Great Britain ruled Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) from 1815 to 1948.
In 1815, over 90% (3 Million) of the Sri Lankan population was from Sinhala community and about 10% (300,000) was from Hindu Tamil community.
Slowly, Britishers began bringing in Tamil labourers from India for plantation of tea, coffee and rubber and this led to a sudden rise in Tamilian population.
Till 1930s, there was no tension between Sinhala and Tamil community.
But Britishers had been working on ‘divide and rule’ theory, building, for example, disproportionate number of English-language schools in the North part of Sri Lanka, which was dominated by the Tamil community.
Because English was the language of rule in Sri Lanka, this advantage enabled Tamil community to grab all important bureaucratic jobs, angering the Sinhala community.
From 1936 to 1944, multiple demands were made to replace official English with Sinhalese and/or Tamil, but the British government didn’t agree.
In 1948, Ceylon gained independence from Great Britain.
Sri Lanka Freedom Party came to power in 1956 and passed the controversial Sinhala Only Act, which made Sinhalese the language of governance and didn’t give any official status to the Tamil language.
Discrimination against Tamilians began and many of them were asked to resign from top bureaucratic positions because they couldn’t speak fluent Sinhalese.
In 1971, the government made a policy to set higher benchmarks for Tamil students to enter universities.
In 1975, the dreaded Prabhakaran killed a member of the governing Sri Lanka Freedom Party and a year later, created a group called LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), which sought a separate state called Tamil Eelam in North and East of Sri Lanka.
In 1983, LTTE killed an army envoy and that led to the worst anti-Tamil riots, which are considered to be the start of the civil war that lasted for over 25 years.
This civil war killed more than 100,000 people over two-and-a-half decades, including the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, whom LTTE claimed to have killed in 1991 for sending Peace Keeping Forces (to eliminate LTTE) to Sri Lanka between 1987-1990.
In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced a victory over LTTE and the official end of civil war with the killing of Prabhakaran.
