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‘Nothing! No one gained by it, not a single MP has achieved anything. We have no other solution, we have no option, we have to do this politics,’ said a former Tamil militant who gave up arms in 1989 to become an elected Member of Parliament (MP), in response to a question regarding whether he believes he and other Tamil militants who joined the democratic mainstream benefitted from the decision.
The minority politics that has existed in Sri Lanka since independence is disintegrating, on the one hand crushed by structural majoritarian nationalism and on the other stunted by a lack of vision, identity and leadership within minorities’ own political parties.
Representatives elected to parliament from ethnic minority parties explain that since independence majoritarian nationalism, functioning for example through state organs such as the military and civil service, has limited their effectiveness. This same nationalism partly contributed to the ethnic conflict and Tamil militancy which led to three decades of civil war in the country from 1983 to 2009. Extremist Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism rose within the government particularly under the presidencies of Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005-2015) and his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa (2019-2022), whose credibility is now severely damaged by their policies of subjugation and oppression. Their terms in office are seen as especially suffocating for minorities, whose political representatives were restrained from serving their communities at different levels. This included a number of different strategies ranging from allegedly buying out minority MPs and sowing division in ethnic minority parties, to completely curtailing these parties from acting in the interest of the communities they represent.
An old guard of national political parties with a history of fielding minority candidates has, in the recent past, shifted tactics to form alliances and coalitions with ethnic minority parties while offering less space inside their own parties for both minority representatives and minority issues. Minority representatives who have been elected from the former two major parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), and their various fronts have felt isolated, with little opportunity to take up minority issues in national party agendas.
The strong and vibrant political landscape that ethnic minority parties once enjoyed in Sri Lanka, though not totally diminished, is both collapsing from within and being destroyed from without. Ethnic minority parties from all three minority communities have splintered into several factions, and the larger, more popular ones are internally deeply divided. These divides have been caused in part as a consequence of majoritarian nationalism, but also due to weak leadership and allegations of corruption within parties.
Extremist positions espoused by some groups belonging to minorities have also contributed to this worsening situation. The most prominent Ceylon Tamil party, Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) (literally, ‘Sri Lanka Tamil State Party’), has struggled since the end of the war to define its political path, given the prevalence of Tamil ultranationalism in the areas formerly affected by the civil war. Ethnic minority parties from among the second largest minority,
Muslims, and the smaller Malaiyaga Tamil community (of recent Indian origin), present a story of disarray, division and lost credibility. These parties have erratically switched allegiances with nationalist mainstream parties trying to capitalize on shifting alliances and coalition formation, which eventually damaged them deeply. Their own lack of openness to new leadership and progressive reforms, amidst allegations of corruption, has not helped their cause.