Editorial

Once ‘the hewers of wood and drawers of water’ for the British Raj, launched an attention-grabbing programme – ‘Maanbumigu Malaiyaha Makkal’, retracing the journey of the first groups of women and men – brought to Ceylon/Sri Lanka to work in the newly opened, labour intensive coffee estates in the central highlands, 200 years ago.

Ironically, the awareness march was sponsored by some NGOs while political parties and the community’s representatives in Parliament opted to keep away, for reasons best known to them.

The British colonial administration introduced the Waste Lands Ordinance to clear the land for these estates. These vast acres were the heritage of the indigenous Kandyan peasantry who were thereby subjected to pecuniary disadvantage for generations thereafter by that land grab.

At least one in three, some 35 percent of those who were recruited by job agents of the day in colonised India died during that long march by foot (see feature on Plus cover today) from Thalaimannar to Matale due to dehydration, disease or snake bite. Today, this could be tantamount to ‘Genocide’.

This community is not asking for separation, nor claiming a ‘homeland’. They want integration. That the community was never treated as equals either by the majority or the mainstream minority, politically, socially or economically, is a fact. They were referred to as “estate Tamils”, or worse; “coolies” by the British planters and the latter derogatory term stuck on after even they left among not only the natives who took over from the pukka sahibs, but among the caste-conscious others of their ilk. Officially, they were called ‘Tamils of recent Indian origin’ to distinguish them from the northern Tamils.

As British subjects, they derived the right to vote when the universal adult franchise was granted in 1931. Much has been repeatedly said about how Ceylon’s first Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake disenfranchised the entire community when he had the Ceylon Citizenship Act No. 18 of 1948 passed soon after Independence. The year before, seven candidates from this community were elected to the 95-seat First Parliament. In his book ‘Parliamentary Government in Ceylon’, S. Namasivayam says the outcome of 14 other constituencies was also influenced by this community’s vote bank. Marxist/Trotskyite parties started wooing them as belonging to the ‘working class’ to win seats for themselves.

The majority Sinhala polity recovering from 450 years of foreign rule shuddered to think of the newly independent nation being dominated by the northern politicians demanding either federalism or parity of status (50/50) and the central highlands dominated by ‘Indian Tamils’. That two MPs from the community voted against the Soulbury Constitution granting independence to Ceylon did not help.

Little is mentioned, however, that India after its own independence on August 15, 1947, also enacted a Citizenship Act disenfranchising thousands of Nepalese and others living in India. Ceylon/Sri Lanka only followed the example. In the USA, the African-American community was already disenfranchised.

When the Sri Lankan Citizenship Bill was moved, some northern Tamil MPs, abstained, without voting against it. Later, Premier D.S. Senanayake introduced the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Bill on which he corresponded with the Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru and for which the concurrence by the Indian Foreign Office was given. Some northern Tamil MPs even voted for this law, while others joined hands with the plantation workers community to boycott registration for citizenship. Hundreds of thousands were thereby rendered ‘stateless’ either by the law or by the boycott.

India at the time did not show any eagerness to take back these ‘Tamils of recent Indian origin’. It was only after many years of negotiations that they reluctantly agreed to take some of them back, and Ceylon/Sri Lanka agreed for some, while many remained in limbo, ‘stateless’. The Sirima-Shastri Pact (1974) saw many eventually repatriated, trekking back the way their forefathers came, though under better conditions. It was only much later that the ‘stateless’ also got full citizenship.

While it now seems a miscarriage of democracy to have deprived this community of their vote, they themselves hadn’t, or couldn’t, integrate into the mainstream of this island’s social life. Their party, the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) earlier known as the Ceylon Indian Congress (CIC) dropped the ‘Indian’ in it, but the party flag was the Indian national flag’s tri-colours; their linerooms had photographs of Mahatma Gandhi. Today, India has displayed a ‘newfound love’ for this community, pledging to pump in aid like never before for their upliftment. It has nothing to do with a guilt complex; it is geopolitics and its ‘extended neighbourhood’ policy to have a firmer footprint in Sri Lanka.

The new generation from this community, better educated than the generation before, have greater aspirations, like their peers elsewhere in the island. Many have already abandoned the highlands and come to Colombo and the big cities in search of employment. The women don’t want to be tea pluckers like their mothers; they opt for jobs in supermarkets, though on their feet most of the day, and even spas – to work in air-conditioned comfort. That seems preferable to carrying a basket on their backs in the hot sun or driving rain on slippery slopes. Their unions complain that wages on the estates are not in sync with the rising cost of living, and they are not alone in asking for ‘a living wage’.

Some from the community went on to become professionals, others successful entrepreneurs in Colombo, their turf being the Pettah’s bustling business sector where they dominate the gold market and the wholesale import-export trade in food items. Others went into start up big conglomerates. Their collective economic clout is not to be underestimated.

There is no question that the plantation community remained as virtual ‘second class citizens’ in every way, but their continued allegiance to ‘Mother India’ and inability to break away from its apron strings has not helped in their quest for national integration. They must not look like the fifth columnists of the north. Neither ought the Government leave it to India to be the godfather to this community absolving itself of its own responsibility towards them.

Given the contribution they and their forebears have made to the national economy with their sweat and their toil, they richly deserve the ‘identity’ they demand as “free and equal citizens” on par with other communities having been on this island now for two centuries, and counting.