Sri Lanka’s Complex Dance of Sinhala and Tamil Nationalist Politics

At present, the Sri Lankan government is caught in a tricky situation. Elections are slated to be held between September and October this year, pending sweeping electoral reforms. This marks the first time since August 2020 that voters will go to the polls. With the election coming just two years after a massive economic crisis, the incumbent government faces the herculean task of convincing the people to keep it in power for another term.

The government is led by the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), a party headed and arguably owned by the Rajapaksas, the family ousted from the offices of both president and prime minister by popular protests in 2022. Ranil Wickremesinghe, the current president, is the sole representative in the parliament of the United National Party (UNP), and depends on the support of the SLPP for his position. While Wickremesinghe and the SLPP do not see eye to eye on every issue, this arrangement has worked in favour of both sides: the SLPP remains in control of the parliament, while the president receives its support to enact laws. This Faustian pact is likely to continue.

With public discontent still soaring over the economic crisis, brought onto Sri Lanka by the corruption and mismanagement of the Rajapaksas and the traditional political elite, there are naturally a higher number of contenders than earlier jostling for the public’s vote. Yet each of the contender parties is facing its own internal crises.

The main opposition, for instance, happens to be a splinter group from the UNP – the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), led by Sajith Premadasa. While it has been pursuing a distinct identity, its economic ideologues have been accused of peddling solutions no different to the government’s policies: essentially, closer engagement with the International Monetary Fund and a continuation, with some modifications, of the reforms package it pushed through as a condition for a bail-out package.

The National People’s Power (NPP), a coalition led by the left-wing Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), has been critiquing the government’s economic policies and the SJB’s proposed alternatives. Yet it has been less than coherent in offering its own solutions. Over the last few months it has gained much traction, exemplified by the fact that it sent a delegation to India in February upon an official invitation from New Delhi – a sign that it is now a serious contender in Sri Lankan politics after spending decades unable to make a dent in the polls. But its stance on the current debt restructuring process and economic reforms has provoked the ire of the SLPP, UNP and SJB.

These developments underlie a seismic shift in the country’s politics, and the incumbents and the challengers have been responding in their own ways. While the government has forced through one authoritarian law after another – including the Online Safety Act, already being used to crack down on online freedom of expression – opposition parties have been busy trying to build alliances. This is undoubtedly because, in Sri Lanka, elections have mostly been won by those political camps that have been able to put together the broadest possible coalitions. For much of the country’s post-independence history, these coalitions revolved around the two largest traditional parties: the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the UNP. These have since been upstaged by the newer SLPP and SJB, respectively, and these outfits are as keen to seek alliances with smaller parties as their predecessors have historically been.

Arguably the most significant among these smaller parties are those representing the interests of the country’s ethnic and religious minorities. Throughout Sri Lanka’s post-independence history, they have remained important partners for mainstream parties, sometimes even playing the role of kingmakers and deal-clinchers.

Tamil-led parties have played a particularly significant role in national politics. These parties have agitated for greater economic and political rights for their constituent communities, as well as for reconciliation and accountability vis-à-vis the country’s long and brutal civil war, which lasted almost three decades up to 2009.

Equality and transitional justice remain relevant to Tamil voters. Yet, in Sri Lanka’s complex dance of confrontations between Sinhala and Tamil nationalist politics, the largest mainstream opposition parties – which, like the traditional mainstream parties, are dominated by the majority Sinhala community – are likely to mobilise support by exploiting public anger over the economic crisis and the government’s austerity policies, and not to address questions that could bring some reconciliation between the majority and minority communities: the mechanisms of Tamil self-governance, for instance, and accountability for war-time violations.

Many of Sri Lanka’s larger political players, irrespective of their sometimes competing ideologies, have shown relative disinterest in addressing the issues raised by minority voters. Rather, they seem to be pandering as always to the majority Sinhala community. This, in turn, seems to have pushed Tamil nationalist parties towards more hardline positions. Extremism in one group has reinforced extremism in the other.

This has benefitted the opposition greatly. As Tisaranee Gunasekara pointed out in a recent piece for Himal Southasian, the aragalaya – the protest movement that ousted Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president in 2022 – came to accommodate Sinhala nationalist forces, including Buddhist monks. This conjunction of anti-government sentiment and Sinhala nationalism appears to have encouraged opposition parties to appropriate some of the populist-nationalist rhetoric of the Rajapaksas’ SLPP, in recent times the most unabashed flagbearer for Sinhala chauvinism. The SJB and NPP’s accommodation of ex-military officials, including those associated with the civil war, confirms these trends.

Wickremesinghe, on the other hand, has made some overtures to Tamil parties in the last year, including inviting parliamentarians to engage with the government over issues such as reconciliation. Regardless of the government’s motives in this, the move showed that the political mainstream still sees such parties as important – even if for furthering its own interests. But these overtures have not translated into anything concrete, frustrating Tamil voters.

These engagements have since been overtaken by significant shifts within Tamil politics. In particular, the leadership of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) has passed from R Sampanthan, a veteran politician who died in June, to S Sridharan, a hardliner who appears much less willing to negotiate with Colombo than Sampathan was. One of Sridharan’s first acts as leader of the ITAK was to visit the Kanakapuram cemetery in Kilinochchi, where cadres from the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are buried. Sridharan competed for the top post against M A Sumanthiran, a lawyer who has been accused of betraying calls from the Tamil community including the diaspora for a political settlement which includes greater autonomy for Tamils through implementation of the 13th amendment to Sri Lanka’s constitution, allowing for the creation of Provincial Councils and for the possibility of devolving land, police and financial powers to the North and East. The ITAK is the dominant party in the Tamil National Alliance, the main body of Tamil representation in national politics; the choices of its leadership will determine the trajectory of Tamil politics in the upcoming elections.

Another shift has been the emergence of fringe parties in Tamil politics, particularly the Tamil National People’s Front in 2010, and the Tamil People’s National Alliance, established in 2020. Both groups defected from the TNA and today denigrate the organisation, deeming it a traitor to the “Tamil cause” over what they see as the TNA’s duplicity on issues like autonomy. They have also taken the TNA to task over some of its political choices, including its backing of mainstream political figures in Colombo.

Such ruptures follow a long line of divisions in the Tamil political movement: a movement which has its antecedents in the early 20th century, and whose history still has resonance in the country’s politics.

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, Sri Lanka, then British Ceylon, was run by a colonial government under the administration of a British governor. In 1833, a state-appointed commission of inquiry recommended reducing the powers of the governor. That led to the establishment of a legislative council, the composition of which reflected the balance of power in the country at the time: ten government officials, including the governor, and six “unofficial” members, including three Europeans, one Sinhalese, one Tamil and one Burgher (representing a group that traces its descent from the Portuguese and Dutch, who preceded the British as local colonial powers). In 1889, the number of seats on the council was increased to accommodate one Muslim and two Sinhalese members, one each from the low country in the island’s south-west and the Kandyan highlands at its centre.

These were hardly representative political institutions, and over time they provoked local calls for reform. Yet issues of ethnicity did not feature prominently in such calls: there was some conception of a “Ceylonese” identity which transcended communal barriers, although there was conflict based on caste and class. The reservation of a slot on the Legislative Council for “Educated Ceylonese” in 1911 became a manifestation of this conflict. Rivalry between local political representatives took the form of a contest between different layers of the colonial elite. Against this backdrop, Sinhala and Tamil elites worked closely with each other, identifying the colonial government, and specifically its more conservative elements, as a common adversary.

In his essay “Nationalism in Sri Lanka and the Tamils”, the historian S Arasaratnam observes: “In Sri Lanka, though there were early signs of competition and even conflict among the two major groups, it was assumed that this was a competition among the elites of those two groups and did not involve any basic conflict of interest in the mass. Thus, it was common among perceptive observers of politics to talk of communalism as a ‘middle-class’ phenomenon, meaning thereby a jockeying for positions between English-educated professionals among the communities.”

Three developments in the early 20th century ruptured this status quo. First, the growing potency of the 19th-century Buddhist revival movement. Begun as a response to Christian missionary activity and British colonial rule on the island, the Buddhist revival valorised the Sinhala and Buddhist majority on the island as a unified group. In the 20th century, however, its leaders began defining their community in opposition to not just colonialists but also other ethnic groups, in particular those perceived as beneficiaries of colonial rule. Tamils, for instance, formed a significant part of the civil service, while Muslims and other minorities thrived as traders and merchants. This fuelled resentment within sections of the Sinhala Buddhist community, who felt they were entitled to more privileges as the majority community. Such tensions built up, sowing the seeds of prolonged violence in the years to come.

As the historian K M de Silva has noted in A History of Sri Lanka, the British government also snidely used communal differences to derail constitutional reforms in the country. These machinations had their intended effect, creating a rift between Sinhala and Tamil elites that has never since been healed. Moreover, the granting of universal suffrage in Ceylon – the first British colony and the first Asian country to get the right to vote – fanned fears among minorities, Tamils in particular, of a Sinhala electoral takeover.

As a result, the Tamil elite, who had earlier worked with their Sinhala counterparts, felt compelled to leave the very institutions they had had a hand in shaping. Prime among these bodies was the Ceylon National Congress, formed in 1919. Modelled along the lines of the Indian National Congress, but lacking its anti-imperialist outlook owing to a predominance of landed and mercantile interests, the party lost what little unity it had barely two years after its founding with the resignation of Ponnambalam Arunachalam, the leading Tamil political representative in the country.

Arunachalam’s exit was hastened by the Sinhala-dominated Congress’s refusal to agree to his demand for a Tamil seat in the Legislative Council in the country’s Western Province. Underlying his decision to leave was a sense of frustration with the Congress leadership, which resisted even the most moderate reform.

The Marxist writer Hector Abhayavardhana notes in his essay ‘Tamil Nationalism and the Sinhalese’ that “this breach of faith left Arunachalam with no alternative but to resign from the Congress. All Tamil members walked away with him, leaving the Ceylon National Congress as a purely Sinhalese political body – a condition from which, despite all national pretences, it was doomed never to recover.”

The Ceylon National Congress’s failure to transcend its conservative politics and communal bias pushed both Sinhala and Tamil voters to other political outfits. These included the Sinhala Maha Sabha, founded by S W R D Bandaranaike in 1937, and the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), founded by G G Ponnambalam in 1944.

K M de Silva has noted that both Bandaranaike and Ponnambalam had “much more in common than either would have liked to admit”. Both belonged to the English-speaking elite, and  both became the loudest voices of communalism by feeding into “the worst fears of their opponents.” That helped each build their own votebase while emphasising ethnic and religious divides. Their campaigns peaked with Ponnambalam’s call for “Fifty-Fifty”: a proposal to apportion half of legislative seats to Sinhala representatives and half to representatives of the minorities. It was rejected by both Sinhala politicians and the colonial government.

BY 1948, the Ceylon National Congress had co-opted Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Maha Sabha. In 1946, a group in the Congress broke away and formed a new outfit, the United National Party. Two years later, the UNP lured Ponnambalam into its fold as a cabinet minister. In 1949, a faction in the ACTC broke away and formed another party, the ITAK, in response to the disenfranchisement of Malaiyaha Tamils – a distinct group within the Tamil minority, descended from indentured Indian labourers, to date among the most marginalised communities in the country. In 1951, Bandaranaike, earlier part of the UNP, established a new vehicle for his own ambitions: the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

Like Ponnambalam, the ITAK claimed a separate and distinct identity for Sri Lankan Tamils. This sentiment was not shared by other parties. The sole exception was the Communist Party of Ceylon, which followed the Stalinist definition and conception of a nation as constituting “a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” In 1944, the Communist Party became the first Sri Lankan political outfit to recognise Tamils as a nation; the ITAK officially endorsed this position only seven years later.

With politics increasingly split along communal lines, Sinhala nationalism gained momentum and the once-cosmopolitan Sinhala elite wilfully pandered to it. The ITAK, meanwhile, oscillated between mass protests and electoral alliances. Increasingly, it focused on language rights and regional autonomy for its Tamil constituents.

In 1956, Bandaranaike and the SLFP recorded a historic electoral victory, dislodging the UNP from power for the first time since Sri Lanka’s independence. With Bandaranaike as prime minister, the government soon passed the highly divisive Sinhala Only Act, making Sinhala the country’s only official language and marginalising Tamils in the process. The ITAK demonstrated against the move, and this resulted in targeted anti-Tamil violence.

The next year, the party leader, S J V Chelvanayakam, signed an agreement with Bandaranaike to establish regional councils in a bid to provide some degree of autonomy for Tamils, who were concentrated in the island’s North and East. Known as the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact, the agreement led to a sit-in at the prime minister’s residence by Buddhist monks fiercely opposed to it. In response, Bandaranaike tore up the document in public. A month later, in May 1958, the country witnessed an anti-Tamil pogrom that left hundreds dead – the death count varies between 300 and 1500 people.

As a result of these developments, stances hardened on both sides of the divide. While Sinhala nationalists lobbied for greater privileges from the state, Tamil nationalists increasingly shifted their demands from autonomy to separatism. This culminated, in 1976, with the Vaddukoddai Resolution, which called for the establishment of a separate Tamil state.

The resolution was drafted by the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), a group of parties led by the ITAK leader Chelvanayakam. At the 1977 general election, the TULF won enough seats to become the country’s main opposition group.  But that did not, and could not, prevent the rise of militant Tamil separatism. It did not help that the government of the time, led by J R Jayewardene of the UNP, not only enacted a new constitution that gave the president sweeping  powers – powers Jayewardene quickly assumed by becoming president himself – but also paid little attention to the TULF and in fact tolerated chauvinist elements in its own ranks.

Jayewardene’s election in 1977 had been followed by another anti-Tamil pogrom, which further poisoned relations between the government and the Tamil political leadership. Then, in 1983, came the Black July pogrom, with Sinhala mobs killing somewhere between 400 and 3000 Tamils with the alleged support of groups allied with the ruling UNP government. Almost overnight, these attacks strengthened the cause of Tamil separatism.

Within the democratic mainstream, the Tamil political leadership continued to call for autonomy while trying to balance their electoral interests against the demands of Tamil liberation movements. The latter engaged in internecine wars within themselves and against one another in a bid for dominance in the community. When the LTTE gained ascendancy, the Tamil political leadership tried to talk to them and reach some kind of compromise. But the LTTE had its own political ambitions. In 1989, it assassinated the TULF’s leader at his residence in Colombo. For the next two decades, until the end of the civil war in 2009, Tamil parties maintained an uneasy balance between their parliamentary presence and their engagements with separatist movements.

Maintaining such a balance during the war meant cohabiting or entering into particular arrangements with these movements. In 1989, for instance, the TULF contested parliamentary elections in alliance with no fewer than three militant groups. Twelve years later, a new alliance, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), came into being, based on an agreement between the TULF, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) and two militant groups. Though the TNA never really supported the LTTE, some news outlets described it as the LTTE’s “political proxy”.

Tamil political parties’ trajectory post-2009 has been as complex as it was pre-2009. Some militant groups – most prominently the Eelam People’s Democratic Party – have been absorbed into the government. Others, like the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, have aligned with former militant groups – the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front and more – to form a new alliance called the Democratic Tamil National Alliance, breaking away from the ITAK. The ITAK itself, while it remains committed to autonomy for Sri Lanka’s Tamil people, has been willing to continue the old cycle of engagement with the government.

HISTORICALLY, the question of whether or not to engage with the state led to internal rifts in Tamil politics. The ITAK’s decision to break away from the ACTC in 1949 is a good example of this. It must be noted, however, that the ACTC actually chose to join the UNP government of the time. Today, by contrast, even negotiations with the state have become a divisive issue.

But complex as the trajectories of Tamil politics may be, they are not entirely unpredictable.

In an interview with this writer, a former editor of a newspaper in the North observed that, since the end of the war, the dominant question in Tamil politics has not been about issues such as transitional justice and accountability for war crimes but rather about the means of achieving such aims. He added that even the most hardline political parties believed the best way to reach these goals is by negotiating with the government.

The mainstream TNA and more radical outfits share the broad goal of transcending Sri Lanka’s constitutionally enshrined status as a unitary state so as to secure autonomous rule for Tamils via the devolution of state power in more of a federal setup. But even in the 1980s, until the civil war escalated, such parties did not seek solutions beyond a constitutional framework.

Since 2009, parties like the TNA have been resolutely opposed to the Rajapaksas, who played a major role in the war against the LTTE, when Mahinda Rajapaksa served as president and his brother Gotabaya as the defence secretary. Both have since been implicated in war crimes and human-rights violations committed during the conflict. The TNA’s stance on the Rajapaksas, however, has led to its share of contradictions: in 2009, for instance, the party supported Sarath Fonseka, the man who oversaw that same war as the commander of the Sri Lankan army, in his presidential bid against Mahinda. The decision to support Fonseka resulted in the defection of a group from the TNA, and the formation of the Tamil National People’s Front.

Perhaps because of the failures of all these strategies to improve the position of the Tamil populace, the Tamil political leadership has come to view all negotiations or engagements with the government – regardless of the party in power – as something to be avoided. In 2022, when Wickremesinghe openly invited the TNA to discuss matters like reconciliation, the party accepted only reluctantly, encouraged perhaps by the president’s past record on the ethnic conflict, including his role in negotiating a ceasefire agreement in 2002. However, today, while the president continues to engage with the Northern Province through development projects, the discussions on reconciliation have stalled. At the same time, the president has been meeting parliamentarians from non-mainstream Tamil parties, including the Tamil People’s National Alliance.

Wickremesinghe regularly invokes the rhetoric of reconciliation. Critics see this as a camouflage for and diversion from his authoritarian policies, including his crackdown on the protester movement in 2022 after he came to power. Moreover, the Rajapaksas’ SLPP, the party that has given him his parliamentary majority, has questioned his motives, including on the devolution of power and relations with India. This has taken on a new dimension with the government’s advocacy of closer integration with its next-door neighbour, which has run into controversy in light of corruption allegations and transparency concerns over business deals involving an Indian multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group.

The TNA’s recent leadership change has thrown cold water on any hopes for future negotiations over these issues. Although the party has not completely stepped out: recently, the TNA accepted the president’s invitation to discuss the country’s agreement with the IMF – an invitation that other opposition parties, including the SJB and NPP, did not take up. Crucially, at the meeting, the TNA was represented not by S Sridharan, the ITAK’s current leader, but by his rival Sumanthiran, suggesting a rift between those who want to engage with the government and those who do not.

All this suggests that, in Tamil politics, credibility has come to depend on how distant you are from the political centre. It is ironic, then, that almost every leading Tamil politician has some connection with the centre; most of them studied and have worked in Colombo. Three in particular – the TNA’s Sumanthiran, the Tamil National People’s Front’s Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, and the Tamil People’s National Alliance’s C V Wigneswaran – not only grew up in Colombo but also studied at the same school. In that sense, the new ITAK leader is more rooted in the North, having been born, raised and educated in Jaffna.

The opposition’s response to all this has been somewhat tepid. Sarath Fonseka, the former army commander who ran against the Rajapaksas as the opposition candidate in 2010, has declared his intention to contest elections, opening further space in the opposition for the army.

At the same time, despite the SLPP’s hold over him, Wickremesinghe has attempted to present a kinder and gentler image of the government to minority communities. Yet most of these attempts have proven to be insubstantial.

Recently, for instance, the UNP appointed as its organiser in Jaffna a man accused of being a member of Ava, a crime syndicate that operated in the region a few years ago. Although Wickremesinghe denied making the appointment after some backlash, news of it fuelled controversy given claims, including from parliamentarians, of the Ava group being linked to the Sri Lankan military. The organiser in question, Arun Siddharthan, is a sort of bête noire of Tamil nationalists: in 2023, for instance, he led celebrations of Sri Lanka’s Independence Day in Jaffna. At a ceremony this March, he praised Wickremesinghe and the UNP, recalling the president’s peace efforts from an earlier era.

Against this backdrop, the Tamil political leadership’s loss of confidence in the Sri Lankan state is predictable, particularly given the government’s tendency to clamp down on dissent in the North and East. This has led to contestations within the Tamil political leadership. Externally, the TNA is competing with other parties; internally, it has become embroiled in a silent power struggle – most discernibly, as the veteran Tamil journalist D B S Jeyaraj has pointed out, between Sridharan and Sumanthiran. Muscle-flexing has become the norm.

In this, Tamil nationalist politics differs very little from Sinhala nationalist politics, which has its own share of inter- and intra-party rivalries. The difference is in how each side views their communities. While the Sinhala nationalist framing of Sri Lanka puts Sinhala people as the rightful heirs of the country, the Tamil nationalist framing depicts Tamils as a people possessing their own culture and history, and entitled to full autonomy.

These conceptions of nationhood reveal the weaknesses underlying Sinhala and Tamil nationalism. Both are, ostensibly, based on “historical claims”. While Sinhala nationalists resort for support to narratives like the Mahavamsa, a 6th-century chronicle that depicts Sri Lanka as a Buddhist realm and the Sinhala as protectors of the faith, Tamil nationalists resort to claims of the country’s Northern and Eastern Provinces being the “traditional homeland” of their community. Some go further, claiming that the Tamil presence in the country predates the Sinhala one.

PREDICTABLY, like a ritual, Sinhala and Tamil parties recycle and reiterate these claims. Both sides’ approaches are problematic. The Sinhala nationalist framing refuses to accommodate the multiple identities that make up Sri Lanka. It swings towards a form of ethno-supremacy that has resulted in much violence since independence. The Tamil nationalist framing, on the other hand, imagines the Tamils of Sri Lanka as a monolith. This has managed to essentialise them at the expense of their cultural and political heterogeneity.

In this regard, Tamil political commentators point at two issues: the problem of caste in the Northern Province, the Jaffna district in particular; and the position of Tamils living outside the country’s Northern and Eastern provinces.

While the issue of caste has become an elephant in the room in Sinhala society, always present but typically overlooked, in Tamil society it is inescapable and explosive. The scholar Sankaran Krishna has observed that, unlike in South India, where Tamil politics embraced anti-Brahminism, in Sri Lanka Tamil politicians have accommodated the “overt exclusionary aspects” of caste. Even proponents of separatism became defenders of caste strictures. This is a far cry from the South Indian situation: for perspective, it was not until 1977 that Sri Lanka elected a Tamil member from an oppressed-caste community to parliament, whereas in South India politics had at least become accessible to such groups by the 1960s.

Tamil nationalists have been defensive about caste even as a number of reports have noted its prevalence in the community.They allege that the government uses caste to sow division, and add that Sinhala nationalists exploit the issue to promote Buddhism among oppressed-caste communities and convert them. As the historian S Arasaratnam wrote decades ago, the government’s tactic here seems to have been to groom “depressed caste leaders” as “agents and supporters of the Sinhalese.” (Arun Siddharthan, the UNP’s controversial Jaffna organiser, hails from an oppressed-caste community and has spoken about the ostracism he faced while growing up during the war.)

While the Tamil political mainstream has failed to address caste, it has also not succeeded in incorporating non-Northern Tamil elements into its fold, even though a majority of the country’s Tamils live outside the Northern Province. This has been especially pronounced in the case of the Malaiyaha Tamil community.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Marxist parties managed to mobilise Malaiyaha Tamil labourers working on tea and coffee plantations for little to no compensation. Since the formation of the Ceylon Indian Congress – later named the Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) – in 1939, however, they have resorted to their own political platforms. This became more pronounced after the passage of the Citizenship Act of 1948, through which the government deprived vast swathes of the Malaiyaha Tamil population of citizenship and franchise.

The CWC has become a coalition partner in several governments, including with the UNP, the SLFP and even the SLPP. Its rival for the Malaiyaha Tamil community vote, the Tamil Progressive Alliance, joined the UNP-led government between 2015 and 2019, but has since drifted into the opposition. As yet, neither of these parties have become partners of any Northern Tamil political alliances.

Considering all of this, there is no denying that Tamil nationalist parties occupy an important place in Sri Lankan politics. Ideologically, they are committed to some form of autonomy for the Tamil people. That they couch this in different terms, partly to distinguish themselves from one another, does not belittle that fundamental commitment, though their framing of the Tamil people, and of the “Tamil nation”, tends to essentialise their community. Tamil nationalism itself has served a pivotal role in Sri Lankan politics, and in Sri Lankan history. More than anything, it has given Tamils in the Northern and Eastern provinces a sense of belonging, even if, as scholars point out, the Tamil nationalist ideology is grounded in historical claims that are as slippery as those buttressing Sinhala nationalism.

In a piece for Himal, Mario Arulthas argues that Tamil nationalist sentiment has been crucial in the community’s resistance against the excesses of the Sri Lankan government. To him, its persistence “suggests that Tamil nationalism will remain a significant political force.” So too, in that sense, will Tamil politics. So long as the government is associated with what Arulthas calls the “Sinhala Buddhist state-building project”, Tamil nationalism will be a force to reckon with. As a counter to – and, for its supporters, a corrective against – the excesses of Sinhala nationalism, it has gained a resonance and logic of its own.