Indian tamils are here because of the tea estates and nothing else. I believe under the sirima -shastri pact 50 per cent were sent off. The balance 50 per cent also would have been sent off if not for the tea estates.

Indian Tamils were brought here for labor and nothing else. I agree with you on that. However, we are not discussing any sinister motives of Indian Tamils but the implications of British bringing them here and what should have been done about them after independence. For example, Stephen Jones is using their presence here to argue for 50-50!!!

Repatriation of Indian Tamils made tea industry suffer at the time and the government would have considered retaining a sufficient number to make sure the industry did not collapse.

Today if you go to the hill country you see a never ending beautiful carpet of tea bushes. The british and the indian tamils added value to the land.

Before the British came, our economy was geared towards producing what we needed. The administration sponsored cultivation of paddy not tea or rubber. The British turned our economy into growing what they needed and importing what they produced. I have a hard time understanding that as adding value to our land.

It is true that today the tea industry is a major contributor towards our economy but it was something that was forced upon us for the benefit of the British and nothing more. Same goes for the roads and railways. If the British were so good, then why the hell did we tried so hard to get rid of them?

Sirima would have thought if i send the balance 50 per cent indian tamils off will the sinhalese do this type of work, and sadly realised they would not. This is exactly what is happening in western countries too. By the white people becoming picky and choosy the tough and menial jobs are given to migrants. Then the whites complain there are too many migrants. You can’t have the cake and eat it.

Hence the logical thing to have done was to assess how many Indian Tamils were necessary to keep the tea industry afloat and send back the rest. It sounds immoral but had the British taken Sinhalese to TN to work in tea plantations there, the same equation would have applied and all Tamils who are labeling Sinhalese as racist here would have applauded at the decision.

In a nutshell indian tamils have contributed a lot for this country for hardly anything in return and deserve to be here as permanent citizens.

FYI there is no Malaria in Nuwara Eliya. The climate is too cold for mosquito to bread and mountainous terrain make water flow rather than collect. There is Malaria in the Uva province however.

Indian Tamils came here without the consent of the locals. Thus the locals have the right to decide whether or not they are going to keep them here. They have contributed towards the economy but how them been here affect towards the future of local community is paramount to everything else. After all, we are not asking them be sent to the gas chamber like they did in Germany but they be resettled in their “homeland” among their own people with government assistance. Stephen Jones’s arguments are just a taste of things to come. Thanks to JR’s greed for power, Sinhalese screwed up their only chance to have had them repatriated and now it’s too late.

As for the land you mention that they have taken from the sinhalese go and see the deeds whether it is in their name. They have been put in government lands not lands owned by any sinhalese.

You are quite right. The British asked the Sinhalese to show deeds and any land without a deed was deemed as belonging to the government. What deeds do you think those Sinhalese had to land that had been passed on from generation to generation?

I feel story of Madduma Bandara will guide us in this context.
As I am not so conversant in English
Can any one write the story of Madduma Bandara in this column?
Is Madduma Bandara still living in our Heart?
Parathy

1. It is a fact that they were brought in by the British, with no input from the locals and then settled on lands that were forcibly taken over by the British from the original native Singhalese. That was ethnic cleansing pure and simple, 100s of years before the term was invented.
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First of all let us see what is ethnic cleansing. The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group.”
Intimidation is behavior which would cause a person fear of injury or harm

Now let us look at some historical facts to get a clear picture of what happenned.

1. In the mid 1830’s the British began experimenting with many plantation crops. The first coffee plantation was opened in the kandyan hill region. Within 15 years one of the crops coffee became so sucessful that it transformed the countrys economy from subsistence crops to plantation agriculture.

2.The problem of limited availability of land for coffee estates was solved when the British government sold lands that it had acquired from the Kandyan kings.

3. The coffee plantation system faced a serious labor shortage. Among the Sinhalese, a peasant cultivator of paddy land held a much higher status than a landless laborer. In addition, the low wages paid to hired workers failed to attract the Kandyan peasant, and the peak season for harvesting plantation coffee usually coincided with the peasant’s own harvest. Moreover, population pressure and underemployment were not acute until the twentieth century. To compensate for this scarcity of native workers, an inexpensive and almost inexhaustible supply of labor was found among the Tamils in southern India. They were recruited for the coffee-harvesting season and migrated to and from Sri Lanka, often amid great hardships.

4. The initial capital for coffee cultivation was provided by British civilian and military officials resident in kandy and they behaved more like coffee planters than government officials. This led to serious abuses, however, culminating in an 1840 ordinance that made it virtually impossible for a Kandyan peasant to prove that his land was not truly crown land and thus subject to expropriation and resale to coffee interests. In this period, more than 80,000 hectares of Kandyan land were appropriated and sold as crown lands.

So Ranjan you were quite right that a great injustice was perpetrated on the poor kandyan peasant but see whether it falls under the definition of ethnic cleansing. It did not make the area homogenous because there were no 2 ethnic groups there in the first place. the Indian tamils were brought only for the harvesting season and went back. They were also used for clearing up 100000 hectares of rain forests for coffee plantation. Many of them died in the malaria infested forests.
If the british had acquired the lands and settled the tamils on it then probably it could be considered ethnic cleansing. In this case they only planted the coffee on it and brought the tamils for harvesting and sent them back.
Even bhuddhist temple lands were not spared and acquired for coffee plantations.

Even though the initial capital was put in by the british government officials as time went on one third of these coffee plantations were controlled by srilankans.

5. In 1869 a devastating leaf disease struck the coffee plantations destroying the coffee industry within fifteen years. Planters desperately searched for a substitute crop. Climatic conditions for tea was excellent in the hill country.

6.The first tea plantation was started in 1867. The tea estates needed a completely different type of labor force than had been required during the coffee era. Tea was harvested throughout the year and required a permanent labor force. Indian Tamil immigrants settled on the estates.

So you see ranjan it was only after 30 years after coffee started the indian labour force were settled in srilanka on a permanet basis. The 80000 hectares acquired for coffee from the kandyan peasantry would have mostly tea bushes and a little space for line rooms for these people. in addition to this as i mentioned in point 2 land acquired from the kandyan kings was first used for coffee and subsequently for tea, and also 100000 hectares of rainforest that was cleared with the blood ,sweat and tears of these people, which now all Srilankans enjoy.

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THANKS FOR ALL YOUR CONTRIBUTONS, FOR WHETHER I AGREE OR NOT, THERE IS NO OTHER KULTOOR TAMIL-SINHALESE FORUM TO MATCH DEAR.

“The key test, in the former CJ’s opinion, was to ensure whether the subject – in this case General Fonseka – was subject to Military Law.
According to Sarath Silva, there was no complexity in deciding who exactly was subject to Military law. Part VII of the Army Act notes them to be as a) All Officers and Soldiers of the regular force; b) All officers and soldiers of the Regular Reserve volunteer Force. Additionally Section 8 deals extensively with the Army Commander. The term Officer is defined precisely in section 162 to mean “an officer commissioned as an officer of the army”.
Analysis of the relevant sections would reveal that the Army Commander is neither a commissioned officer nor an enlisted soldier. In fact, under section 8 of the Act, the President shall appoint ” a fit and proper” person to command the Army. In effect, it follows that the Army Commander can be a civilian. ”

The problem i have with this interpretation is though the president can appoint a civilian in this case he has not done so. He appointed a army officer though Sarath Silva if he was the president would have probably appointed a civilian, and that must be the reason he is not the president, thank god.

And as for a commissioned officer, no point in making a mountain out of a molehill about this term.It is merely a military officer who holds a commission, a formal government document which vests power in the individual to whom it is issued. Typically, commissions are issued by the head of state. In the modern era, commissions are awarded on the basis of merit, to people who have completed officer training

So according to sarath silva, Fonseka is not an Army Officer and has not received Officer training. The reason he beat tubby on the battlefield was maybe because tubby also was in the same boat.

By settling these Indian Tamils who were essentially loyal to their British masters among the isolated Kandyan villages that dotted the countryside, Brits ensured that the ethnic mix of the area was changed and chances of further insurrections were slim.

Your timescale’s all wrong. The British didn’t even start the coffee plantations, let alone the tea plantations, until decades after the Uva rebellion was put down.

The land taken from the Sinhalese under the waste lands act was bascally land used for chena cultivation. The Sinhalese farmer would have had less land to rotate, but there was not a surplus of labour for working on the plantations.

Whenever power has been taken away from plantation owners the plantation economy collapsed. Working on a plantation was not, and is not, a pleasant experience.

One of the reasons that has been cited by historians for British not employing Singhalese in the tea estates is that they refused to work as laborers on the same lands that were stolen from them. Some also say that this was in retaliation against the Uva uprising of 1817-1818. Apparently during this time complete Kandyan villages were destroyed and people were forced to flee. In fact some argue that some of the so called indigenous people (Veddas) were actually Kandyan Singhalese who abandoned their villages during this time and took to the jungle to escape the British forces.

By settling these Indian Tamils who were essentially loyal to their British masters among the isolated Kandyan villages that dotted the countryside, Brits ensured that the ethnic mix of the area was changed and chances of further insurrections were slim.

What is interesting here is that the situation in the lower country rubber and coconut estates seems to have been somewhat different. In these areas, you do get a lot of Singhalese in the labor force in the estates. This also is consistent with the fact that in the coastal areas, the population (which was multi-ethnic to start with) did cooperate much more with the foreign forces, thus escaped wholesale destruction of villages and societies.

Why the British did not use the Sinhalese labor force
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The sinhalese peasant was a farmer. He feels it is beneath his dignity to work as a labourer. He has his plot of land and though poor is proud to be a farmer. Even now it is the same. Try buying acres of land and see whether you can get farmers to come and work for you. In addition to this only an idiot will work for the pittance offered by the British. The Indian tamils were bonded labourers little better than slave labour. They were not idiots but they did not have much choice anyway. They worked in apalling conditions and many died when clearing the malaria infested forests. Therefore this was not ethnic cleansing as Ranjan from toronto pointed out. When shankar from st. bridgets has the time she will give a detailed clarification on this so called ethnic cleansing business pointed out by ranjan from toronto.