A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, June 5, 2017
Muslims Should Start Asserting; We Are Equal Citizens; Not ‘Karapincha’!
“You
fight for your rights when your rights are being denied. When the
building is on fire, you don’t stand by and let the building burn down
and say we’ll fight the fire another day.” – Richard Gilbert
It
is indeed a healthy sign that at least the intellectual sections and
civic leadership of the Muslim community in particular are now slowly
but surely awakening to the fact that Muslims can no longer afford to
live solely on the sympathy and goodwill of the rulers, and further
relying on certain political personalities to safeguard or win their
rights is just a futile exercise and not a long term solution. This
stark reality and their imperative need to lead the community to come
out of the ‘victim-minority’ mentality and think and act as equal
citizens may well and truly would have been catalysed by the bitter
experiences of the replay of the ‘dark days’ of the Post-war MR era , in
an increased tempo in recent times, even after a regime change in
January 2015 which promised a ‘Yahapalanaya’
and fair treatment to all communities. Perhaps this regime change is
proving to be a case of changing the pillow to cure a headache’( to
borrow a Sinhala adage). However, how the ‘Presidential candidate’
Sirisena boldly made assertions then to be a leader for all communities
and how two years later as ‘President’ appear to be meekly submitting to
the diabolical plans of the racist lobby to ‘govern’ the country as
they deemed fit, are nothing surprising if only the trends of governance
in Post- Independence Sri Lanka are closely studied!
Muslims/
Moors in their history of more than 1000 years, majority of whom live
outside N&E Sri Lanka, have found Sinhala people great and tolerant
and have found them much amicable to live
with and there have been no major issues in such regard at the
grass-root level. However, many scholars have argued that ironically,
the competition among the Sinhala ruling classes, for acquiring state
resources and political capital, sadly turned nationalism into the
ruling ideology and the state ideology of Sri Lanka, while the rise and
institutionalisation of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in post-independent
Sri Lanka bear much responsibility for today’s ethnic conflicts between
the majority Sinhalese state and
the minorities. Nira Wickramasinghe, an author in history (2006) says
that ‘the three Constitutions of post- independence Sri Lanka, helped
demarcate and define a majority from within the citizens pitting them
against non- Buddhists and non- Sinhala speaking minority
communities…(placing) minorities in a somewhat dependent and subaltern
situation’.
B.H.
Farmer, a distinguished geographer, ‘Ceylon –A Divided Nation’ in 1963
referring to the times which followed after Independence, too wrote :
‘’…Since those saddening days of 1958 Ceylon has had its share of
trouble…..The truth, though unpalatable may be to some, is simply that
nobody unacceptable to the present Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism has
any chance of constitutional power in contemporary Ceylon.”. The ‘Mad
Monk phenomenon’ (as Journalist C A Chandraprema once put it) being
witnessed today is an extension of this strategy. This explains why
despite the many historic opportunities, –one at the Independence and
one recently after the end of the War – Sri Lankan ruling class appear
to be still dishing out the same bag of garbage to the minorities and
acting as if they are just ‘Karapincha’ and pawns in their power seeking
games. Non implementation of the relevant LLRC recommendations and lack
of a coherent strategy to resolve the national ethnic problem even
after 8 years of the end to the War under two regimes also prove this
point succinctly. Muslims of Sri Lanka in particular, with their
traditional commercial mind-set, should therefore cease to be used as
pushovers or punch-bags anymore ,relying merely on the magnanimity of
the government in power and taking some political leaders as their
champions to ensure their survival and progress.