Word: tamils
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...quite a post-election statement, but justified in the sense that the big issue at the polls had indeed been Sukarno and his vicious guerrilla and propaganda offensives against the new Federation of Malaysia. In a lively five-week campaign, heated slogans in Malay, English, Tamil and four dialects of Chinese filled the air as candidates ran for most of Malaysia's national Parliament and state assembly seats. Charges flew that politicians were luring women voters with love potions. More serious were charges that some of the parties were playing into the hands of the Indonesians by opposing...
...addition to economic and political turmoil, Mrs. Bandaranaike has touched off religious bitterness. The government nationalized 700 Roman Catholic schools, refused to issue building permits for any more. Climaxing a long campaign against the English-speaking government elite and the Tamil-speaking Hindu minority (almost one-quarter of Ceylon's 10.6 million people), Mrs. Bandaranaike ordered that all official business must be conducted in Sinhala, the language of the Buddhist majority...
...Tamil Federal Party declared a day of mourning. Hundreds of registered letters piled up in post offices because registry slips were addressed in English. Some 2,300 civil servants quit without waiting for the switch to Sinhala to become official; remaining bureaucrats are already evading the language decree by circulating memos in English with the notation in the margin: "Sinhala version to follow." It rarely does...
...million Ceylonese Tamils, who migrated from the Indian mainland as long as two millennia ago, but who still speak their own language and practice the Hindu religion, were in a state of near rebellion over the government's proclamation of Sinhala, the language spoken by the 6,750,000-strong Buddhist majority, as the official tongue of the land. Although the controversial "Sinhala Only" law was passed in 1956 under the administration of the late Prime Minister Solomon West Ridgeway Bias Bandaranaike, it was his energetic widow Sirimavo who first set out to enforce it early this year...
...this threat to the island's basic economy, Widow Bandaranaike acted swiftly. She went on the radio, declared that "the nation cannot be held to ransom by threats," ordered general mobilization of the armed forces, sent troop reinforcements scurrying up to the Tamil areas. She decreed a state of emergency, under which strikers could be jailed for up to five years, and imposed curfews on principal Tamil communities. She banned the Tamils' Federal Party, tossed into jail more than 70 of its leaders, including all but one of its Members of Parliament. Swiftly, the rebelliousness of the widow...