Christians pawns in Lankan power game

Sandeep Dikshit in New Delhi

For outsiders, Christians in Sri Lanka are largely accessed through books or cricket. Aravinda de Silva, Angelo Mathews and Dilhara Fernando have all played with their heart. Authors Jean Arasanayagam, Michael Ondaatje, Nihal de Silva and, of course, the incomparable Carl Muller have brought out the humour, the sparkle and the carefree lives of the people of this island nation.

For outsiders, basing their evidence on books and cricket to position Christians in the national life of Sri Lanka is misleading. The carnage on Easter Sunday may have made their marginalisation from Sri Lankan political life complete.

The murderous fanatics of the Tawhid sect could not have chosen a more defenceless minority than the Christians of Sri Lanka for a warped venting of their ire against democratic political systems. After all, Christians were the biggest losers when post-Independence Sri Lankan politicians opted to play with the fire of linguistic nationalism to carve out support among Sinhala Buddhists. The latter make up almost three-fourths of Sri Lanka’s population.

The aversion of these politicians to a heterogeneous political culture had echoes of the Jan Sangh’s battle cry of ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ when it sought to consolidate political support in North India.

It is not as if the Muslims fared any better. They were at the receiving end of Christian colonialists right from 16th century onwards. Muslim traders and cultivators strung along the Sri Lankan coastline and had to make way for the faith-brothers of the colonialists who occupied Colombo. In 1915-16 came the anti-Muslim riots, the Sinhala mobs in the 1970s and the LTTE’s depredations in the 1980s... When the civil war ended, Buddhist chauvinists turned on them.

Islam predated Christianity in Sri Lanka by at least 700 years. Portuguese and Roman Catholicism came in the 16th century during intense turmoil within the Christian community in its cradle, Europe. Their politico-spiritual opponents, the Dutch, came next. Finally, the opponents of both these strands of Christianity, the Protestants arrived along with the British.

The Dutch and the Portuguese brought along their Mediterranean hostility against the Muslims. The heat was immediately felt by Sri Lanka’s coastal Muslims where the colonialists sought to set up bases for shipping out raw material. The largest Muslim concentration in Eastern Province came up after Sinhala Kings accommodated Muslims, fleeing from the hostility of Christian colonialists on the western coast.

Buddhists and Hindus, too, did not fare any better. Temples of both the faiths were either plundered or destroyed in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Roman Catholics and the Counter-Reformists. During the Portuguese rule, they were banned from openly practising their religious preferences. The Protestant British were not as rigid but the loaves and fishes of patronage, along with aggressive conversion, swelled the Christian population to 10 per cent, five times more than their compatriots on the Indian mainland. Their numerical strength and accommodation in the power structure has since put them in the cross sights of Sinhala Buddhists.

The divisions among Christians exist even today. Most Roman Catholics are Burghers (mixed descent, much like our Anglo-Indians) with a very few of Sinhalese or Sri Lankan Tamil descent. The Protestants are divided on ethnic lines and successive Bishops of Jaffna have been powerful speakers for Tamil rights.

But among Muslims, less than one per cent comes from the three dominant Sri Lankan ethnic groups. Most trace their origins to the Moors (Arabs) or Malays.

Unlike India, where the confrontation between the proponents of a secular state and a faith-dominated polity began to peak 1990 onwards, this has been a recurring theme in Sri Lankan politics. Language became representative of nationalist feeling. This was stoked by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) which, in 1956, promised to make Sinhala the national language. However, when the SLFP came to power, it sought to strike a balance by giving concessions to Tamil language, leading to an enraged Bhikkhu masterminding the assassination of PM SWRD Bandaranaike.

Since then, the killing has cast a shadow on the attempts to make the state religiously neutral. There were winds from across the border, especially Burma, which created several institutions to become the pre-eminent Theravada Buddhist country. It led to demands for Buddhism as the state religion. 

After Bandaranaike’s assassination, Mrs Bandaranaike kept quiet on Buddhist resurgence. When that proved to be a constant nuisance and headache, she opted to align with the Marxists to bring minority secondary schools under state control. In this, one major area of patronage for Christians was severely diminished.

In 1965, the United National Party went a step further and declared a Paya holiday where the weekly off was based on the phases of the moon. By then, the decisions of the Vatican Congress of 1962-63 led to the acceptance of religious pluralism by the Catholics and helped Christian rapprochement with the state.

Sri Lanka seemed to have struck the right balance under JR Jayewardene who consciously tried to create a distance between state and religion. But the strife with Tamils saw R Premadasa dramatically reversing his policy by taking the oath of office in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy instead of a secular setting. He set up a Ministry of Buddha Sanana and green-lighted daily TV programs on Buddhist worshipping.

Yet, by 1995, the acceptance of Christians was consecrated when the Pope held an open air mass at Galle Face Green, usually the site of swearing-in ceremony of the PMs and Presidents. This was in contrast to a hurried, airport-tarmac confined visit by the Pope in 1970. But for some irritation posed due to aggressive proselytising by the US Bible Belt-funded Seven Day Adventists, the Christians were finally finding their place in Sri Lanka’s power structure. This carnage of the Christians, shrunken and diminished in their own land, makes their targeting even more cowardly and fiendish.