Farhan Wahab
The Racists in Sri Lanka always get gala premiers to stage their sickening racism; sometimes back, a minister in parliament asks Muslims to leave the country if they want to enjoy particular cultural customs or practices based on Sharia laws. In his demagoguery, he shouted out loudly that Sri Lanka is a Buddhist nation (racists on Facebook are also saying the same) and asked Muslim people to adapt themselves to its native culture.
First of all, what is the native culture? Second, what I don’t understand is whether minorities are immigrants?, even though the Buddhists themselves make up the majority of the population, they still had to colonise aboriginal people in Sri Lanka to implement their Buddhist values in the first place. Buddhist temples distributed Chittha fabrics to aboriginal women and criminalised the essential traits of aboriginal life and culture, such as hunting and taught Buddha’s Ahimsa”, ousted them from their ancestral Hamlets, and eventually, they were forced to urbanise. Doesn’t it sound more like colonialism?
The matriarchal deity Kuveini believed to be the mother of Sri Lanka’s aboriginal population (the colonial subjects of Buddhism and ancestors of the present-day Sinhalese), was lost by her descendants in the project of Buddhist disciplinary formation.
The claim of a “Buddhist nation” is inherently flawed and undemocratic; you can either have a theological monarchy, which, of course, is like Saudi Arabia or any other Middle Eastern kingdom. Alternatively, you can have a plurinational state that recognises all the existing religions in the country. The idea of a mono-national state is a fully blown absolute secular democracy where religiousdom belongs to the state like we have in European countries. However, even those countries, which are Catholic nations adapting Christendom made of (after the Holocaust) Judeo-Christian values, still go under the banner of secularism (that is a different argument)
Here, the problem lies in the very rudimentary level where Sri Lanka recognises its state religion as Buddhism, so it does not make it a secular democratic republic. Therefore, it is forced to recognise other existing cultures and religions if they deny it and continue to keep its Buddhist identity under democratic dispensation while suppressing other identities. No matter what the constitution is, it is still an ethnocracy, in other words, an apartheid fascist country. It has no moral ground to proclaim itself a socialist democratic republic.
Srilanka emerged as an independent country with subtle notions of stable democracy, but leaders of the Sinhala community Sought to secure dominance over the Government by virtue of their majority. As a result, the democratically elected Government adapted a series of MAJORITARIAN measures to establish Sinhala supremacy. Top of everything, in the 70s, The constitutional reform insisted that Sri Lanka was a Buddhist nation, which gave legitimacy to majoritarian claims. Identities of the Buddhist religion were established in all public areas. Even though there is participatory democracy,it is still sidelined with majoritarian claims. You can see it from the administration to its policies. This majoritarian notion is carefully represented. That is the very reason why communal-based politics is repeatedly being defeated in the self-proclaimed Buddhist nation.
On the other hand, minorities are being told to be loyal to the Buddhist nation for the rights they enjoy under the democratic republic. In the case of Muslims, the marital law, divorce law, and the holidays on festivals and other cultural-based special days are their fundamental rights under a democratic dispensation (Plurinational state ). This is not something minorities are receiving out of majoritarian’s generosity. As natives and citizens of Sri Lanka, they are entitled to their fundamental rights. The “Buddhist nation” argument is misleading here; if the country decides to have Buddhism as its state religion, then it is a plurinational state under democracy. So, it is forced to recognise other religions. The minorities are not in debt to the majority Sinhalese for given rights. ( rights are not given, every person is naturally entitled to it )
Suppose Sri Lanka insists on its Buddhist leaning based on its racial hierarchy. In that case, it is a theological monarchy (like Saudi Arabia, a homogeneous wasteland) and not a democratic republic unless it recognises other existing identities and defines itself as a plurinational state. Alternatively, if it insists on its democracy and Buddhist identity at the same time while denying the rights of minorities, following the Jewish Israeli model, then it can’t be a democratic socialist republic. The most appropriate way to define it is an apartheid ethnocratic-fascist state.
