Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka A British colony from 1796, during the nineteenth century it was transformed into a plantations colony, whose economy was dominated by the cultivation of tea, coffee, and coconuts, at the expense of self-sufficiency in food production. These products were shipped to other parts of the British Empire, creating an important indigenous commercial middle class. At the same time, the British imported Tamils from southern India as cheap labour, a minority which remained at the bottom of the social and economic scale, even after independence. Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century the country was marked by a relatively harmonious transition to independence. A relatively advanced educational sector produced an articulate population which became increasingly organized, for example in trade unions in the cities and Marxist groups in the countryside. Once the prosperous Tamil and Sinhalese communities demanded a greater political role, this was granted in 1931, following recommendations by the Donoughmore Commission. Only three years after Britain itself, Ceylon was granted universal, equal suffrage for parliamentary elections. During the 1930s and 1940s, politics was dominated by Senanayake. He was responsible for innovative social policies which saw the irrigation of dry areas in order to promote the cultivation of foodstuffs. Other remarkable policies during this era included increased spending on education and food subsidies. On 4 February 1948 Ceylon was released into independence, without any of the strife and tension which had just occurred in neighbouring India and Pakistan. Senanayake carried on with his inclusive policies, continuing his agricultural projects and insisting on the mediating role of the secular state between the Buddhist Sinhalese majority, which constituted around 75 per cent of the population, and the Tamil (largely Hindu, but also Christian) minority, which made up around 18 per cent of the population. His early death in 1952 was a tragic blow to the country, since his successor and son, D. S. Senanayake, was unable to keep the United National Party (UNP) united and inspire the population.

In 1956 he was outmanoeuvred by his rival, Solomon Bandaranaike, whose election marked a watershed in Ceylonese politics. He pursued a more anti-Western policy but, more importantly, he had been elected on a platform of guarding the interests of the Buddhist and Sinhalese majority. Sinhalese replaced English as the official language, while he managed to offend both Hindu and Christian Tamils through his discrimination against them on educational matters. He was succeeded in 1960 by his wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who pursued more radical socialist policies. She lost the 1965 elections to Senanayake's UNP, but regained power in 1970. With the help of the Marxists and other left-wing groups, in 1972 she passed a new socialist constitution wherein the country's name was changed from Ceylon to Sri Lanka. By 1974 she had nationalized the last plantations. Private enterprise had been stifled in most other areas of the economy, too, so that she was completely unable to respond to the 1973 oil price shock.

In 1977 Bandaranaike's government collapsed, and the UNP gained power under Jayawardene. He revitalized the economy through privatization and liberalization, and passed a new constitution in 1978. He abolished his predecessor's discrimination against the Tamils, for example by introducing Tamil as an official language next to Sinhalese. Ironically, however, it was during his rule that the ethnic tension that had built up during the Bandaranaike years exploded into open warfare and civil war in 1983. Matters were complicated by Indian intervention (1987–9), though even after India's withdrawal it proved impossible to reach either a political solution to the problem or a military one, owing to the ragged state of the army. Early elections in 1994 led to a surprise defeat for the UNP at the hand of the People's Alliance, a left-wing coalition headed by C. Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. The latter became the new head of state, with her mother, the veteran Sirimavo Bandaranaike, as Prime Minister. Kumaratunga pursued a policy of military confrontation to force the Tamil rebel force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) into negotiations. The LTTE responded by starting a large-scale military offensive in 1999, which extended its control on the Jaffna peninsula without defeating the government there completely. In the military impasse that ensued, negotiations between the two sides made little progress. The LTTE rejected a constitutional revision suggested by Kumaratunga which suggested autonomy for Jaffna as part of a federal state structure. Kumaratunga won the 1999 presidential elections, but in 2000 her People's Alliance lost its absolute parliamentary majority. She opposed what she considered to be overgenerous concessions of her Prime Minister, Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, in his successful negotiations with the LTTE to bring an end to the Civil War.