Deteriorating Sinhalese-Muslim Relations II
Dr. Ameer Ali
The
year 2009 marked a turning point in the history of Sri Lanka. It was
not simply a year of military victory alone, but lot more than that.
From the point of view of the Sinhalese and specially Buddhists, that
victory wiped out from memory the historic fear they carried over
centuries of a possible Tamil invasion from the subcontinent. The
betrayal of the India and particularly Tamil Nadu during the final
stages of the civil war taught LTTE and the Tamils that in international
politics national interests would always prevail over ethnic and
religious affiliations and sympathies. This is also a lesson to those
local Muslim leaders who entertain the hope that the Arab majority outside will come to rescue the ajam (not Arabic speaking) minority inside, if any danger faces the latter.
India’s neutrality demonstrated to the Sinhalese that their historic
fear was misplaced and misconceived. At the same time, the 2009 victory,
won by an overwhelmingly Buddhist tri-forces, injected a fresh hope,
confidence and resolve at least amongst the most ardent Buddhist
nationalists that Sri Lanka in future should and would be transformed
into a supreme Theravada Buddhist State. 2009 therefore, marked the
emergence of a Buddhist supremacist wave in national politics.
Among these supremacists are university academics, public professionals,
business leaders, media moguls, and more importantly, “political
Bikkus”, a category of monks identified by Ven. Walpola Rahula.
It was this scholar monk, who declared in no uncertain terms that, “Sri
Lanka is a Buddhist Sinhala country. Let no one make a mistake”1.
Unfortunately, he left unsaid about the place and position of other
minorities in Buddhist Sinhala Sri Lanka. Not surprisingly therefore,
political Bikkus are the ones who are currently leading the campaign for
a Buddhist State. After
the civil war, and once the Tamil threat had been overcome, they and
their followers, turned the focus on Muslims, who had been a thorn on
their side for some time.
After nearly one thousand years of indigenisation and integration with Sinhalese, Tamils, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians, Anagarika Dharmapala,
the father of Buddhist nationalism, branded all Muslims aliens and
demanded them to be repatriated to Arabia, a sentiment that echoes in
the propaganda slogans of today’s supremacists. Perhaps, Dharmapala was
confused at that time to identify and distinguish the indigenous Muslim
majority from a transient minority that arrived from India to enrich
from the plantation economy. They were birds of passage, and it was
their exploitative business and commercial practices that partly
contributed to the impoverishment of rural Sinhalese in particular. But,
in targeting these exploiters Dharmapala dumped all Muslims in one
basket, which ultimately ended in the 1915 riot, marking the first
fissure in the millennium old Buddhist-Muslim amity and coexistence.
However, Dharmapala’s call for repatriation never happened, although
local leaders of the indigenised majority realised the dangers of
identifying themselves with the non-indigenous, and when the opportunity
arose in 1951 with the Ceylon Citizenship Act, Muslim parliamentarians
had no qualms in supporting that bill, even though that Act
disenfranchised hundreds of their Indo-Pakistani and Afghan Muslim
brethren.
Now, after almost five decades, a number of political, economic and
religious issues relating to Muslim community, which were discussed in
Part I, and which were irking Buddhist nationalists had compounded and
become the source of paranoia. A systematic anti-Muslim campaign has
been unleashed by organizations such as Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), Ravana
Balaya, Sinhala Ravaya, Sinha Le, Mahason Balakaya and so on, which are
apparatchiks working for the cause of Buddhist supremacy and its
proponents. Together, they constitute a powerful pressure group, which
is able to influence government policies and programs. Professor
G. H. Peiris, whose publication was cited in Part I, is of the view
that these groups are manipulated by foreign powers that are interested
in ‘regime change’. Adding substance to his contention was Colombo Telegraph’s recent exposure (30
April 2020) of the Chinese Embassy in Colombo, “spearheading”
anti-Muslim hatred in this country. Be that as it may, even foreign
powers cannot instigate violence and riots on their own without local
support and connections. That anti-Muslim violence increases its
intensity especially in times of elections is testimony to the
involvement of local political elements. Muslim community and its
historic friendship with Sinhala Buddhists has unfortunately fallen
victim to this sinister exercise.
Soon after the war, when President Mahinda Rajapaksa delivered
the victory speech from the podium, he made a timely and momentous
statement, that ‘there would be no more Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims in
the country but only Sri Lankans’. People who listened to his words
enjoyed a great sigh of relief. It looked as if MR was about to achieve
what previous leaders failed to do over sixty years, and the country
would witness the dawn of a new era. No wonder then, when he contested
the Presidency for a second term, MR won with an outright majority.
Alas! To the Muslims in particular, MR’s second term proved to be a
period of increased anxiety and existential worries, because of the
outbreak of a new wave of anti-Muslim violence.
Unlike those 24 major Sinhalese-Muslim clashes happened between 1976
and 2002, which had been researched in detail by a team of academics and
published in 20082,
and in which economic grievances had been the primary motivator,
anti-Muslim violence after 2009 has taken a more dangerous trend moving
towards another July 1983.
According to a submission by SLMC to UNCHR, already in 2013 and just two
years before another Presidential Election, a total of 241 incidents
had occurred between Sinhalese and Muslims, and of which 51 were
described as violent. Quite several of those incidents might have been
“trivia”, as Professor Peiris reckons, but among those fifty-one, the
lavishly funded (probably from abroad) BBS – a breakaway group from JHU,
with “a spatial scatter of loyal youth” had been prominent by its
presence at the scenes. Already
in 2013, Muslim businesses had been under attack, starting with Fashion
Bug, a Muslim retail store in Pepiliyana, near Colombo, which was
followed by an arson attack on another retail fashion store, NoLimit at
Panadura. In mid-June 2014, a major flare up broke out in Alutgama in
which the firebrand monk Galagoda Atte Gnanasara, the secretary of BBS
had been a notable participant. Soon after this, on 26 September 2014,
MR spread the red carpet to welcome Myanmar’s Ven. Ashin Wirathu, “The
face of terror” according to Time magazine,
whose 969 movement was fully behind Myanmar government’s genocide
against Rohingya Muslims. BBS stalwarts were even protesting against
providing asylum for Rohingya refugees in Sri Lanka. MR obviously wanted
to appease the anti-Muslim BBS, whose support he needed to win the
Presidency for another term. The Alutgama riot was followed by a series of similar convulsions in Gintota, Ampara, Digana and Katugastota.
The Alutgama riot is of particular significance, because it took place when President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR)
was Secretary to the Defence Ministry. If these riots were intended to
alienate the Muslim community from the Rajapakse regime, as argued by
Professor Peiris, why didn’t his brother who was the Defence Secretary
at that regime take any action to stop it? Didn’t he know that it was an
attempt by foreigners to swing Muslim votes against MR? GR absolutely
took no action to intervene, because, as is clear now with hindsight,
that he also needed the support of Buddhist extremists in his own plan
to contest for the presidency. Even in the case of the other riots,
security forces appear to have turned a blind eye, as video recordings
bear evidence, allowing Muslims, their businesses, places of worship and
property be looted, destroyed and burnt by drunken rioters, often in
the payroll of politicians. It should be recorded with great concern
that until now not one rioter had been brought before justice. Even
those who were arrested by the police were released later, apparently
due to pressure from political hierarchs and Buddhist hierocrats.
After 2009, Buddhist supremacists focused their attention in eliminating
the bargaining power of Muslim political leadership on the one hand
while removing on the other the commercial rivalry of Muslim
entrepreneurs. In this aggressive phase of anti-Muslim violence, just as
the threat of a Tamil invasion was employed to rally Sinhala masses in
the war against Tamils, the myth of a Muslim population explosion to
take over the country demographically and create a so called sharia state,
became the battle cry for mass mobilisation to fight Muslims. In that
propaganda Muslim wombs were suddenly turned into destructive weapons to
convert Sinhala-Buddhist majority into a minority. Members of BBS and
JHU were in the forefront of spreading this canard, which has now been
exposed and ridiculed by experts in Seri Lankan demography.2
The supremacists have tried to replace the old fear of a Tamil invasion
with a new one about Muslim fecundity. In this fear mongering, the
publication in the Sinhalese language, Al-Jihad Al-Qaida,
authored by the former minister from JHU, Champika Ranawaka and
distributed within his party members and members of the Sangha was a
deliberate ploy to deepen the fear about Muslims. Two TV channels, Hiru
and Darana are openly behind this malicious campaign.
Thus, the process of Islamization with its Wahhabi conservatism
and radical tendencies, disrupted the historic and peaceful interaction
Muslims had with other communities. This disruption, engendered a
self-alienating tendency in the name of strengthening Islamic identity.
At the same time, an aggressive post-2009 Buddhist nationalism turned
into a supremacist movement, considered Muslims as aliens and accused
them of surreptitiously designing to convert Sri Lanka into an Islamic
state with sharia laws. In the violence that ensued Muslim places of worship and businesses became main targets of attack. Government’s
relative inaction to protect the Muslim community from street thugs and
larrikins drove some Muslims into the fold of Islamism.
The emergence of the National Thawhid Jamaat (NTJ) from Kattankudy under
the leadership of a madrasa dropout Mohamed Zahran Hashim should be
seen as a response to the post-2009 anti-Muslim wave. As pointed out in
Part I, Kattankudy had already been a hot-bed for intra-religious Muslim
violence in 1990s. The birth of NTJ from this conservative
mullah-merchant enclave is therefore not a surprise. The complete story
about NTJ’s origins and spread, and circumstances surrounding its
macabre killing of hundreds of innocent and mostly Christian lives
during the Easter Sunday celebrations of 2019, are yet to be unearthed
and told in full. There are a number of unanswered questions. However,
given the post-2009 anti-Muslim violence which was allowed to spread
under the watchful eyes of government authorities was destined to invite
retaliation of some sort. Yet, that infamy could have been prevented
had the authorities taken prompt action on information received from
multiple sources. Nevertheless, that tragedy provided further ammunition
to supremacists to continue attacking Muslims. In Chilaw, Negombo,
Minuwangoda and other places Muslim businesses and property were
targeted and at least one Muslim was killed.
Anti-Muslim incidents did not cease even after GR came to power. The outbreak of Covid-19 is
the latest episode giving yet another occasion for accusing Muslims. A
malicious campaign through the Sinhala print, voice and tele media has
been launched to create an impression among ordinary Sinhalese that it
was Muslims who brought the virus to the country and it is they who are
spreading it. In this context, the decision by the health department to
cremate Muslims who died of Coronavirus, with utter disregard to Muslim
religious and cultural susceptibilities appears to be more of a
punishment for crime committed than a preventive measure to check the
pandemic.
How one sided are sections of the mainstream media and how selective are
they when reporting on Muslims was demonstrated recently during the
coronavirus shutdown. Of all private sector employers in the country,
only two business establishments owned by Muslims came forward to pay
the wages of the employees in full, in spite of complete shutdown of the
shops. Among thousands of their employees were hundreds of Sinhala
Buddhists, Christians and Hindus, men and women. That
exemplary act received no mention at all from the supremacist media
outlets, which are always ready to portray Muslims as destroyers of the
nation. Similarly, Akbar Brother’ contribution of 50 million rupees to
MR’s Covid-19 Health care and Social Security Fund hardly received
publicity in the same media. These fashioners of falsehood and feeders
of friction are the cruellest agents in the country today dedicated to
destroy the historic Sinhalese-Muslim friendship.