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Sri Lanka Election of 1977 and More Violence
After molding the UNP around his personality and having
successfully built up the party's infrastructure, Jayewardene
easily became prime minister. The UNP won an unprecedented
landslide victory in the 1977 elections, winning 140 of 168
seats. The SLFP was reduced to eight seats. The Sri Lankan
Tamils, however, gave little support to Jayewardene or any other
non-Tamil politician. The Sri Lankan Tamils entered the
parliamentary election fray under the banner of TULF, which had
elevated its earlier demand for regional self-rule to a demand
for an independent state, or
Eelam (see Glossary).
TULF became
the largest opposition party in Parliament and captured all
fourteen seats in the heavily Tamil Northern Province and four
east coast seats. TULF won in every constituency with a Tamil
majority on the island, except one. In Jaffna District, TULF
candidates won all eleven seats, although forty-seven other
candidates contested the seats. TULF originally included the
largest Indian (plantation) Tamil political organization, the
Ceylon Workers' Congress, but after the 1977 election, the leader
of the Ceylon Workers' Congress accepted a cabinet post in the
UNP government. The Sri Lankan Tamil demand for Tamil Eelam had
never been of central concern to the Indian Tamils, who lived
mostly outside the territory being claimed for the Tamil state.
The opportunities for peace that the 1977 UNP electoral
victory provided were soon lost. Just before the 1977 elections,
Chelvanayakam, the charismatic leader of TULF, died, leaving the
party without strong leadership. A Tamil separatist underground
(which had split into six or more rival and sometimes violently
hostile groups that were divided by ideology, caste, and personal
antagonisms) was filling the vacuum left by the weakened TULF and
was gaining the allegiance of an increasing number of
disenchanted Tamil youths. These groups were known collectively
as the Tamil Tigers. The strongest of these separatists were the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), founded in 1972 by
Velupillai Prabhakaran. The LTTE was responsible for some of the
earliest and most gruesome acts of Tamil terrorism
(see Sri Lanka - the Tamil Insurgency
, ch. 5). The LTTE first gained notoriety by its 1975
assassination of the mayor of Jaffna, a supporter of the SLFP.
During the 1977 elections, many Tamil youths began to engage in
extraparliamentary and sometimes violent measures in their bid
for a mandate for a separate state. These measures precipitated a
Sinhalese backlash. An apparently false rumor that Sinhalese
policemen had died at the hands of Tamil terrorists, combined
with other rumors of alleged anti-Sinhalese statements made by
Tamil politicians, sparked brutal communal rioting that engulfed
the island within two weeks of the new government's inauguration.
The rioting marked the first major outbreak of communal violence
in the nineteen years since the riots of 1958. Casualties were
many, especially among Tamils, both the Sri Lankan Tamils of
Jaffna and the Indian Tamil plantation workers. The Tamil Refugee
Rehabilitation Organization estimated the death toll at 300.
Data as of October 1988
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