Abstract:
After the wining the civil war in 2009, the president
of Sri Lanka announced that hereafter there would be
no majorities and minorities in Sri Lanka but patriots
and traitors. This re-labelling while allowing the age
old inequalities to continue, marks all the voices of
dissent as non-patriotic. In the post-independence
politics of Sri Lanka, competing political parties and
armed groups constantly use the word traitor to
single out individuals and groups who have
differences in opinion, ideology and vision. Dissent
has been seen as a threat. On the other hand the
nation-building project in Sri Lanka constantly
produced its ›Other‹ along the line of binaries such
as Aryan–Dravidian, native–invader, Sinhalese–
Tamils, majority–minority and South–North.
