Here is a short but insightful interview from Himal Southasian, recorded weeks before the defeat of the LTTE and the death of their leader Prabhakaran on May 18, 2009. In it, two former LTTE members explain the factors behind the rise and fall of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka. In the excerpt below, they tackle the rise of the movement; read the interview for their reasons behind its fall. (Registration may be required but is well worth the effort.)

What followed from the 1950s onwards was the burgeoning of a virulent form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, and the passing of a series of discriminatory legislation against minorities and Tamils in particular. The Sinhala Only Act was passed in 1956; the Republican Constitution was adopted in 1972, giving Buddhism a place of privilege in the constitution while removing the protection that was afforded minorities in the previous constitution; and immediately afterwards, the infamous policy of standardisation of marks for university admissions was also implemented in 1972, which Tamils found to be discriminatory. This came alongside colonisation attempts that had begun in the 1950s in the Eastern Province, where a lot of Tamils lived, radically altering the local demography and reducing Tamil and Muslim representation in Parliament. Non-violent protests by Tamil parliamentarians and their supporters were responded to with periodic violence by the state, throughout this period.

In my opinion, the minority leadership did not quite understand the forces driving this Sinhala nationalism. Therefore, rather than build a strong grassroots democratic movement, the minority leaders felt that their problems could be fixed by going into deals with the political leadership at the Centre, thereby securing concessions for their communities. The standard official narrative of Tamil nationalism will always tell us that the Tamil leadership waged a decades-long democratic struggle against the Sri Lankan state before giving way to the militant movement. I believe this to be incorrect.

The militarisation of the movement started not as a result of exhausting methods of protracted democratic struggle, but as a response to the 1972 standardisation of marks referred to earlier. This affected a miniscule percentage (about 0.01 percent) of the Sri Lankan population – the Jaffna and Colombo Tamil middle-class and upper-class youth. Years of poor economic conditions during the 1960s and 1970s prompted the first JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna] insurrection of mostly poor and rural Sinhala youth. Following its merciless putdown by the then government, the policy of standardisation was set forth to placate anti-government sentiment in the south. This policy required Tamils to have higher marks for acceptance into university, which marginalised Tamil youths who looked to university education as a means to secure employment in the state sector. The perceived discrimination catalysed the taking-up of arms by select middle- and lower-middle-class Tamil youth of Jaffna, initially.

Recruitment of people from the poorer sections of the Tamil community into the militant movement happened afterwards. Because of the narrow class composition of the movement’s leadership, many marginalised groups – Muslims, Up-country Tamils, Dalits, Tamils who hailed from the Eastern Province and the Vanni – were alienated and excluded from the so-called ‘Tamil nation’. While the ‘bourgeois’ struggle waged on, Sinhala Buddhist nationalism responded with violence, through periodic government-instigated pogroms against the Tamils. It was after the Black July killings of 1983 that Tamil militancy mushroomed.