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Part I
Normative spaces
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1 Nation
A resilient memory from my childhood is of sitting on the floor of our living room in Colombo in a state of feverish excitement while colouring-in a map of the electoral divisions of Sri Lanka on the night of the 1977 general election. The air around us, noisy with radio announcements, phone calls and adult conversation, was infused with the promise of tremendous change. The map (replicated in Figure 1.01), issued by one of the newspapers, provided an early lesson in the democratic process; its proliferation of green-coloured spaces incrementally documenting the electoral gains of the pro-capitalist United National Party (UNP). Support for the incumbent and soon to be outgoing government – the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), represented by the colour blue – was barely evident; while a new amalgam of the Federal Party and Tamil United Front – the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), coloured in yellow – had won eighteen out of 168 seats including fourteen in the Northern Province. The TULF campaign had expressed separatist ambitions – incipient stirrings of long-repressed ethnic politics – that prefigured the territorial struggle to come. Across the nation, a generation that was soon to be radically dislocated by war was unified in colouring-in the map.
Sri Lanka’s shift towards a market economy dates from that election when the UNP, led by Junius Richard (JR) Jayewardene, captured over 80 percent of the popular vote and, by doing so, so reduced its main contender, a socialist coalition, that a minority, Tamil party formed the parliamentary opposition for the very first time. Massive structural transformations followed, including the island nation in the imminent global dissolution of Cold War borders and reconfiguring its geography and economy for investment-led national development. This chapter will begin by outlining these processes. The state-led spatial strategies, which will be expanded on, created new ground for political sovereignty as hegemonic and mono-cultural, fortifying majoritarian ethno-ontological security at the expense of minority groups. The consequent enlargement of a constitutionally ratified Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist imaginary further provoked an adversarial and already politicised Tamil nationalism.
Whereas the Sinhala Only Act (1956) had prompted ethnicised discrimination along linguistic lines in an earlier era and Buddhism was protected in the 1972 Constitution, Jayewardene’s further advocacy of Buddhist values in the general operation of state and polity continued the political conversion of a pacifist theology into a hegemonic episteme. Ethnonationalist sentiment infiltrated the platforms of all the leading political parties. This preference alienated minority groups, including Christians among the Sinhalese, and others who opposed the political manipulation of deeply held beliefs including many Sinhala-Buddhists. Communal and religious identities overwhelmed other forms of self-representation replacing the sensibility of a shared destiny with one in which entitlements were to be fought over. As they grew to be the dominant vectors of visibility these positions became associated with the ethnopolitical aggression of their representatives. Tamil and LTTE identities were often conflated in the minds of many Sinhalese, as was Sinhala identity with Buddhism and state violence in the minds not only of many Tamils but also of international commentators, an association fuelled by popular and media biases. Ethnicised identities were magnified to the detriment of all other social relations and were internalised by many Lankans as existential truths. The gentler, empathetic practices of these sibling cultures were muffled by militarisation and militancy and even the most innocuous performance of culture produced subliminal undercurrents that augmented this political field.
Copyright Chandra Jayasuriya. Based on Department of Elections, ‘Results of Parliamentary General Elections 1977’; and Maps of World, ‘Sri Lanka – Electoral districts’.
Figure 1.01 Map showing winners of the polling divisions in the Sri Lankan parliamentary election of 1977, as represented by shading in the map.
The ethnicisation of Sinhala political culture strengthened Buddhist cultural hegemony authorising what was believed by the majority to be the authentic model of Sri Lankan citizenship. By the 1980s Buddhism was being defended and protected at the highest level and professed and practised in public by national leaders. Buddhist values were integrated into secular regulatory structures as a normative overlay. While, at face value, some of these processes appeared as the natural outcome of Sinhala-Buddhist demographic preponderance and desire to erase colonial-period preferences given to urban, Sinhala-Christian and minority communities, their politicisation was selective and discriminatory. As outlined in this chapter, these political positions were further cultivated through ontologically potent spatial interventions in the national landscape.
Among these interventions were key national development projects after 1977, which seized upon historical ethno-ontological proclivities to garner majority support. River valley development projects, rural housing and archaeological conservation programmes, examined in the following sections, represented the nation’s history and polity as essentially Buddhist. This presumption recast secular government as a vehicle for the dominant cultural group. Deliberate exclusion of Tamil interests energised the separatist cause, further provoking the defensive politicisation of Sinhala-Buddhist cultural hegemony.
Such processes have a longer postcolonial history. Successive politicians had reproduced the peasant economy as part of their historical mission to recreate a rice-and-village-based Sinhala society (Moore 1992, 335–7). Sinhala recession from Dry-Zone capitals, such as Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa (fourth century BCE to thirteenth century ACE) left a landscape of historical ruins as evidence of an ancient polity of small-landholding peasantry engaged in rice cultivation. They were regarded as the geopolitical basis for the monarchy and Buddhist institutions at an urban or rural scale. The agrarian society of a hydraulic civilisation connected to Buddhist institutions and dynasties became mythologised and politicised as an identitarian trope. The resilient image of ‘vava, caitya, yaya’ (irrigation tank, temple, paddy field), used in campaigns for village regeneration (Hennayake 2006, 51–3; Moore 1992, 337), linked contemporary patterns of settlement to historical precedents creating nostalgic moral ground for developmental processes. Mindful of their resonance for rural voters, Jayewardene and his ministers cultivated and enlarged upon these culturally specific themes.
Political and economic transformations
The overwhelming mandate afforded Jayewardene gave him the power to implement political and economic changes on an unprecedented scale. He amended the constitution and established an executive Gaullist presidency over the extant Westminster model, reducing the power of parliament and increasing his own authority. His advocacy of a ‘Free and Just Society’, reflecting Ashokan modalities of Buddhist governance, placated Sinhala cultural anxieties over Western-style liberalisation (Richardson 2004, 48) and pacified religious patriots.1
Although economic liberalisation introduced domestic deregulation and the free flow of commodities and capital, there was relatively little shrinkage of the state (Richardson 2004, 52; Stokke 2011, 12). On the contrary, the GoSL embarked on large investment programmes funded by international financial institutions. This produced what is described as a ‘peculiar combination of economic liberalisation, statism and aid dependence’ (Stokke 2011, 13), with aid now sought from liberal democracies; European nations, North America and Japan. Japan, the biggest donor of grants (rather than aid), gifted the parliament building at the new capital, Sri Jayewardenepura, and Sri Lanka’s first television station – a conduit to world culture. Private postal services and mobile phone operations transformed communications previously monopolised by government, while private bus companies and (mainly three-wheeler) taxi services competed for passengers. The centralisation of political power and access to globalisation via the media seemed to be equal and opposing forces, just as marketisation, the export economy and large-scale agricultural projects seemed to be at odds. Economic deregulation through the relaxation of monetary exchange controls, import and export controls, custom duties, foreign investment, export promotion zones for manufacturing and new industries in garments and tourism all constituted the most significant economic shifts. They replaced the previously insular protectionist policies of import-substitution, nationalisation, land reform and expropriation of private property, which had accompanied republican status in 1972 (reviewed in Winslow and Woost 2004). Manufacturing outputs doubled. Although privatisation would take a slower course, the immediate growth of the private sector benefited minorities with trading connections in India. These changes were largely felt in urban centres, including the former colonial capital, Colombo, the major port and home of Sri Lanka’s first parliament.
By focusing on cultural or ethnic competition before 1977, many scholars writing on the civil war neglect the massive structural changes that transformed Lankan subjectivity after marketisation and their impacts on the political agents of the conflict. Arguably, this change was sharply felt by the generation that came of age during this process, moving from a world of monochrome newsprint to a technicolour rendering of their everyday lives. Television gave these experiences an aural and ambulant dimension that irrevocably altered the time and space of the imagined nation. With the gaining of international test cricket status, Sri Lanka appeared more active and visible internationally and projected its national ambitions onto a global stage. Similarly, global systems and processes infiltrated the nation through several channels. The relaxation of exchange controls for overseas education, followed by the establishment of private ‘international schools’, diverted knowledge streams away from uniform national curricula while heightening internal class divisions and re-orienting educational aspirations. Importation of books from the West replaced a system of knowledge that had been dominated by nationalist textbooks, and displaced Chinese, Russian and Indian publications and institutional connections. Foreign NGOs funded by Western donor agencies proliferated, flooding the relief economy and saturating it with expatriate dollars. They destabilised the long-suppressed property and commodity economies. Globalisation was spatialised through gated environments establishing artificial dollar economies for investment and labour. The newly established export promotion zones cultivated islands of foreign capital in the national geography, primarily employing women garment workers; while private investments in the hotel industry segregated and urbanised large portions of the coastline (Gunasekera 2014).2
Indeed, provisions for industrial labour mobility stand out as the single most effective means of transforming individual subjectivity (Richardson 2004, 50–1), albeit with limited freedoms of association, and societal subordination for women (Hancock 2006). Sri Lanka exported its labour, sending domestic workers (housemaids who were childminders, cooks and cleaners), port workers, construction workers and hospital orderlies to Southeast and West Asia. They came from towns and villages throughout the island. For example, in 2004, five years prior to the end of the conflict, 56,748 persons departed for overseas employment from the Western Province, 27,196 from the Eastern Province and 18,798 from the North Central Province (out of a total 214,709 departures; CBSL Report 2012, 24, Table 3.16). Women’s subjectivity was also transformed due to militarisation, with the inclusion of women in the armed forces, alongside women’s militancy within the (Sinhala) JVP and the Tamil separatist groups.
In the area of government, Sri Lanka’s third Constitution (1978) instituted the executive presidency, giving the president, as head of state, head of government and commander in chief, power over ministerial appointments and the army. Proportional representation replaced the first-past-the-post system and strengthened the autonomy of the judiciary, although scholars argue that this did not prevent a culture of impunity aided by centralisation or statism (Stokke 2011, 14). Constitutionalised political centralisation countered minority demands for devolution of power (Stokke 2011, 12), hardening Sri Lankan state sovereignty against secessionist claims. Although the Provincial Councils Act of 1987 devolved local planning responsibilities to regional authorities, following the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord, political power was retained at the centre. During the war, the northeast of the country was under de-facto military rule without constitutional protection. Elections were marked by non-democratic manipulations and violence (Stokke 2011, 15).
Certain attributes of the former era were strengthened under the liberalised economy, such ...
