Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka rights on a limited scale, which had only a marginal impact on improving access to governance. Subsequently, the issue of citizenship or statelessness was solved in 2003, but this did not resolve other dimensions of legal citizenship rights such as access to governance, public services, social rights, and institutional and policy reforms so as to enable this community to enjoy social rights in a substantial manner on par with other citizens of the country. Though there is superficial progress in some social indicators, government policies towards this community have not changed in reality, as this chapter shows. More importantly, three decades of protracted civil war also have had a negative impact on this community’s social development, where successive governments did not pay much attention to the demands and aspirations of this community, as there was an intensive conflict with another minority. Therefore, governments concentrated largely on suppressing the conflict rather than addressing the demands of ethnic minorities. In fact, political demands of this community were seriously taken into policy and political forums only after the end of civil war. This becomes evident when we look at the social development of this community before and after 2009. Drastic increase in political representation at all levels together with percentage of voters in this community also significantly influenced the structure and process of party and electoral politics of the country shortly after the civil war. This tendency invariably forced the ethnic majority leaders to hear the demands and voices of this community due to coalition politics persuaded by the present proportional representative system, where a single major political party could not secure a clear simple majority to form the government. This becomes evident when 30