Culture, politics and economy in the Sri Lankan crisis

Jonathan Spencer

Social Anthropology

University of Edinburgh

In discussions of nationalism in Asia it is hard to avoid the temptation to present Sri Lanka as some sort of extreme case: most violent, most unsuccessful, most divisive? Yet the current stumbling moves towards peace in the 20-year-old civil war are based on enough change in political and ideological formation to warn against premature conclusions.

In terms of the broad themes of this meeting, there are some obvious parts of the Sri Lankan story that would bear retelling in a comparative context, notably the weakness of anti-colonial nationalism, and the increasing early hegemony of sectional ‘cultural’ nationalisms, starting in the decade after Independence. At this stage in my thinking, I would like the bulk of my argument, though, to concentrate on the watershed year of 1983, when officially sponsored anti-Tamil violence pushed the country into civil war. In its actions and rhetoric, the UNP government of J.R. Jayawardene which came to power in 1977, combined and entangled elements from both sides of the divide sketched in the workshop proposal: a strong rhetoric of popular developmentalism, and heavy use of the symbols and gestures of majoritarian Buddhist nationalism, an apparently neoliberal economic policy which somehow increased the state’s control of key resource flows. And, above all, the entwined growth of political participation and political violence. In 1983 ruling party cadres were in the forefront of attacks on Tamil persons and Tamil property, prompting many more young Tamils to join the secessionist LTTE. Indian intervention in 1987 prompted young Sinhala people to rise against the government under the leadership of the radical nationalist JVP. The southern insurrection was quelled by the early 1990s, but the violence in the north and east has continued until the last year or so, when a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire was instituted.

If it still makes sense to treat 1983 as the key moment in Sri Lanka’s steady political collapse, how do these themes look twenty years on? In the north of the country, political moves have been dominated by the LTTE, an authoritarian movement, strongly culturalist in some of its actions, but as much oriented to its own, characteristically inchoate, vision of the future, as to any aspect of the Tamil past. In the south, war fatigue has lessened commitment to the cultural politics of the 1970s and 1980s, while liberals despairingly appeal to the corrosive impact of the market economy as the best corrective to the LTTE’s authoritarian claims in the north and east. In Sri Lanka, the tensions between ‘culture’, ‘politics’ and ‘development’ still structure the political field, albeit in different ways from the early 1980s; but the situation is , to put it mildly, unstable.