Better Must Come had been rendered redundant based on previous responses. 43 The interviewees selected for this study were fifteen women and fifteen men, all of whom identified as Up-Country Tamil. Structured questionnaire surveys, consisting of seven straightforward ‘yes, no, no change’ questions designed to gauge whether people personally believed that access and entitlement to the four human rights indicators used in this study had increased since 2003 were conducted in each location to ascertain a more expansive range of statistical information from a representative sample of this population. The choice to proceed with such a limited line of questioning was made in order to capture the experiences of as many people as possible within a limited period of inquiry. The questionnaire survey respondents selected for this study were fifty women and fifty men, all of whom identified as Up-Country Tamil. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was deployed so as to put a human face on the statistics generated by the structured questionnaire surveys. Lastly, to overcome any language barrier between myself and those that had agreed to partake, I was accompanied by a research assistant fluent in both Tamil and English when conducting these interviews and surveys, all of which were undertaken between 25 July and 25 August 2016. The human rights analysis was employed to analyse the data generated from the above research methods for the purpose of identifying the extent to which access and entitlement to the four human rights that constitute the focus of this study had increased, and whether particular segments of this population had an increased rights entitlement in the years following the acquisition of citizenship as compared with others. Beyond these methods, a mix of primary documents, secondary research sources, and news media provided the data needed to complete this project. THE UP-COUNTRY TAMILS AND SRI LANKA — A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW A The Colonial Period With the 25 March 1802 Treaty of Amiens, 44 Ceylon was confirmed as a British Crown colony. 45 The 1823 Colebrook-Cameron Commission enacted by the Colonial Government put forth a number of recommendations pertaining to the administration of the island, and with the establishment of the first Legislative Council in 1833 a unitary state structure had been emplaced. 46 Mirroring these developments was the view from the Colonial Office that the large-scale cultivation of commercial crops presented as ‘an important option for Ceylon’, 47 and plantation agriculture was soon introduced to the island’s central region. 48 The 43 44 45 46 47 48 ibid 146. For purposes of historical accuracy, Ceylon will henceforth be used when speaking of the pre1972 period, whereas Sri Lanka will be used when speaking of the post-1972 period after the country’s name had been officially changed from Ceylon to Sri Lanka. Vijayapalan, Endless Inequality (n 37). Valli Kanapathipillai, Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka: The Case of the Tamil Estate Workers (Anthem Press 2009); Vijayapalan (n 37). Kumari Jayarwardena and Rachel Kurian, Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest (Orient Blackswan 2015) 18. Yvonne Fries and Thomas Bibin, The Undesirables: The Expatriation of the Tamil People ‘of Recent Indian Origin’ from the Plantations in Sri Lanka to India (K P Bagchi & Company 1984); Sivapragasam (n 1). 13

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