Paper Tigers on the Prowl: Rumors, Violence and Agency in the Up-Country of Sri Lanka

In February 2007, international press reports from Pakistan were filled with accounts of Pakistanis refusing to participate in polio vaccination campaigns coordinated by UNICEF out of fear that the vaccines caused sterilization (see Latif 2007; Walsh 2007). Several local clerics had claimed that the vaccines were actually part of an American-led conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. Similar rumors about vaccinations and sterilization were widespread in Nigeria's Kano state in 2004 (see Associated Press 2004; Walsh 2007), and had also received significant attention in the international press. However, press accounts of these rumors contain little to no explanation for why local leaders in Pakistan and Nigeria spread these rumors, except for accusations of ignorance or general references to anti-Americanism.

I argue that such rumors, and the paranoia and conspiracy theories that coalesce around them, serve local rhetorical political purposes, and often have little to do with public health policies or international affairs. However, rumors are never about just one thing (White 2005:245). Somewhat paradoxically, these rumors are not necessarily evidence of local elites' power and agency, although temporary setbacks to government vaccination programs point otherwise. Instead, I suggest that these rumors actually illustrate the lack of agency and power among local elites, in the face of more powerful authorities, be it the central government, or international aid agencies, or a new generation of leaders on the horizon. In this essay, I will address the issues of rumors, agency and local elites, not in the contexts of Pakistan or Nigeria, but in another war-torn country, Sri Lanka.

Ever since I began doing ethnographic research in the tea-growing central highlands, or up-country, of Sri Lanka in 1999, local Tamil politicians, union leaders, academics and NGO workers repeatedly told me that if something significant was not done for the development of the up-country, the continued neglect and poverty would almost certainly lead to wide-spread violence. They would often compare the large numbers of over-educated, under-employed youth currently in the up-country tea and rubber plantation areas with similar situations in the 1970s and 80s in the island's South and its North, which gave rise to the violent, militant nationalist Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (People's Liberation Front, or JVP) and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), respectively (see Hettige 2004; Moore 1990:616; Spencer 2000:125; Tambiah 1986:14). Speakers implied that violent uprisings were an inevitable consequence of Sri Lankan ethnic politics, and that Up-country Tamils would soon have their turn.¹

However, when I returned to Sri Lanka in 2006 and heard very similar claims, often from the same people who made them years before, I realized that something more than a simple warning or call to action was going on. For example, Narayan, an Up-country Tamil manager of a tea estate, as plantations are called in Sri Lankan English, claimed that the LTTE and other "Northern groups have infiltrated in a large way" into the eight estates under his control in the Dickoya area, although he lacked any first-hand evidence.² "Anytime it can erupt," he said, and with "the slightest provocation, it will boil up," since the up-country was "sitting on a powder-keg." He agreed with me that the threat of such violence was not imminent, but repeated that all it would take is one incident, and things could rapidly fall apart.

Narayan said that many estate workers who are parents of relatively over-educated, yet under-employed youth want them to get estate staff jobs for which they are not qualified. "These people are the troublemakers on the estate," he said. "Once this gets to an even bigger number, it will be a great social problem." Increasing education on the estates has often led to increasing frustration, since the promises of a middle-class lifestyle are not easily achievable in the up-country today due to the ethnic conflict and the currently unstable Sri Lankan economy. Many children of estate workers do not want the same demeaning and debilitating jobs...