Two of the Commissioners, Dr. Drummond-Shiels and Frances Butler, had been Labour Party London County Councillors for many years prior to entering Parliament and serving in the short-lived Lib-Lab government coalition stitched together by Lloyd George in 1926.
Having noted that the island was riven by power struggles between competing ethnic groups, it devised a system of executive committees that would control all government departments.
Jane Russell in her detailed study[1] states that (p. 16) "Ponnambalam Ramnathan and most of the 'conservatives' believed and argued that the giving of the vote to the non-vellala castes and to women was not only a grave mistake, leading to 'mob rule', but Ramanathan explicitly suggested that it was anathema to the Hindu way of life".
The All-Ceylon Tamil league first opposed the DC on the grounds that the abolition of the communal (representation) principle when coupled with the universal franchise proposal would mean "death to the minorities", as the Sinhalese would now receive over 50% of the seats.
They were followers of Nehru and Gandhi, and in 1925 called for the abolition of the caste system, cooperation with the Sinhalese, adoption of the national dress and "swabasha" in place of English.
Tamil leaders who did not take part in the boycott were Dr. Saravanamuttu (Colombo North), M. Subramanium (Trincomalee-Batticaloa), S. M. Ananthan (Mannar), Peri Sundaram (Hatton), S. P. Vytilingam (Talawakelle).
G. G. Ponnambalam, an ambitious catholic lawyer from Colombo who did not belong to the elit group of the earlier Tamil leaders, also rejected the boycott.
Sri Lanka remained virtually independent under the Donoughmore constitution, with full control over domestic affairs, using the mechanism of universal suffrage to elect a national government at a time when only white countries in the European empires had that privilege, and continue its passage to relative prosperity without any major ethnic clashes for 16 years.