Sri
Lankan monks join rampaging
mob By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - Sri Lanka's Muslim community
is insecure and angry.
A mosque in the
central town of Dambulla was attacked with petrol
bombs and vandalized around 10 days ago by a mob
led by radical Buddhist monks. To add insult to
injury, the government has bowed to the mob's
demand and ordered the mosque's demolition and
relocation.
Muslims say the mosque is
about 60 years old. The monks insist it was built
after 1982 when the government declared the area
to be a "Buddhist sacred area". They allege that
the mosque is an "illegal structure".
Located about 150 kilometers northeast of
the capital Colombo, Dambulla is a Buddhist
pilgrim town. Trouble erupted when a mob of around
2,000 Sinhalese, including monks led by the
mahanayaka (chief
priest) of the Rangiri Dambula chapter, Inamaluwe
Sumangala Thero, stormed the mosque and damaged
it, disrupting ongoing Friday prayers. Television
footage has captured the mob chanting derogatory
and racist slogans. Monks can be seen going on a
rampage, with one monk even disrobing and exposing
himself.
They have threatened to demolish
the mosque if the government doesn't relocate it.
Within days of the violence and the
warning, Prime Minister Disanayaka Mudiyanselage
Jayaratne, who also heads the Ministry of Buddhist
Sasana and Religious Affairs, announced the
mosque's relocation. Muslims have been "offered
the choice of three alternate locations" to
relocate the mosque, he said, adding that "steps
are being taken to immediately shift the mosque".
Muslim leaders have rejected the offer.
"We will not agree to any compromise of taking
land elsewhere," Sri Lanka Muslim Congress leader
and Justice Minister Rauf Hakeem told reporters in
Colombo. The SLMC is part of the ruling United
People's Freedom Alliance.
The Muslim
community has been protesting the violence and the
government decision through demonstrations and
shut-downs.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa,
who has refrained from reining in the Buddhist
extremists in his government and outside hitherto,
was outside the country when the attack in
Dambulla took place. He has been silent on the
matter since his return.
Also in the
crosshairs of the Dambulla monks is a Hindu temple
in the area.
"There are 72 unauthorized
constructions near the Dambulla Buddhist temple,
including the mosque and a kovil [a Hindu
temple in Tamil], which will be removed within six
months," a monk from Dambulla is reported to have
said.
Buddhism is the religion of the
majority of Sri Lankans. It is estimated that
around 70% of the island's population are
Buddhist. Almost all Buddhists are Sinhalese. The
religious minorities include Hindus (15%), who are
mainly Tamil speaking, and Muslims (7.5%) and
Christians (7.5%).
Although Buddhism
advocates peace and tolerance, the way it is
practiced by a fringe - albeit one that is growing
and extremely powerful - is rather violent,
fanatical and far from accommodative.
The
Sinhala-Buddhists' self-perception has three
components. The first is that they belong to the
"Aryan Sinhala race" (as distinct from the Tamil
Dravidians) and that Sri Lanka is their homeland;
the second is that they are defenders of the
Buddhist faith, the mission of protecting Buddhism
having been entrusted to them by Buddha himself;
and the third is that Sri Lanka is the home for
the Sinhala language. This self-perception has
created a virulent form of Sinhala-Buddhist
supremacism.
Sinhalese-Buddhist
supremacists draw on the Mahavamsa, first
written in the sixth century AD and revised
thereafter in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to
justify Buddhism's dominance in Sri Lanka and to
bolster claims that the country is and has to be a
Sinhala-Buddhist state. Much in the
Mahavamsa consists of myths, but to many
Sinhalese it is irrefutable history. It has
created what is often described as the
Mahavamsa mindset, a belief that Sri Lanka
is a Sinhala-Buddhist land because the
Mahavamsa says so.
The
Mahavamsa mindset lies at the core of
Sinhala-Buddhist hardline arguments that the
island is "theirs" and religious and ethnic
minorities are "guests", who stay in Sri Lanka on
the sufferance of the Sinhalese-Buddhists. Their
continued stay here is on the condition of "good
behavior". As former chief of army staff,
Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, once said in an
interview, the minorities must not "demand undue
things".
Over the past 125 years or so,
violence has been directed against the
asinhala (un-Sinhala) and the
abaudha (un-Buddhist). During colonial
rule, Buddhist revivalists like Anagarika
Dharmapala mobilized the masses not so much
against the colonial regime but the Christian
minority, their privileged position in society and
political life, and their alleged misdeeds. In the
early 20th century, it was the Muslims, who
dominated business and trade, who came under fire
from the Sinhalese-Buddhists.
In 1915,
Dharmapala wrote: "The Muhammedans, an alien
people ... by Shylockian methods became prosperous
like the Jews. The Sinhalese sons of the soil,
whose ancestors for 2,358 years had shed rivers of
blood to keep the country free from alien invaders
are in the eyes of the British only vagabonds."
Inflammatory writing in publications
Dharmapala's Sinhala Bauddhaya and Piyadasa
Sirisena's Sinhala Jathiya fueled anti-Muslim
sentiment in the island and is believed to have
culminated in the anti-Muslim riots that year.
Dharmapala hailed the anti-Muslim
violence. "The peaceful Sinhalese have at last
shown that they can no longer bear the insult of
the alien," he wrote. "The whole nation in one day
has risen against the Moor [Muslims] people."
The role of Buddhists in Sri Lankan
politics grew substantially post-Independence
especially in the decade of the 1950s, when the
country was swept by a wave of Buddhist resurgence
in the wake of the 2500th death anniversary of the
Buddha.
It is in the Buddhist revivalism
of this period that the beginnings of the
conflictual relationship between the Sinhalese and
Tamils can be traced. The role of political monks
in obstructing a federal solution to the ethnic
conflict, by unleashing violence if necessary
became apparent in the 1950s. It would plunge Sri
Lanka into bloody civil war.
The end of
the civil war and the defeat of the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009 triggered a tidal
wave of Sinhalese-Buddhist triumphalism. It has
manifested itself in a new cockiness vis-a-vis the
international community.
In the
war-ravaged, Tamil-dominated Northern province
this muscular assertion of the Sinhala Buddhist
identity has manifested itself not only in
increasing Sinhalization of signboards and village
and street names but in a proliferation of Buddha
statues and Buddhist temples.
A recent
report by International Crisis Group (ICG) says
that Buddhist temples are coming up near military
installations but also "without permission on
private land". "New constructions" are coming up
over destroyed Hindu temples.
"There are
also fears," the ICG report says, "that the
government's archaeological department, long under
the influence of Sinhalese nationalists and
heavily lobbied by influential Buddhist groups,
would use 'discovered' ancient Buddhist sites in
the north" to build new Buddhist temples there.
It is in the context of this
Sinhalese-Buddhist triumphalism that the recent
aggression against Muslims and other religious
minorities and their places of worship must be
seen.
In September last year, a mosque in
Anuradhapura, an ancient Buddhist city and United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization world heritage site, was demolished
by a mob. The monk who led that attack told BBC
that the mosque was built on land given to
Sinhalese Buddhists 2,000 years ago; hence the
attack.
Attacks on churches and priests
have grown in post-war Sri Lanka too, with the
Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), a party led by monks
that is a part of the ruling coalition, justifying
the violence by claiming that priests are luring
Buddhists to Christianity.
If recent
events in neighboring India are anything to go by,
the attack on the Dambulla mosque is reason for
concern. Twenty years ago, Hindu mobs led by the
Sangh Parivar, a family of Hindu right wing
organizations, and egged on by saffron-clad
clergy, stormed a 16th century mosque, the Babri
masjid, in the north Indian city of
Ayodhya.
They alleged that the
masjid was built on the site where the
Hindu deity Ram was born and where a temple once
stood. The mob demolished the mosque even as the
administration and police looked on, while the
rest of India watched with horror the live
telecast of the event.
The demolition of
the Babri masjid set off a series of events -
communal riots, terrorist attacks and pogroms -
whose impact continue to traumatize India 20 years
later.
The underlying issues and context
of the attacks on the Dambulla mosque and the
Babri masjid are not identical. The mobilization
in Dambulla was local, unlike the country-wide
campaign that preceded the Babri masjid's
demolition.
Still, Sri Lankans should be
worried. The hate rhetoric articulated by the
radical monks is uncannily similar to that mouthed
by India's proponents of Hindutva. The Dambulla
incident could unleash emotions and events with
far more serious consequences.
Divisions
along caste and linguistic lines have defeated
somewhat the Hindutva (literally Hinduness, an
exclusivist ideology that aims at making India
Hindu) agenda of India's Hindu nationalists and
extremists.
In Sri Lanka, although its
society too is multi-ethnic, multi-religious and
multi-lingual, Sinhala-Buddhist radicals have been
far more successful. The Sinhala-Buddhist identity
is far stronger than the Hindu identity in India.
Sinhala-Buddhist ideology has been
institutionalized and the Buddhist nationalist
ideology has wide acceptance among the Sinhalese.
Yet to recover from decades of civil war,
Sri Lanka is lurching towards more bloodletting,
this time along religious lines.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore. She can be reached at
sudha98@hotmail.com
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