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Muslims: prominent
in politics despite numbers With a solid territorial and demographic base in the north and some parts of the east, their politics generally emphasized regional autonomy based on ethnic identity; later on this took a separatist or secessionist form. Their separatist claims were perceived as a threat both to the legitimacy of majority rule and the integrity of the polity. In contrast,
the Muslims generally chose to support the Sinhalese majority on
some critical issues and were supported in turn by the Sinhalese
on issues regarded by the Muslims as necessary for maintaining their
culture and identity (on education, for instance). They were helped
in this quite substantially by the volatility of the island's political
system in which, from 1956 onwards, the ruling party was defeated
on six consecutive occasions (including 1956). The result was that
Muslims were offered opportunities for political bargaining which
they used to the great advantage of their community. There is also the crucially important fact that the island's Muslims never faced the prospect, much less threat, of assimilationist policies. All governments respected the ethnic identity of the Muslims and have, in fact, helped to protect and foster this. Until the late
1980s, the Muslims had no 'ethnic' political parties of their own.
Neither the All Sri Lanka Muslim League nor All Ceylon Moors Association
became Muslim political parties in the years after independence;
by contrast their contemporary, the Tamil Congress, continued as
a Tamil political party and was indeed the principal Tamil political
organization on the island until the mid-1950s. Muslims sought and obtained membership and achieved positions of influence in all major national political parties, the UNP and SLFP in particular. They were not well represented in the governing bodies of Tamil political parties. The link with the UNP had given that party a majority of the Muslim vote at every election since 1947 till the presidential election of 1994. The UNP has always had more Muslim Members of Parliament than the SLFP till the parliamentary elections of that year. Within the party, Colombo-based Muslims have been, until very recently, the dominant element. Since 1947,
every Cabinet has had a Muslim in it; the UNP government of 1977-94
generally had three. The first Cabinet after independence had two
Tamils; there was one between 1952 and 1956, but none at all from
then until 1965. Thereafter every Cabinet has had a Tamil representative,
generally a Sri Lankan Tamil; since 1977 there have been two or
three (1978-89) one of whom has been the leader of the Indian Tamils.
Even more remarkable is the ready acceptance of Muslims by Sinhalese
voters in electorates where Muslims comprise less than a fifth and
quite often less than a tenth or a twentieth of the total voting
strength. Muslims are regarded as being so clearly integrated into
the Sri Lankan political community that the Sinhalese will vote
for them on party grounds against Sinhalese opponents. In contrast,
not a Tamil candidate has won a seat in a predominantly Sinhalese
area since independence, except for Indian Tamils who have won seats
in the plantation districts or in the periphery of such districts. As in the 1940s,
rivalry between Tamils and Muslims in education has been an important
feature of the island's ethnic disharmony: apart from the Muslims'
anxiety to break away from Tamil tutelage in schools of the Tamil
medium, they have successfully lobbied for more Muslim schools and
more Muslim school teachers. Mahmud's tenure of office as Minister
of Education was an important landmark in the gains Muslims achieved
both in literacy and a notable improvement in educational standards
at the secondary level. Equally significant
has been the divergence of views on devolution of power. Till the
appearance of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress in the late 1980s Muslims
have been inveterate opponents of any attempt to tamper with Sri
Lanka's existing unitary political structure. Two examples of this
are: the opposition mounted by A.R.A. Razik, later Sir Razik Fareed,
within the government parliamentary group to the District Councils
scheme which Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake sought to introduce
between 1966 and 1968. Similarly, two Muslim members of the Presidential
Commission on District Development Councils wrote a lengthy note
of dissent against the main recommendations of that commission in
its report published in 1980. Neither the
UNP nor the SLFP could take Muslim support for granted. While each
has large reserves of Muslim support - the UNP's has traditionally
been larger than the SLFP's - they were aware that Muslim voters
could tilt the balance, in not less than 15 electorates in all parts
of the country, in the days before the proportional representation
system was introduced. Often they did precisely that. Muslims have
seldom hesitated to vote against a governing party if it appeared
to them to be inconsiderate to or negligent of their interests.
Thus in 1964-5,
the then SLFP-dominated government's failure to remedy the legal
deficiencies which the Supreme Court pointed out concerning quazis
courts was a significant enough factor in turning large numbers
of Muslims against them in the general election that year. Then
again, some of that support returned to the SLFP and its allies
in 1970 as part of a national trend against the UNP, which was seen
to have done more for Tamils than Muslims. They turned against the
UNP once more in 1994 much more emphatically than in the past because
of the perception that the party's leadership at that time was not
as sensitive to the interests of the minorities as their predecessors
had been. Briefly, then,
while Muslims have not been reluctant to consider themselves as
a counterweight to Tamils in communal rivalries that have been so
prominent in political developments in post-independence Sri Lanka,
they have seldom hesitated to express their displeasure at signs
of neglect of their interests, or hostility to them, by a government.
And Sri Lanka's electoral system has provided them with all the
opportunities they need to make this displeasure felt. Governments
have changed with remarkable frequency in Sri Lanka, and the Muslim
community, small though it is, has contributed mightily to these
swings of the electoral pendulum. It would be
too naive to assume that these advantages were secured as a result
of Sinhalese altruism. On the contrary, one has the feeling that
quite often Sinhalese politicians have used State resources to build
the Muslim community or sections of it as a counterweight to the
Tamil community in a game of checks and balances, an intrinsic element
in the process of government in any plural society. As we have seen,
Muslims - in striking contrast to Tamils - have had no distinct
ethnic or religious political parties of their own till the appearance
of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress to contest seats to Parliament
in competition with, if not in opposition to, the main national
political parties. Instead, their political organizations preferred
to work in association with and as adjuncts of the latter. The result
is that the Muslim community, although numerically much smaller
than the Tamils, had far greater bargaining powers electorally than
their number seemed to warrant. (More next week) |
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