evidence: TAMILS IN SRI LANKA Tamils are the largest minority in Sri Lanka. They make up about 16.4 percent of the population of Sri Lanka compared to Buddhist Sinhalese, who make up three quarters of Sri Lanka’s population. Tamils live primarily in the north and east and the tea-growing areas of central Sri Lanka. Many are Hindus but some are Christians. Tamil-speaking Muslims are called Moors. They make up 9.2 percent of the population of Sri Lanka and are regarded as a separate group. If you add the Tamils and the Moors — both Tamil-speaking groups — together they make up 25.6 percent of Sri Lanka’s population. The Tamils in Sri Lanka are divided into Sri Lankan Tamils (11.2 percent of Sri Lanka’s population), whose descendants arrived in Sri Lanka many centuries ago, and the so-called Indian Tamils (4.2 percent), descendants of Tamils who were brought into Sri Lanka from India by the British during the last 150 years. Tamils in Sri Lanka are linguistically and culturally related to the Tamil- and Malayalam-speaking people of southern India, particularly the 70 million residents of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, just 32 kilometers miles across the Palk Strait, which separates northern Sri Lanka from southern India.