India–Sri Lanka Relations
Sri Lanka (Ceylon until 1972), with its mixture of Buddhist and Hindu institutions, has always been Indian in culture, though its identity is distinct from its northern neighbor's. The Sinhalese language occurs only in Sri Lanka and has a distinguished literary tradition. Likewise, Theravada Buddhism remained the religion of the island, while Hinduism displaced it on the subcontinent.
From the third century BCE, Ceylon was involved in the politics of southern India for more than a millennium. Beginning in 177 BCE, it faced a succession of invaders from southern India and itself invaded mainland kingdoms as political alliances shifted, until they finally broke down in the twelfth century. In the fourteenth century, the Sinhalese kingdom moved near the coast, where the rulers, originally southern Indian traders, founded the Kotte Kingdom (1415–1580). Merchant communities moved back and forth between Ceylon and the mainland. These included Chettiar traders and bankers who traveled throughout South and Southeast Asia. Muslims came for trade and on pilgrimage to what they believe is the footprint of Adam on a mountain still called Adam's Peak.
European colonial rule (1517–1948) restrained relations between Ceylon and India. The British East India Company briefly united Ceylon with India, but in 1802 the British removed it from company control and ruled it directly as a Crown Colony. The governments of the two colonies were separate at the level of the British Parliament, sometimes leading to disagreements on trade, labor migration, navigation, and transport.
People of Indian Origin
During British colonial rule, Indians and Ceylonese were British subjects, and many Indians migrated to the island to work on plantations. Administrative separation and the British compulsion to classify their subjects, however, discouraged assimilation. Earlier migrants, such as the karava and salagama castes, who arrived before the colonial era, became fully Sinhalese; but during British rule communities of Indian origin were considered "Indian" even after generations on the island.
With British support, Chettiars eventually dominated domestic finance in Ceylon. They traded between India and Ceylon and were intermediaries between British bankers and Ceylonese clients, both as guarantors for borrowers, and as moneylenders who borrowed money from banks for relending at high interest. Since many Chettiars retained their Indian identity, their role occasioned anti-Indian animosity on the part of Ceylonese traders and planters.
Plantation workers were and are primarily of southern Indian origin. The resident labor population grew as coffee, tea, and then rubber plantations advanced across central and southwestern Ceylon. The Indian government could not insist on the protection that indentured migrants had elsewhere because they could not control emigration, due to the proximity of the island. The Indian Emigration Act No. 7 of 1922 demanded reformed treatment of Indian immigrants on threat of prohibiting emigration altogether, a threat finally enforced in August 1939. Indian intervention resulted in improved wages, educational opportunities, housing, and health services for plantation laborers.
Tamil immigrants sought employment in other occupations in Ceylon, often in menial, low-wage occupations. Recent Indian immigrants made up about one-sixth of the population in the 1920s and 1930s— a serious concern for the indigenous population, and a matter of legitimate national interest for India. When the Great Depression struck, Sinhalese politicians condemned merchants, moneylenders, and laborers of Indian origin.
Under the Sinhalese-dominated State Council (1931–1946), voting rights of people of Indian origin were restricted. Jawaharlal Nehru (India's first primeminister) and D. S. Senanayake (prime minister of Ceylon, 1947–1952) met fruitlessly several times in the 1940s to settle the question of their citizenship. Ceylon finally passed three citizenship and franchise acts that effectively made people of Indian origin stateless. As recently as November 1964, only 140,185 people who had applied for citizenship by registration were granted it, while 975,000 remained stateless. That year India and Ceylon negotiated the Sirima-Shastri Pact, under which Ceylon agreed to grant citizenship to 300,000 people (later raised to 375,000) and their progeny. More than 630,000 applied, but when the pact expired in October 1981, only 162,000 people of Indian origin had been registered as Sri Lankan citizens. In the same period, 373,900 received Indian citizenship and 284,300 were repatriated to India. Legislation in the 1980s finally granted citizenship to the remainder.
India has served as a temporary home for Tamil refugees fleeing the ethnic fighting in Sri Lanka. Here, a Sri Lankan Tamil family stands with their belongings on Manar Island, Sri Lanka, after their return from India. (HOWARD DAVIES/CORBIS)
Civil War
India has been active in several ways in the ethnic conflict ravaging Sri Lanka. India's responses were influenced by its own Tamil separatist movement, which waned in the 1960s, and its position after the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war as the most powerful South Asian state. After 1977, Sri Lanka abandoned neutralist foreign policy, becoming openly pro-Western when India was forging closer Soviet ties.
As violence against Tamils increased in Sri Lanka, militant separatists organized and trained in Tamil Nadu in southern India, possibly with Indian support. When civil war erupted in July 1983, more than 100,000 refugees from northern Sri Lanka fled to India. These events, and increased violence by security forces against Sri Lankan Tamils, made the crisis the major political issue in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Mediation by India's central government began after July 1983, and Indian-facilitated proposals to resolve the conflict were presented to an All Party Conference that met fruitlessly throughout 1984. President Jayawardene of Sri Lanka and India's prime minister Rajiv Gandhi met in early June 1985, and the Sri Lankan government and Tamil organizations held peace talks in August at Thimpu in Bhutan, but these efforts failed too. In late 1986 talks were held in Delhi, which arrived at a proposal for devolution of power that would allow considerable autonomy at the provincial level.
After severe fighting in Jaffna in April and May 1987, India intervened directly. India wanted neither Sinhalese hegemony over the Tamil minority (unacceptable to Indian Tamils) nor the establishment of a separate state (which would encourage secessionist movements among India's Tamil population). An agreement between the governments of Sri Lanka and India "to establish peace and normalcy in Sri Lanka" was signed on 29 July 1987. To ensure implementation, India stationed more than 60,000 troops in the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka as the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF).
By October 1987, the IPKF was waging all-out war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). IPKF maintained order in parts of northern Sri Lanka and helped conduct elections in 1988 and 1989, but withdrew in March 1990 after more than 1,200 soldiers had died. On 21 May 1991, an LTTE suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, who as prime minister had negotiated the peace agreement. India banned the LTTE and has not intervened since, although it opposes creation of a separate Tamil state and has been asked by some Tamils to facilitate peace talks.
India and Sri Lanka signed a Free Trade Agreement in 1998 and were working to eliminate trade restrictions in early 2000. Both nations are active in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which was established in 1985 and also includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan. Tensions between India and Pakistan have impeded progress toward multinational cooperation, however, and the November 1999 summit was postponed indefinitely because of India's protest of the military coup in Pakistan.
Further Reading
Bullion, Alan J. (1995) India, Sri Lanka and the Tamil Crisis, 1976–94. New York: Pinter.
Dubey, Ravi Kant. (1993) Indo-Sri Lankan Relations with Special Reference to the Tamil Problem. 2d ed. New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications.
Gunaratna, Rohan. (1993) Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka: The Role of India's Intelligence Agencies. Colombo, Sri Lanka: South Asian Network on Conflict Research.
Muni, S. D. (1993) Pangs of Proximity: India and Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage/PRIO.
Sahadevan, P. (1995) India and Overseas Indians: The Case of Sri Lanka. Delhi: Kalinga Publications.
This is the complete article, containing 1,292 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
INDIA SRI LANKA FRIENDSHIP ROXXXXXX!