Sri Lankan Reefcomber, responding to Chandre Dharmawardena’s article entitled “Facing Polarized Extremism in Sri Lanka in 1973 ….” ++
Thanks, Michael. A thought-provoking essay. The author packs layers of historical grievances, personal academic politics, and comparisons between Sri Lanka and Malaysia into a short space. Many of the author’s arguments are grounded in personal experience. His critique of the language barrier, insular academic circles, and the blindness of the elite to the radicalisation of Tamil youth in Jaffna is compelling.
However, his comparisons with Malaysia are the weakest part of the essay. While he claims that the policies of the Sri Lankan SLFP-LSSP government were far less discriminatory than the Bumiputera policy, introduced in 1971 with its 30% equity target, designed to marginalise Malaysia’s Chinese minority, he also asserts that the Malaysian Chinese successfully avoided violence by retreating from politics to focus on capturing financial and mercantile power, leaving governance to the Malays. Although this captures a surface-level economic reality, it is misleading because it confuses a forced survival strategy with a voluntary choice.
By praising the Malaysian Chinese for their non-violence, the author omits the bloody May 13 Incident of 1969 and ignores how aggressive state engineering drove the Chinese community to adopt a pragmatic political stance. He oversimplifies a complex history of state control and racial tensions into a sanitised narrative about minority non-violence. In reality, the Malaysian government employs censorship and persistent social media monitoring to maintain political stability and safeguard the privileged position of ethnic Malays. Granted, the Chinese community excels economically within this system, but the arrangement remains far from equitable.
By allowing one ethnic group to dominate political power, Malaysia’s power structure perpetuates the logic of British rule. In essence, Malaysian independence simply swapped one group of elites for another while keeping the underlying hierarchy intact. The British divide-and-rule system—which left the Chinese in tin mining and commerce, Indians on rubber plantations, and Malays in agriculture and administration—still persists in its foundational framework today.
By unmasking the coercive reality behind Malaysia’s stability, we can see that Sri Lanka did not fail a unique historical test; rather, both nations fell into the exact same post-colonial trap. The author attempts to contrast the two settings by arguing that Sri Lanka’s SLFP-LSSP policies were less discriminatory than Malaysia’s Bumiputera laws. Yet this distinction misses the shared colonial blueprint. Instead of dismantling the British divide-and-rule legacy to build an inclusive civic identity, majoritarian elites in both Colombo and Kuala Lumpur hijacked the colonial machinery for electoral gain. The ultimate trajectory of each minority group was not a matter of voluntary political strategy, but a result of the economic options left open to them. While Malaysia left a lucrative private sector open for Chinese survival, the Sri Lankan state choked off Tamil access to state employment and university admission without offering a viable alternative. In both settings, majoritarian nationalism is misplaced, serving only to mimic the very colonial hierarchies these nations fought to overthrow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abeyratne, Sirimal. (2026). “Economic Development and Political Conflict: Comparative Study of Sri Lanka and Malaysia.” ResearchGate Comparative Series.
Chin, James. (2009). “The Malaysian Chinese Dilemma: The Never Ending Policy (NEP).” Journal of Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, 3, 167–182.
Comber, Leon. (2009). 13 May 1969: The Darkest Day in Malaysian History. Marshall Cavendish.
De Silva, C. R. (1979). “The Impact of Nationalist Policy on University Admissions 1970–1977.” In Collective Identities, Nationalisms, and Protest in Modern Sri Lanka. Marga Institute.
De Silva, K. M. (1998). Reaping the Whirlwind: Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Politics in Sri Lanka. Penguin Books.
DeVotta, Neil. (2022). “Standardization and Ethnocracy in Sri Lanka.” UNU-WIDER Working Paper Series, No. 2022/86.
Horowitz, Donald L. (1985). Ethnic Groups in Conflict. University of California Press.
Jomo, Kwame Sundaram. (2004). “The New Economic Policy and Interethnic Relations in Malaysia.” UNRISD Papers.
Kua, Kia Soong. (2007). May 13: Declassified Documents on the Malaysian Riots of 1969. Suaram.
Perera, Nihal. (1998). Decolonizing Ceylon: Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Space in Sri Lanka. Oxford University Press.
++ I have refrained from my usual policy of highlighting vital segments in the essay because this is a complex topic and I do not have adequate knowledge of the Malaysian scenario to implement it.
Reply to reefcomber by Chandre Dharmawardana.
Thank you for your detailed comments and recognizing the importance of studying the trajectory of Malasyian ethnic politics that Ethnic Studies people in Sri Lanka have so far missed looking into.
The writer (whose identity has to be guessed) says “By praising the Malaysian Chinese for their non-violence, the author omits the bloody May 13 Incident of 1969 and ignores how aggressive state engineering drove the Chinese community to adopt a pragmatic political stance. He oversimplifies a complex history of state control and racial tensions into a sanitised narrative about minority non-violence.”
In saying “how aggressive state engineering drove the Chinese community to adopt a pragmatic political stance” he grants my premise that the Malasian govt. stance was very aggressive, and that the Chinese minority took a pragmatic stance. Indeed, my thesis is precisely that while the Chinese minority took a pragmatic stance, the Tamil minority (only 12% compared to the 30% Chinese in Malasiya) took a completely unwinnable military stance in challanging the Sinhalese and Mulsim groups (80%) assembled under successive legitimately elected governments.
In my essay (https://thuppahis.com/2026/09/15/facing-polarized-extremism-in-sri-lanka-in-1973-in-simpleton-mode/) I specifically mentioned 1970 in saying “However, in fairness to the SLFP-LSSP government, their policies were nowhere as discriminatory as what was placed on the Chinese minority (30%) in Malaysia by 1970”. This was because the Malay and Chinese clash was in 1969 and I was not writing about Malaysia prior to 1970. I was pointing out the relevance of studying Malaysia by those who study the Sri Lankan Ethnic issues.
The point that seems to escape “reefcomber” is that just one year after the 1969 clashes, the leaders of the Chinese minority made a pivotal political decision. Similar decisions had been made by other important minorties, such as the Jews and Hispanics in America who do not try for politcal power, but have established their influence though clear hegemony in other sectors. New York city alone has over two million Jewish citizens. No Jewish leader has created agitation asking that the star-sprangled banner be sung in Yiddish in any New York civil ceremony. The Tamil community enjoyed a clear hegemony in finance, business, and the professions even upto the late 1960s. The wealthy prefrred to relocate their wealth, while the Elite Colombo-7 Tamil lawyers led a political movement aimed for political power with clear separatist objectives. Given the latter, what happened was inevitable.
But it could need not have been a 30 year war that completely sapped the Tamil people and made the North and East the most backward parts of Sri Lanka. Today it is the least-dense in population and it is normal that the other Ethnic groups will move in, causing more clashes because of the attempt to impose exclusive Tamilness against a steep demograhic concentration gradient.
A more detailed study of Malaysia’s political trajectory, comparing it with Sri Lanka is something very necessary, but right now I dont have the time to do that as I am heavily buried in more bread-and-butter work in physics which is my main discipline. So I cannot write a longer reply to reefcomber. However, I think he is fully competent to see the reality— if he wants to.
Chandre Dharmawardana’s charge that I am ‘praising the Malaysian Chinese for their non-violence’ misreads the argument. I was describing a strategic choice under constraint, not passing a moral judgment. When you praise a group as being good because they were passive, it implies a moral judgment I was not making.
It is enough to limit the focus to Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Trying to generalize case studies from around the world is futile. For every example of a country where minorities accept one ethnic group in power, you will find counterexamples.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear: the fact that the leaders of the Chinese minority made a pivotal political decision does not mean the situation is resolved, which the criticism implies.
Since independence, the Malaysian Government has introduced a swathe of laws, including the notorious Internal Security Act (1960) — originally passed to deal with the Malayan Emergency, a 12-year war the Malaysian establishment has every reason not to repeat — which allows the government to intern any critic indefinitely without trial. The 1969 riots added further layers to an architecture already in place, including the Emergency (Public Order and Prevention of Crime) Ordinance (EPOPCO), which allowed detention without trial and still remains in force today.
The Public Order (Preservation) Act 1958 grants police sweeping powers. The post-riot settlement also produced the 1971 NEP, accompanied by constitutional amendments that make it illegal, even in parliament, to question the special position of the Malays. The National Cultural Policy of 1971 defined Malay culture as the national cultural foundation.
The effect of these laws is to make Malaysia appear harmonious on the surface, by using force to suppress all criticism. The evidence tells a different story. The 3R Task Force arrested 12 individuals in the first 4 months after opening 61 investigations. The comedian Rizal Van Geyzel was arrested under the Sedition Act and the Communications and Multimedia Act for social media posts. Artists have been arrested, such as Fahmi Reza. Anwar Ibrahim was arrested under the ISA and was beaten while in jail. Now Mahathir is being investigated under the Sedition Act. We could go on like this for hundreds of pages – the claim that I was oversimplifying doesn’t stand up against the evidence.
In Malaysia today, the 3 Rs are taboo — race, religion, and royalty. The three topics are legally and politically protected from public questioning or criticism. You raise them and you go directly to jail. That sort of repressive system of laws, and there are many more, is why you might perceive everything as being acceptable in Malaysia. Those tensions remain beneath the surface in daily life. The “pragmatic stance” was not a free choice; it was the only available option under the ISA, EPOPCO, and the 3 Rs.