Nationalism and Communalism

First published in The Island of 20th Wednesday, February 2008



That ‘rabid Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’ is to blame for the ongoing national crisis in our country is treated as an incontrovertible truth by many members of the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia, both local and foreign, who offer comments on the problem. Some even appear to use it as an excuse for condoning LTTE terrorism. In a sense, such views are insignificant because they condemn something that is not there. But they also can do some harm: they mislead the powerful ‘international community’ whose cooperation is indispensable for the resolution of the conflict sooner or later.



Since these analysts and commentators, including the native ones among them, have no intimate knowledge of or familiarity with the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhist masses (due to the communication gap that exists between them), they tend to satisfy themselves with popular generalizations, which do not usually correspond to the reality. But if they had an opportunity to survey the opinions of the ordinary Sinhalese Buddhists – the majority of them are rural villagers – about the current crisis they would have been simply amazed by the latter’s anti-communalism, sense of tolerance, fair play and accommodation towards their minority compatriots, an enlightened attitude shared by the average members of those minority communities.



The ordinary Sinhalese do not even think about an exclusive ownership of the island or of a part of it. What they might say, if they were queried, is that from time immemorial Sri Lanka has been known as their native land, and that they have no other country to call their own; they also believe that they must share it with all the minorities who live with them, and that these minorities must enjoy the same rights and privileges as themselves, not less , not more. There are no traditional homelands in this country. The whole island is the traditional homeland of all the communities, whether majorities or minorities.



It is a gross misrepresentation of the so-called ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka to assert that it is a straight fight between the southern Sinhalese and the northern Tamils. Just as the ordinary Sinhalese do not claim the sole proprietorship of the island or a part of it the ordinary Tamils do not subscribe to the Tamil extremists’ claim that the north and the east constitute their exclusive homeland. In 1995 Tamils formed 9% of the Sri Lankan population, and the Sinhalese 83%. The Tamils live scattered among the other communities all over the island, with a large enough concentration of their population in the north and the east to form majorities in those provinces. In fact, more Tamils live in the south among the Sinhalese than in the north and east. Therefore the term ‘ethnic conflict’ is actually a misnomer. The conflict is between the Sri Lankan state and a group of rebel extremists who demand one-third of the land mass and two-thirds of the coastline for 9% of the population on an ethnic basis.



Some commentators try to reduce the national crisis to an internecine rivalry between those who came to the island first and others who did so later. This is a fallacy, too. Of the two communities Sinhalese and Tamils, whether they came to the island together or at different times, only the Sinhalese can be said to have developed a distinctive civilization in this island., the evidence for which is found in abundance.



There is an attempt in some quarters to explain away Sinhalese nationhood by asserting that the Sinhalese are a hybrid people, and that they have no claim to a distinctive racial identity. The truth is that no race on earth can satisfy the infamous Hitlerite insistence on the ‘purity’ of race, which was associated with the heinous crime of genocide inflicted on the Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s in Europe!

The racial stock of any ethnic community is, more often than not, a composite one with the probable exception of isolated jungle tribes such as the Veddahs of our country or the Pygmy tribe known as the Mbuti of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We don’t normally carry out DNA tests on individuals before we assign them to a particular race or ethnic group! In general acceptance a person’s ethnicity is determined in terms of physical characteristics such as colour of skin, shape of head, facial features and bodily stature, and cultural traits such as language, customs, religious beliefs and traditional modes of behaviour peculiar to a group of people that set them apart from other similar groups. Probably the language spoken by a race is its most vital characteristic. However, the language that is traditionally associated with a racial group also undergoes constant change, but it doesn’t lose its historical identity. The same applies to a race. All races share this quality of illusory constancy in flux much as a river that is given an unchanging identity over millennia perhaps in spite of the fact that its physical composition changes every fraction of a second.



The division of human societies in terms of shared racial and cultural characteristics is essential for the physical survival and overall advancement of the whole human race. We still talk about the awesome achievements of the ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans, etc. They accomplished those astonishing feats of human endeavour as races through the refinement of their racially inherited knowledge and skills. The assertion of one’s racial identity and its meaningful expression for the common good of all humanity is a good thing. These divisions need not be fences that keep one group of people from another. Going beyond racial boundaries to reach out to the rest of the humanity is better, but the ‘Ascent of Man’ (though the very phrase smacks of gender-bias) is still well short of the level of sophistication which would make such ideal cosmopolitanism possible. Until humanity attains to that stage of development we must be content to live with our racial divisions. Yet we need not, nay must not, be so retrogressive as to condemn ourselves to racialism ( the fanatical belief in the superiority of one’s own race) that leads to ruinous hate and rivalry among people.



Racialism is not a common characteristic of the Sinhalese people contrary to what certain critics would have us believe. The Sinhalese are self-effacing even in their everyday appearance. Their everyday dress has no special features that reveal their race or religion. (The so-called ‘national dress’ – a long white ‘banian’ for the upper body and a ‘verti’ for the lower part - adopted and popularized by Mr SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956, later adopted particularly by politicians of both the main parties, and also by other community leaders as a means of identifying themselves with the ‘common man’, is today called, among ordinary people, the ‘kapati suit’ meaning the ‘garb of a cheat’!). What is more, they do not put any marks on their bodies to distinguish themselves from others. Their names do not always reveal their ethnicity either.







Even some apparently impartial commentators argue that the LTTE terrorism that has ravaged our country over the past quarter of a century was provoked by the essentially 20th century phenomenon of ‘rabid Sinhala Buddhist nationalism’. Nothing can be further from the truth. The division between the Sinhalese majority and the minorities was created and exploited by the British colonial rulers in pursuit of their own ends. And the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism which inspired and spearheaded the freedom struggle was unjustifiably identified with raw communalism and made a bugbear of by some minority politicians. The members of the majority race were required to black out their true history as it potentially hurt communal feelings of others. I learned from one of my teachers that the popular children’s novel (1939) by the Englishman Denis Clark entitled ‘Golden Island’ was banned in schools in the 40’s because it is woven round the story of the warrior king Dutu Gemunu (who ruled Lanka from 161 to 137 BCE). In the recent past, the teaching of history as a school subject was stopped for the same reason.



The Sinhala Buddhist consciousness is as old as the history of the island. In ancient times our country was known to the outside world as the Sinhaladvipa, (‘the country of the Sinhalese’ from which Seylan or Ceylon derives), Taprobane (from ‘Tambapanni/Tamraparni’), or Serendip (Serendib as Arabs called it from ‘Swarnadipa’ ‘the Golden Island’). The map of the island drawn by Ptolemy the Greek astronomer and geographer in the second century CE marks Anuradagama (later Anuradhapura) as the central city. It had been founded, according to one tradition, by a companion of Prince Vijaya, the legendary founder of the Sinhalese race. This national consciousness survived many vicissitudes of their fortunes amidst internal and external threats until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1505. Our country suffered foreign domination in some parts or in the totality of its territory for the next 450 years, but the nationalist spirit didn’t die. For the Sinhalese, independence from the British in 1948 meant a restoration of their long lost national sovereignty over the country. This independence, they thought, was however not only for them; it was also for the minorities who were their partners in nation building. But the minority groups (or more correctly certain members of the elite who claimed to represent them, although they , like their counterparts in the majority race, were alienated from their own people) were not too ready to appreciate or willing to accommodate these sentiments, calling into question the trustworthiness of Sinhalese politicians in the matter of sharing political power equitably after independence from the British.



Although the dominant group of pioneer national leaders who came from all communities did not put a premium on internecine racial divisions, hoping to forge one multiethnic ‘Ceylonese national identity’ in the earlier stages of the independence movement, ethnic tensions started coming to the fore when a trend towards the achievement of self-rule emerged in the first half of the 20th century. This was mainly due (not unlike the situation today) to the wrong interpretation of Sinhalese Buddhist political ideals which were not properly articulated or understood by the local politicians who came almost exclusively from the privileged westernized elite. Even those among them who were sympathetic to Sinhalese nationalist sentiments believed that these would divide the ‘Ceylonese’, and hence chose to ignore them while focusing on what they considered ‘ more urgent matters’.



To go back a little in history, after the amalagamation of the Kandyan kingdom with the rest of the island in 1815 the British started consolidating their rule. They introduced occasional reforms, which were primarily meant to establish an efficient trouble-free imperial administration, and only secondarily to promote the welfare of the subjects. The first Legislative Council (1833) consisted of six unofficial members nominated by the Governor – one member to represent the Sinhalese, one for the Tamils, and four for Europeans. This lasted for the next seventy-five years, until in 1909 in response to revived agitation for constitutional reforms, the number of the unofficial members was raised to eight – three for Europeans, two for Sinhalese, one for Tamils, one for Burghers, and one for the Muslims (Think of the ‘improved’ communal balance in the Legislative Council, ignoring the fact of its powerlessness to influence government policy in actual practice: three for European interests, three for minorities, and only two for the Sinhalese!)



Although the membership of the Legislative Council allowed little participation in actually determining or influencing government policy, the deliberate imbalance in racial representation that it embodied showed the more favoured position of the minorities as opposed to the majority Sinhalese. The imperialists preyed on the country, and left the scavenging job to others, including the comprador class (the elite formed of members from all the communities).



Any move towards redressing this anomaly was met with apprehension by the minorities. However, as a result of joint demands made by the Ceylon National Association based in Colombo and the Jaffna Association, the Manning Reforms of the early 1920’s introduced a form of territorial (instead of communal) representation, which enlarged the Legislative Council giving the Sinhalese a decisive edge over the minorities in the legislature.



The fears and suspicions of the minorities aggravated when the Ceylon National Congress of Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam began pressing for self government, because the minorities concluded that if the demand for self-government was granted, then an excessively powerful Sinhalese majority would be ensconced in a position of perpetual domination over them. Attempts to allay these fears, such as the proposal to allocate a special seat for Tamils of the Western Province (where there was a concentration of them engaged in official and business activity), actually worsened the disagreements. Eventually, Tamils under the Jaffna Association left the Ceylon National Congress despite the concerted efforts of leaders like D.S. Senanayake, A. Mahadea and F.Molamure to stop their withdrawal.



When the Donoughmore Commissioners who arrived in the island in the late 1920’s offered universal suffrage based on territorial representation, Tamils opposed it arguing that this would give the Sinhalese majority an advantage over the minorities. But the Commissioners went ahead with their reforms. The Legislative Council was replaced with a State Council. The first State Council elections under the Donoughmore Constitution were held in June 1931. The Jaffna Tamils in general boycotted the polls, but later gave up the boycott, and got elected to the State Council in fresh elections in 1934. The price that they had to pay for the initial boycott was that they forfeited their chance of joining the Board of Ministers. The State Council experience provided Mr D.S. Senanayake with an opportunity to show his abilities as an efficient manager. He was a committed nationalist opposed to colonialism, communism, and communalism, and firmly believed in, and worked with dedication for, the ideal of a multiethnic united Ceylonese nation.



But some Tamil politicians thought that the Sinhalese majority would not allow the special privileges they had enjoyed under the British to continue, and wanted to somehow check what they considered the emerging Sinhalese majoritarian ascendancy. Mr G.G.Ponnambalam came out with his outrageous 50-50 proposition in the early 1940’s when the Soulbury Constitution for an independent Ceylon was being mooted : that is, fifty seats in the legislature for the majority, and fifty for the minorities, and also the ministerial positions to be allocated on the same basis! Simply, this would have violated the very basic democratic principle of equality, because, the minorities being only about 20% , and the majority Sinhalese 80%, it would mean that one member of a minority was equivalent to four Sinhalese! Yet the Sinhalese are still condemned as communalists.



Mr D.S. Senanayake did not approve of Mr S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Maha Sabha of 1937 for obvious reasons, though it could be seen as a parallel development to the communal line of the minorities that gradually became marked in the decades preceding independence.



Had the minority leaders, especially the Tamils, and certain less wise Sinhalese politicians acted in the broadminded, democratic, statesmanlike , non-racialist way that Mr D.S. Senanayake did in responding to the progressive reforms towards self-rule gradually exacted from the British colonial administration over a period of more than one hundred years from 1833 to 1948, an achievement made by the sincere efforts of a galaxy of patriotic freedom fighters from all communities, seeds of division between the majority and the minorities would not have been sown, and the country would not have been condemned to taste the bitter poisonous fruits of communal politics that we are reaping today.







Rohana R. Wasala