Youth in Sri Lanka
Social scientists have pointed to difficulties in pinning down “youth” as a general category for analysis, and have raised questions around what or who youth is. They have shown that the named life-stage category of “youth” is fluid and often an ambiguous social experience (Valentine 2003; Vigh 2006; Beck 1992).
Durham suggests that invoking youth is a pragmatic or political process, where youth is constantly being reconstructed through claiming it for oneself, or assigning it to others (2004). She urges us to think of youth as “a social shifter,” which situates it “in a social landscape of power, rights, expectations, and relationships - indexing both themselves and the topology of that social landscape” (2000, p. 116). To draw attention to youth is to recognize the dynamics of power, agency, memory, history, governance, and globalization, among other things (Durham 2000). The following pages show the ways in which former insurgents inscribed their constructions of youth with specific affective characteristics and powerful cultural meanings, drawing on representations of youth to provide elaborate moral critiques of violence.The youth who spearheaded the JVP insurgency (like their Tamil insurgent counterparts in the north) belonged to a demographic cohort of educated, unmarried, aspirational youth that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in Sri Lanka (see Thiranagama 2011). This cohort had benefited from the free universal healthcare and education (from primary to tertiary levels) provided by the post-independence state. However, this generation was by no means homogeneous. Their “contact” (Mannheim 1952) with the social, economic, and political world around them was shaped by their gender and class, ethnic, religious, geographic, caste, and linguistic backgrounds.
The state-educated Sinhala Buddhist youth who participated in the JVP insurgency belonged to a youth cohort that harbored aspirations for social mobility and an escape from poverty.
These aspirations were thwarted, however, by the failure of the prevailing socioeconomic and political system to provide adequate opportunities (e.g., decent employment) on a just and equitable basis. The result was widespread frustration, and anger at the state. This generation had come of age during the economic liberalization policies of the UNP regime post 1977, which resulted in a sharp rise in social and economic inequalities, in effect reversing many of the achievements gained by the post-independence welfare policies of the previous decades (Venugopal 2011). The communities to which these youth belonged further bore the brunt of the escalating rural agricultural crisis. Economic liberalization also led to an increase in state patronage in the distribution of economic and political resources (Moore 1990), and the 1980s witnessed the rapid rise of the politicization of society. The importance of political connections and bribes to securing state employment, for instance, discriminated against youth from socially and economically marginalized backgrounds.Sinhala youth from poorer backgrounds, already frustrated at their inability to access decent employment and opportunities for social mobility, also found themselves politically excluded. The political system that this youth cohort (and subsequent generations) were faced with was one based on power and connections, dominated by politicians from English-educated, urban-elite backgrounds. This left little opportunity (if any) for rural youth to influence policy, and elite politicians failed to recognize the serious social and economic challenges faced by young people from marginalized backgrounds. The independence in 1948 that followed over 400 years of brutal colonial subjugation had seen the departing British colonists hand over state power to a select English educated, westernized, local elite. This small elite, which now held the reigns of political power, were hopelessly disconnected from “the masses” in terms of language, culture, and lifestyle (Spencer 1990).
This segment of Sinhala Buddhist youth experienced further seismic political shifts - most notably the outbreak of civil war between the state and young Tamil militants in the north and east in 1983, increasing state violence and authoritarianism, and the unwelcome political intervention of India in the war between the state and the LTTE in 1987. Some scholars have rightly argued that explaining away the insurgencies in the north and the south of Sri Lanka as “ethnic” or “youth” problems respectively detracts attention from the economic and political issues that produce social discrimination, which lie at the root of young people’s readiness to engage in political violence against the state (see Hettige and Mayer 2002). Indeed, social problems such as escalating suicide rates (particularly among rural youth) in the 1980s and 1990s indicate the hopeless sociocultural circumstances from which both Sinhala and Tamil militant groups drew their recruits (Spencer 1990). While ethnic discrimination was undoubtedly a critical factor that fueled the violence between Tamil militants and the state, scholars have importantly emphasized that it is one among many interconnected and complex factors that gave rise to, and shaped, the conflict in the north. It is equally important to recognize the pernicious workings of discrimination embedded in the socioeconomic and political structures, which excludes monolingual youth from marginalized backgrounds across the ethnic groups in Sri Lanka (see Amarasuriya 2010).
Youth unemployment, particularly among educated youth, and the disjuncture between aspirations and available opportunities is perhaps most widely recognized by local commentators as a key factor that fueled the JVP insurrection. Debates on youth unemployment in Sri Lanka have tended to draw a narrow causal link between unemployment and youth unrest, often pointing the finger of blame at young people themselves. This has largely contributed to “youth” being considered a “problem” and predisposed to violence.
Much has been made of the “unrealistic aspirations” of youth and the mismatch between education and the skills required by the labor market by local commentators. But comparatively little has been said about the failure of the economy and the private sector to provide decent employment opportunities to meet the needs of these young people on a fair and equitable basis. The institutionalization of political patronage and favoritism in the distribution of state welfare and resources has excluded poorer monolingual youth from accessing decent state employment. At the same time, other insidious social and cultural factors (e.g., the value assigned to English language and education, social networks, cultural symbols of Westernization, which are perceived as markers of progress) lie at the source of discrimination against these youth in the private sector (see Amarasuriya 2010).While the post-independence welfare state made commendable strides in providing free universal education, there were serious problems relating to the education system in Sri Lanka, particularly concerning access, and the type and quality of education offered, which caused widespread discontentment among young people. Formal education carries great value in Sinhala society, and is seen as a marker of social status and a vehicle for social mobility. Education in itself, however, is often a “contradictory” resource that can draw some people tighter into structures of inequality, while also providing some opportunities (Jeffrey et al. 2004). Some of the grievances specific to the education system in Sri Lanka that led to violent youth protest included the woeful lack of resources for, and poor quality of education offered in, state schools (particularly in deprived rural areas); the politicization of the education system; and the barriers faced by educated youth who are products of the state-sponsored swabhasha (national languages) education system in a labor market that privileges the English language/education and Western cultural demeanor.
The latter issue in particular has led to further polarization between swabhasha-educated youth and their English-educated multiethnic urban peers from wealthier backgrounds. The harsh reality of frustrated aspirations and social discrimination continue to form the basis of the youthful experience for the majority of young Sri Lankans today.The JVP's revolutionary ideology spoke to these very issues in a way that other more “out-of-touch” elitist political parties in the mainstream did not. These issues were firmly identified by former insurgents as fueling their initial motivations to join the insurrectionary effort, and they drew on examples of personal experiences of poverty, social discrimination, state violence, and political corruption to substantiate this in their narratives. All the former insurgents who participated in this research claimed their goal to be that of overthrowing a corrupt and unjust regime, in order to replace it with a state based on justice and equality. But in retrospect they did not offer these widely acknowledged causes of “youth unrest” as the sole or most significant factors motivating their decision to take up arms against the state (while they did mention them in relation to the unjust and unequal state they wanted to overthrow). Neither did these factors feature elaborately in people’s recollections of their overall experiences of the Bheeshanaya.
In hindsight, former insurgents overwhelmingly reflected on their involvement in the insurrection in terms of their “youthfulness” (tarunakama). Through this, they went on to project a particular representation of the kind of “youthful” insurgents they were, and demonstrated how this shaped their experiences of violence. Rather than subscribing wholeheartedly to the causes of “youth unrest” identified as being the prime motivators of their involvement in violence (discussed above), former insurgents drew on the constructed concept of tarunakama to give meaning to their relationship with violence and to allocate an ethical space for it post terror.
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