A sad sorry tale of two lands – and one stateless people (Part II of II)

Despite having tenuous links with both nations, these Indian-origin Tamils of Ceylon/Sri Lanka found themselves as pawns in a game of chess played by the home country, India, and the country that played host to them under British colonial government, Sri Lanka

• The criteria for qualification were not only stringent but also prohibitive, as the practice of registering births had not been common two generations before the citizenship issue was born. And although these laws did not include any literacy qualifications on paper, in real-life terms they favoured literate individuals who could not only read and write but were more likely to have registered births and thereby were in a better position to meet the application criteria
• in an age where long delayed social justice has great potential to be realised by a regime that unites rather than divides to govern – as demonstrable in the way the country voted in the past two polls – will there be redress for these and other hapless people of the republic?

As the Hindus of Sri Lanka mark Thai Pongal, a community of Sri Lankan Tamils unite in spirit to celebrate prosperity and plentifulness. Yet, some of the people who should reap a harvest of peace with justice remain outside the boundaries of communion with other citizens of an island nation on the cusp of ethnic and racial harmony as perhaps never before.  

So it would be of interest to examine the nexus between those who celebrate this multi-day harvest festival, others who don’t or can’t quite muster the means, and their common as well as disparate histories harking back to colonial times.

In the second edition of a two-part piece that focuses on the tale of one of these two ethnicities, we try to unravel the tangled skeins of history that once wove representatives of this marginalised community and others who remained agnostic to their hapless plight. 

[CONTINUED FROM A PREVIOUS ISSUE] 

By the year 1988, however, only 236,000 people and their natural increase in numbers by dint of childbearing were granted Ceylonese citizenship, bringing the total number of people granted Sri Lankan citizenship until 1988 up to a far more precise 343,985, according to the Department of Immigration and Emigration. 

The need to expedite citizenship for the balance 233,000 or so people saw the propagation of the Grant of Citizenship to Stateless Persons (Special Provisions) Act No. 39 of 1988 being ratified as law. 

This law of the land was amended once, via the Grant of Citizenship to Stateless Persons (Amendment) Act No. 5 of 2009, where citizenship entitlement of those who were empowered to obtain Ceylonese citizenship under the provisions of the 1964 act – but were unable to do so because of the exigencies of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka since 1983 and the protracted war that followed – were facilitated to obtain such citizenship despite living in India as refugees.

Out of the estimated 506,000 persons due to be repatriated to India, only approximately 342,000 persons of Indian-origin and their natural increase living in the former colony of Ceylon had been granted Indian citizenship as of 31 December 1992. 

The remaining 164,000 people and their natural increase could not be repatriated to India because of ongoing issues such as human trafficking and the provision of illegal shelter for refugees in Tamil Nadu since the onset of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka in 1983. 

Many of these were never granted the Indian citizenship due to them (although some were given travel permits by the Tamil Nadu government) but they continued to remain in Sri Lanka for a variety of sociopolitical and logistical issues, and were not able to avail themselves of Indian citizenship. 

Therefore the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act No. 35 of 2003 was enacted to grant citizenship to these hapless people, and the status of ‘Citizen of Sri Lanka’ was granted in theory to all 164,000 of these individuals of Indian origin. 

In practice however, despite the operation of this law coming into effect on 11 November 2003, only 585 certificates of conformation of citizenship had been issued as at 31 December 2017, over 14 years later.

This act was amended once more, by the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin (Amendment) Act No. 6 of 2009, “to make provision to enable persons who were permanent residents of Sri Lanka with Indian origin since 30th of October 1964 and their descendants and are presently residing in India, to have the status of citizen of Sri Lanka from the date of commencement of the principal enactments” of the said Act. 

The Department of Immigration and Emigration’s current official website now states that “with the enactment of this Act, long existed [sic] problem on citizenship of Indian Origin Persons of Sri Lanka was solved and concluded.”

A political perspective of the Citizenship Acts 

In December 1947, Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru of India and D.S. Senanayake of Ceylon attempted for the last time before Ceylon became independent to reach a settlement on the issue of citizenship for people of Indian origin (Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 179). 

Nehru suggested giving citizenship to all those who asked for it and who satisfied the criterion of residence of seven years in Ceylon preceding 1 January 1948. Senanayake proposed more stringent conditions, namely that persons could apply for citizenship if they had been resident in Ceylon for a minimum of seven years for married and ten years for unmarried adults. 

Applicants further had to provide proof of adequate means of livelihood and that they had conformed to Ceylonese marriage laws. Senanayake was keen to draw up a law that would restrict as much as possible the number of eligible applicants but Nehru refused this proposal. 

On gaining independence, the new nation-state of Ceylon hurriedly passed citizenship and franchise legislation. The Ceylon Citizenship Act No. 18 of 1948 created two types of citizenship – by descent and by registration. 

In both cases, documentary proof was required for application – a procedure that disqualified the majority of Indian Tamil workers, who were illiterate. In addition, citizenship would only be given to those who satisfied the government of the intensity of their desire to adopt Ceylon as their home.

Citizenship by descent was restricted to persons who could prove that at least two generations or more of their forbears had been born in the island. Citizenship by registration was open to those residents of Ceylon who could prove that either of their parents had been a citizen by descent, and the individual in question had been resident for seven (if married) or ten (if unmarried) years.

The minister in charge was given discretionary powers to register 25 persons a year for Ceylonese citizenship for distinguished public service. Anyone who laid claim to citizenship was expected to apply to the assigned government agency. 

The Ceylonese citizenship and immigration acts were much discussed and debated in Indian political circles, especially in the Madras Legislative Assembly where Tamil Nadu politicians expressed concern to ensure that “the procedure of application be simple and inexpensive” (Hindu Organ of 26 Oct 1948) because a majority of the Indian-origin persons eligible for putative citizenship were “ignorant workers” (Hindu Organ of 26 Oct 1948).

The criteria for qualification were not only stringent but also prohibitive, as the practice of registering births had not been common two generations before the citizenship issue was born. And although these laws did not include any literacy qualifications on paper, in real-life terms they favoured literate individuals who could not only read and write but were more likely to have registered births and thereby were in a better position to meet the application criteria. 

Therefore, as a Sri Lankan historian argues: “Mastery of the written word was implicitly the criterion for citizenship and franchise. And the Ceylon Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Act No. 48 of 1949 made the status of citizenship mandatory for having the franchise” (Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 180).

As shown by the same scholar, it was arguable that the ruling elites in Ceylon had absorbed “one of the main mythic models of Western culture, which assumed that writing indicated learning, ability to lead and be the hallmark of civilisation that distinguished Occidental – especially European – culture from the supposedly savage and unlettered Orient” (Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 180). 

Attendant electoral issues 

The new citizenship and franchise laws altered the balance of power between the various communities and helped consolidate a majority within the polity. Through these laws, the so-called ‘plantation Tamils’ were defined by default as an alien group and marginalised, often by design.

Part of the reason for the urgency of passing such stringent laws was that before independence, sociopolitical links had been forged between the leftist parties in a nascent Ceylon and the upcountry communities. 

This became a concern to the conservative elite to whom colonial power had been transferred in the exercise to grant Ceylon its independence. The left had won 19 of the 95 seats in the 1947 parliamentary elections while the United National Party (UNP) had only 42, and a possible alliance between leftist parties and the plantations workers constituted a threat to the right-wing UNP.

They also pandered to the fears of the Kandyan constituency that they would be swamped by the ever-growing Tamil population that challenged the hegemony of a purer Sinhalese electorate, putatively ‘destined’ to rule Ceylon by dint of their alleged ‘superiority’. And the Citizenship Acts also spelt the end of any sort of trust between the plantation community of Indian origin and the Jaffna Tamils. 

Ironically, the leader of the Tamil Congress accepted a ministry in the UNP government that had only just disenfranchised nearly a million plantation 

workers of demonstrably Tamil ethnicity.

The stand taken by the newly created Federal Party’s leader S. J. V. Chelvanayagam did not create much of an impact among the estate Tamils. 

In fact, when that worthy signed a pact with Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in 1957, the demands for citizenship and voting rights for the estate Tamils was dropped in the face of other concessions considered to be more important to Jaffna Tamils – for instance: recognition of Tamil as an official language, creation of regional councils, and reversal of ‘aggressive’ and ‘expansionist’ Sinhala settlement policies in Tamil areas. Indeed, as Nira Wickramasinghe observes, “the Estate Tamils had been betrayed twice”. 

These political machinations came “at the expense of ten per cent of the population that was cast away as not belonging to the nation-state”.

So it was not surprising that the ruling elite engineered the passing of these exclusionary laws that pre-empted the possibility of stronger inter-ethnic and class-based alliances by excluding the entire estate Tamil population from participating in the polity. 

Therefore these laws in many ways embodied a class position on the part of an elitist group in society which was closer in cultural and sociopolitical terms to the middle or upper class British society than the Sinhalese proletariat or plebeian Tamil labourer.

A short summary of the two Acts and their ramifications

 Ostensibly intended to address the ongoing issues faced by Indian-origin Tamils, the Citizenship Acts of 1948/49 ironically compounded the injustices faced by this demographic of former indentured labourers.

Firstly, they were seen as a socio-political liability rather than a deserving cause for social justice, and were eventually reduced to a series of names, numbers, and statistics by successive bureaucracies under first Ceylonese and then Sri Lankan governments. 

Secondly, despite having tenuous links with both nations, these Indian-origin Tamils of Ceylon/Sri Lanka found themselves as pawns in a game of chess played by the home country, India, and the country that played host to them under British colonial government, Sri Lanka. First host, and then home country refusing to take ownership and therefore responsibility for them. 

Thirdly, to add insult to injury, the only stakeholders who could have rightfully stood up for them – their Tamil cousins of Ceylonese/Sri Lankan origin – chose for reasons of realpolitik rather than principle to jettison their cause. 

Fourthly, in terms of electoral priorities of the major parties, the Tamils of Indian origin, who had previously been marginalised by their ethnic cousins, now found themselves abandoned by the ruling elites of the day because of class and caste reasons, by both Tamils and Sinhalese. 

Fifthly, their illiteracy did them a disservice in the process of applying for citizenship – a fact that may have arguably and demonstrably been cynically exploited by state authorities.   

Finally, in an age where long delayed social justice has great potential to be realised by a regime that unites rather than divides to govern – as demonstrable in the way the country voted in the past two polls – will there be redress for these and other hapless people of the republic?

| Editor-at-large of LMD | Many peoples. One nation. #PluralisticSriLanka |