Democracy and entitlements in Sri Lanka: The 1970s crisis over university admission

Affirmative action policies came into effect in Sri Lanka in the 1970s with the left-of-centre United Front government headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her government introduced changes in the criteria for university admission, initially designed to benefit the majority Sinhalese students. These policies were later transformed into a regional quota system cutting across ethnic and religious identities. The schemes were condemned for straying away from principles of merit and fairness, failing to guarantee social mobility through education and limiting the number of Tamil students in the science and medical faculties. The perceived unequal distribution of educational entitlements was a central issue in the Southern leftist insurrection and the Tamil insurrection in the North and East in the 1970s. While issues of unemployment led the Sinhala rural educated youth to rebel in 1971, the early Tamil militancy was energized by the issue of standardization in the university admission of students. Affirmative action policies can be usefully read as linked to an understanding of democracy that originates in the late colonial period founded on the premise that the democratic state has a responsibility to correct imbalances that exist in society between communities and classes and to distribute entitlements in the fairest manner. The politics of university admissions can also be traced back to the practice of Ceylonization of the public service that began in the 1930s and to the commitment to welfarism that was borne out of the Fabian inclinations of the men who drafted the Donoughmore Constitution of 1931.