Sri Lankan Tamils, the Public Service, and the Roots of Rebellion

From the British Colonial Office's Ceylon: Report of the Commission on Constitutional Reform (1945), which I just happen to own:

We received from the All-Ceylon Tamil Congress complaints of discrimination against the members of their community in regard to appointments in the Public Services. This matter provides a common source of dissension between the majority and minority communities, but in this case the complaint did not, as might have been expected, disclose that the proportion of posts held by Ceylon Tamils was smaller than the size of their community would justify.

On the contrary, the Ceylon Tamils appear, at any rate as late as 1938, to have occupied a disproportionate number of posts in the Public Services. In that year a reply to a request from a Sinhalese Member for a statement giving the racial strength of the officers of the various Departments of Government, including the Public Works Department, showed that of 6,002 pensionable officers, 3,236 were Sinhalese and 1,164 Ceylon Tamils.

If these posts had been allotted in proportion to the population of each community, the share of the Ceylon Tamils would have been about 600. That they have won for themselves a much larger share is a consequence of the higher standard of literacy and education which this community has so long enjoyed, and of its energy and efficiency. [...]

It does, however, appear that what was described to us as "the preponderant position occupied by the Tamils in the Public Services, especially in the clerical services by the open competitive examination" is now being challenged by competition from the Sinhalese. The Tamil witness maintained that in order to improve the chances of Sinhalese candidates, various small changes in examination syllabuses and conditions of entry have been made as a result of the intervention of Sinhalese Ministers, who have also endeavored in various ways to use their influence, e.g. with Selection Boards, to favour candidates of their own race.

One of the examples cited to us was that before 1931 arithmetic was a compulsory subject for the General Clerical Services examination. But after the introduction of the Donoughmore Constitution in that year this subject was deleted from the list of compulsory subjects because the well known aptitude of the Tamils for mathematics was thought to give them an advantage in it over their competitors of other races. [...]

But it would not in our opinion be right to regard the Sinhalese challenge to the predominant position of the Tamils in public appointments as based on such small acts of discrimination; rather is it the natural effect of the spread of education and of the efforts being made to bring other portions of the Island up to the intellectual level of one portion of it. [...]

In this connection, we cannot help recalling a period in our own history when, as the result of the superior educational facilities and better teaching prevalent in Scotland, a minority was enabled to secure a larger share of the administrative and executive posts in the United Kingdom than could have been justified on any proportional allocation.

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Sri Lankan Tamils are the brown Scots! I wonder if elevating and shamelessly praising the minority ethnic group was a strategy used by many colonial powers? I recall reading that the Belgians did something similar in Rwanda.

Not surprisingly, the world of would-be Tamil public servants turned upside down after Independence. According to Sri Lanka: A Country Study (1988):

By 1980 the percentage of Tamil employees in the public sector, excluding public corporations, was roughly equivalent to their percentage of the population, or 12 percent.

Political factors played a role in the decline in the number of Tamils in public service. Under the so-called chit system, which became pervasive when Sirimavo Bandaranaike was in power during the 1970s, the influence of a parliamentarian was needed to secure a government job (the chit being a memorandum written by the legislator to inform personnel authorities of the preferred candidate). The Jayewardene government made the machinery of patronage still more overt by giving each legislator "job banks" of lower level positions to be distributed to their followers.

The expanding role of patronage on all levels of the civil service had two implications for Tamils: first, merit qualifications that would have benefited educated Tamils were sacrificed to patron-client politics; second, the patronage system provided Tamils with little or no access to public employment because their political representatives, especially after the 1977 general election, had very limited influence.

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Finally, in Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism, A. Jeyaratnam Wilson argues that:

Two actions of the (Sinhalese) government [in the 1970s] were the catalysts that produced a full-fledged Tamil nationalism, implying a drive for sovereign statehood as a way out, especially for young Tamils who suffered most from the state's discriminatory policies.

The first of these acts of discrimination was Mrs. Bandaranaike's government's action in introducing two systems of standardization of marks for admission to the universities, directed specifically against Tamil students. [...]

[Secondly], similar policies were followed in employment patterns in the public sector...

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The country's minority youth weren't admitted into the universities and public service. Instead, they started blowing shit up and demanding their own state.

Is there some general lesson to be drawn here, or is this specific to Sri Lanka? I'll have to look into that one day.