Sri Lanka’s tea estate workers courted by presidential candidates

Trouble brews before presidential election as long-marginalised group says it’s heard the candidates’ promises before.

Whoever Sri Lanka’s next president is, Muthuthevarkittan Manohari isn’t expecting much to change in her daily struggle to feed the four children and elderly mother with whom she lives in a dilapidated room in a tea estate.

Both leading candidates in Saturday’s presidential election are promising to give land to the country’s hundreds of thousands of tea estate workers, but Manohari says she’s heard it all before. The workers are a long-marginalised group who frequently live in dire poverty – but they can swing elections by voting as a bloc.

Mahohari and her family are descendants of Indian indentured labourers who were brought in by the British during colonial rule to work on the estates that grew first coffee, and later tea and rubber. Those crops are still Sri Lanka’s leading foreign exchange earners.

For 200 years, the community has lived on the margins of Sri Lankan society. Soon after the country became independent in 1948, the new government stripped them of citizenship and voting rights. An estimated 400,000 people were deported to India under an agreement with the neighbouring country, separating many families.

The community fought for its rights, accumulating wins until it achieved full recognition as citizens in 2003.