After the independence and especially after the 'Sinhala only act" of 1956, Tamil parties were asking for more power for the North and east of Sri Lanka where Tamils are the majority. Some had gone further, asking for a federal system. There were many agreements with the Prime ministers, but nothing implemented. Finally, the desperate Tamil leaders decided that there was no point in co-existence and only solution was a separate state. In 1974, all major Tamil parties representing Tamils in the North east came under one forum and in 1976 they adopted a resolution at their party convention in Vaddukoddai, Jaffna calling for a separate state. The election of 1977 took place on July 21, 1977. The Tamil districts voted almost entirely for the Tamil United Liberation Front, a political party in Sri Lanka to openly advocate separatism of the Tamil regions of the country. For some years, there had been sporadic attacks on army and policemen in the Jaffna region, by militant Tamil youth groups which consisted a handful of members advocating separation through violent means. The new prime minister, Junius Richard Jayewardene, was convinced there was a link between the TULF and the militants, and wanted to suppress both.
There were different beliefs on how the riots started. Some believe they started when there was a dispute that began when four policemen entered a carnival without tickets. Apparently the policemen were inebriated and proceeded to attack those who asked for tickets. The conflict escalated and the policemen were beaten up by the public and in retaliation the police opened fire. Others have the view that the carnival incident was a pretext, inquiries revealing that it was conducted in an organized manner and was hence a pre-planned attack. The riot started on August 12, 1977, within less than a month of the new government taking office. Walter Schwarz wrote in Tamils of Sri Lanka, Minority Rights Group Report 1983': Edmund Samarakkody in Workers Vanguard reported':
Government response
Questioned in Parliament by Amirthalingam, Prime Minister Jayewardene was defiant, blaming the riots on the TULF:
People become restive when they hear that a separate state is to be formed. Whatever it is, when statements of that type are made, the newspapers carry them throughout the island, and when you say that you are not violent, but that violence may be used in time to come, what do you think the other people in Sri Lanka will do? How will they react? If you want to fight, let there be a fight; if it is peace, let there be peace; that is what they will say. It is not what I am saying. The people of Sri Lanka say that.
Finally, on August 20, the government ordered curfews and deployed the military to quell the riots.
Aftermath
More than 75,000 plantation Tamils became victims of racial violence and were forced to relocate to parts of North and East Sri Lanka. The events during the pogrom radicalized Tamil youths, convincing many that the TULF's strategy of using legal and constitutional means to achieve independence would never work, and armed insurrection was the only way forward. The outbreak of the pogrom highlighted the TULF's inability to provide safety for the Tamils. It was only after the pogrom, the TELO and LTTE, the two major Tamil liberation groups began an active campaign for a separate Tamil Eelam. Uma Maheswaran, a TULF activist, joined the LTTE in 1977 and was made the organization's chairman by Velupillai Prabhakaran. Many such Tamil activists began to join various Tamil militant groups to fight for separate statehood.
