Ceylon Workers' Congress

The Ceylon Workers' Congress (CWC) (; Lanka Kamkaru Kongrasaya) is a political party in Sri Lanka that has traditionally represented Sri Lankan Tamils of Indian origin working in the plantation sector of the economy. History The CWC was formed by Peri Sundaram and G. R. Motha as an Indian Estates Workers Trade Union in 1950. It was an outgrowth of the Ceylon Indian Congress (CIC), formed 15 July 1939. In 1950 the CIC changed its name to the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) and became the largest trade union in the country. Another trade union, the Democratic Workers Congress (DWC), was formed in 1956 as a breakaway faction of the CWC as a result of leadership rivalries between the president, S. Thondaman, and the general secretary A. Aziz. The former retained control of the CWC to date. Thondaman has been the dominant trade union leader of the Indian Tamil workers for nearly four decades. As president of the Ceylon Indian Congress, he contested the Nuwara Eliya seat at the 1947 general election and won. His party put forward eight candidates in the plantation electorates and seven of them were returned, they were Thondaman, S. M. Subbaiah (Badulla), G. R. Motha (Maskeliya), K. Rajalingam (Nawalapitiya), K. Kumaravelu (Kotagala), C. V. Velupillai (Talawakelle) and D. Ramanujam (Alutnuwara). Organisation The political potentiality of the Indian Tamil workers and the CIC led by Thondaman were viewed as threats to the power of the ruling United National Party. Another view was that the enfranchisement of the Indian workers would interfere with the representation of the Kandyan Sinhalese in the legislature. However, the main reason for the disenfranchisement was the fear of political leaders like Senanayake (and even Ponnambalam) that the estate sector would become a prey to the Marxist movement. The left movement was militant and had a public image which concealed that its political strength was minuscule. However, the political leaders of the era had a more pessimistic prognosis. Even though the Donoughmore Constitution had granted universal franchise to Ceylonese, this was not applied to the Indian Estate Tamils, due to opposition from caste-conscious Colombo Tamils, vote conscious Kandyan Sinhalese, as well as due to the general opposition to any form of universal franchise. The latter was named "mob rule" by Arunachalam Ponnambalam. Thus, even by 1939, only a fraction of the Hill-country Tamils had been granted the franchise.