Territorial Spaces and National Identities

Territorial Spaces and Their Identities: 26 Colombo.

In the late 1940s, the Tamil based Federal Party adopted federalism as its strategy to resolve what it saw as issues concerning the Tamils. However, it was the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna which advanced ethno-politics to a serious national issue through its “Singhala only� language policy, implementing some measures to this end after it came to power in 1956. In 1972 the two main Tamil political parties, the Federal Party and the Tamil Congress, responding to the Singhala biased politics of post-colonial governments and the need to secure their votes, banded together to form a Tamil United Front (Tamil United Liberation Front in 1976). In May 1976, they raised the demand for a separate Tamil state.71 The TULF drew massive support for its policy of a separate Tamil state, winning all electorates where Tamils were the majority of voters and making, for the first time, a Tamil political party/front the second largest in the Parliament. Once the TULF became the second largest group in the parliament, instead of there being a leftist or a right-wing government and a corresponding opposition, the Parliament polarized into a Singhala-Tamil duality. In this context, ethnic issues concerning the Tamils were prioritized in the national political agenda, and any issue that came up in the Parliament was debated for its implications on Tamils until the TULF had to leave the Parliament in 1986.72 Spatially, what the TULF proposed was two states on the island instead of one, with an international boundary between them, and two capitals, Jaffna and Colombo. In this sense, the alternative society and space proposed by ethnic separatism was clearer than whatever the JVP struggles had implied. Although the TULF, as the main opposition, was in the best ever position to bargain for the rights of the Tamils, the heavy imbalance of forces (a mere 18 TULF seats in a 168