Having come out of the war, a war which I for one am glad the Sri
Lankan State won, Sri Lanka as a State and a society had one of several
directions in which it could go. Whilst being happy that the war ended
with a certain outcome, we could have asked ourselves why we had the war
in the first place. Why thirty years of conflict? What needs to be done
to prevent such conflict? To the extent that that question had been
asked, it seems to me that the answer –and I do not mean only within the
Government but outside in civil society as well– has been that the way
to prevent another cycle of conflict is to tighten up, to pre-empt, and
to securitize. I am Realist enough to admit that, that in certain areas
it is necessary to be more vigilant in security and strategic terms– but
the fundamental lesson has not been learned, and that lesson is that we
have not been able to formulate, forge, construct, call it what you
will, a social contract among the constituent components of our
citizenry.
The topic of discussion this evening is “The dilemmas of diversity,
reconciliation and post-war nation building”. The term dilemma implies
that the matter is not simple. Why is the matter not simple? Because
there are certain specificities, certain exceptionalities, that have to
be taken into account. One such specificity is that the island of Sri
Lanka is indeed the only place in which there are Sinhalese, those who
speak the Sinhalese language in any significantly large number. We do
talk about better ordered and fairer societies such as Singapore where
there are 75% of Chinese but then there are a billion Chinese in China.
As far as the Sinhalese are concerned, this island is home and this is
the only place they can call home. This is a reality.
What does this mean? Does this mean that the island belongs solely to
the Sinhalese? Does it mean that it belongs primarily to the Sinhalese
and that everybody else has to put up with being second class citizens,
whether it is legally, constitutionally or in actual fact? Is that the
nature of the only social contract that can issue from the specificity
that I spoke of? I do not think so, not only because it is wrong but
also because it won’t work and because it is not desirable.
Much depends on how one views diversity. This is almost a
commonplace: the idea that diversity is a resource. The more variegated
we are, the richer we are. But this is not an idea that has been
propagated successfully among the masses of our people. It is an idea
that is been limited to an urban hothouse as it were. But this is an
idea that has to be disseminated because the flip side of that, which is
the attitude and practice of considering only one’s own ethnic,
ethno-lingual or ethno-religious community as the nation, has the same
result as inbreeding has in any family. What has been going on is
cultural inbreeding and an advocacy or upholding of cultural inbreeding
as some form of authenticity or purity. The consequence of this has been
cycle upon cycle of conflict issuing from a sense of mutual alienation.
If one is able to recognize that diversity means richness and
richness is a resource, then one would look very differently at the
matrix or the mosaic that is Sri Lankan society. This is yet to become
the preponderant view.
So the war having ended in a victory over separatism, the spirit of
separatism still lives –and I do not mean in the form of what Government
spokesmen inelegantly call “the LTTE rump”. What I mean is that the
spirit of separating ones connectivity from The Other continues. When I
came upon the propaganda against the Muslim community in recent years
and months, I was reminded about that old joke “it’s déjà vu all over
again” because it is exactly the same stuff that was out there before
July ‘83. So the comparison is not today with July ‘83, it is with what
led to July ’83, it is the run up to July ‘83. I refer to the years from
‘77 to ‘83, a period covered by the Sansoni Commission, the violence of
‘77, ‘79, ‘81 and finally the massive explosion of 1983. The road to
July ‘83 was paved, prepared, though perhaps not intended in that form,
by anti-Tamil propaganda. At the time, it came from within the
Government. You had anti-Tamil propaganda with illustrations being sent
out in envelopes with a stamp of the then Minister of Industry, Mr.
Cyril Mathew. It is the same kind of toxic waste material that is being
put out today against the Muslim community, though not officially, not
from within the government. I am not saying that it would have the same
result, but it could.
I am particularly worried, anxious, that the current wave of the
anti-Muslim propaganda is on population growth rates. Why this makes me
worry is that violence in such a context would not be preeminently
anti-property but anti-persons, because if the name of the game is
numbers, and rates of population growth, and the number of children that
the Other has, then any violence is bound to seek to address that
particular problem. In other words, the solution would be seen as one of
an ethnic cleansing or ethno-religious cleansing.
I am happy just as Rajiva is, that President Rajapaksa did what he
did and said what he did on the subject. Then again I also remember that
in 1981, not ‘83 but ‘81, President Jayewardene condemned the violence
that had taken place in the Hill country. I remember his speech in which
he talked of a “crisis of civilization”. This was in ‘81 not in ‘83 but
it could not and did not stop the slide to violence. So as John F.
Kennedy use to say “Never mind what he says, watch his hands”. It can be
said that there are no majority and minorities, but then watch their
hands. Is that the way policy is formulated and implemented? Is it
really the case that there are no majority and minorities? I am quite
unconvinced of this.
I am not going to continue in the vein of a normative sermon of what
is wrong or right because I am not the person to tell you that. Why
would one listen to my view of what one should do? I will content myself
by talking about what is strategically and diplomatically prudent and
what is strategically and diplomatically suicidal. There are certain
things that should not be done, not only because it is the wrong thing
to do, not only because it is morally and ethically abhorrent but
because it is also stupidly counter-productive to do. Similarly there
are certain things that should be done not only because it is the right
thing to do but because it is a strategic imperative.
Deriving from the specificity of the Sinhalese and their situation on
the island of Sri Lanka, you can go either way: either an exclusionary
solution that imposes itself on others or comprehension that the
strategic imperative is to avoid isolation. If you start off by saying
that we Sinhalese are just 15 million people and that there is nowhere
else where there are such concentrations of Sinhalese, no other country
but this, then certain other things have to follow. It has to be
recognized that there are 70 million Tamils in Tamil Nadu and another 10
million elsewhere, there are one billion adherents of Islamic faith in
the world, and there are two billion Christians around the world. Of
course it is not the case that one billion Muslims or 70 million Tamils
are going to invade Sri Lanka, but a shift in stance of even 0.1% of
those very large numbers out there in the world would make Sri Lanka’s
situation and that of the Sinhalese, strategically untenable. This is my
contention as a Realist, but this reality is sadly not understood.
Domestically, those who conduct the anti-Islamic propaganda are also
those who are opposed to devolution, but they do not seem to understand
that if Muslim sentiments were to shift away from the Sinhalese, there
would automatically be a shift to a Tamil speaking majority in the
Eastern Province. The anti-Muslim elements do not seem to understand
that in the diplomatic arena Sri Lanka has always counted on the support
of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and that those States
constitute a very important factor in many UN and multilateral fora.
Look at the neighborhood. We already have a problematic relationship
with India to the extent that it voted against Sri Lanka at the UN HRC
in Geneva last year. A drive against the Muslims, perhaps not on the
part of the State, but on the part of Sinhala extremists, would hardly
contribute positively to our relations with Pakistan, which stood by us
consistently during decades of war. I am not sure how intelligent it is
to have troubled relations with two of our neighbors. Of course there is
also the factor of the revenue that comes in from the Middle East job
market.
Even if for pragmatic, strategic reasons, it has to be understood by
the State and by society that the anti-Muslim surge is profoundly
counterproductive and almost suicidal. It will only lead to further
isolation of the country and of the majority Sinhalese. The minorities
who are seen by Sinhala extremists as Trojan horses are in fact the
bridges between the Sinhalese and the outside world, given that there is
no other collectivity or concentration of Sinhalese elsewhere (except
in the Diaspora in relatively insignificant numbers). The Muslims, the
Tamils, the Hindus, the Catholics, all of these are the points of
intersection between the Sinhala Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka and the
world outside. They are the bridges and if those bridges are burned the
Sinhala heartland will find itself isolated– which ironically, is
exactly the situation in which those hostile to Sri Lanka want to place
the State and the Sinhalese!
In conclusion, I would like to pose a question: which way can we go?
It is not very helpful to see this as a struggle between the bad State
and good civil society because the political history of Sri Lanka
–certainly post independence – has been one in which elements of civil
society have played a far more retrogressive and reactionary role than
the State itself, and when the State has taken those positions it has
been due to the pronounced and prolonged pressure from the most
chauvinist elements within civil society. Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike did
not advocate Sinhala only when he founded his party in 1951, nor did he
do so when his party contested elections for the first time in 1952. He
did so only in 1955 when the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress set up the
Buddhist Commission to coincide with the Buddha Jayanthi, and put out a
report ostensibly on the rights of the Buddhists but actually made
pronouncements on the status of the Sinhalese Buddhists and the Sinhala
language.
It is from within civil society that these ideas have sprung and it
is also within civil society that the battle will have to be waged– and
not only, not simply, against the State, or against a political
leadership. This is a battle of ideas, of consciousness, that has to be
waged within the State and within civil society. Both State and civil
society have to be viewed not as antipodes but as terrains of
contestation.
I return once again to the reality of Sri Lanka being the only place
on the planet where the Sinhala language is spoken by a large
collectivity and where those who consider themselves of Sinhalese
ethnicity constitute a majority. That is axiomatic. If so what are the
solutions?
One is that of equal rights in every sense, constitutionally and
legally. Certainly I am for it because I find it abhorrent that there
should be any form of discrimination. What we have today in our
constitution, which is something that was introduced in ‘72 and retained
by Mr. Jayewardene in the ‘78 Constitution, is structural
discrimination, where one language and one religion, in a multilingual
and multi-religious social formation, are given a privileged place.
Would the populace be ready to level that playing field, to return – or
go forward– to what I call Soulbury Plus, that is the Soulbury
Constitution with a stronger safeguard against discrimination? I would
like to think that it would be the case, but I doubt that it would be
so.
If that is not a viable option, then we have the solution of the
autonomy at the peripheries. There again, there is the fear of a
centrifugal motion where by an autonomous province would or could secede
over time.
I was one who was very skeptical about this domino theory, or this
theory of an escalation ladder, until recently when the issues of
Scotland and Catalan independence in Spain came up, where even within a
non-federal system, devolution has over time not stopped separatism but
actually fed into demands for a separate independent State. I am not
saying that devolution automatically does so, but we have to recognize
that there are problems, dangers, legitimate threat perceptions.
If so, then I think what we need is a hybrid or mixed solution where
if we cannot guarantee absolute equality of citizenship in the
Constitution, we should build in very strong anti-discriminatory
legislation. I think it is easier to do that than to say that we are
going to remove the privileged place of Buddhism. It is easier to set up
institutions which have teeth and which would be a watchdog (hopefully a
pit-bull or bulldog) against discrimination. We can also defend notions
of provincial autonomy which are centripetal and not centrifugal. One
really must have a policy mix. To me, it is the only ethically
appropriate and strategically prudent way to go. (Groundviews)
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