State expulsion and ethnic conflict raised the Sinhalese share of Sri Lanka’s population.
Evidence
Indeed, the percentage of Sinhalese and Buddhists has increased due to the ethnic conflict and the subsequent exodus of thousands of Tamils from the island, coupled with the state’s discriminatory policies toward its Indian Tamils, which caused thousands more among the third and fourth generation born in Sri Lanka to be forcibly resettled in India—so that the island’s Indian Tamil population dropped from 11.73 percent in 1946 to 5.52 percent in 1981. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 277
Categorization
- CANDY: A stark counterintuitive fact: the discriminated minority was forcibly resettled out of the country, so majority share grew from conflict-driven ethnic cleansing rather than birthrates.
- XREF: connects to: Sinhalese nationalists engineered demographic consolidation of Tamil regions through state land seizure.; Ethnic outbidding by Sinhalese parties drove ethnic polarization.; Military security zones double as demographic colonization of contested Tamil land — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 272 (+1 more)