AJITH SIRIWARDANA 
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My father brought in Sinhala only Bill to give country back its identity: CBK
Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga yesterday said her father had brought in the Sinhala only Bill in 1956 not as a racist move but as a means of giving back to the country its identity after 450 years of subjugation by foreign rulers.
“After eight years of independence, the Sinhala people, who accounted for around 75 per cent of the population, felt that they were being discriminated against, not by the Tamil or Muslim people but by the white rulers and they felt they needed to express their identity by regaining an important place for the Sinhala people. What better way to give people an identity than to elevate the status of their language?,” she asked.
Ms. Kumaratunge said both the languages should have been given rightful place without giving its rightful place to the language of the people who made up the majority of the population.
“We only gave the language of the majority its rightful place. We should have given both languages their rightful place,” she said.
Speaking at the launch of the website of Language Facilitators pool at the BMICH, she said leaders of the 1956 government realized a year later that Tamil language must also be given recognition and brought in the Reasonable use of Tamil Bill, but it had not been implemented so far.
“Every successive government in this country excelled in sweeping the Bill under carpet and not giving the Tamil language its rightful place. This has created a situation where we do not have a single person who can speak Tamil or work in Tamil in most government departments and ministries. I looked into this when I became President. However, we had to face practical problems when recruiting Tamil people due to the war,” she said.
"This may be a small initiative but this is the first time that in post-independent Sri Lanka, a government has taken an effort to create an enabling environment to allow citizens to communicate with the government, in their language of choice,” she said.
Minister of National Co-existence, Dialogue and Official Languages Mano Ganesan said the implementation of the language policy, addressing language related issues and implementing them would be a prelude to solving more than half of the ethnic problems in the country.
"A cabinet paper has been put forward to re-assess the selection criteria of recruitment into government services, where there will be further motivation for learning new languages,” he said. (Ajith Siriwardana)
Video by Indika Sri Aravinda
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