After The Tamils, The Muslims… but…

N Sathiya Moorthy, The Sunday Leader,

 SLMC leader Rauff Hakeem has called for an end to the ‘hate campaign’ against Muslims. His statement indicates an increase in such numbers and refers to a small group of Sinhala-Buddhist hard-liners for the incidents. As Justice Minister, he should know.

The reference was to a recent incident in Maharagama, where some men shouted slogans outside a commercial establishment, whose owners were Muslims. In April last, Muslims protested a Government-condoned move to have a 60-year-old mosque shifted from what was claimed to be Buddhist temple land in Dambulla.

Cutting across political differences, all senior Muslim Ministers in the Government rushed as a team to ease tensions at the time. Now, Minister Hakeem has recalled the 1000-year-old history of peaceful co-existence of Buddhists and Muslims in the country, and called for governmental action to end the current ‘hate campaign’.

Cutting both ways

At a time when Census figures show a ‘disproportionately high growth rate’ of the Muslim population in the country compared to other ethnic communities, particularly the majority Sinhala-Buddhists, ‘hate campaigns’ of the kind can cut both ways. There seems to be an unspoken anxiety in the ‘Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist’ camp that at some distant point in time, the community might be rendered a ‘minority’ in the country that they call their own.

Similar anxieties, mostly unjustified, had persisted at the turn of Independence, leading to the ‘Statelessness’ of the Upcountry Tamils and state-sponsored marginalisation of the Sri Lankan Tamil community. If nothing else, ‘ghosts in the shadows’ should not make for state policy. There is an unlearnt lesson still in the decades-old ethnic issue, war and violence. Celebrating victory over the LTTE is one thing, introspecting on the very cause for the war is another.

Today, only hate and suspicions remain. The ethnic issue, for instance, remains unresolved. Minus the war, Sri Lanka would have been where the ‘Sinhala-Buddhists’ could have been truly proud of, in terms of economy and regional/global standing. Cutting across ethnicities, Sri Lankan housemaids, and fitters and drivers need not have become a large ‘exportable commodity’ for their forex earnings, more than for improving the lot of their sisters and daughters back home.

If at Independence, for instance, the idea was to seek a fair share in the national cake, which was not available to the majority community, in the case of Government jobs at the turn of Independence, the ‘Sinhala Only’ law went too far. Instead, a proportionate recruitment policy, based on population figures, would have sufficed. By over-emphasising on the language part, their only comfort zone at the time, the Sinhalas did themselves a dis-favour. Today, their Government is being forced to teach them ‘English’, whereas the English-knowing Tamils are better off in the western job market.

‘Global identity’?

There are in the Muslim community those who seem wanting to put their ‘global identity’ ahead of their Sri Lankan identity. That does not work, as the Tamils have found out in a way. Yet, the Sri Lankan State, as also the Sinhala hard-liners, should be alive to the possibilities, and refuse to trigger a situation where the existing ‘globalisation’ model may end up having more takers among Sri Lankan Muslims.

Thankfully, the Muslim polity has refused to be drawn in, despite threats and temptations to the contrary. They remained so when the LTTE got their people killed in the East and ousted from the North, en masse, in 1990. For their part, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists should stop telling the rest that they have only ‘Sri Lanka for us’. The Sri Lankan state should effectively discourage them from holding such beliefs and acting on them.

Claims of the kind are a fallacy. Buddhism is present across South-East Asia. None of these nations or their peoples have conferred on the Sinhala-speaking Buddhists in Sri Lanka, the right and responsibility of ‘fighting for the faith’. If anything, it is very much against the tenets of Buddhism, whose founder was a ‘foreigner’ and not a Sinhala by any stretch of imagination. Nor were the propagators of His faith in Peace in what used to be the ‘Serendip’. Misinterpreting centuries-old history to interpret and influence contemporary politics does not help. Sri Lanka has found it out once. It should also be the last one.

Rizana Nafeek and after

The overnight eruption of the impeachment episode involving then Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake may have robbed the ‘Rizana Nafeek execution’ the kind of media space that the five-plus years of Sri Lankan Government’s efforts to obtain freedom for her may have had. Yet, the fact remains, the Government did its utmost, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa took a personal initiative in the matter.

Poverty did not permit Rizana’z family to accept the ‘bloodied money’ from the Saudi Government, which to them too is the ‘protector of the faith’. The Saudi family employing Rizana would not accept the ‘blood money’ offered by many in Sri Lanka, for her life and freedom. There are those in Sri Lanka however who may have continued to accept ‘bloodied money’ of the kind when the rest of the nation was pleading for Rizana’s life – at times, to build places of worship and for charities of every kind. Some irony, this should have been.

There are others in the country who would want the kind of laws and practices that saw Rizana executed by sword, practiced, at least by and on the nation’s Muslims – when much of the world is pleading for an end to death-penalty. They have no qualms using the instruments of modernity like the web and the blog to spread their ‘hate message’, which does not exclude all those that they unilaterally designate as ‘kafirs’, faith and religion no bar.

In political terms, UNP MP Kabir Hasheem has called the relevant Saudi law ‘barbaric’. A party colleague of his, Ranjan Ramanayake, has pointed out how the Muslim polity in the country was ‘mum’. All major Muslim political parties are now in the Government, and cutting across political differences, they were together at Dambulla last year, to help ease the mounting tension. Yet, their competitive community-based politics overlooked all those illegal neighbourhood radio stations with their ‘hate campaigns’ when the security forces uncovered them a year or so back.

By looking the other way when hapless Muslim women are made to hide behind the burqa that they had not known in their Islamic past in the country, when the men alone continue to don the western attire has social consequences for the future, near and afar. It is symbols such as these that end up being seen as ‘symbolism’ by the rest. It had happened elsewhere earlier. It is beginning to happen in Sri Lanka, nonetheless.

The ‘delaying hand’

If the Rizana execution got postponed time and again over the years, the Sri Lankan Government’s hand was behind it. If Rizana was still executed, it owed to a system of law that still lives in the past. To the extent that western democracies condemned the killing when they still needed Saudi Arabia more, the ethos of modern-day governance needed to be acknowledged. The UN and INGOs too raised an alarm – and suspects in Sri Lanka can take note of the same, as well.

The West has problems with their overall scheme, nonetheless. Their ‘hate campaigns’ against Islamists, though possibly not Islam, and theories on the ‘Clash of Civilisations’, too, belonged to another era in Eurasian history, deliberately transposed to the post-Cold War world of the late 20th century. Punishing nations and peoples for the wrong-doing of a few is what they want Sri Lanka and the rest of the world to eschew. Where they needed to do more on this sphere, they are looking elsewhere.

President Rajapaksa has since offered Rs. 1 million to the family that has lost their dear one to their poverty and consequent compulsion to send Rizana to work overseas. Sri Lanka already has a ‘model’ recruitment policy for overseas jobs. Post-execution, the Government has hinted at revising the existing norms for overseas recruitment, starting with discouraging Sri Lankan women to take up housemaid jobs in Saudi Arabia.

A day or two after Minister Hakeem spoke against the ‘hate campaigns’, President Rajapaksa mentioned how Buddhist temple lands were being allowed to be used for festivals by other religions. Leader of the House Nimal Siripala de Silva has since spoken in Parliament about the need for a PSC to address ethnic and racial issues. The Government’s habitual, escapist targeting of external forces eternally for Sri Lanka’s internal troubles, Minister De Silva’s concern needs to be taken seriously, and pushed forward.

With the Government still talking about post-war accommodation, which however, is yet to see any substantial progress for a variety of reasons, the case of the Muslim community cannot be excluded from those of the rest. Nor can Muslims any more be seen as an ‘inclusive component’ of the larger Tamil-speaking minorities in the island-nation.
Post-war Muslims too are here to start a new beginning. Which way do they go would depend as much on the direction that the Sri Lankan State leads them onto, and their own polity leads them up to.