My cousin and I have a little joke between us. It is that when getting into a three-wheeler in Colombo, one needs to check for two things: a working meter, and the political tendencies of the driver. The former causes haggling over the rate, but the latter may make you the recipient of ethno-nationalist diatribe all the way from work to home.
Beware, beware, there are racists everywhere. Sri Lanka’s post-war landscape is troubled by new and re-emergent ethno-nationalist tensions that manifest variously, and are concretized by a concatenation of factors, social and political inequality, to the racism that is deeply embedded in the system.
In March, as Digana burned, analysis on Sri Lanka’s ethno-nationalist tensions burned even brighter. Look, said analysts, at the lack of economic and political progress that continues to stoke ethno-religious tensions between the Sinhala majority and minority groups. Indeed, the events in Digana were preceded barely two weeks prior by a furor over the alleged lacing of food with ‘sterility pills’ in Ampara. Neither is anti- Muslim rhetoric or activity new. Indeed, the new enemy who causes current grievances is an enmeshed part of Sri Lanka’s post-war nationalist rhetoric. The Muslim is a foreigner, an interloper, an invader, a stranger, with a strange culture that has only disruptive meaning for the country. Conversations had around the country, with Sinhalese from a variety of demographics will argue that the Muslims arrived as traders, and as businesspersons, and are thus always strangers, aliens, with an alien, exclusivist culture. Deployed here is the rallying cry of populist movements around the world, that which gave us President Trump, and Brexit; “They’re not like us.”
But who is this ‘us’? A valid and important analysis is that which looks at the kinds of structural and horizontal inequalities that manifest in Sri Lanka’s post-war economy. Disparities in wealth, language, access to finance, education, white-collar employment, dysfunctions at the level of local and national government, and the vagaries of essential services fuel a kind of politics of resentment that is easily pitted against whichever entity is positioned as the ‘Other’. The inequalities that trouble Sri Lanka now are, in part, the result of the victor’s peace of 2009, but are also connected to long-term structural challenges, where interlocking inequalities stunt achievement and exacerbate precarity. Such precarity, in turn, fuels a politics of resentment and builds upon existing prejudices to concretize extremism. It is, indeed, that which happens to dreams that are deferred by structural and historical inequalities, becoming, as the poet Aja Monet puts it “a house of flames/emerging… from/ a massacre of meaning”. This is especially the case for youth, who, around the world, have become more susceptible to joining extremist movements akin to the Mahason Balakaya that is alleged to have led the attacks in Digana and Teldeniya.
However, it is noticeable that the extremist voices are not limited to those who live in such precarity, or who perceive that they have less stable lives. Rather, these ‘precarious’ often have their situations and sentiments exploited by movements whose invisible hands are affluent and highly placed individuals. Prosperous Sinhala business persons have confided that they will not hire a non-Sinhala person. In real estate, clients may refuse to rent from a non-Sinhala landlord, or to rent or sell to a non-Sinhalese. Young, affluent, Colombo-centric persons have suggested that there is a ‘Muslim invasion’ occurring. The narrative that is prevalent here is that Muslim businesses are becoming more prosperous, exclusively look after their own, and are funded by external agents who seek to convert all to Islam.
It is also important to note that these sentiments are not exclusive to the Sinhalese alone. In conversations that this writer has had in various spaces, it is also evident that a certain subsection of Tamil nationalism is also orienting its discourse in an anti-Muslim vein. Some of this stems from the grievance that the Muslim community did not stand by the Tamil community during the 30 year war, and that the Muslim community continues to live exclusionary lives. Some of it articulates itself as ‘Othering’, where the Buddhist community is seen as more ‘natural’ allies due to similarities of culture and worship. Indeed, when the Siva Senai- a Hindu right wing organisation with links to the RSS, Hindu Jana Jagruthi Samithi, Shiv Sena and VHP- was launched in Vavuniya in 2016, it’s leader noted that “…observing that the island’s Muslims were being funded by countries such as Iran and Iraq and that the Christians received Western missionaries’ support…“Hindus alone have no support.” In April this year, Professor Ratnajeevan Hoole noted that the ‘danger signs of Hindu intolerance’ were growing, describing calls to exclusively vote for Hindus, and speeches directed against Christians in the Northern Province. Tamil civil society meanwhile has distanced itself from the Siva Senai.
This narrative is built along the same lines as that which is articulated by Sinhala Buddhist fundamentalism, that the Sinhalese only have Sri Lanka, that they are isolated ethnically, and that other ethnicities have global support and solidarity. In the recent past, tensions with regards to the anti-conversion bill brought this narrative to the forefront with the Buddhist leadership arguing that, “other religions, especially Christians and Muslims are encroaching on their territory and forcibly converting Buddhists through bribery. Buddhism lacks influence and clout in the international arena to the extent that Christianity and Islam enjoy, and that Buddhists do not have the equivalent of a World Council of Churches to raise issues concerning Buddhists internationally to create world public opinion” (Nathaniel 2013).
It is, to put it mildly, a worrying trend, and one which already threatens to pit itself against Sri Lanka’s Christian population. Already, there have been attacks on Christians by hardline Buddhist actors, and the National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka has recorded 190 such attacks since 2015. Christianity, too, is seen as a foreigner, an interloper, a stranger to Sri Lankan culture.
This violence towards religious minorities like Muslims and Christians is also systemic, ubiquitous, and often enabled by State led actors.
And so this picture of ethno-nationalist tension is complicated, historical, diverse, and concretized by both economic and socio-political concerns. Analysis that reflects on this must, continually, bring all these varying strands together in order to think robustly on how to move ‘beyond’ this crisis. However, in as much as we dwell on the economic and socio-political, it is important to remember the one tie that binds these tensions, as well as the associated global politics of resentment; racism. This is racism that keeps us within colonized, exploitative economic systems and is not only articulated at ‘high octane’ levels, but that which manifests in the everyday and the innocuous. It is also not an individualized phenomenon that is restricted to one community, country or individual but a global system that takes our knowledge and our thinking and transforms it into violent action across all institutions (Aganthagelou 2018), systemically dehumanizing the other from without and within.
