Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

The civil war has also brought to the political agenda the nature of Sri Lanka’s postconflict
state and its capacity to accommodate minority aspirations for political equality.
The Tamil nationalists, particularly those who share the thesis that Tamils constitute a
nation in Sri Lanka, envisage re-constitution of the existing state enabling Tamils to
enjoy an extensive measure of territorial autonomy. Paralleled with the Tamil nationalist
vision for a post-civil war state is the Muslim vision. The political leaders of the Muslim
minority have articulated the idea that a post-civil war state should be conceptualized to
accommodate regional autonomy to the Muslim community in the Eastern province.
What is noteworthy is that during the attempts at a negotiated settlement to the civil war,
an argument for extensive state reforms has emerged from the minority communities.
However, in the Sinhalese society, the idea of state reform to accompany a civil war
settlement process continues to remain intensely contested. There seems to be three
clusters of approaches on this issue in the Sinhalese society – no state reform at all, state
reform through expanded devolution and limited, pragmatic reforms.
Tamils and the claim to ‘Nationhood’
The most dramatic shift in Sri Lanka’s minority rights discourse is linked to the rise of
Tamil ethnic nationalism that claimed that the Tamil community was not a ‘minority’, but
a ‘nation’ with the right to self-determination. Since the Tamil nationalists have always
defined the rights of the Tamils in a framework of self-determination, the liberal
constitutionalist discourse of minority rights could not for many years engage with this
particular conceptualisation of rights. But it had recognised the ‘collective rights’ of
minorities in the form of the right to non-discrimination. viii The Soulbury constitution of
1947, drafted mainly by the advisors of the outgoing British colonial state, contained a
crucial provision that prohibited the Sri Lankan parliament from enacting discriminatory
legislation. ix However, the socialist-nationalist constitutionalism that came to prominence
in the 1960s and 1970s radically disagreed with the liberal constitutionalist perspective of
minority rights as collective rights. Thus the 1972 Constitution removed the collective
rights clauses of the Soulbury Constitution and subjected minority rights entirely to the
will of the legislature, the majority of which were under all circumstances, members of
the ethnic majority.
Meanwhile, the notion of self-determination, as politically constructed in Tamil
nationalism, has had both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ claims. The political goal of ‘internal
self-determination’ has been posited as regional autonomy. The Federal Party’s federalist
idea, articulated as far back as the early 1950s, was based on this notion of ‘internal selfdetermination’,
although the literature of the Federal Party did not exactly carry the
formulation in these terms. The formulation used was then the right to ‘nationhood.’
Interestingly, secession had not entered the political imagination of Tamil nationalists in
the early phases of post-colonial state formation in Sri Lanka.
The re-framing of self-determination in ‘external’, or secessionist terms occurred in the
late 1970s. And in the early 1980s, it entered the political practice of Tamil nationalism
in a serious way in the form of an armed insurgency. The argument of secessionist Tamil
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