Sri Lanka’s first Prime Minister D S Senanayake rushed the Citizenship Act through the legislature just seven months after independence. Explained: Reading Bangladesh provisions for citizenship and freedom of religionThe Citizenship ActUnder the Act, citizenship could be only by patrilineal descent or registration. By the time the window agreed upon in 1964 closed, only 1,62,000 IOTs had been given Sri Lankan citizenship. The decades-long absence of political representation, however, led to the complete exclusion of Indian Tamils from the Sri Lankan national imagination. Until almost the end of the 20th century, they had the worst human development indices of any ethnic community in Sri Lanka.

Source: Indian Express January 15, 2020 22:41 UTC