Landmarks In Our Journey To Ethnic Morass
By Ameer Ali –January 17, 2018
Today’s tumultuous ethnic relations that bedevil Sri Lanka’s political and social tranquillity is the end product of decades of political miscalculations and misunderstandings by each community about the others, and the overall mismanagement of the country’s pluralism by post-independence rulers. In this saga of miscalculations, misunderstanding and mismanagement certain historical landmarks stand out prominently. Before outlining these and interpreting how they shaped our journey to an ethnic morass it is important to remember two contrasting episodes from Sri Lanka’s pre-independence history.
The first episode relates to the successive Dravidian invasions from South India dating back to 230 BCE according to one source, and the destructions they inflicted upon Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the seats of Buddhist royalty. These acts of aggression, conquest and destruction, the memory of which has been kept alive by partisan historians and story tellers, have ingrained in the Sinhala Buddhist psyche over centuries that Tamils are a domineering community. In the modern era, the state of Tamil Nadu across the Palk Strait and the concentration of Tamils in the north and east of the island with another 19th century addition in the central highlands added to the Sinhala Buddhist psychological fear that similar invasions from Tamil Nadu, perhaps on the invitation of their local brethren, cannot be discounted. This fear almost translated into reality in 1987 when the Indian Air Force forcibly entered Sri Lankan air space and dropped what India called “Mercy Aid” to Tamil victims during the civil war. No wonder Sri Lanka condemned it as an act of “naked aggression” and President Jayewardene called it an “invasion”.
The second episode relates to the advent of Muslims to the country. Nowhere in Asia or for that matter in any part of the world was a Muslim minority treated with such great magnanimity and respect as in Sri Lanka during the reign of the medieval Buddhist kings. The hospitality that these monarchs extended to the early Arab and Persian Muslim immigrants is unparalleled in the annals of history. Even when the Muslims were chased out of Sitawaka during the Portuguese rule in the 16th century it was a Buddhist king, Senerath, who gave the victims refuge in his Kandyan Kingdom. This historical fact is a living memory in Muslims psyche.
On top pf these two contrasting historical episodes and their equally antithetic impact on the Sinhalese and Muslim psyches respectively other developments in the modern era added to the prevailing inter-ethnic mistrust and miscalculations. These developments are the landmarks that contributed to the current tumult.
Development 1:
During the British rule in the 1880s, at a time when an opportunity arose for Muslims to gain representation in the Legislative Council, the then Tamil leader and Legislative Councillor Sir Ponnampalam Ramanathan argued in the council, and authored a paper, which was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, that the Muslims were Tamils by origin but the follow the religion of Islam, implying thereby that there was no need for a separate representation for them. This diabolical blunder by Ramanathan, not so much because of the substance of his arguments but because of the timing of it, sowed the seeds of mistrust between the Tamil and Muslim communities. A permanent legacy of this unfortunate episode is that from that time onwards the Muslims of Sri Lanka began to call themselves Moors, a disparaging epithet bestowed upon all Arabs and Muslims by the Portuguese. This mistrust however, got further deepened after the 1915 Sinhalese-Muslim riots when the same gentleman led a delegation to London to plead before the court for the release of the Sinhalese leaders who were arrested by the colonial government on charges of aiding and abetting the rioters. Later in the 1930s and 1940s the mistrust deepened again when the Tamils supported the Indian Congress and Muslims the Muslim League in the struggle for Pakistan.
