Towards A Non-Racist Future
Mahendran Thiruvarangan
M. Jaffer, an Ettankattai resident was despairing. “The main junction is going up in flames. At the same time, the authorities are folding their arms and watching,” he complained.
Jaffer says that about 20 minutes after the shops were set ablaze, a few Muslim boys from the area had flung stones at the attackers in retaliation. “At that time we heard the Army personnel telling their colleagues,‘they are beating our people; bring your weapons and come here,’” the Ettankattai resident related.
“Until then they just watched and waited. Is this our Government? Is this our justice system?” “You know what happened to the Tamils in 1983? That is what is happening to us today,” another frustrated resident of Ettankattai told reporters just yards away from where the fire was raging.
Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism embedded in the structures of the Sri Lanka state and embraced by a significant cross-section of the Sinhala-Buddhist polity in the island has raised its gory head once more. We will never be able to understand the foundations of the violence that the Muslims are facing today in Sri Lanka nor put an end to anti-minority violence in the long run without unpacking the social, psychological, economic and institutional dimensions of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, even if one views the assault on the Sinhala-Buddhist truck driver, who later succumbed to his injuries, by three Muslim men in Kandy as the immediate background to the current ethnic tensions in the Central Province.
Those instigating and supporting the violence try to scare the majority community that the Muslims are trying to make Sinhalese infertile by mixing sterilization pills in the food served at Muslim eateries with a view to causing a decline in the population of the Sinhalese in the country. Some others blame the Muslims for being a thriving economic force in the country. Others just want a country without Muslims. The Sinhala nationalist discourse of anti-Muslim hatred is based on myths, lies and crude homogenizations about the economic strength of the Muslim community and a cultural desire to eliminate and eject the ‘Other’ from the nation-state.
As a country that has witnessed massacres targeting the minority communities for many decades, a thirty-year-long civil war centering on the national question in the North-East and inter-ethnic conflicts over land and other natural resources, employment, educational opportunities and access to state power, the Sri Lankan state should have already taken strong measures to win the confidence of the numerically smaller ethnic and religious groups by re-configuring itself as an inclusive body, in contrast to the current state structure that constitutionally offers foremost place to Buddhism, the faith that has the largest following in the island. The government in power, which claimed to pursue a reconciliation agenda to heal the wounds caused by the war, should have also created at the grassroots in the South and the war-affected North-East, not in Colombo’s plush hotels, spaces that nourish dialogue between communities that fear and mistrust one another at present. The state alone cannot be blamed for the terror that Muslims are facing today because our social organizations, religious institutions and trade unions could not situate their actions and activisms beyond the narrow cultural boundaries they have drawn for themselves and their constituencies. What we have been confronted by the past few days is a socio-institutional paralysis for which the state and non-state forces are collectively responsible.
The minority communities and everybody who yearns for a state that respects religious pluralism and cultural diversity have every reason to reject and rebel against the current Sri Lankan state as it has unambiguously and constitutionally ceased to be a common body that the people can relate to regardless of their identities. But in Sri Lanka, several powerful social and political groups representing the minorities, including the Archbishop of Colombo and mainstream Tamil and Muslim political parties, were willing to leave the constitutional privilege given to Buddhism untouched during debates on the new constitution. Despite the conciliatory positions taken by minority groups, Sinhala chauvinists continue to frame the religious minorities in the country as a threat to their existence as a nation. The institutional support Buddhism enjoys is undoubtedly one of the cardinal factors that boost the chauvinistic mobs to advance their violent political projects without fear, hesitation or shame and discourage the law-enforcing authorities from acting against the perpetrators of the violence without fear of reprisals.
The ineffectiveness of the government in taking stringent action against those who participated in the recent violence and their cheerleaders online and offline and its failure to bring to book those who were involved in the violence that hit the country in the past, the silence of a large segment of Sinhala-Buddhist civil society and its religious and social leaders who have not publicly condemned the mobs including the Buddhist monks who took part in the violence, the reluctance on the part of the mainstream media in the South to foreground in their analyses of the violence the destructive link between the ideology of the state and the actions of the mobs and the slowness on the part of the law enforcing bodies to curb the violence are all manifestations of nothing but overt and latent forms Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism that is both social and institutional.
