Ceylon Citizenship Acts

Ceylon citizenship acts presented in 1948 and 1949 is to define the

citizenship of Sri Lanka after Independence.
The Ceylon Citizenship Act No. 18 of 1948 required that anyone
wishing to obtain citizenship had to prove that their father is a
Ceylon citizen.
Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act No.3 of 1949 act
granted citizenship to anyone who had 10 years of uninterrupted
residence in Ceylon (7 years for married persons) and whose
income was above the stipulated level.
This act affected only on hill country Tamils, different ethnic group from
Sri Lankan tamils.
Later several agreements[8] signed between Sri Lanka and India (NehruKotelawala Pact,Sirima-Shastri Pact) to resolve who should accept the
stateless Indian workers. India repatriate 525,000 Indian Tamils, another
300,000 would be offered Ceylon citizenship. Finally Sirimavo-Gandhi
Pact signed on 1974 ( 9 years before starting the civil war) agreed to
grant citizenship for rest of the unresolved citizens. But majority of the
Indian Tamils liked to live in Sri Lanka even without citizenship. On 7
October 2003 the Sri Lanka granted citizenship for 168,141 persons who
had been Sri Lanka without citizenship.
hill country Tamils who affected by this act didn't fight back with
government or didn't support Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Sri Lankan Tamil people who didn't affected on this act claims [5][6] that
Ceylon Citizenship Act was a major reason to resorting to militancy. Also
surprisingly, most of the Sri Lankan Tamils in the UNP or Tamil
Congress (was the major Tamil party in Sri Lanka) either voted or didn't
opposed to the second bill in 1949.[9]
^ This Part is from Wikipedia. It may make me look like a hypocrite since
trashed all that Wikipedia stuff everyone sent me but I actually read the
entire act to ensure it was perfectly accurate.

Policy of standardization
In 1971, a system of standardisation of marks was
introduced for admissions to the universities, obviously
directed against Tamil-medium students (referred to
earlier). K.M. de Silva describes it as follows:
`The qualifying mark for admission to the medical faculties
was 250 (out of 400) for Tamil students, whereas it was only

229 for the Sinhalese. Worse still, this same pattern of a

lower qualifying mark applied even when Sinhalese and
Tamil students sat for the examination in English. In short,
students sitting for examinations in the same language, but
belonging to two ethnic groups, had different qualifying
marks.`
He observes that by doing this in such an obviously
discriminatory way, `the United Front Government of the
1970s caused enormous harm to ethnic relations.
This was not the end in 1972 the `district quota system` was
introduced, again to the detriment of the Ceylon Tamils. The
(Sinhalese) historian C.R. de Silva wrote:
`By 1977 the issue of university admissions had become a
focal point of the conflict between the government and
Tamil leaders. Tamil youth, embittered by what they
considered discrimination against them, formed the radical
wing of the Tamil United Liberation Front. Many advocated
the use of violence to establish a separate Tamil state of
Eelam. It was an object lesson of how inept policy measures
and insensitivity to minority interests can exacerbate ethnic
tensions .`
Effect
[`...Nothing aroused deeper despair among Tamils than the
feeling that they are being systematically squeezed out of
higher education. They have complained particularly of the
system of `standardisation` in force after 1972, in which
marks obtained by candidates for university admission are
weighted by giving advantage to certain LINGUISTIC groups
and/or certain districts...` - Walter Schwarz: Tamils of Sri
Lanka - Minority Rights Group Report, 1983 ]