Majoritarian intransigence and foreign interference

In Sri Lanka, majoritarianism has impoverished that synergy and today’s economic immiserisation is the stark reality of that impoverishment. It is impossible however to achieve unity and free the country from foreign interference without disempowering majoritarianism and removing its upholders from the seat of Government. To achieve that another Buddhist reawakening seems desperately needed. It is the Buddhist community that should realise this imperative for change. The reawakening should be pioneered this time by enlightened intellectuals and non-politicised Buddhist monks who understand the essence of Buddha’s principles of state governance

This is a sequel to what I published last week titled, “Economic Misery and Majoritarian Tyranny” (see https://www.ft.lk/columns/Economic-misery-and-majoritarian-tyranny/4-729810). 

No country’s sovereignty is sacrosanct in today’s borderless world. Endless cross border flows of people and information keep practically every corner of the world abreast of happenings elsewhere. Therefore, all national governments are compelled by necessity to take cognisance of not only how domestic public opinion reacts to their policies and practices but also how world opinion responds to them. How to manage both is the greatest challenge facing all governments. It is the duty of government diplomats stationed abroad in respective embassies to manage foreign opinion. But that management however, is an expensive exercise, which many less developed countries find unaffordable as Sri Lanka realises now and is beginning to close a few of its embassies. 

Given this global context it is always wiser and cheaper for governments to solve domestic issues quickly and judiciously without allowing them to simmer and become subjects for outside influence, pressures and interference. Local intransigence and unwillingness to compromise on controversial issues damage not only the growth and welfare of a nation but also attract foreign intervention. Sri Lanka is caught in this classic trap between local intransigence and foreign interference. 

The most outstanding illustration of this intransigence is the unresolved ethnic problem, which, even after a civil war, the real cost of which has bankrupted the national coffer, continues to persist and has allowed foreign powers to intervene. Without going into its history, what lies at the bottom of the problem is the intransigence of an ideology manufactured by groups of Sinhala-Buddhist ultra-nationalist intellectuals, writers, preachers and political activists, who believe that none of the ethnic and religious minorities in the country belong to Sri Lanka, and that their members could therefore not claim equal rights with majority Sinhalese. Historical and archaeological evidence to prove that Tamils of Sri Lanka are at least contemporaneous as the Sinhalese and that Muslims are over a millennium old integrated community are all arrogantly rejected as irrelevant.     

The idea that the total ownership of this island belongs only to the Sinhalese remained buried in the hearts and minds of majoritarian ideologues for a long time until it came out to the open in the immediate aftermath of the civil war in 2009. Soon after that victory when a jubilant President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared from the podium that there would be no more Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims in future but only Sri Lankans, there was silent disapproval from the majoritarian camp while the rest of the crowd listened to the leader rejoiced with a great sigh of relief. That silence of the ideologies sent a strong warning to the President not to cross the line, and since then he rarely talked of Sri Lankans in an inclusive sense. 

A decade later, on 7 June 2019, a militant Buddhist monk declared from a public platform in Kandy that Sri Lanka belonged only to Sinhala Buddhists. When one Buddhist politician refuted that claim, hardline Buddhist monks chastised him as an apostate until he died of COVID in June 2021. 

The majoritarian ideology became even more calcified and unashamedly intransigent after its propagandists and powerbrokers enabled the Rajapaksa dynasty to recapture the Presidency in 2019, and made its incumbent an authoritarian by engineering the passage of the 20th Amendment in Parliament. Ideological intransigence became more explicit when the newly elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR) visited New Delhi in November 2019 to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi where GR promised to implement the India inspired 13th Amendment to solve the ethnic issue. Alas! No sooner he returned home, pressure from the majoritarian quarters was so intense that he had to renegue. 

Later, in the middle of 2021, GR invited Tamil leaders for direct talks but again recalcitrance from GR’s backyard forced him to cancel that invitation rather hurriedly. In September that year, he also gave an undertaking to the UN Secretary General in New York that he would meet members of the Tamil diaspora community for talks. That has not eventuated until now. The stumbling block in all this is the intransigence of Sinhala-Buddhist hardliners to concede anything to the minorities, because in their view all minorities are aliens. What options then do Tamils have other than to go international? 

It is the same story regarding the Muslim community also. That community was openly labelled alien more than a century ago. That label reappeared with episodes of anti-Muslim violence during Rajapaksa presidencies. With the onset of the pandemic, majoritarian anti-Muslim attitude was reflected in President GR’s decision to force cremation of Muslim COVID-dead bodies based on quasi-science and in total disregard to Muslim religious sensitivities, which left that community no alternative but to go internationally and complain to the OIC and UNHCR. Although forced cremation was relaxed after pressure from the latter, still Muslim COVID-dead are compelled to be buried only in one spot in the entire island putting Muslim families to inordinate agony and suffering. 

On top of all this is the so-called OCOL task force headed by a demagogic Buddhist monk, with a sinister agenda to destroy the cultural heterogeneity of this nation. OCOL’s latest meddling with subject content in school texts on Islam without explaining to the public the reasons for it, is a dangerous exercise and may have international repercussions.    

Finally, are the Catholic Christians. To the majoritarian ideologues Christianity like Islam is also an alien religion and their fight against Christianity goes back to 1950s with the Catholic Action movement. Currently, Catholics are crying for justice for losses of life and property suffered in the 2019 Easter infamy. All that Archbishop Ranjit is demanding is full implementation of findings of the Presidential Commission of Investigation report. It was a commission appointed by President GR and it is he who is now refusing to carry out its recommendations. Could anyone therefore blame the prelate for taking his case to the Vatican and through that to international courts of justice? 

In all the above instances the actions of President GR personify majoritarian intransigence when it comes to minority issues. In short, GR embodies Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism. The inevitable consequence of this intransigence is therefore foreign pressure and foreign interference in domestic affairs. There is no use crying threat to sovereignty, because, as pointed out at the beginning, sovereignty is a hollowed political concept in today’s global village. It is also not enough to introduce cosmetic changes to controversial legislations like PTA and Public Security Act, in the name of reforms. 

Such an exercise is actually intended more to mollify local hardliners than to comply with demands from international bodies. It is all too clear that the majoritarian built regime has a contemptuous attitude towards the international community. In a sense even the current resistance by Rajapaksas to go to IMF for debt restructuring and solution to the economic crisis is also a reflection of this attitude.   

Foreign pressure and interference can take several forms, and the most effective one in the context of Sri Lanka’s small and open economy is obviously economic. The threat of the withdrawal of the GSP+ scheme by the EU is one such pressure. More than that, foreign economic pressure is also mixed with foreign policy pressures. As economic and foreign policy pressures mount, they may even force Governments to compromise on territorial sovereignty as is happening already. Do the majoritarian ideologues realise where their intransigence is pushing the country into? 

Unity in diversity is the only salvation for plural Sri Lanka and its economy. The economic ruination witnessed today is the long-term consequence of the intransigent ideology of majoritarianism. That ideology has been the edifice upon which all Governments since 1947 were erected. All of them collectively destroyed that unity. Nothing could replace the synergy of the total population of a nation in the war on economic growth. Singapore is the prime example of this synergy. 

In Sri Lanka, majoritarianism has impoverished that synergy and today’s economic immiserisation is the stark reality of that impoverishment. It is impossible however to achieve unity and free the country from foreign interference without disempowering majoritarianism and removing its upholders from the seat of Government. To achieve that another Buddhist reawakening seems desperately needed. It is the Buddhist community that should realise this imperative for change. The reawakening should be pioneered this time by enlightened intellectuals and non-politicised Buddhist monks who understand the essence of Buddha’s principles of state governance, as those principles were so clearly elucidated by the two eminently erudite monks referred to in my previous piece. 

Today’s politicised Sangha is badly in need of re-education in Buddhist governance. With such governance, the country should regain its past glory as a peaceful, tolerant and prosperous Serendib as known to ancient Arabs.  

(The writer is attached to the School of Business and Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia.)