Sri Lankan identity is dead

“The national cake is of fixed size and if the Tamils got a disproportionate share of it then the Sinhala-Buddhists would inevitably get less. The nationalists poured out hateful literature in Sinhala directed against the Tamils. The inevitable result of the manufacture of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is that it led to a similar Tamil nationalism. Fortunately for the Christians it did not take the form of Hindu nationalism since the Tamil leaders were themselves of Christian background.”
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by R.M.B. Senanayake

(July 05, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) I refer to the very readable piece by Anne Abeysekera. She has shown from her personal experience that Sinhala nationalism or Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism is entirely a matter of feeling and emotion rather than of rational thought. Such nationalism is caught not intellectually grasped. It is caught from the social environment where society is stressing ethno-religious identity in an emphatic way. In the past in the social environment she and I too grew up, the social environment was not dominated by the Sinhala-Buddhist ethos. It was a more humanist tradition inherited from the West.

It is SWRD who gave it prominence for the purpose of winning the votes of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority at a time when the UNP was still guided by the Sri Lankan identity adopted by leaders like D.S Senanayake who realized the need to mobilize the support of the ethnic and religious minorities in the negotiations with the colonial authorities for Independence. The Tamil minority had expressed their fears of being swamped by majority populism and they were given assurances by the Sinhala leaders.

Ethno-religious nationalism or for that any type of territorially based nationalism fashioned out of diverse social group sentiments requires an identifiable enemy- an 'other' for the "we" versus "they" polarization. Garibaldi who unified Italy said that having formed Italy his next task is to make Italians out of the various groups whose popular identity was as Florentines, Milanese, and Sicilians etc. A similar unification of Germany by browbeating the different German states required the identification of France as the enemy.

So in the 19th Century with the revival of Buddhism the identifiable enemy was the Christians. They were the "other". But SWRD went further. He found an additional enemy in the Tamils. An appeal was made to the baser instincts of human beings directed at rousing social jealousy. Ever since Pericles, populists have made similar appeals to win majority support. The ancient Athenians decided that such populists should be exiled or ‘ostracized;’ as they termed it. So the finger was pointed at the Tamils as having acquired an undue share of the top jobs and economic opportunities in the government, not by merit but by the preferential treatment shown to them by the colonial authorities. There was deliberate discrimination against the majority Sinhala-Buddhists which was the reason for their relative lower economic status. Whether this was so or not is irrelevant. It was the perception that mattered and in the next few decades this theme was expounded and proclaimed from housetops by Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinists. It led to standardization of university marks and eventual limitation of access to university education for the Tamils.

Sinhala Buddhist populist politicians whipped up mass feeling against the Tamils which led to riots almost in every decade. It was based on what economists called ‘zero sum economics’.

The national cake is of fixed size and if the Tamils got a disproportionate share of it then the Sinhala-Buddhists would inevitably get less. The nationalists poured out hateful literature in Sinhala directed against the Tamils. The inevitable result of the manufacture of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is that it led to a similar Tamil nationalism. Fortunately for the Christians it did not take the form of Hindu nationalism since the Tamil leaders were themselves of Christian background.

Knowing that they were in a weak position the Tamil political leaders did not go the whole way to mobilize the Tamil masses as the Sinhala-Buddhist leaders have done. Ranil is a good man who has lost his way amidst this cacophony of nationalists. He deserves our admiration. I wonder whether his upholding Sri Lanka nationalism may not be based on his Christian background although he is a Buddhist. That task was left to a new generation which was driven to despair by the actions of the government. Initially the claim was for regional autonomy for traditional Tamil areas. But over the years it has led to a demand for secession through armed conflict. They had to re-write history to justify their claims. Again it was the perception that mattered, not the facts.

We have seen how Barack Obama has won the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party against a white woman from the elite political class. Barely fifty years ago Blacks were discriminated against. Abraham Lincoln freed them from slavery but they continued to suffer from a vicious oppression. There was segregation similar to what was practiced in the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Even after the Supreme Court struck down segregation in 1954, human-rights offenses were both law and custom in much of America. A tired and thoroughly respectable Negro seamstress like Rosa Parks could be thrown into jail and fined simply because she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus so that a white man could sit down. A six-year-old black girl like Ruby Bridges could be hectored and spat on by a white New Orleans mob simply because she wanted to go to the same school as white children. A 14-year-old black boy like Emmett Till could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman. Even highly educated blacks were routinely denied the right to vote or serve on juries. They could not eat at lunch counters, register in motels or use whites-only rest rooms; they could not buy or rent a home wherever they chose. In some rural enclaves in the South, they were even compelled to get off the sidewalk and stand in the street if a Caucasian walked by. All this has changed through the peaceful protest movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Osama’s candidacy is thrilling because it carries with it the notion that the gap between the races may be beginning to close.

Will it happen in Sri Lanka? Doubtful. What is more likely is that Sri Lankan identity is dead and cannot be revived. What is however accepted academic opinion is the idea that strong identities are an inherent threat to democracy and peace? Our experience as well as the experience in several other countries has confirmed this theory. We see freedom disappearing before our very eyes. It is all justified in the name of the cause- fighting terrorism. So there are abductions, disappearances and extra-judicial killings by an invisible force. Exponents of post identity theories – post nationalism, postmodernism and multiculturalism – argue that only by shedding the particular identities that divide us could we build a peaceful world. Supranational institutions such as the EU, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations were supposed to help overcome the prejudices of the past and forge a harmonious world based on universal values and human rights. But this seems to be a vain hope.
- Sri Lanka Guardian