Sinha Le Politics and Socio-cultural Persecution

Extremism and fanaticism begin with destruction and end with self-destruction. That is a lesson no Lankan, be he/she of the majority community or minority communities can afford to forget.

by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“Cultural purity is an oxymoron.”~ Kwame Anthony Appiah (Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers)

( February 14, 2016, Colombo, Sri lanka Guardian) The Independence Day celebrations commenced with the national anthem sung in Sinhala and concluded with the national anthem sung in Tamil. It was a first and a good first, a gesture of enormous symbolic significance, an unmistakable indication of the new government’s commitment to an inclusive, pluralist project of nation-building.

Gotabhaya Rajapaksa once derided the singing of the national anthem in Tamil as “a ridiculous and unpractical idea.” But for those who accept the pluralist nature of Sri Lanka and look forward to a truly Lankan future, that moment felt not ridiculous or unpractical, but deeply moving. The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government is not living up to expectation in several key areas, starting with the economy. But now and then it does something which vindicates fully the historic outcome of January 8th 2015 and keeps hope of a better future alive.

We don’t love other people’s countries; we can only love our own. Measures which humiliate ethno-religious minorities cannot promote national reconciliation or foster Lankan patriotism. There is a greater chance of inculcating a sense of Lankan patriotism in Tamil/Muslim children and youth when they are allowed to sing the national anthem in their own language rather than parrot it in a language they barely understand.

Mahinda Rajapaksa imposed the de facto ban on singing the national anthem in Tamil not during the war, but several months after the defeat of the LTTE, as a petulant response to the Oxford Debacle. The LLRC (appointed by the Rajapaksa administration) in its report criticised the ban and warned that it would “create a major irritant which would not be conducive to fostering post-conflict reconciliation.”  It also recommended that “The practice of the National Anthem being sung simultaneously in two languages in the same time must be maintained and supported.” That recommendation was finally implemented by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government on February 4th, 2016.

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