Shattering Myths

The ideology of the Islamic State, like any other ideology, radical or otherwise has exhibited a propensity to transgress borders. Concomitantly, states and the contraptions of the states have embarked upon a policy of hyper-protection, bordering on a siege. On an Easter Sunday, (April 21, 2019) Sri Lanka became the most recent casualty of the virtual non-existence of borders in the realm of thought processes, personified in the killings of almost three hundred people, in a series of well synchronized attacks at three churches and three luxury hotels.   Subsequently, the state, which despite years of experience in civilian strife, acted ‘normally’ in the statist sense of the term, and immediately imposed severe restrictions on the  free flow of information through the internet and social media, the quintessential targets of accusation and condemnation in the immediate aftermath of violence in the contemporary world. Complementing them, were the curbs imposed on the physical movement of human beings by means of the cancellation of visa-on-arrival for tourists from 39 countries.

Sri Lanka is no stranger to violence. It has endured a protracted, ruthless civil war from 1983 to 2009, in which the main protagonists were the majoritarian Sinhalese Buddhists and the militant group, the Tamil Tigers, that originated from the substantial Tamil minority, mostly Hindus, constituting around 15% of the population. Muslims and Christians constitute around 8-10% of the total population. The hegemonic narrative of the picturesque island nation is interwoven with ethnic discrimination. This in turn has enabled the conceptualization of the nation in terms of a theoretical model known as “ethnic democracy.”Sammy Smooha, formulated the model of ethnic democracy to explicate Jewish hegemony primarily in the context of the Jewish majority as opposed to the Arab minority within Israel. He explained the expression in the following words:

Ethnic democracy is a system that combines the extension of civil and political rights to individuals and some collective rights to minorities, with institutionalization of majority control over the state. Driven by ethnic nationalism, the state is identified with a “core ethnic nation” not with its citizens. The state follows a policy of creating a homogenous nation-state, a state of and for a particular ethnic nation, and acts to promote the language, culture, numerical majority, economic well-being, and political interests of this group. Although enjoying citizenship and voting rights, the minorities are treated as second-class citizens, feared as a threat, excluded from the national power structure, and placed under some control. At the same time, the minorities are allowed to conduct a democratic and peaceful struggle that yields incremental improvement in their status.[1]

Sri Lanka was among a group of nations that was considered fit to be categorized as an ethnic democracy. The model has been negated by many in Israel, where and in the context of which it was formulated for diverse reasons, some criticisms simply arising out of the rejection of Israel as a democracy, others due to its inherent shortcoming in considering the majority ethnic group as a single uniform category and consequently the measures used to promote majoritarianism as symbolic of the myth of Jews as a single, equal ethnic category. As ruptures became increasingly evident within the Jewish component due to the proliferation of ethnic/sub-ethnic groups within the category itself, giving rise to a deeply hierarchical category, the model seemed to have lost its relevance in Israel, for most. Yet, its popularity in academic circles outside Israel has gained ground, Sri-Lanka having found a partner in the form of its much larger neighbor, India, a state increasingly being elucidated along the lines of the now familiar model of ethnic democracy.Interestingly, in this context, for a rather protracted period of time India had been embroiled in the internal civil strife within Sri Lanka, with the subsequent upshots of forced migration, identification with the subjugated community across the border based on kinship, culminating in an intense form of viciousness in both nations, with the Indian state attempting to provide a securitized solution to the civil strife as it traversed borders vociferously.  The intertwining of terror across borders, based on empathychallenged the myth of security.

Sri Lanka, after its independence from the British in 1948, has been perceived as a “mono-ethnic state”, a stance, in part emanating from the 1956 Sinhala Only Act that specified Sinhala as the sole language of the nation and subsequently with multiple new constitutions in progression added Buddhism as the sole official religion. The explanation from among the conservative elements of the dominant community has been along the lines of “majority-within-the-minority” to explicate that the Sinhalese, while comprising a majority within the nation are a minority in the broader South Asian context.  The now familiar resort to religion (Buddhism, in this case) to reinforce their authentic claim to the land and concomitantly the absence of allegiance to that very land among the minorities, corroborated by demands for autonomy  were sought to validate the siege within. The heterogeneity of people challenged the myth of a homogenous territory.

Academic readings and policy analyses, both, seem to suggest that the Muslim minority has often been at the receiving end of the majority community and the dominant minority. Since the 1990s, unsubstantiated stories with regard to radicalization among the Muslim community, of the movement of funds from the Gulf region into the island state have been doing the rounds, adding fuel to fire. Then again, there have been accusations regarding the increasing trend towards conservatism within the community facilitating public mobilization based on the frenzy arising out of instigated fears regarding the vision/desire to implement Sharia law in the nation, with the resultant violence against the community, particularly in 2013 and 2018, economic in essence, camouflaged in terms of religious beliefs. The myth of the sacred camouflaged the reality of the profane.

A common thread that runs through politics everywhere but more so in the context of South Asia, has been the dominance of ingrained political families. Sri Lanka is no exception, with accusations and counter accusations of inciting fear and anger among the minority, devising new ways of proving loyalty to the nation as well as questioning the ability of the regime/opposition to combat terror and preserve the integrity of the nation, constituting the corpus of political discourse. The regime, almost always, reflexively responds by attempting to seal the nation, to reinforce the myth of the state.

Priya Singh

27/4/2019

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, in her personal capacity. Itdoes not reflect the opinion of the organization.

[1] Sammy Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,” Israel Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall, 1997), pp.199-200.