A proposal made recently to indicate the nationality of a person as "Sri Lankan" in the relative birth certificate has resulted in a number of letters to the Editor in the national press extolling the virtues of the proposal. The writers of these letters appear to be unaware of the futility of the proposed exercise in view of the following:

1. If all citizens of this country are to be called Sri Lankans, what is the official language of the Sri Lankans. I can almost hear "the official languages will continue to be Sinhala and Tamil". If the Sri Lankans will continue to have two official languages, then the division by language and race is complete and no benefit whatsoever will accrue by calling ourselves Sri Lankans.

2. In any event, the proposal amount to putting the cart before the horse. One need not be a lawyer to find that there are at least four different personal laws applicable to citizens of this country. I. E. Roman Dutch Law, Kandyan Law, Thesawalamai Law and Muslim Law. So long as these laws remain in the Statute Book, legal recognition is available to the different communities and they have to state/declare their race before Courts of Law/Banks, etc., whenever there are testamentary proceedings/release of balances of accounts, etc., etc. In such a scenario, what is required is a common personal law applicable to all citizens of this country. Without having such a law, merely to call ourselves Sri Lankans in a piece of paper called birth certificates is, as I said earlier, putting the cart before the horse.

3. Moreover, most of the countries are known by the language spoken by the majority of their respective countries. E.g, China, Japan, Russia, Arab, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Thailand and Norway, etc. The list is too long to be continued in a letter of this nature. If we are to follow the global patterns, it is anybody’s guess as to by which name this country should be known.

I think I am being quite frank like the child who dared tell the Emperor that he was nacked while all others were prasing his "new clothes".
D. C. Abeyratne
Unawatuna