Indepedence from Britain

Post-independence
Indepedence from Britain

The island of Ceylon officially gained its independence on 4 February 1948 as a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth. Dominion status followed with military treaties with Britain, like the upper ranks of the armed forces were initially British, and British air and sea bases remained intact.

The cabinet of Ceylon and Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker of the Commonwealth Office watched as the Governor-General, Sir Henry Moore, was sworn in. Services of thanksgiving were held in Buddhist and Hindu temples, Christian churches, and Muslim mosques. The lion flag of the old Sinhalese kings of Kandy flew overhead as the first prime minister, sixty-three-year-old rubber magnate Don Stephen Senanayake, went on the radio to express the hope that Britain’s voluntary renunciation of the colony was a seed which would grow into ‘a stately tree of mutual and perpetual friendship’. [1]

The UNP was founded on 6 September 1946 by amalgamating three right-leaning pro-dominion parties from the majority Sinhalese community and minority Tamil and Muslim communities. It was founded by Senanayake, who was at the forefront of the struggle for independence from the United Kingdom.

In 1949 the UNP government introduced the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, the Indian-Pakistani Citizenship Act of 1949, and amended the Parliamentary Elections Act, and disfranchised the Indian Tamils along with persons of Indian and Pakistani ancestry. [2]

Many Indian Tamil plantation workers were deprived of citizenship and stripped of their nationality and right to vote in a country where most of the families had spent several generations [3,]. This strategic move by Senanayake helped obtain the support of the Kandyan Sinhalese, who felt threatened by the demographics of the tea estates where the inclusion of the “Indian Tamils” would have meant electoral defeat for the Kandyan leaders.

Tamil political leaders such as S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and his Tamil opposition party opposed this move. They recognized Indian Tamils were the first community marked out for discrimination by the new state of Ceylon.