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Muslims: prominent in politics despite numbers
In post-independence Sri Lanka, the political attitudes and behaviour of the Muslim community provided a strong contrast to those of the Tamils. First, since 1956 mainstream Tamil leaders have emphasized the distinct and separate identity of their community.

With a solid territorial and demographic base in the north and some parts of the east, their politics generally emphasized regional autonomy based on ethnic identity; later on this took a separatist or secessionist form. Their separatist claims were perceived as a threat both to the legitimacy of majority rule and the integrity of the polity.

In contrast, the Muslims generally chose to support the Sinhalese majority on some critical issues and were supported in turn by the Sinhalese on issues regarded by the Muslims as necessary for maintaining their culture and identity (on education, for instance). They were helped in this quite substantially by the volatility of the island's political system in which, from 1956 onwards, the ruling party was defeated on six consecutive occasions (including 1956). The result was that Muslims were offered opportunities for political bargaining which they used to the great advantage of their community.

There is also the crucially important fact that the island's Muslims never faced the prospect, much less threat, of assimilationist policies. All governments respected the ethnic identity of the Muslims and have, in fact, helped to protect and foster this.

Until the late 1980s, the Muslims had no 'ethnic' political parties of their own. Neither the All Sri Lanka Muslim League nor All Ceylon Moors Association became Muslim political parties in the years after independence; by contrast their contemporary, the Tamil Congress, continued as a Tamil political party and was indeed the principal Tamil political organization on the island until the mid-1950s.

Muslims sought and obtained membership and achieved positions of influence in all major national political parties, the UNP and SLFP in particular. They were not well represented in the governing bodies of Tamil political parties. The link with the UNP had given that party a majority of the Muslim vote at every election since 1947 till the presidential election of 1994. The UNP has always had more Muslim Members of Parliament than the SLFP till the parliamentary elections of that year. Within the party, Colombo-based Muslims have been, until very recently, the dominant element.

Since 1947, every Cabinet has had a Muslim in it; the UNP government of 1977-94 generally had three. The first Cabinet after independence had two Tamils; there was one between 1952 and 1956, but none at all from then until 1965. Thereafter every Cabinet has had a Tamil representative, generally a Sri Lankan Tamil; since 1977 there have been two or three (1978-89) one of whom has been the leader of the Indian Tamils. Even more remarkable is the ready acceptance of Muslims by Sinhalese voters in electorates where Muslims comprise less than a fifth and quite often less than a tenth or a twentieth of the total voting strength. Muslims are regarded as being so clearly integrated into the Sri Lankan political community that the Sinhalese will vote for them on party grounds against Sinhalese opponents. In contrast, not a Tamil candidate has won a seat in a predominantly Sinhalese area since independence, except for Indian Tamils who have won seats in the plantation districts or in the periphery of such districts.

As in the 1940s, rivalry between Tamils and Muslims in education has been an important feature of the island's ethnic disharmony: apart from the Muslims' anxiety to break away from Tamil tutelage in schools of the Tamil medium, they have successfully lobbied for more Muslim schools and more Muslim school teachers. Mahmud's tenure of office as Minister of Education was an important landmark in the gains Muslims achieved both in literacy and a notable improvement in educational standards at the secondary level.

Equally significant has been the divergence of views on devolution of power. Till the appearance of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress in the late 1980s Muslims have been inveterate opponents of any attempt to tamper with Sri Lanka's existing unitary political structure. Two examples of this are: the opposition mounted by A.R.A. Razik, later Sir Razik Fareed, within the government parliamentary group to the District Councils scheme which Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake sought to introduce between 1966 and 1968. Similarly, two Muslim members of the Presidential Commission on District Development Councils wrote a lengthy note of dissent against the main recommendations of that commission in its report published in 1980.

Neither the UNP nor the SLFP could take Muslim support for granted. While each has large reserves of Muslim support - the UNP's has traditionally been larger than the SLFP's - they were aware that Muslim voters could tilt the balance, in not less than 15 electorates in all parts of the country, in the days before the proportional representation system was introduced. Often they did precisely that.

Muslims have seldom hesitated to vote against a governing party if it appeared to them to be inconsiderate to or negligent of their interests.

Thus in 1964-5, the then SLFP-dominated government's failure to remedy the legal deficiencies which the Supreme Court pointed out concerning quazis courts was a significant enough factor in turning large numbers of Muslims against them in the general election that year. Then again, some of that support returned to the SLFP and its allies in 1970 as part of a national trend against the UNP, which was seen to have done more for Tamils than Muslims. They turned against the UNP once more in 1994 much more emphatically than in the past because of the perception that the party's leadership at that time was not as sensitive to the interests of the minorities as their predecessors had been.

Briefly, then, while Muslims have not been reluctant to consider themselves as a counterweight to Tamils in communal rivalries that have been so prominent in political developments in post-independence Sri Lanka, they have seldom hesitated to express their displeasure at signs of neglect of their interests, or hostility to them, by a government. And Sri Lanka's electoral system has provided them with all the opportunities they need to make this displeasure felt. Governments have changed with remarkable frequency in Sri Lanka, and the Muslim community, small though it is, has contributed mightily to these swings of the electoral pendulum.

It would be too naive to assume that these advantages were secured as a result of Sinhalese altruism. On the contrary, one has the feeling that quite often Sinhalese politicians have used State resources to build the Muslim community or sections of it as a counterweight to the Tamil community in a game of checks and balances, an intrinsic element in the process of government in any plural society. As we have seen, Muslims - in striking contrast to Tamils - have had no distinct ethnic or religious political parties of their own till the appearance of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress to contest seats to Parliament in competition with, if not in opposition to, the main national political parties. Instead, their political organizations preferred to work in association with and as adjuncts of the latter. The result is that the Muslim community, although numerically much smaller than the Tamils, had far greater bargaining powers electorally than their number seemed to warrant. (More next week)


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