The Conflict in Sri Lanka: Ground Realities - Ilankai Tamil Sangam

4. Consequently the feeling of a minority complex by the
Sinhalese who not only see themselves as a few millions
in an ocean of Tamils in South India and in Sri Lanka
who can be overwhelmed by the language and published
literature of the elites of the big neighbour In effect to the
outside observer, Sri Lanka is an island inhabited by two
minorities, two ethnic groups (Sinhalese and Tamils) each
seized with a minority complex.
The Indian Factor
Thus during the period 1948 to the present the Tamils under
the leadership of the Tamil Federal Party were being kindled by
a burgeoning Tamil nationalism in a quest for equal status with
the Sinhala Buddhist majority. The Tamils quickly realised that
with India’s intervention in July 1987 the Indian government
would not permit a separate sovereign state in their backyard
which from Indian perceptions would not only become the
happy hunting ground of foreign powers hostile to India such as
Pakistan, Bangladesh and China. India was willing to sponsor
anything short of an independent state. Hence the Sri. Lanka-
India Accord of July 1987. Mr Rajiv Gandhi claimed that he
had ensured that the Sri Lankan Tamils were being granted ‘the
substance of Eelam’ without actual separate statehood.
The Federal Initiative
When federalism was introduced by the Tamil leadership as a
protest and disapproval of the unjust and inhuman parliamentary
legalisations introduced against the Tamils of Indian origin, the
concept was not so readily accepted for nearly three decades
(1949-76) by the Tamil electors. Whereas the ideology of a
separate state was more easily grasped because it was easier to
comprehend; it gained currency in a short span of three years
--as it was a reversion to the past of the Tamil kingdom and the
Tamil kings.
Thus from the year of the inauguration of the Tamil Federal
Party to the launching of the Eelam Wars from 1983 onwards,
federalism was not so much enthusiastically supported perhaps
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