At the base of any architectural setup of ethnocracy is the politics of domination. Whatever shape an ethnocracy takes, it is built on the bricks of ‘us’ and ‘them’, privileging one ethnic community over others. Although numerical superiority is not a determining metric yet, majoritarianism often forms the foundation of this infrastructure (Howard, 2012). The Buddhist Sinhalese supremacy is built around this same game of numbers. As per the 2012 census around 70.2% of the island’s population is Buddhist ((Department of Census and Statistics, 2012). However, the basis of this superordination is far more layered than what appears to the naked eye. In the aftermath of the three-decade-long civil war and the eventual defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Rajapaksa government to secure office began “expanding and perpetuating Sinhalese Buddhist supremacy within a unitary state; creating laws, rules, and structures that institutionalize such supremacy; and attacking as enemies of the state those who disagree with this agenda” (de Votta, 2007). This led to the development of the discourse of Buddhist nationalism and the presumption that the existence of minorities on Sri Lankan soil is a testament to the Buddhist’s ‘sufferance’, a way for the operation of the BBS’s fundamentalist agenda.
The cornerstone of Buddhism lies in the performance of ‘dharma’ where a ‘chakavarti’ (world ruler) can rule and the nation can thrive simultaneously without the use of force. However, the manipulated interpretation of religious texts and /or mythological texts leads to the erection of the ‘just war ideology’ in Sri Lanka (Bartholomeuz 2002 as cited in Khan, 2020). The go-to text for the BBS’s ideological justification is the ‘Mahavamsa’ compiled in the fifth century CE. The chronicle tells the story of the Buddhist king Dutthagamini who after a long war against the evil (Tamil) King Elara evicted the Tamils in the second century BC (Gravers, 2015). This legend of the win of the Sinhala king over the evil invader is interpreted as the application of the military doctrine to protect the ‘dharma’ against the ‘evil other’. This otherization goes hand in hand with the careful crafting of a cosmological struggle to justify violence against the ‘other’ who is a non-believer, a threat. This struggle signifies imaginaries of endangered identities and appeals to a fundamental ontological fear and thus often carries legitimized violence (Juergensmeyer, 2008). In this scheme of things, the performance of ‘dharma’ is not hindered as the cosmic war is nothing but an attempt to restore or defend the moral order which in its very nuance is the society which walks on the trajectory of ‘dharma’ providing religious legitimacy to the use of violence.
When a Defense Secretary in Gotabhaya Rajapaksa occupies a seat as a chief guest for the opening ceremony of Meth Sevana—The Buddhist Leadership Academy of the BBS, the State’s sponsorship or affirmation for the Buddhist supremacy preached and practised by BBS is no longer mere speculation. “To the Muslim community, we invite those who want Arab culture, Wahhabism, and Shariah law to leave for Saudi Arabia. The rest [moderate Muslims] can come with us. We are firm on this stance, and we are not willing to mollycoddle them” (Thero 2019, as cited in Gamage, 2021) said Thero, the face of BBS. A similar ethnocentric ethos also resonates in Rajapaksa’s post-war declaration of Sri Lanka having no minorities but only those who love the nation and those who don’t. This is no coincidence but a strategic intersection of interests to assimilate the minority discourse within the majoritarian ethic. In the process of rejecting the multiplicity of identity, these religious and political leaders are replicating nothing but the imperialist worldview built on the tenets of hegemony. This nexus further crystallizes in the state-backed spatial politics of the BBS. Following the Buddhist revivalist movement, the Sinhalese see the village as the last bastion of the authentic sovereign Buddhist self which is held hostage by the Muslim ‘other’ when they are recruited to go work in the Gulf countries and the capital city of Colombo at the hands of the musalmanis. In this episode of coincidence, the new President-elect Gotabhaya Rajapaksa chose the location of his swearing-in ceremony as the rural heartland of Anuradhapura, in opposition to the usual practice of doing this in the commercial capital Colombo. This line of argumentation leads us dangerously close to excavating the reciprocity of relations between the State apparatus and the BBS where the monks devise the ideological basis of nationalism and the State to maintain their incumbent status and prove their Sinhalese Buddhist credentials and loyalty to an idealised ethnocratic state.
The road to perdition begins with an attack on democracy even when a not-so-subtle nexus is operational. This attack is a part of the larger theatrics to attract majoritarian support for the fulfilment of missions which paralyses a democratically elected government functioning within the mandate extended by a constitution. For example, the BBS’ General Secretary Gnanansara Thero called for its support base to proactively take on the role of “an official policeman against Muslim extremism,” and not rely on “so-called democrats” to protect the Sinhala-Buddhist sovereignty (De Votta, 2018). The call for extra-judicial surveillance polished with the law of the jungle is not a new phenomenon but is a semi-perfect replica of the 1915 anti-Muslim riots when police were accused of being unreceptive to the cultural sensitivities of Sinhala Buddhists and instead beholden to the colonial government and its secular law (Chandrasena, 2016). This merged with the cosmological struggle leads to the creation of a synthetic climate of paranoia and an overt islamophobia furthered by the misinformation campaign thanks to the rise of modern media. I think it is imperative to argue that the power of the media is the spoil of victory available to the winner of a societal power struggle which in Sri Lanka’s case belongs to the Sinhalese BBS. In May 2019, Shafi Shihabdeen was alleged by a leading local newspaper to have conducted a mass sterilization of 4000 Buddhist women after cesarean deliveries. Even after the dismissal of all charges, it is important to note that the verdict remains rejected by some sections of society: “People here believe that Muslims are capable of such a thing. Even now [after the verdict] this opinion has not changed” (Gamage 2019 as cited in Gamage, 2021). In such politically charged campaigns of misinformation, we need to understand that evidence is irrelevant and is nothing but just another opinion discarded due to the power of the discourse of fundamentalist groups such as the BBS who paint the ‘Other’ as alien and dangerous, backed by mystical misrepresentation of myths and legends. The only way to stop such ‘Otherization’ is the State apparatus which in its instrumental interest of securing the majoritarian vote bank would never vehemently obstruct the catastrophic campaigns and would rather play a soft role in cementing the road to perdition as previously argued elsewhere in this essay.
The cosmological ideology and the cosmic war legitimise the ideological infrastructure which constructs the paradigm of paranoia, islamophobia and the eventual religious fundamentalism can only operate when the repressive apparatus of the state is at the same corner of the ring. This held for the Hindutva agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in India; for the BBS in Sri Lanka; White Supremacists in the West; Islamic fundamentalist regimes or Zionism as evident in Israel.
References
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Chandrasena, R. A. (2016). Mama Dharmapala. Buddhist Cultural Centre.
DeVotta, N. (2007). Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology: Implications for Politics and Conflict Resolution in Sri Lanka. Asian Affairs: An American Review. 34(4): 231–245.
Gamage, R. (2021). Buddhist Nationalism, Authoritarian Populism, and the Muslim Other in Sri Lanka. Islamophobia Studies Journal. 6(2): 130–149.
Gravers, M. (2015). Anti-Muslim Buddhist Nationalism in Burma and Sri Lanka: Religious violence and globalized imaginaries of endangered identities. Contemporary Buddhism. 16(1): 1–27.
Gunasekara, T. (2013, March 4). Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his Bala Sena. Colombo Telegraph. https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/gotabaya-rajapaksa-and-his-bala-sena/
Howard, L. M. (2012). The Ethnocracy Trap. Journal of Democracy. 23(4): 155–169.
Jones, R. N. B. (2015). Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and Islamophobia in contemporary Sri Lanka. Journal of South Asian Studies. 38(3): 445–462.
Juergensmeyer, M. (2008). Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian militias to Al Qaeda. University of California Press.
Khan, N. (2020). Buddhism, Religious Extremism and Muslims in Sri Lanka. International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts. 8(8): 3036–3042.
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Diptesh Banerjee is a final-year student, pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Jadavpur University. He has a deep-rooted love for Sociology and looks at everything through a sociology-tinted lens.