17 results in Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
3 - Kulaks to Clerks
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary
In 1954, Sir Ivor Jennings, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ceylon and a key figure in the decolonisation period, described a new political phenomenon that he had identified: an ‘undercurrent of opinion which has no direct political representation’:
It is aggressively nationalist and aggressively Buddhist. In language policy it is anti-English; in religion it is anti-Christian; in foreign policy it is anti- Western; and in economic policy it is both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist. Socially it might be described as anti-Colombo, because it consists primarily of English educated young men from the provinces, the sons of small cultivators, minor officials, shop-keepers, and the lower middle-class groups generally (Jennings 1954: 344).
Jennings's brief sketch of this group of young educated lower-middle class men from the provinces is a historical freeze-frame of a social avalanche in the making. What was an ‘undercurrent of opinion’ without political representation in 1954 had just two years later, gained enormous momentum, and went on to dominate and permanently transform Sri Lanka's nascent electoral politics.
The first phase of the nationalist project as Miroslav Hroch describes it, is a time when a small group of intellectual activists initiate scholarly inquiry on linguistic, historical and cultural attributes of the nation (Hroch 1985). In a second phase, these ideas gain some circulation among intellectual circles, but have little political influence before they reach the third stage of mass nationalism. This early cultural nationalist phase of Sinhala nationalism took place roughly over the span of a century from 1850–1950, under the Buddhist revivalist movement, and over the intellectual life-span of Sinhala nationalism's iconic founding father, Anagarika Dharmapala (Seneviratne 1999, Kemper 2015). After a century of incubation in the cultural nationalist phase, Sinhala nationalism was transformed into a contemporary mass nationalism in a moment of explosive political transformation in the mid-1950s, and the angry young men that Jennings describes were the main protagonists.
The trigger factor that catalysed the Sinhala nationalist mobilisation of the time was over the official status of the Sinhala language. The necessity to promote the vernacular languages in place of English had featured as a pending item on the political agenda since at least the early 1940s.
7 - Cosmopolitan Capitalism
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary
Today, Sri Lanka has a great window of opportunity. The United National Front (UNF) Government that came to power in December 2001 with a mandate to secure peace and accelerate economic growth has already embarked on a bold program of peace/reconciliation and a comprehensive set of economic policy/institutional reforms to promote private sector-led growth (World Bank 2003b: 1).
Introduction
This chapter is concerned with the United National Party (UNP) before and during their period in power as the leading partner in the United National Front (UNF) coalition government between December 2001 and April 2004. It broadly describes the circumstances under which their agenda for a ceasefire and negotiations with the LTTE came into being in the late 1990s, and develops an analytical narrative for its subsequent failure in terms of its economic agenda. The material presented in this chapter is not stand-alone, and is integrally connected to a historical contextual discussion, literature review, and issues of theoretical relevance discussed in preceding chapters, as well as to the subsequent chapter that discusses the JVP. Following from the questions raised in the previous chapter, this chapter explores the collapse of the 2001–2004 peace process, and in particular, why the Sinhala Buddhist majority turned against it in 2004.
The matter presented here is based largely upon primary material gathered during 2002–07, including personal interviews with a large number of people in the UNP-led government and party structure, including the prime minister, cabinet secretary, UNP chairman, and the treasury secretary. In addition, it draws on interviews and documents from members of leading corporate associations and aid donors, such as the Employers Federation, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, ‘business for peace’ NGO organisations, the World Bank and IMF. This material was combined and contrasted with a review of the available English language news media sources of that period, translated compilations of the vernacular media, financial statistics, secondary literature, and interviews with a number of trade unionists, opposition political parties, journalists, and civil society activists.
A Party in Reform
The UNP that came to power in December 2001, with an audacious agenda of ceasefire and negotiations with the LTTE, was a substantially different party from the one that had lost power seven years earlier in August 1994.
5 - Military Fiscalism
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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‘We live because of our son who is in the army’ (cited in Lindberg 2012: 69)
In the early 1970s, a controversial study by the economist Emile Benoit made the unusual and counter-intuitive finding that there was a positive, causal correlation between military expenditures and economic growth in poorer countries. Military spending, Benoit concluded, had a Keynesian fiscal effect on aggregate demand, generating positive multiplier effects. It created beneficial externalities for the civilian economy by
feeding, clothing, and housing a number of people who would otherwise have to be fed, housed, and clothed by the civilian economy-and sometimes doing so, especially in LDCs, in ways that involve sharply raising their nutritional and other consumption standards and expectations (Benoit 1978: 277).
Benoit's findings provoked a series of critical rejoinders in the coming years, in which the empirical validity of the results and their theoretical foundations were subject to vigorous challenge (Ball 1983, Faini et al 1984, Deger 1986). At about the same time, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran's classic work on monopoly capital also saw a positive correlation between military spending and economic growth, although this argument primarily applied to mature capitalist economies. One of the key links posited by Sweezy and Baran is that millions of jobs are generated by military expenditure, and this, in turn, absorbs the reserve army of labour:
Some six or seven million workers, more than 9 per cent of the labor force, are now dependent for jobs on the arms budget. If military spending were reduced once again to pre-Second World War proportions, the nation's economy would return to a state of profound depression, characterised by unemployment rates of 15 per cent and up, such as prevailed during the 1930s (Baran and Sweezy 1966: 531).
This chapter deploys a modified version of what can be termed the ‘military fiscalism’ explanation used by Benoit, and Baran and Sweezy to the context of the relationship between economic development, political stability, and the civil war in Sri Lanka. In brief, it sets out an argument that the high levels of military expenditure associated with a prolonged civil war had a positive impact in addressing youth unemployment and rural poverty in some parts of the country.
Tables
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Figures
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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6 - The ‘Best and Last’ Chance for Peace
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary
The Context
The Cease-Fire Agreement (CFA) of February 2002, and the peace process that followed, gave rise to unprecedented optimism that the long-standing civil war had finally come to an end (Saravanamuttu 2003, Balasingham 2004, Uyangoda and Perera 2002, Uyangoda 2002, Goodhand et al 2005). With strong public support, and with the strong diplomatic and financial support of the international community, the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) engaged in six rounds of direct negotiations, and had reached substantial agreement on critical conceptual issues. By late 2002, a final settlement of the conflict came clearly within sight as the Norwegian mediators announced that both parties had reached a ‘paradigm shift’ in their respective positions, and had agreed on the broad outlines of a future settlement:
[T]he parties have agreed to explore a political solution founded on the principle of internal self-determination in areas of historical habitation of the Tamil-speaking peoples, based on a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka.
The LTTE's chief negotiator, Anton Balasingham, announced that ‘both the parties have made an unprecedented historic decision to work out a political formula for the solution of the protracted ethnic conflict.’ Chief government negotiatior, Professor G.L.Peiris, was equally optimistic, announcing: ‘I think an interim solution can certainly be arrived at in a matter of months rather than years.’ By then, the cease-fire had already held for an entire year, the longest cessation of hostilities since 1983. There remained numerous irritants on the ground level, as well as some clear provocations, but nothing of a scale that could disturb the clear momentum of the peace process. The benefits of peace were so overwhelming and self-evident that it seemed irrational that either side would ever want to return to war. There was a warm relationship and considerable goodwill between the LTTE and government, epitomised by the reported bonhomie that developed between the two chief negotiators. On the ground level, the return to normality was characterised by widespread reconstruction, the return of refugees, the removal of military checkpoints, the de-mining of roads and farmlands, and a general atmosphere of optimism.
But within three years of the euphoric ‘Oslo Declaration’, the peace process had unravelled to the point of complete collapse, and both sides were clearly preparing for a renewed phase of war.
Frontmatter
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Bibliography
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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4 - The Politics of Market Reform at a Time of Ethnic Conflict
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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In 1977, the newly elected UNP government of J.R. Jayewardene initiated a landmark change in the direction of Sri Lanka's economic policies. After almost four decades of the steady expansion of state welfare provision, and of the heavy regulation of private sector economic activity, Jayewardene inaugurated a risky and radical programme of market liberalisation. Sri Lanka was one of the first countries in the developing world – after Chile and Indonesia – to embrace market liberalisation, and soon enjoyed the benefits of a wave of foreign aid by western donors who were eager for these to be seen to succeed. In the first two years of the reforms, the UNP deregulated foreign trade, removed import controls, devalued the exchange rate by 43 percent, eliminated subsidies on food and petrol, liberalised internal agricultural markets, reduced export duties, encouraged foreign investment, established export processing zones, modified labour legislation, and deregulated credit markets (Athukorala and Jayasuriya 1994, Jayewardene et al 1987, Stern 1984, White and Wignaraja 1992, Herring 1987).
The economic reform period, and the aftermath of the 1977 elections also witnessed a paradoxical escalation in the island's ethnic conflict. After three decades of pursuing federalism through parliamentary means, the centre of gravity of Tamil political activity was shifting decisively in the direction of separatism in terms of its goals, and militancy in terms of methods. The 1977 elections had led to the ascendancy of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), an umbrella organisation formed largely out of the old Federal Party (FP), which had contested and won a decisive share of the Tamil vote on the basis of an explicitly separatist platform. Over the period 1977–83, the Colombo-based parliamentary leaders of the TULF were overtaken and eclipsed by the Jaffna-based militant youth groups that they had earlier patronised and presumed to control.
It had long been supposed by the UNP leadership of that time that faster economic growth, and a reduction in youth unemployment would help to address the economic drivers of the ethnic conflict. For a combination of economic and social-cultural factors, the UNP's traditional support base in the business community has been the segment of society least invested in the logic of Sinhala nationalism, and most interested in bringing a quick end to the ethnic conflict.
Contents
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Preface
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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This book has its origins in a DPhil thesis at Oxford, submitted in 2008, and has since been much revised, updated, and augmented. It is based on a long period of research and engagement in Sri Lanka which began in 2002, and which continues to the time of writing in 2018. Over the years, I have benefited immensely from the generosity and support of many individuals and institutions, starting with my supervisors, Frances Stewart and David Washbrook, and the examiners, Nandini Gooptu and Jonathan Goodhand. I am very grateful for research funding provided by the Carnegie Corporation and the Wingate Trust, and to the institutional support provided by the University of Oxford, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, the University of York, and the London School of Economics. The Department of International Development at the LSE kindly provided me with sabbatical leave in 2016-17 to complete the manuscript. More importantly, I would like to sincerely thank the many dear friends, colleagues, well-wishers, teachers, librarians, and students, in each of these institutions, who have provided guidance, assistance, and sustenance.
Parts of this book have appeared earlier in different forms. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as a chapter in Stokke, K. and J. Uyangoda (eds.), Liberal Peace in Question: Politics of State and Market Reforms in Sri Lanka (Anthem). Chapter 5 had a previous life as ‘The Politics of Market Reform at a Time of Civil War’, Economic and Political Weekly 46 (49): 67-75. Composite parts drawn from chapters 6 and 7 have formed chapters in Newman, E., R, Paris, and O. Richmond (eds.), New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding (UNU Press), and in Raviraman, K., and R. Lipschutz (eds.), Corporate Social Responsibility: Comparative Critiques (Palgrave). An older version of chapter 8 was published as ‘Sectarian Socialism: The Politics of Sri Lanka's JVP’. Modern Asian Studies 44 (3): 567-602. I have drawn on arguments first developed in a 2015 article ‘Democracy, Development and the Executive Presidency in Sri Lanka’ Third World Quarterly, 36 (4): 670-690 in chapters 1, 2, and 9.
The responses I have had from these earlier publications has helped greatly in improving this text, and also in shaping my own intellectual evolution over this period. I must also thank two anonymous reviewers who provided very valuable and thorough comments on the manuscript.
Index
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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9 - Conclusions: Elites, Masses and the Rajapaksa Presidency
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary
In May 2017, construction workers building Colombo's new Shangri La hotel reported the discovery of human skeletal remains under the site. For a brief period, work was paused. Discomfort and embarrassment served to interrupt the forward march of development, as people wondered what might have been uncovered, and what it might lead to. Who were these people? How did they die? How did their bodies come to be buried in that spot? The ten acre piece of land in question was previously the headquarters of the Sri Lankan army, and had been the nerve-centre of military operations during the civil war. Were these the bodies of those who had gone missing or who disappeared in that period?
Shortly after the end of the war in 2009, the army was relocated in order to release this prime piece of real estate facing the Arabian sea and Galle Face Green for commercial development. The Hong Kong-based Shangri La group which purchased it had reportedly invested US$600 million to transform the site into a majestic and exclusive property development with a hotel, luxury apartments, and a shopping mall.
Upon the discovery of the human remains, an investigation was announced. In the meanwhile, construction work resumed and was completed within six months. The Shangri La hotel was ceremonially opened by the president in November 2017. No further information on the investigation was released, or is likely to emerge, so that the discovery of the bodies under this temple to affluence and futurism remains only as a macabre metaphor – a glimpse of the way in which development is being used to bury the conflict and consign it to the past. This task may not be easy: with over 65,000 complaints of missing people that have accumulated in various commissions of enquiry over the course of the war, there are possibly many more such skeletons to be uncovered in the years to come.
In this book, development and conflict have been articulated in terms of the dynamics of two separate spheres. On the one hand, as Cowen and Shenton (1996) explain, there are the ‘immanent’ processes by which real world socio-economic transformations affect the dynamics of nationalist consciousness, ethnic politics, and the course of the civil war.
Dedication
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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8 - Sectarian Socialism
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary
Between 2001 and 2004, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) emerged at the vanguard of a broad campaign of opposition to the peace process underway between the UNP-led government of Ranil Wickremasinghe and the LTTE. In the months after the signing of the ceasefire agreement in February 2002, the JVP articulated a powerful and coherent ideo-political programme of opposition to the internationally-sponsored peace process, and its foreign sponsors, which it propagated energetically and relentlessly. It successfully capitalised on the growing momentum of economic discontent against the UNF's market reform policies and used its growing influence in the union movement to instigate a series of public sector strikes in hospitals and trains in late 2003 and early 2004. The JVP played a decisive role in mobilising and coalescing public opinion against the peace process, and in bringing about its collapse.
After the 2004 parliamentary election, the JVP's influence as a stubborn and uncompromising coalition partner within the new United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) government contributed to the failure of all subsequent attempts over the following two years to re-ignite the peace process. The JVP posed impossible pre-conditions to be met before agreeing to talks, refused to tolerate any agreement with the LTTE over joint post-tsunami aid distribution in early 2005, and backed the successful presidential campaign of Mahinda Rajapaksa on a platform explicitly opposed to the peace process. From early 2006 onwards, the JVP openly promoted a military solution to the conflict, goading the government to resume the war that finally resumed in July–August 2006.
This chapter examines the role of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the collapse of the 2001–2004 peace process, and draws on this as an entry point to a broader historical exploration of the JVP as a phenomenon, and to the central themes raised in this book. The material in this chapter must be viewed in close connection to that on the UNP in the previous chapter, which is in many ways, its mirror image. The evolution of the JVP's anti-peace process agenda occurred in parallel to, and in the context of, the same circumstances within which the UNP developed its pro-peace agenda.
1 - Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Sri Lanka's civil war is over, but the nationalist ideologies that gave rise to it live on, and continue to define the parameters of a post-war future. At the end of the war in 2009, the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa consciously prioritised economic development in order to rebuild and catch up. But development also served a larger purpose beyond physical reconstruction: economic growth and transformation, it was suggested, would address the underlying drivers of grievance. It would reintegrate the war-torn north and east, rebuild legitimacy for the state through service provision, and create new ground realities that would help to transcend the basis for the resurgence of a violent separatist threat.
At the inauguration of a new expressway in 2011, Rajapaksa explained: ‘Separatist tendencies will fade away when we have better road connectivity’. In that sense, post-war development contained not just an economic purpose, but also functioned as a project of ersatz conflict resolution. In lieu of the substantive but difficult tasks of forging reconciliation, redressing past injustices, and negotiating constitutional futures, Rajapaksa instead proposed modern infrastructure, a doubling of the national per capita income, and an eight percent growth rate.
Indeed, much in the name of development did transpire. Beyond the ‘dead cat bounce’ revival of economic activity after the end of the war, significant strides were made in the restoration of agriculture and fishing, as well as in physical infrastructure. Economic growth increased steadily, and there was a historic reduction in the national incidence of poverty. The Rajapaksa period will, for all its failings, be remembered by posterity for the ornaments to infrastructure that it built – the railways, expressways, bridges, airports and ports, and the urban beautification projects of Colombo.
However, at the end of its nine-year span in power, and five years after the end of the conflict, Rajapaksa's evident record of post-war development had failed in one important aspect. Sri Lanka, it is common to hear, is post-war, not post-conflict. Far from rendering the ethnic conflict and Tamil grievances superfluous, the economic development approach had, if anything, embittered Tamils more. Even as many evidently benefitted from it, and became complicit in its webs of patronage and affluence, they also resented it, and voted against Rajapaksa in overwhelming numbers when the opportunity arose, bringing about his electoral defeat in 2015.
2 - Sinhala Nationalism
- Rajesh Venugopal, London School of Economics and Political Science
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Sinhala nationalism is the dominant form of political consciousness in contemporary Sri Lanka. As what might easily be characterised as an illiberal ‘ethnic’ nationalism of the east rather than the western ‘civic’ ideal, it is also widely identified as a serious challenge to the functioning of liberal democratic institutions, and to multi-ethnic coexistence. Sinhala nationalism features as a central element in the literature on contemporary Sri Lankan politics, and in particular, on the ethnic conflict. Understanding Sinhala nationalism is thus of critical significance, and this imperative has inspired an extensive and sophisticated literature.
This includes the historicity of Sinhala identity (Gunawardena 1985, Dharmadasa 1992, Roberts 2004), the Buddhist revival and colonialism (Malalgoda 1976, Bond 1992, Tambiah 1992, Blackburn 2010, Rogers 1994), the Mahavamsa (Kemper 1991), colonial forms of knowledge (Rogers 2004, Kemper 1991), the State Council, Olcott and Dharmapala (Seneviratne 1999, Amunugama 1985, Roberts 1997, Kemper 2015), archaeology, the rediscovery of Anuradhapura and the Sinhala Buddhist past (Nissan 1989, Kemper 1991, Jeganathan 1995, De Silva 2013), the evolution of ‘protestant’ and post-protestant Buddhism (Obeyesekere 1970, Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988), the changing role of monks (Seneviratne 1999, Kemper 1980, Bartholomeusz 2005, Kent 2015), temperance, the 1915 riots, language and literature (Coperahewa 2012, Rambukwella 2012, Field 2014), the transformation of village society, politics, and religious practices (Spencer 1990, Brow 1997, Woost 1994), the discourse of peasant preservation, and development projects (Brow 1997, Tennekoon 1988), the nationalist upsurge of 1956 (Kearney 1967), and the constitution (Schonthal 2016, Wijeyeratne 2013).
But despite the large amount of historical and anthropological literature, there is surprisingly little research available on the actual insinuation and operation of nationalism in the contemporary political sphere. Sinhala nationalism is widely deployed as an independent variable to explain political outcomes and as an explanatory prop. It is often thought of as a bubbling cauldron, a dormant evil genie, or some base instinct in the masses that is awakened by irresponsible politicians. But being seen as a self-evident evil in this way, nationalism itself is under-explained and its political operation is obscured.
Succinct, abstract definitions of nationalism are often found wanting and inadequate, in part, because the task is complex: it involves creating a generalisable, universally applicable, comparable category out of something inherently very particular.
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