundamental test of nationhood, firstly that of a, separate historical past in the Island at least as ancient and glorious as that of the Sinhalese, secondly by the fact of their being a linguistic entity entirely different from that of the Sinhalese, with an unsurpassed classical heritage which makes Tamil fully adequate for all present day needs, and finally by reason of their territorial habitation of over one-third of this island,  this first National Convention of the I.T.A.K. demands for the Tamil-Speaking Nation in Ceylon their inalienable right to political autonomy and calls for a plebiscite to determine the boundaries of the linguistic states in consonance with the fundamental principle of self-determination” (First part of Resolution No.1 adopted at the Convention of the Federal Party held at Trincomalee on 13th, 14th and 15th April 1951 – italics supplied. The party was formed on 18th December 1949 at the G.C.S.U. Hall in Colombo)

The following points must be noted before we examine the claim to antiquity and its place in the asserted statehood:

Accordingly, the territory of the Tamil linguistic state was said to be “over one-third’ the area of the island, not merely that of the Northern and Eastern Provinces (which are about 29% of the island) demarcated by the British in the nineteenth century in order to dismember the Sinhala state ceded to them by the Kandyan Convention of 2nd March 1815.

The organization called ‘International Alert” formed in 1985 specifically to sponsor Tamil political claims has published a map of the island in which approximately 50% of the territory of the island is depicted as “main Tamil areas”.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa is a vice-president of this organization; he apparently promotes a form of apartheid and minority domination in Sri Lanka while opposing them in his own country. Despite settlement by a Sinhala king of Muslims exiled in 1626 from the south west by the Portuguese, and despite colonisation by Tamils and Muslims under Dutch and British rule, Tamil and Muslim occupation of the Eastern Province had not gone beyond 10 miles from the coast by the time the British left in 1948.

Post-independence governments settled Tamils and Muslims well beyond this distance, in and after 1962, particularly in the Morawewa and Mahadiulwewa colonisation schemes, on Kandyan Sinhala lands; even British administrators had deplored Tamil buying lands of the helpless Sinhalese in this part of Trincomalee District (Administration Report for 1898 of the Assistant Government Agent Trincomalee District)

A few years after the Trincomalee resolutions Muslims in the Federal Party objected to being regarded as part of a single nation or even a single community along with Tamils and to being in a “linguistic state” which was to be Tamil dominated. A formal demand was made at the 1956 sessions of the Federal Party that “if the Muslims were to find a place in the Federal Party and were to continue in the Federal, it should not only ask for a Tamil state but also for a Muslim state for the Muslim people if the Muslim people want it. Accordingly, the objectives of the Federal Party were amended in 1956. … we are committed to ask for two states for the minorities, one for the Tamils and the other for the Muslims” (proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, March 16th 1971, speech of V. Dharmalingam, spokesman for the Federal Party – (emphasis mine). Thus disappeared the linguistic nation.

With the formation of the Tamil United Liberation Front there was a reversion to the Tamil State – The Tamil nation, however, now meant “the entirety of the people in this country (italics supplied) whose mother tongue is Tamil” (the first election manifesto of the TULF, 1977); this contradicted the claim four paragraphs later that there were two countries in the island.

The All-Ceylon Tamil Congress was formed in 1944 to claim the rights of the Tamils, complain about grievances and to put forward proposals for constitutional reform before the Soulbury Commission; and to conduct political activity thereafter on a communalist basis. The leaders were G.G. Ponnambalam, S.J.V. Chelvanayagam and E.M.V. Naganathan. They submitted a memorandum to the Commission and gave oral evidence before it at a public sitting at the Colombo Town Hall on 16th February 1945 G.G. Ponnambalam had a private meeting as well with the Commissioners. Neither in the memorandum or in the oral submissions was any claim made that the Tamils were entitled to a particular territory in the island on a historical basis or otherwise (the name itself of the new Party was “All-Ceylon Tamil Congress”. A Tamil-speaking nation was unknown to Chelvanayakam and Naganathan in 1945.

They were so dissociated from the idea that the Tamils had a right of self determination that the main constitutional demand made by the trio orally and in writing was that the British continue to be the colonial masters of the entire country and that the powers of the Governor be increased beyond those vested in him by the Donoughmore Constitution of 1931. Combined with this were the demands that gained notoriety and made the Sinhalese completely distrustful of Tamil Politics, i.e. that (1) there be a legislature of 100 seats of which 50 should be reserved for the minorities (25 to Tamils) while the balance 50 should be general seats open to all communities, thus effectively disfranchising more than two thirds of the Sinhalese; (2) there be a Council of Ministers appointed by the Governor at this discretion (after consulting communalist interests) and presided over by him – i.e. the imperial governor should be head of Cabinet!, (3) less than half the members of the Council of Ministers should be chosen from any one community – in a Cabinet of ten not more than four could be Sinhalese.

These proposals of the Tamil Congress, articulated by Ponnambalam, Chelvanayakam and Naganathan were too much even for His Imperial Majesty’s Commissioners; they were rejected on the ground that  “any attempt by artificial means to convert into a minority is not only inequitable but doomed to failure:. They could not have imagined that later in the century the Sinhalese would convert themselves effectively into a political minority.
 

Later in this paper we shall examine in more detail the actual evidence of Tamil antiquity or otherwise both here and in South India. We shall see, inter alia, that Tamils are indebted to the historical chronicles of the Sinhalese for the only mention of Tamils in the Island prior to the 10th century A.D. and for the dating of Tamil History in their homeland in South India. We shall also see that Tamils of modern Sri Lanka are of confused Origins (the modern Sinhalese are themselves mixed but the first Sinhala immigration was indisputably in the 6th century B.C.) and in terms of antiquity are collectively later arrivals in the Island than even some  of the Moor groups. Linking political claims to an invented history is dangerous for the claimants and linking such claims to antiquity leave the admittedly recent immigrants such as the Indian Tamils, politically marooned.
 

Ceylon was thus given a new Constitution by the British. This constitution was contained in the Ceylon (Constitution and Independence) Orders in Council, 1946 and 1947; the Principal Order was the Ceylon (Constitution) Order in Council 1946, popularly called the Soulbury Constitution. On 10th December 1947 the UK parliament enacted the Ceylon Independence Act which declared that as “from the appointed day His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom shall have no responsibility for the government of Ceylon” (sec. 1(2). The day appointed was 4th February 1948.

When the Soulbury Constitution and the Ceylon Independence Act came into operation, the All-Ceylon Tamil Congress lost the very basis of its existence. This was, it will be recalled, three-fold:

(i) British imperialist rule to continue;
(ii) Executive power to be vested in an entirely communalist Cabinet headed by the imperial Governor with the Sinhalese in a permanent minority and the minorities in a permanent majority;
(iii) The legislature to have 100 seats of which only 50 were for the Sinhala majority (75% today) while 50 were to be reserved for the minorities (25% today) consisting then of Ceylon Tamils, Indian Tamils (so described by the Tamils, themselves, Moors, Malays, Burghers and Europeans – the European Association worked hand in glove with Ponnambalam to prevent the country being granted independence just as Ponnambalam Ramanathan did with Governor Manning in the nineteen twenties (see e.g. the secret memorandum discovered by the “Ceylon Daily News” and published on 16th August 1920)

G.G. Ponnambalam came to terms with the new situation. He abandoned his positions and, on 3rd September 1948, took office as a Minister in D.S. Senanayake’s Cabinet.

S.J.V.Chelvanayakam refused to support his leader and went ahead with plans permanently to keep the Sinhalese and Tamils politically divided. Late in 1947 he had portrayed independence from Britain as a secession from the British Empire by the Sinhalese. He had said that if the Sinhalese could “secede” from the British Empire, the Tamils had the right themselves to secede and federate with south India. This position was taken up in the context of and obviously in collusion with the Justice Party of south India which had, under the leadership of  P.V. Naicker, carried on a militant campaign for thirty years to establish a Dravidastan – its most violent agitation was against the Hindi language.

When the Republican Constitution of independent India was adopted in 1949, the Justice Party was replaced the same year by the new Dravida Munnetra Kazagam under Naicker’s erstwhile deputy C.N. Annadurai Chelvanayakam fell into line and formed the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (Lanka Tamil State/Government Party) in December 1949; this was committed in the first instance to the establishment of a “Tamilspeaking” state in over one third the territory of the island, and seven years later to the establishment of two states, Tamil and Muslim. This so-called “Federal Party” was the main component of the Tamil United Liberation Front formed in 1976 as the response and in opposition to the first republican Constitution of 1972. A comparison of the occasion of the conversion of the Justice Party into the DMK and that of the formation of the TULF is inescapable.

The TULF also based its case for a separate Tamil State on a claimed political history going back over 2,500 years and for the first 2,000 years of which the authorities cited and relied on were the Mahavansa and the Culavansa of the Sinhalese (the first election manifesto of the TULF; memorandum submitted by the LTTE to the Seventh Summit Meeting of Non-Aligned Nations in New Delhi, March 7-15 1983).

It will be observed that the Constitutional scheme presented by the Tamil Congress to the Soulbury Commission had as its objective minority rule over the whole island through a minority dominated central government functioning under continued British rule. A claim to a part of the territory of the island, on whatever basis historical or otherwise, would have been a direct obstruction to this grand plan and would also have necessitated a demand for the departure of the British. Theories of traditional Tamil homelands, a separate Tamils speaking nation (replacing the 1945 Tamil minority and the distinct Moor minority in a Sinhala majority country) and an allegation of a right of self-determination were untenable in 1945 from the political point of view of the Tamils themselves.

After the grant of independence in 1948 Chelvanayakam changed his plans and purposes and invented an exclusively Tamil historical homeland, more than half of which had been populated by the Sinhalese for centuries and had been under Sinhala rule till ceded by the Sinhalese to the imperialists (“independence to whom? “Is yet another question but a discussion in detail of the legal and political effect in 1948 of the Sinhala British Treaty of 1815 is outside the scope of this paper). Minority rights ceased and “national” rights were born just 50 years ago.

Thus when British cooperation could not be enlisted for the imposition of minority rule over the whole country, Chelvanayakam and his associates principally E.M.V. Naganathan – it was a combination of the National Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church in disregard of their congregatoins) decided on fighting for Tamil rule over part, albeit a substantial part, of the Island. This required the claim of ancient settlement and a history of Tamil achievement. What they relied on and what the Tamil political elements now rely on are British imperialist boundaries proclaimed by Gazette notification of the 19th century specifically to dismember the territory of the Sinhala Kingdom ceded conditionally by the Sinhalese on 2nd March 1815 (the Report of the Colebrooke Commission, 24th December 1831, sections entitled “Kandyan Provinces acquired” and “Proposed Incorporation of the Kandyan Provinces” with map; Marshall, Ceylon, General Description, Ceylon Government Gazettes of 1.10 1833 and 6.91873; Ponnambalam Arunachalam, Kandyan Provinces, JRASCB 1910, pp.103-119).
The claim that Tamils had been demographically and politically dominant in Sri Lanka from pre-historic times and that the Sinhalese are comparatively (6th century B.C.!) recent arrivals are made by the TULF and, following its lead, by the Tamil terrorist groups (some of whom might be called “retired terrorists”).

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