Fight Against Extremism Should Not Be Confused With Islamophobia

By Lakmal Harischandra –

Lakmal Harischandra

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. 

By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an eternal law.” –Dhammapada

What happened on Easter Sunday is unforgivable and our rage and condemnation is beyond imagination. The nation should be complimented for their patience and maturity and the civilized way, they conducted themselves without allowing their baser instincts to take control over their rational thinking. Both Cardinal and Army Commander spoke in a balanced manner looking beyond the terror movement of the barbarians who carried out these dastardly attacks, while the politicians and social media warriors have been as usual in competition, to spread hatred and anti-Muslim venom using this massacre as a pretext. For the hate lobbies, the maturity of the people to observe constraint in the face of provocations was seen as a weakness. We have seen in this massacre, the worst that human beings are capable of doing. But, we’ve seen in the past, what happens when leaders are allowed to abandon common decency in favour of rage and hate. Through the lens of history, we saw how the Holocaust happened and how many genocides happened and even in our backyard how hate led to 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, Aluthgama/Digana anti-Muslim violence. In this background, when will our people learn the lessons of history that hate cannot be dispelled by hate? 

It is sad to witness that in the aftermath of this tragedy, another tragedy is in the process of becoming a reality. The monster of anti-Muslim hate appears to be rising again from the backwoods. This volatile situation where a group of terrorists bearing Muslim names carried out these monstrous attacks on churches and hotels, became an ideal breeding ground and a playfield for the hate lobbies who inflicted much damage and destruction in the Post-war era in Sri Lanka to re-enact their dramas. While the terrorists attacked physically, the hate groups used social media, ably supported by rogue sections of the Sinhala media like Hiru. Ada Derana, to begin their own brand of ‘war of terror’. They began to attack the Muslims psychologically and mentally, making the entire Muslim community guilty by association. They began once again to brainwash the average moderate Sinhala mind (both Buddhist and Christian) about the inherent danger posed by the entire Muslim community. This included fake news, photo-shops and cherry picking Islamic quotes to show that Muslims are with the terrorists. A parallel anti-Muslim campaign is also happening in the Tamil media as well. This disastrous campaign is already attaining victory when we see Christian and Buddhist people appearing to be consuming this hate propaganda. This is a tragedy worse than the Easter attacks. Perhaps, this is what the Muslim extremist group want to achieve – to divide communities and make Muslims alienated so that their youths will be ready recruits to their radical groups.  As a Sinhalese, I am feeling worried about how our past friendships and comradeship with the Muslim friends have given way to mutual mistrust and suspicion . This is another national tragedy indeed.

Our post-Independence history was full of racism and communalism. Barely we attained Independence with all political leaders of all communities coming together in 1948, when under a decade we had the election of SWRD, who fought his election platform on a racist agenda. This led to Sinhala only bill which divided Sinhala and Tamil communities. Two years later, in 1958, Ceylon (then) witnessed the first ever anti-Tamil riots. An year later, SWRD Bandaranaike fell to a bullet by a Saffron clad Buddhist monk. This did not make the people to suspect every member of the Maha Sangha who wore a Siwura and ask the government to ban the Siwura. (quite rightly). Today, people are different and they are asking many cultural and religious symbols of Muslims to be banned including the Burqa. Burqa of course had a legitimate reason to be banned in this situation; but the hate peddlers are calling for more- even the Abhaya, madrasas etc. Well! the governments allowed this Sinhala Buddhist fever to take hold in the body public, renegading on various pacts signed with the Tamil parties and marginalizing the Tamil people through colonisation in the N& E. What happened in 1983 and how the JR Jayewardene government acted was really unacceptable which led to the internationalization of this ethnic conflict and the subsequent Tiger led period of terror. With the end of war in 2009, sense of triumphalism was witnessed with the Rajapaksa government posing off as the champion of the Sinhala Buddhists. 

The religion I follow – Buddhism is widely accepted as a pacifistic and tolerant religion. Yet political ‘Sinhala Buddhism’ has been linked to ethnic violence in both Sri Lanka’s pre and post-independence history. The end of the war in May 2009 saw the resurgence of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-nationalism as a prominent force, the most patent instance of its link to violence being manifested in the June 2014 anti-Muslim riots in Aluthgama, in culmination of the well-orchestrated hate campaign by hate groups like BBS, Sihala Ravaya etc with State patronage then. Later, the patent popularity of the ‘Sinha-Le’ campaign and other grassroot level hate movements, which appears to be politically-backed and well-organised, also provided convincing evidence of the power of ethno-nationalism as a tool to mobilise insecure masses. The involvement of Buddhist monks in politics following independence in 1948, in effect, also transformed Buddhism into a highly politicised religion. In Buddhism Betrayed, StanleyJ.Tambiah draws attention to the paradox between Buddhism’s non-violent philosophy and the high degree of political violence in Sri Lanka. In fact, the first ethno-nationalist violence was directed against the Muslims and not the Tamils in 1915. Thus, religious extremism is not limited to Muslim extremism, but both Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil extremism too existed as well, as history in Post-Independence Sri Lanka has clearly proved. 

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