Workings of Power and Alliances of Resistance in Sri Lanka
Ahilan Kadirgamar and Yathursha Ulakentheran
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history is often read through the lens of ethnic majoritarianism. This framing seeks to explain the rise of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and the marginalization of the Tamil community, leading to the rise of Tamil nationalism, and the subsequent thirty-year civil war, devastating the country. However, this binary conception of two confrontational ethno-nationalisms is limited and obscures the complex and historically contingent nature of majority-minority relations. We propose an alternative framing of majorities and minorities drawing on our research [1] and engagement in war-torn Northern Sri Lanka, which does not treat majority and minority as fixed ethnic constituencies and, for that matter, purely numerical categories. Rather, we consider them as shifting configurations of power and resistance that we conceptualize through the workings of majoritarian logics of power and minority alliances of resistance. While the former consists of state power, class power, and other mechanisms like security and environmental regulation, the latter undermines such hegemony through strategic coalitions.
This essay is grounded in action-research addressing the socio-economic struggles of returning Northern Muslims who had been evicted from Northern Sri Lanka by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Hill-Country Tamils displaced from the plantations in the Central highlands, and oppressed caste communities. Our analyses of post-war resettlement issues, rural economic relations, and state-led development policies compounded by class, caste, ethnic, religious, and gender identities inform our understanding of the contemporary workings of majoritarian power and minoritarian resistance in Northern Sri Lanka.
Foregrounding political economic analysis, this essay reframes majoritarianism as a shifting structure linked to the deployment of power that adapts to changing social, economic, and political relations. Such a conception allows for a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of Sri Lanka’s post-war reality, where majorities and minorities are understood as shifting social constituencies related to domination and resistance. We find such reframing necessary to explain the social and political changes observed in our research, and thus the move to go beyond ethnic and numerical claims while advancing a more dynamic understanding of oppression, social exclusion, and progressive change.
Colonial Legacy and Postcolonial Inequalities
The colonial history of the island nation is crucial in understanding the dynamics of majoritarianism. Electorally constructed majorities emerged in late-colonial Ceylon with the Donoughmore Commission of 1928 and its recommendations. Indeed, universal suffrage in 1931—Ceylon was the first country in Asia in which all men and women gained the vote—came with territorial electorates and systems of censuses and administrative divisions. These colonial state reforms categorized populations into fixed ethnic and religious identities associated with geographical locations. As a result, electoral majorities were able to legitimize their claims over state power.
Within this mainstream frame, the concept of majoritarianism is quite straightforward: an outcome of elections that gets institutionalized through constitutional arrangements. Following independence, a new ruling regime emerged in 1956 with an ethno-nationalist call for “Sinhala Only”—undermining the progressive demand for official bilingualism of Tamil and Sinhala as national languages while turning away from elitist affinity for English. Later, the 1972 constitution gave Buddhism the foremost place and demanded that the State protect it, while there were also guarantees for the freedom of religion of other citizens. Over time, this framing of majorities and minorities was reified into political identities that are considered stable, homogeneous, and arranged along ethnic lines. However, we argue that these policies about language and religion are in fact also contestations along lines of class, region, and caste, but get fixed into ethnic categories by drawing on the ideological power of ethno-nationalist mobilizations. Furthermore, our analysis focuses on how sections of the elite take control of state power, advance their economic interests, and direct the bureaucracy in a process to produce majorities that are constantly shifting.
Majoritarian Logics of Power
Our research highlights at least three majoritarian logics linked to state power: first, capitalist exploitation dispossesses local communities for accumulation; second, environmental lobbies push for greater forest cover, conservation, and climate protection to the detriment of local livelihoods; and third, militarization and surveillance create a climate of fear and restrict the mobility of local communities, including access to local resources. These majoritarian logics of power oppress and exclude communities, and construct them as the “other”. We call this majoritarian logics of power because they are claimed to be in the interests of the majority, with state power deployed against any form of resistance.
In this context, for example, if we consider the environmental logic of power in Mullaitivu, the most war-devastated and highly militarized rural district in the North, 34% of the land was considered to be forest at the end of the war. But in the decade after, close to 65.3%of the district has been gazetted as forest land. Such land grabs, which dispossessed the peasantry, were possible because the district was the main base of the LTTE during the war. However, in the post-war context, militarized surveillance and control have been combined with a new environmental logic that does not solely rely on anti-Tamil sentiments.
Relatedly, the case of resettling Northern Muslims in the Musali region of Mannar district compels us to consider how environmental enforcement and “anti-terror” securitization entrench an ethnicized minority as the “other.” Evicted by the LTTE in an act of ethnic cleansing in October 1990 and displaced for almost two and a half decades, this community has been returning to their lands after the war. However, they were denied access to their original lands when Colombo-centered environmentalist groups and the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist constituencies backing the government claimed that the community was resettling in national forest reserves. In the ensuing debates, social geographers like late Shahul Hasbullah showed that, in fact, their original settlements had been overgrown by forest after their displacement. Nevertheless, the Forest Department has taken over most of the land, denying the community’s access to agricultural and grazing land. The community could not protest or even negotiate with authorities about their land rights—after the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, the entire Muslim community was subject to an anti-terror backlash.
The dynamics of power and resistance to different logics of oppression can be further illustrated through the experiences of the Hill-Country Tamils in the North. This community was brought to the island by the colonial government to work in the plantations as indentured labor. Disenfranchised after independence and subjected to violence, including pogroms in the late 1970s and 1980s, sections of the community were displaced to the North of Sri Lanka. However, even in the North that the ethnonationalists claimed to be the homeland for Tamil speakers, they became bonded labor under the landowning gentry in the Vanni region. When the war started, the Hill-Country Tamils were used as cannon fodder, settled in border villages and with their children recruited into the LTTE’s military machine in large numbers. Although they have been resettled again after the war, their lands are bereft of irrigation, and their livelihood options are limited to precarious agricultural day-wage labor, exploitative labor in garment production, and dangerous mine-clearance work. Their case demonstrates how the Tamil nationalist quarter claims the majority position in the North—despite portraying themselves as an oppressed ethnic and numerical minority at the national level—while alienating the Hill-Country Tamils and pushing them to the position of minorities.
Finally, the category of ‘majority’ itself requires complication in the case of Weli-Oya in the Northern Province. The relocation of landless Sinhala peasants, in the 1980s, to border villages in Weli-Oya occurred as part of the World Bank’s Mahaweli Development Programme. The call to “reclaim their ancestral territory,” paired with promises of land for agricultural production, was in fact part of a military strategy of creating a buffer during the civil war. Far from consolidating the Sinhala peasantry as a majority, this resettlement produced new forms of marginalization, where, to date, the settlers are isolated in the region, with limited access to livelihoods, markets, or productive infrastructure. There is considerable resentment on the part of this community about their abandonment by the state.
Moving away from the national level analysis of the workings of power and resistance, our research at the provincial level, addressing hegemonic structures, opens up the conception of majorities with its fluid dynamics. We critique the reductive understanding of ethnic majorities and analyze them through the workings of power at different scales, including its claims to work in the interest of the nation. The three cases above depict how centers of power overlap with each other. Furthermore, power is deployed claiming to be in the interest of majorities. In this context, the provincial or sub-national level of research and analysis provides nuanced insights about oppressive structures and their workings.
Minoritarian alliances of resistance
From our research, we observe that while majorities are constituted through overlapping centers of power, resistance emerges through dynamic coalitions among marginalized communities, sometimes joined by members of the elite. Such resistance is shaped by specific material conditions and political maneuvers that aim to subvert hegemonic structures. Minoritarian struggles highlight how such resistance is galvanized.
Since the end of the civil war, poaching Indian trawlers from Tamil Nadu in India have been ravaging the livelihoods of small-scale fishers of Northern Sri Lanka. Tamil parliamentarians and provincial council representatives initially refused to address the issue, as they saw Tamil Nadu as a supporter and leverage for their Tamil nationalist politics vis-à-vis the Sri Lankan state. However, since 2012, several campaigns and protests in the north by the fishing community have called out the political class and Tamil Nationalist constituencies. This struggle by the fishing community, sometimes in alliance with Christian priests and activists, fractured the Tamil nationalist position, pushing a section of the Tamil political elite to take on the poaching by Tamil Nadu trawlers. Eventually, this resistance led to a ban on bottom trawling in Sri Lankan waters and bilateral negotiations between India and Sri Lanka in 2016.
In another example, rapid financialization after the civil war led working people, particularly women, into the debt trap, with microfinance companies lending at high annual interest rates of 40%-220%.The indebted women were framed by a majority view consisting of government officials, bankers, and sometimes even the local community leaders as being extravagant and lacking financial literacy when they borrowed money for their daily household needs. Nevertheless, rural and urban women, in alliance with the co-operative movement, engaged the Finance Minister and the Central Bank Governor to take on the powerful finance companies. This alliance subverted state policy and led to changes, including an interest rate cap; it also strengthened the co-operative movement as an alternative source for credit.
Finally, following the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019, Islamophobic attacks horrified the Muslim community. In order to stand in solidarity with them, the Jaffna People’s Forum for Co-existence was formed by Muslims and progressives from the Tamil community. This network in Jaffna was a crucial space—meeting alternatively in churches and mosques—in support of economically vulnerable Northern Muslims, whose mosques and homes came under increased surveillance by the military, ideological attacks by the Tamil media, and who were threatened by local goons when they undertook daily wage work activities such as collecting scrap metal. At the center of the Forum were Muslim women who organized an alliance with Tamil women, including around shared livelihood concerns.
These examples highlight how resistance by those who are oppressed inevitably draws on alliances that go beyond ethnic or other reified identities, including at times even reaching out to elite or “majority” actors. Furthermore, in the spaces of contestations and struggles against hegemonic forms of dispossession, both the categories of “majorities” and “minorities” tend to shift as certain elite actors shift in solidarity with the oppressed while others reorganize themselves to suppress or fracture the alliances created for resistance.
Conclusion
Our research on struggles in post-war Northern Sri Lanka has shaped the way we theorize the categories of “majorities” and “minorities” and critique reductive conceptions of ethnicity. We propose a more dynamic understanding of social divisions, drawing on the workings of power. In particular, attention to majoritarian logics of power and minoritarian alliances of resistance illustrates the fluid nature of these categories. While placing much importance on state power, we disaggregate its deployment into bureaucratic, military, and other institutions of the state. We also see state power working in conjunction with capital, environmentalist, and security systems in the interests of certain local elite and global actors. Furthermore, we argue that minorities embedded in particular material conditions confront oppression and exclusion and subvert hegemony through alliances of resistance. In this understanding, hegemonic majorities and resisting minorities are contingent formations with agency that produce fluid consciousness about their identities. In the post-war Northern Sri Lankan context, theorizing majorities and minorities through a lens of power and resistance helps us better analyze social relations and changes.
Notes
[1] This essay draws on five years of collaborative research by the two authors, and another decade of research by one author in Northern Sri Lanka after the end of the civil war.
Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna.
Yathursha Ulakentheran is a researcher from the Young Researchers’ Network.
Thumbnail credit: "Jaffna city" by සඔපින is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.