Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka Despite this, many Up-country Tamil leaders feel that these demographic changes are part of larger, intentional discriminatory government policies. Joseph, the Up-country Tamil party leader told me, “If you take this population-wise, the government manipulation is there. Up-country people register themselves as ‘Indian Tamil’, some [government officials] don’t like this and mark them as Sri Lankan Tamil”. While he acknowledged Up-country Tamils’ reticence associated with the stigma of being marked as an “Indian” Tamil, he blames government officials as much as individual Up-country Tamils. Such conspiracy-minded thinking is widely prevalent in Sri Lankan politics (Bass 2012, 17–18), and developments post-war have only furthered and legitimated such views. Some Up-country Tamils leaders argue that pernicious government birth control policies have limited the population of the community. While the government has been negligent in providing fully informed consent for birth control practices in the up-country, this has not been an intentional policy, as much as one born out of neglect and indifference (Bass 2008). However, even if Up-country Tamils were victims of purposefully discriminatory methods of population control, it cannot statistically explain the entire decrease in the “Indian Tamil” population documented in the last census. Many scholars and activists estimate that Up-country Tamils made up about 7 per cent of the island’s population in 1981, not 5.5 per cent as officially counted, and should account for a similar proportion today (Bass 2012, 63; Chandrabose and Sivapragasam 2011, 20). Some blame the census for being incompetent at best, and biased at worst, when it comes to counting Indian Tamils. Yet, the instructions for census workers in 2001 clearly stated, after 12