On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: “The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory … we have completely defeated terrorism.” The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over—this endless war that had pitted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the security forces of the government of Sri Lanka since 1983. It had sunk deep into the psyche of the people of all communities, and its terrible violence had elicited much international attention and reprimand. President Rajapaksa then addressed his citizens in the Tamil language, promising reconciliation and embracing the Tamil-speaking people in his program of recovery for the ravaged North. A “northern spring” would soon come. On the streets of Colombo, there was a feeling of trepidation, while celebrations, some spontaneous and others orchestrated by sycophantic politicians, peppered the capital. The day had been given as a special holiday for the war-weary people to celebrate by eating kiribath (milk rice) and launching (peaceful) rockets, as fireworks are commonly called. People waved the Lion Flag and compared the president to the famous second-century bce Sinhalese hero Dutugemunu, another son of the Ruhuna (Southern Sri Lanka) who succeeded in conquering Anuradhapura from the Tamil king Elara, whom he famously slew with a dart. King Dutugemunu has long been a folk hero in Sri Lanka for uniting the country under a single rule.

In the Colombo suburb of Wellawatte, however, where many Tamils live, shops were kept closed and the mood was more reflective. If they felt that Prabhakaran's death was a liberation, Tamil shopkeepers and passersby could not yet say it openly. The shadow of the violent outfit that had spread fear and practiced covert extortion still loomed over them despite its collapse in the past few days. Perhaps they had a few doubts about how much weight to give to words and promises, especially when pronounced by a political leader, or perhaps, like me, they had read a recent article in the government newspaper, the Daily News, announcing that the president wanted nine stupas built in the nine provinces of the country to signify its reunification under a single flag. As an afterthought, the report added that alongside this program, a place of worship for Hindu, Muslim, and Christian devotees would also be built in each of the nine provinces to promote unity and fraternity among all communities.Footnote ¹

For many, there would be a sense of déjà vu. More than thirty years ago, in his first address to Parliament, the leader of the United National Party (UNP), J. R. Jayawardena, proclaimed the idea of a new social order, a “Dharmista Samajaya,” which his regime would bring about together with neoliberal reforms of the economy. Jayawardena not only had the presidential flag redrawn to include the dhamma cakka (wheel of righteousness), he also initiated a meritorious ceremony of lighting 84,000 oil lamps in honor of the Buddha, emulating Emperor Asoka's building of 84,000 Buddhist viharas (monasteries) in India.Footnote ² Jayawardena's regime from 1977 to 1989 would prove to be the most notorious for its suppression of labor and minority rights, culminating in the 1983 riots during which more than 3,000 Tamils lost their lives.

Consolidating a Political Majority

Another segment of President Rajapaksa's speech related to the general landscape of politics in the country:

In this one paragraph, the president summed up his new politics of patriotism for postcolonial Sri Lanka. First, Sri Lanka would no longer have minorities (no mention was made, however, of any imminent disappearance of a majority). This statement in effect redefined the idea of multicultural society embodied and endorsed in the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of 1987. In the new civic nation of the president's speech, citizens/patriots would be ethnically undifferentiated, although Rajapaksa seemed to hold out the promise that all religions and ethnic identities would be respected.

The idea of a civic nation is commendable but utopian. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, any attempt to construct “one people” involves marginalizing some. Furthermore, all examples of civic nations—the United States and France are cases in point—have anchored their liberal principles in a particularist legacy. Most liberal democratic political cultures reflect the norms, history, habits, and prejudices of majority groups. They usually attempt to foster a political identity whose political content makes it compatible with a variety of practices and beliefs. Moreover, the new patriotism enunciated in this speech has little in common with the postnational or constitutional patriotism that has been theorized as an alternative form of loyalty, compatible with universal values but distinct from and superior to nationalism. It has little in common even with a civic patriotism that recognizes the public sphere cannot be neutral.Footnote ³ On the contrary, the president's vision merges nation and state and promotes a love of country based on a particular reading of the history and foundation myth of the Sinhala people in which all other groups—those formally known as minorities—are present merely as shadows, not as constitutive elements of a common political culture.Footnote ⁴

If the Rajapaksa regime takes patriotism seriously and expects non-Sinhalese communities to identify with a superordinate identity that transcends their attachment to a group, it will need to be sensitive to the ways in which certain expressions of “banal nationalism” can easily alienate cultural minorities. Continuing to flag Sinhala Buddhist nationhood, a practice that started in the mid-1950s, might not be the most judicious way for the state to win over the hearts of members of other communities to the goal of civic patriotism.

President Rajapaksa's address seems to define loyalty and love of country as a kind of blind patriotism in which the people follow the dictum “my country, right or wrong.” Accusing fingers are pointed at civil society groups, which, during the past two years, have moved dangerously close to the much-abhorred international community. Such groups were instrumental in raising human rights issues in the war zone as well as in the South, where the dissenting media is still under constant threat. They are easily identified as the core of the “small groups who have no love for the land of their birth” rather than as individuals who want higher standards in their country and who practice a form of “constructive patriotism” imbued with critical loyalty.

The new patriotism implies that political parties of the left and the right have no role to play because the true path and best interests of all people are being pursued by the ruling party. Class politics, opposition politics, and identity politics wither away and disappear in this symbiotic state–society utopia, in which alternate visions can only derail the state in the fulfillment of its mission. Sadly, none of the opposition parties—from the Tamil National Alliance slavishly following LTTE dictates, to the United National Party plagued with an ineffectual leader who is out of touch with the mood of the electorate, to the former Marxist but now nationalist Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, People's Liberation Front) whose agenda was captured by the ruling party—show any will to survive.

The terrain for the coupling of state and nation in this new patriotism was prepared by a gradual weakening of the party system. Beginning in 2007, President Mahinda Rajapaksa deftly maneuvered the political scene to incapacitate his two legitimate political challengers. These were, first, the main Sinhalese opposition party, the right-wing United National Party, led by Ranil Wickremasinghe, who during his premiership had brokered an ill-fated truce with the LTTE. The second was the JVP, which was still performing its role offering critique from the left.

In January 2008, President Rajapaksa's government secured a long-elusive parliamentary majority after nineteen UNP parliamentarians defected to its ranks, many of them joining the government in return for perks and cabinet positions. The majority was further consolidated in October when the UNP redefined its position on the national issue by giving up “federalism” as the solution to the national question and embracing the idea of maximum devolution. While this strategic repositioning was meant to woo the Sinhala electorate, the unintended consequence was to lead UNP supporters to abandon the sinking ship and support the ruling party instead, as there was now no clear difference between the opposition and the government on the ethnic issue. The majority grew again when a minor coalition partner of the government, the Ceylon Worker's Congress, which represents the interests of the Indian Tamil minority and acts as trade union for tea plantation workers, left the government and rejoined it in October.

The nationalist left presented no real challenge to the Rajapaksa regime, but it had strong youth support. Moreover, it served as a constant irritant through its regular tirades on corruption and nepotism, which it claimed were rampant in government ranks. In 2008, the government benefited from—some say prompted—the split in the radical Sinhalese nationalist Janatha Vimukti Peramuna. Wimal Weerawamsa, the party's former propaganda secretary, today leads a breakaway group of ten out of thirty-nine JVP members. Through the guise of the Patriotic National Movement—a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist movement that he founded—he and his colleagues continue to advocate a close partnership with the Rajapaksa regime.Footnote ⁵ In the eyes of the public, the shrinking JVP has ceased to play its role offering critique from the left, and its recent performance at the local polls has been dismal.

Fashioning a “new patriotism” during these last two years was made possible by the gradual weakening of the traditional political parties of the left and the right and the consequent unconditional support bestowed by a depoliticized middle class for President Rajapaksa's program of homegrown solutions to national issues.

The Making of a National Majority: Lineages of the Past

“Majorities are made, not born,” posited Dru Gladney.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, by consolidating the majority in the twenty-first century—as a political group and as a people united by a common love for the land—Mahinda Rajapaksa was in fact finishing a project that had been initiated in the late 1920s. In that sense, the new patriotism that he invokes is not completely new, but a vindication of the perverse logic of the nation-state.

The majoritarian state did not suddenly emerge in 1948 with independence from Great Britain, but rather can be traced back to the Donoughmore Commission Report of 1927. That report introduced the principle of equality among individuals by abolishing the existing form of communal representation, and it instituted universal suffrage in the first elections to the State Council in 1931. Until then, representation had been apportioned on a communal and ethnic basis: communities defined by the colonial state—Ceylon Tamils, Indian Tamils, Low Country Sinhalese, Kandyan Sinhalese, and Muslims—were awarded seats in the Legislative Council in a manner that did not accord with their numerical importance. The Sinhalese community, too, was divided into two groups: the Low Country Sinhalese and the Kandyan Sinhalese. The latter had even been recognized as a minority group thanks to the tireless lobbying of some of its leaders in the early 1920s.

All of this changed in 1931, when universal suffrage was given to the people of Sri Lanka. Those who aspired to become representatives of the people in the newly formed State Council in 1931 understood that old divisions were futile and that the law of numbers would prevail. In the new equation, the voice of the Sinhalese rural folk would count more than that of urban workers, the microscopic middle classes, or Indian plantation labor. The creation of the Sinhala Maha Sabha (Sinhalese Great Assembly), a new political organization, in 1934 by future prime minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was motivated by a conviction similar to that of Mahinda Rajapaksa—that the Sinhala community had to stand united and forget divisions based on caste, religion, and region.

Yet there is a difference today. President Rajapaksa, in his post–civil war vision, attempted to include all peoples of the island in his patriotic fold, as long as they were motivated by a common love of the country that transcended other communal belongings. The core of his people, however, was an idealized Sinhalese rural man who cultivated the land and gave his life to protect his country against secessionists. In a middle-income country that had liberalized its economy in 1977, young people were moving away from the agricultural sector, but the state cultivated their nostalgia for the village and its “authentic values” through the state-controlled media and textbooks and through its political rhetoric.

The rural bias of politicians was not new: it had begun in the early twentieth century when a first generation of nationalists, looking for an issue that would give legitimacy to their claim to be “representatives” of the people of the colony, found it convenient to champion the cause of the peasantry, who had suffered from dispossession of land in the plantation areas. They also romanticized the village and subscribed to the view that the source of strength and vitality of the ancient civilization of Sri Lanka had been based on the rice economy (which itself had depended on an ingenious and intricate system of irrigation works).

Rescuing the peasant from this state of neglect became the main purpose of the men who were elected to the first State Council in 1931. In the process, the peasantry, who previously had been seen in educated circles as a superstitious and ignorant community—the lay preacher Anagarika Dharmapala's Code of Conduct for the Laity was aimed at purging the Sinhala people of the coarseness of rural habits—was suddenly elevated to represent the archetypical Sinhalese man, proud and self-sufficient. The divisions and hierarchies that prevailed among those engaged in agriculture were reread as based on ancient communitarian values. The paddy farmer thus acquired a near-emblematic value. In the same vein, the very foundation of colonial development—plantation agriculture—was repudiated.

Another step in border drawing was initiated through the Citizenship and Franchise Acts, which were hurriedly passed by the new nation-state. These laws altered the balance of power among the various communities and helped consolidate a majority within the polity. The Ceylon Citizenship Act No. 18 of 1948 created two types of citizenship—citizenship by descent and citizenship by registration. In both cases, documentary proof was required for applicants, a procedure that disqualified the majority of Indian Tamil workers, who were illiterate. The Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act No. 3 of 1949 was based on proposals made by the leader of the State Council, D. S. Senanayake, at negotiations in December 1947, the only change being the decision to make January 1, 1948, the qualifying date for completion of residence. The Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act No. 48 of 1949 made the status of citizenship mandatory for the right of franchise. Through these laws, plantation Tamils were defined as an alien and marginal group.Footnote ⁷

We Are All Peasants … from the Politics of Nostalgia to the New Patriotism

The United People's Freedom Alliance regime led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, which came to power in 2005, placed the rural person at the center of its circle of citizens. “My father washed his hands from the waters flowing from the sluices of the paddy fields before signing his nomination papers,” claimed presidential candidate Rajapaksa. In his Mahinda Chintana, or manifesto, he built his entire image on the valorization of his rural and Southern roots. Indeed, in this new vision, the “rural” represented authentic ethical values, as opposed to those of the Colombo elites, who tended to scoff at Rajapaksa's lack of sophistication and generally voted for the UNP.

Rajapaksa's manifesto incorporated many of the ideas of his electoral partner, the JVP. Among these was a pledge to complete the restoration of 10,000 village tanks and implement multipurpose irrigation schemes. Most interesting was the enthusiasm displayed by the middle classes for this project. In their view, it reengaged with the authentic essence of the nation, namely, its link to the land and those who worked it. The project was launched in its first phase as the Dahasak Maha Wavu, or “renovation of a thousand lakes,” with the pledge that in two years, 10,000 small and medium-sized tanks would be restored. This project was pushed to the forefront by the dynamic JVP minister of agriculture, Anura Dissanayake. In an interview published on the JVP's official Web site, the minister reminisced about the past greatness of Sri Lanka as the “Granary of the East” and the decline of the farmers who, he said, suffer today without water to irrigate their cultivation. The purpose of the tank restoration was not development as such, but rather a rekindling of the nostalgia of recently settled urbanites for the villages they or their parents had left. The JVP understood the need of the middle classes, who led cosmopolitan and often unconnected lives in the city, to feel that they still had roots in the land. Nostalgia for the rural way of life was harnessed as a winning political strategy that the ruling party gradually made its own.Footnote ⁸

In recent years, the peasant as projected and represented by state institutions became not simply a man who cultivated the soil expecting help or redress from the state. In the vision of more recent Sinhala ideologues, ranging from those in the regime in power to the JVP, the “peasant” could very well be a businessman who sells his products in rural areas or even a city dweller who empathizes with the life of the paddy cultivator and yearns for rural values. This was also a way of honoring the sacrifice of the rural youth who had been called upon to wage the war against the secessionist enemy. The army of 200,000 was mainly composed of young Sinhalese men of underprivileged backgrounds.

From Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake's vision of a nation of small landholders in the 1930s to the present regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa, the nationalist state has placed the peasant on a pedestal in an effort to bring back pride and honor to the subjugated cultures that these leaders claimed were being sidelined, first by the colonial state and then by the neoliberal tendencies of previous regimes. Unlike previous nationalist incarnations, the present avatar, the new patriotism, is not “othering” the migrant Indian, Muslim trader, or Tamil businessman. Instead, it takes as its target those of cosmopolitan tastes and lifestyles, Westerners, and local intellectuals of any creed, caste, or ethnicity who profess ideas that deviate from the norm.

The tone of moral reprimand of some Western government officials, which often smacked of neo-imperialism,Footnote ⁹ only served to prove the case of the Sri Lanka state that it was being bullied. This made the work of local groups concerned with human rights and media freedom even more difficult, as their claims were dismissed as voicing the concerns of the West. The question is how long the Sri Lankan state and its citizens will be able to face the opprobrium of the people of the world, who watched the tragedy unfold day by day on their television screens. Until the government opens up to impartial observers the refugee camps where at least a quarter of a million people are confined, doubts will linger in everyone's mind about any statement made by Sri Lankan state officials. Until then, Sri Lanka's image will be tainted by the perception that the state is hiding a terrible truth. Numbers and facts are less important than the force of images of suffering and fear that have been brought to us, even in the reporting of the state media. If the Sri Lanka government is suspicious of Western governments meddling and of possible security breaches that could come with an influx of aid workers in the refugee camps, it could open itself up to more acceptable observers from Asian or African countries. The hypocrisy of Western states reprimanding Sri Lanka while turning a blind eye to the death and displacement of civilians in Pakistan's war against the Taliban or to the crimes they committed against the “darker races” during their colonial past does not under any condition allow the Sri Lankan state, a signatory to international human rights treaties and a member of the United Nations, to follow the example set by Western powers in accepting the inevitability of collateral damage in the war against “terrorist groups.” The government must act fast before the horror of the LTTE using its own people as human shields is forgotten and overshadowed by the state's callousness. Sri Lanka should do what is right because it is right, not because of pressure from outside.

Is it futile to hope that the utopian patriotism that forms the core of the state ideology today has the capacity to reshape the institutions of the state by sapping the cultural exclusiveness of schools, offices, clubs, associations, and political parties and by working toward a trilingual society in which Sinhalese and Tamils will be able to speak to each other as well as speak to the world? Even if this happens, it might not suffice. Multiculturalism, however crucial, is not enough to deal with one's fundamental right to be different. If patriotism is to be shared by all, there must be an effort to ensure that across communities, cultural symbols, religious and ethnic—of the majority and minorities—recede as much as possible from the state apparatus, at least until wounds are healed. While pushing for autonomy for the Tamil-speaking majority areas, it is essential to work in a parallel fashion toward a more culturally neutral social democratic state, where even an agnostic person of mixed descent would feel at home. Furthermore, devolution of power to the North and East alone will not spawn change in the everyday life of the Tamil peoples when half of this community lives outside these two provinces in areas where Sinhalese are the majority.

These are drastic measures, and they would mean the end of a certain type of symbolic politics as it was practiced in the past by generations of statesmen, from D. S. Senanayake, who liked to see himself as a modern king Parakramabahu—a twelfth-century Sinhalese king—opening up the dry zone of the island to colonization schemes, to President J. R. Jayawardena, whose imperial style emulated an Asokan persona.

With a possible two-thirds majority supporting him, if parliamentary elections are held in the aftermath of the victory over the LTTE, President Rajapaksa has a free hand to reform Sri Lanka into a social-democratic state and guide its people toward civic patriotism. He seems, however, to be wavering, encouraged by favor-seeking flatterers to take the same easier course as his predecessors. At the Sri Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Tooth in Kandy) on May 23, 2009, he pledged never to “allow the bifurcation of the Motherland which was united after defeating divisive separatists.” He was addressing the ceremonial gathering on the occasion of receiving the honor Vishwa Keerti Sri Sinhaladhishwara from the Karaka Sangha Sabhas of the Malwatta and the Asgiriya chapters of the Siyam Maha Nikaya. What bifurcation signifies and how it departs from the “homegrown” solution advocated by the regime as an answer to Tamil grievances remains to be seen, but meanwhile, the chattering classes can only speculate. Some analysts expect the devolution plan in the North to be nothing but a more militarized version of the situation in the Eastern province, where a former LTTE rebel, a close ally of the government, is the chief minister of a powerless provincial council.

The communities formerly known as minorities, languishing in their refugee camps, might have been reminded of how thin the line was between nationalism and a potentially emancipatory civic patriotism when reading about the president's visit to Anuradhapura, one of the ancient capitals of Sri Lanka, on May 24 in order to attend special religious observances. President Rajapaksa, it is reported, offered hereditary gold ornaments to the sacred Bo tree, a ritual that ancient kings used to perform and that later was entrusted to high Buddhist officials. Later the president walked round the Ruwanweli Chetiya and stopped at the statue of King Dutugemunu.Footnote ¹⁰