Christian restraint as a few Sinhalese and Tamil communalists call the shots

By: Samuel Ratnajeevan H. Hoole
Courtesy: christiantoday

Background

(May 08, Colombo,Sri Lanka Guardian) Babu Thomas’s piece (“Columnist accuses Christians for Sri Lanka war”, 5 May, 2009) touches on the currents of aggressive self-aggrandizing communalism in Sri Lanka now spreading to India. This paper examines communalism in the Sri Lankan context where, whether Tamil or Sinhalese, Christians are increasingly under attack, and Hindus from India are joining in the fray. A lesson in restraint is drawn from the experiences described, avoiding generalizing what a small but effective communal minority does to the larger populace.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s civil war has been building up between the majority Sinhalese (mainly Buddhist) and minority Tamils (largely Hindu with a significant Christian minority to which this writer belongs) since independence in 1948. Sinhalese communalism has held sway over Sri Lankan institutions such as the media and textbooks and teaches Buddhist stories as history. Tamil school children learn that they came from India as invaders while the Sinhalese came as settlers (Educational Publications Department (Isurupaya), 2003, Social Studies and History – Year 8, Bataramulla: The Ministry of Education, Sri Lanka). Sustained discrimination in language, employment, education and land settlement has marginalized and unsettled Tamils

As peaceful Tamil demands for equality were ignored and responded to by state violence, the totalitarian Tamil Tigers with a northern leadership under V. Prabhakaran violently took over all Tamil civil organizations and ran a de facto state in the Tamil North-East. Unlike previous governments that were restrained in fighting the Tigers because of civilian death, a determined Sinhalese government was elected to power in 2005 with the backing of ultra-nationalists. Prosecuting the war without any care for its Tamil citizens, the government has brought the Tigers close to military defeat although their capabilities at guerrilla warfare are intact. At the time of writing, they hold thousands of Tamil civilians as hostages while the government bombs them despite hostage deaths. Tiger overseas activists are crying genocide as the government bombs areas that the government itself declared no fire zones; but are silent on the Tiger use of the civilians as hostages. The precarious state of civilians has fired up the Tamil Diaspora and Tamil Nadu. The agitations in Tamil Nadu have made Sri Lanka an election issue in India.

Genocide

The aggressive assertion of the Sinhaleseness of Sri Lanka has led to genocide. The Burghers (of European descent) have nearly all left in the 1960s as they recognized Sinhalese assertiveness. Many Tamils of recent Indian origin have been deported to India with the latter’s connivance. Many other Tamils have left as refugees because of the large scale military massacres and communal riots targeting them. Many Sinhalese Christians have converted to Buddhism. Christians at 9% at independence were 7% at the last census in 1981 and are probably much less today because of the exodus of Vellala Christian Tamils after the pogrom of 1983. In contrast, the Tamils at 22% at independence were down to 18% at the 1981 census and are probably around 10-11% today largely through Tamil emigration induced by state violence and discrimination. This genocide, leaving aside the ongoing massive massacres of civilians by the army and internal killings of dissidents by Tamil Tigers, is evident from the numbers alone.

After decades of inexorable suppression of Tamils, Sri Lankan anti-Tamil communalism is about to succeed as the Tamil Tigers face defeat. We Tamils lost the world’s sympathy by using methods of terrorism after the cataclysmic events of 1983, rather than a rights-based framework for making our just demands; especially by the Tamil Tiger assassination of Rajiv Gandhi who was a Tamil benefactor although his reasons might have involved Indian strategic calculations. On the throes of victory over Tamils, Sinhalese communalism is now focusing on marginalizing other minorities, in particular the Christians. Legislation ostensibly to stop so-called unethical conversions but seeking to prevent almost any conversion has been repeatedly revived. However good sense has prevailed so far. As the US State Department’s human rights report details, Christian churches have been damaged with impunity and pastors attacked.

Sinhalese = Buddhist

The claim that Sri Lanka belongs to Buddhists and that Tamils are evil is rooted in The Mahavamsa, a quasi-historical religious document of the 7th century AD. It narrates the 1st Century BC story of the Dutta Gemunu who had defeated the Tamil king Ellalan. Gemunu as a Buddhist has gone into a depression because of the karma of killing millions of Tamils. As the Mahavamsa records it (Ch. 25: 98, 103, 107-112), eight Arahants (i.e. those who had achieved nirvana) are sent to counsel him not to worry about “any hindrance in [his] way to heaven” since he had killed only a human and a half – the Tamil who “had come unto the three refuges” and the other who had “taken on himself the five precepts” – and the rest of the Tamils are “not to be more esteemed than beasts”! Mahavamsa also records Gautama promising to preserve pure Buddhism in Lanka. It is this promise of pure Buddhism in Lanka and the idea that Tamils are no better than beasts – an idea borne from the experiences of the South Indian Saivite revival when many Tamil Buddhists and Jains were slaughtered by Tamil Saivites – that are at the crux of the Sri Lankan attitude to anyone not a Buddhist; a true Sinhalese now had to be a Buddhist. Therefore Sinhalese Roman Catholics in 1983 have, as pointed out by Stirrat (C.R.A. Hoole, “Sri Lanka at 50,” World Pulse, April 17, 1998, Volume 33:8, pp. 1-2; also [3]), joined mobs in attacking Tamil Roman Catholics as if to prove their Sinhaleseness.

Attack on Leaders

The hysteria of war has made many people of good sense lapse into silence. Communalists have a field day and the vermin is seen crawling out of the rotten woodwork of Sri Lanka to write things that most of us would have been ashamed to verbalise as recently as 2 years ago.

Turning on Christians, Father Caspersz, that venerable apostle of nonviolence and a peace activist, was accused by writer Ruwan Weerakoon (“Why they lie in the name of …”, April 29, 2009) of being “known to be a diehard Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) sympathizer” and of lying for the Tigers. The story was with the imprimatur of the Sri Lankan government’s Ministry of Defence [4]. The actual statements attributed to Father Caspersz had been issued by some other priest whose name sounded a bit like Caspersz. Why Father Caspersz? Because he stands for peace between the communities and vocalizes it. Targets are people of potential leadership. So he is fair game for these new writers who stand for a Sri Lanka that is mono- everything.

Likewise consider the treatment of The Rt. Rev. Thomas Soundranayagam, the [Roman Catholic] Bishop of Jaffna. He is a leader among the Tamils of Jaffna and a man of God best known for speaking the truth with Christian economy of words. Despite attempts by the Tamil Tigers to use him for propaganda purposes, he has never knuckled down. Of note is his defiance in Oct. 1995 when the Tigers forced everyone to vacate the Jaffna peninsula and retreat with them when they ran away; just as they have done now in 2008-9 in taking civilian hostages in the Vanni by forcing villagers to march with them as they retreated as the army gained ground.

And yet, this very same Bishop was targeted in The Asian Tribune by one Dr. Edward Perera in his article titled “Tamil Diaspora and the Church: What comes next?” on March 18, 2009 [5]. In that diatribe Dr. Perera, claims that “Except for the hierarchy in the Catholic and Anglican Church [sic.] in Sri Lanka, nobody would tolerate the leader of this terror group, Velupillai Pirabhakaran.” Perera further alleges that the Bishop of Jaffna (misnamed as Emmanuel) compared the Tiger leader V. Prabhakaran to our Lord Jesus. The fact however is that another high cleric of the Church by the last name Emmanuel, a Vicar General, did make that untenable comparison several years ago and was moved out discretely by Bishop Soundranayagam because he was an embarrassment to him, the Church and indeed all of Christendom. To twist that old story to defame the good bishop is a new turn in Sri Lanka’s labyrinthine communalist processes as with Father Caspersz.

When this writer wrote a correction in the comments section of Asian Tribune, like a pack of wolves there were several people behind Dr. Perera who started name calling and Dr. Perera asserted that the Bishop’s name is indeed Emmanuel. It took this writer some weeks to contact Jaffna and verify that Emmanuel is not a part of Bishop Thomas Soundranayagam’s name and by then the malicious article had gone off the main page. Contacting Asian Tribune to make a correction as a separate article describing the real bishop and his work, there was no reply.

Tamil Hindu Communalism: Tamil = Saivite

While Ceylon Tamil Teachers’ Association protested against Sinhalese distortions of school texts based on The Mahavamsa, the objections were often not principled. While school texts in all subjects were controlled by Sinhalese, Tamil language texts specific to Tamils were left to Tamil committees. These texts by Tamil teachers pioneered jingoist paths just like the texts by Sinhalese. C. W. Thamotharampillai, this writer’s ancestor and a great contributor to the Tamil language and literature, was claimed to be a Hindu who pretended to be a Christian for privileges in the school text studied by Christian and Hindu children in Grade 6 (Educational Publications Department (Isurupaya), 1993, Tamil-Year Six, Government of Sri Lanka, Bataramulle, Sri Lanka). The fact however is that he was born to Assistant Pastor Cyrus Kingsbury, a Tamil convert of the American Mission and his baptismal records still exist (See S.R.H. Hoole, C. W. Thamotharampillai, Tamil Revivalist: The Man Behind the Legend of Tamil Nationalism, Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1997).

Similarly, Arumuga Navalar, the Saivite revivalist who countered the missions is said to have authored (sic.) the Bible – whereas he knew neither Greek nor Hebrew and the translation was by a committee of missionary scholars who did the actual translation and then used Tamil Pandits of whom Navalar was just one to put their Tamil rendering into better Tamil. And the texts do not mention that the Christians of Jaffna rejected this translation after 50 years for the Indian one which is what is in use today.

And worse, the agricultural Vellala (or Pillai) leadership of Tamils – really Sudras who claim high caste because Brahmins were not allowed to cross the seas, thereby leaving the Vellalas at the Lankan caste pinnacle – teach school children of all castes that it is only those who live tilling the land that truly live. The lower caste children recite this innocently. No one seems to notice.

As we Tamils insist on our right to equality, some have come forward to assert that Saivism is the religion of the Tamils and that Tamil = Saivite and vice versa. This mirrors the Sinhalese phenomenon where some Tamils want to prove they are more Tamil than others. While the Tamil Tigers, despite their unacceptably violent response to Sinhalese aggression and Tamil dissent, have not openly endorsed this view, many of their supporters have. Satyendra Nadesan, one of their top spokemen running the rankly communalist TamilNation.org has been making this claim at many public events. I have addressed this claim in the article “The Tamils of Sri Lanka: The Problem of Religion and Identity” (Indian Church History Review. Vol. XXVI, No. 2, pp. 88-135, June, 1992). Much more has since come to light based on the architecture of many ancient Saiva temples being built in several stages, the oldest stages being wooden. Professor Paul Younger of McMaster University, an authority on South Indian temples, in a private communication says these wooden bases are of Christian origin and that Siva worship among the Tamils is much more recent than is often claimed. These affirm this writer’s position that there is no one religion with claims to being Tamil.

Any correction of these bigoted teachings is labelled religious zealotry [6] so that most people are scared to take on the bigots. The Vellala domination of the Diaspora institutions ensures that the other side of the coin is not brought out and those who dare try are seen as traitors to the Tamil cause because it is said to divide us when we are down. Thus the teaching of falsehoods continues. Tamil communalism, however, without state power, has been limited in the damage it can do. Its main mischief is in isolating those who do not accept its ideology.

Repercussions in India

Today, the near death of thousands of Tamils held as hostage by the Tigers even as the state bombs them has made their plight a worldwide issue. The Northern Tamil leadership which seemed not to care as the supposedly lower-caste Tamils of the East were lined up and shot by Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force (STF) in the 1990s and bombed as the army retook the East in 2006, and were chased down streets by the Tigers and slaughtered for belonging to other militant groups in 1986, went into quick action. Major intersections in Canada, UK, US and Australia saw massive demonstrations. Just the way the Tigers forced school children to show up at demonstrations in Sri Lanka, school children chanted at demonstrations in the West, illegally cutting school. Northern Vellala women and children testified to gullible western reporters about that aunt and this cousin being decapitated in government bombings while coming out of trenches to mix milk for their baby or look for a wounded family member – such decapitations are real but not of relations of these well to do northern Vellala elite who have few connections in the Vanni where the battle is on; in fact they will not even marry there. Their sudden concern is not for the Vanni population since if so they would demand that the Tigers let them go instead of shooting anyone who tries. The real concern is for the hostage-takers – saving the northern Tiger leadership hiding behind civilians. A Free Church pastor and three Brothers (Pastor Janson A. Jacob and Brothers David K. Karunakaran, Barnaba Thiruvarudselvam, and Uthayakumar) of the Vanni have died in the bombings with total silence from the Diaspora. Much has been made of two northern Roman Catholic priests who lost limbs.

Naturally with large scale Tamil deaths, Tamil Nadu got fired up. The Tigers, terribly unpopular after the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, earned a new lease on life there. Sri Lanka has become a big issue in the ongoing elections. It was inevitable that Hindu nationalists would enter the fray. The opposition BJP came out strongly against Sri Lanka while the ruling Congress initially expressed sympathy for Tamil civilians but not for the Tigers but on May 8 (The Hindu) did a volte face expressing openness to the possibility of a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka.

Like many vendors of passionate communalism, Rajeev Srinivasan the Hindu rights activist referred to by Thomas has come out against the Tigers, trading in untruths and half-truths – “Endgame and Tragedy in Sri Lanka,” May 4, 2009 [7]. Trying to blame Christians for everything, he lists Sri Lanka’s Prime Ministers as being Christians or Christian converts or being married to Christians -- some on his list do not qualify as Srinivasan avers. Nor does he allow for converts to Buddhism from Christianity being hostile to the Church.

Likewise the Tiger leader V. Prabhakaran is a Hindu of the fisher caste of smugglers, with his biographers and the Tigers hinting at descent from the Chola Emperor Karikalan and other military castes of Vellala origin as the first step in rewriting history. For his Vellala biographers, accepting him as leader means saying that caste does no matter. This not being acceptable to their world view of themselves, they have chosen to make Prabhakaran Vellala. He is not a Christian as Srinivasan claims. Srinivasan who would be expected to be an ardent Tiger supporter because of his ideological make up, seems against the Tigers because of his belief that Prabhakaran is a Christian. In fact the Methodist Church to which Srinivasan assigns Prabhakaran is one of the least politicized Churches. One wonders if Srinivasan, mistakenly thinking that Prabhakaran is a Christian and opposing him, is trying to play the caste game of raising prejudice against Prabhakaran.

I recall how my ancestor Charles Winslow Kingsbury with the “home name” Thamotharam, despite his accomplishments as one of Madras University’s first 2 graduates in 1857 (and of getting the higher mark of the two [8]) renamed himself Chirupitty Wairawanathar Thamotharampillai when he went to Madras Presidency. This ensured that a) he had access to the Sangam-era Ola manuscripts in the mutts that he is credited with restoring, b) he kept his original initials and c) he removed obstacles to his becoming Rao Bahadur and, as chief justice, Regent in Puthukkottai. To maintain this farce he only had to whisper to his Jaffna friends on arrival in Madras not to let on that he was a Christian in Jaffna. (See S.R. H. Hoole, 1997; ibid.). Such was the disadvantage of a Christian in India in learned circles.

The point is that Tamil nationalism is as evil as the Sinhalese nationalism it opposes. It is therefore not surprising that Hindu communalists are joining the fray by laying it on thick on the Christians. Like Rajeev Srinivasan, on April 29, 2009 we find one B.R. Haran writing in The Sri Lanka Guardian: “Is ‘Tamil Eelam’ a Christian agenda?” [9]. Besides his atrocious claims against Christians and the Church, he too pronounced Prabhakaran a Christian. (Is this an ongoing conspiracy?) The identity of Prabhakaran is clear in Sri Lanka. Everyone in Sri Lanka knows that Prabhakaran is a Hindu and that his wife is a Hindu and that they worship regularly at temples. He is even worshipped by many of his followers as an avatar of Muruhan – a psychiatrist has testified how his patients take soil from Prabhakaran’s home for their shrines “like collecting water from the Ganges” [10].

Lessons from Sri Lanka – A Restrained Response

Given the violent conundrum that Sri Lankan society has become, it is important not to over-react or to generalize. Even as rabid communalists wreak their havoc, there are thinking Sinhalese who raise their rational voices above the din The numerous examples include Lasantha Wickrematunge who was murdered for speaking out against the war [11], other journalists who do likewise and even people in secular jobs who are moved to speak out like Prof. A.N.I Ekanayake [12]. It is also good to note that despite attempts at passing the religious conversion bill, it has not been passed because many Sinhalese are not for it. To over-react would be to lose thinking friends, whether Sinhalese-Buddhist or Tamil-Hindu.

On the Tamil side too, it is important not to generalize and offend the majority who are minority friendly. For instance, when this writer was appointed Vice Chancellor of Jaffna University in March 2006, the Tamil Tigers and many others opposed the appointment. Kyoto’s University’s Sachi Sri Kantha, an obsequiously adulating biographer of Tiger leader V. Prabhakaran’s who is on the US Government’s no-fly list and others raised objections in Oru Paper, a tabloid of that is tasked with keeping communal passions high so that the Tamil Diaspora can be whipped up for demonstrations and the like. Oru Paper is best known for cooking up absurd quotations that their writers then attribute to those they wish to attack so that the target is devalued among its readers. One of the objections to this writer’s appointment as Vice Chancellor of the secular, government-run University of Jaffna was that: "[T]here are a few Christian who are unable to reconcile their minds to the fact that they had deserted the religion of their forefathers [emphasis mine]. This grievance they carry against the whole community. The Hoole brothers, Lakshman Kadirgamar [Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister murdered by the Tigers] and D.B.S. Jeyaraj [a widely respected journalist] of Canada belong to this category. As for Ratnajeevan Hoole as Vice-Chancellor of Jaffna University, this much has to be said. He should not be allowed to roam free in Jaffna’s Tamil Hindu society, particularly in the university campus where there is even a Saiva temple [Emphasis as in the original]” (Oru Paper, April 7, 2006; Jan. 19, 2007). These Tamil writers who have sought refuge in Canada and the UK (where the paper is registered) and other democracies on the grounds that they are an abused minority in Sri Lanka, have no shame in threatening minorities within the Tamil community with murder.

However, to place things in context, this writer’s election with 2 others for the post of Vice Chancellor was, as prescribed by law, through a nomination of three persons by the Tamil University Council of University of Jaffna followed by appointment by the President from these three persons. Of the then Council of 25 leading Tamil citizens with 22 Hindus, 15 had cast their vote for this writer at great danger to their lives as the Tigers put up posters threatening with death those it thought had voted for this writer; indeed, many of those 10 persons who did not vote for this writer would likely have had non-communal reasons for not voting so. To generalize the putrid, jealous hatred spewed out by a few to all Hindus would be to dismiss the great sacrifices made by the Hindus who stood up for their convictions. It was simply a case of a small minority trying to whip up communal hatred just the way a small minority of Sinhalese object with their loud mouths when a deserving Tamil gets a plum appointment. Unfortunately, this minority is dominant as the majority is silent.

Christian Response

So what do we Christians as minorities do in the face of this unprecedented assault in a time of turbulent nationalism when anyone not fired by nationalist hatred is put down as a traitor? The answer is not to raise the temperature. Patient prayer in the example of Jesus Christ is the only solution. It is far more important lost in a worldly sense than to insult all good people in making generalizations. Communalists are a minority like that drop of urine that accidently falls into the milk. Unfortunately this murderous minority spreads its virulence as thinking people feel embarrassed to draw the attention that comes in countering them. Although these rabid communalists may have their field day as they do at present, we need forbearance and the courage to counter them publicly with grace and no malice. But we must not allow ourselves to be cowed into silence or verbally hit out wildly at the innocent in responding.

Samuel Ratnajeevan H. Hoole fled under Tamil Tiger death threat from his post of Vice Chancellor of University of Jaffna in 2006 and is now a Professor of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States.

-Sri Lanka Guardian