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One of the first things I had to do in the new year was to firmly remind my (Lankan) Facebook friends to avoid posting or tagging me to any anti-Muslim rhetoric that is growing in an organized manner. A systemic and sequential anti-Muslim campaign is taking place in many parts of the island (as we observe now) largely mobilized by a Saṅgha led lay organization called Bodu Bala Senā – BBS (or Forces of Buddhist Power). While we are unaware of the legal status, finding sources and possible powerful political backing, their public face in a www site gives a glimpse of the structure and nature of this undoubtedly ‘Buddhist’ organization. My first reading of their public picture is impressive. They are well organized. More interactive/informative than many government websites. Modern, seem to seriously adhere and willing to stand for their socio-political beliefs irrespective of such beliefs and practices being Buddhist or not in its nature, modality and ambition. In many ways, this neatly fits into what Juergensmeyer had labeled as ‘e-mail ethnicity’.
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One of the first things I had to do in the new year was to firmly remind my (Lankan) Facebook friends to avoid posting or tagging me to any anti-Muslim rhetoric that is growing in an organized manner. A systemic and sequential anti-Muslim campaign is taking place in many parts of the island (as we observe now) largely mobilized by a Saṅgha led lay organization called Bodu Bala Senā – BBS (or Forces of Buddhist Power). While we are unaware of the legal status, finding sources and possible powerful political backing, their public face in a www site gives a glimpse of the structure and nature of this undoubtedly ‘Buddhist’ organization. My first reading of their public picture is impressive. They are well organized. More interactive/informative than many government websites. Modern, seem to seriously adhere and willing to stand for their socio-political beliefs irrespective of such beliefs and practices being Buddhist or not in its nature, modality and ambition. In many ways, this neatly fits into what Juergensmeyer had labeled as ‘e-mail ethnicity’.
What is the need for a well-organized outfit of this nature even
after four years after the war? Why that is, BBS is on an anti-Muslim
campaign? Is BBS only a standalone organization or it in fact, a symptom
of a wider political undercurrent that developing in Lanka in the
postwar context? Why does the Sinhala Saṅgha often find an ‘enemy’ they
should defeat? This is a short reflection of the political sociology of
Saṅgha resistance and their impact in contemporary Lanka. Towards the
mixed and wider audience of GV, I keep this essay non-theoretical and
leave open for further discourse.
Postwar Buddhist Politics
It is nearly four years ago that the modern state of Lanka
recentralized her strong ethno-religious i.e. Sinhala-Buddhist
structure. Its total defeat of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) – until then
considered one of world’s most effective textbook terror political
group- reaffirmed the political will of the Sinhala elites and their
voters. For them, Lanka is and will remain a Sinhala-Buddhist state no
matter the democratic/human cost or her ground demographic/historical
reality as a multicultural island that survives on a dependent economy.
There is no doubt that the Rajapaksa rule, unlike its predecessors
steadfastly held the Sinhala determination to defeat the LTTE
irrespective of some internal and occasional (often-marginal)
international pressures. Retrospectively, mobilizing such ‘just-war’ to
safeguard the territorial integrity of the dhammadeepa and the
sovereignty of the Sinhalas was made easy and possible by the Saṅgha.
The uncompromised stand, activism and the rhetoric of a minority of
radicalized Sinhala (largely southern) Saṅgha as much as the passive
support of majority of the Sangha fraternity across the island across
the all major nikayas helped win the war in 2009. State of Lanka is yet
to give the due honour of her unforgiving victory to the two most
contributing entities: first, the just war chapters led by activists
Sangha such as Athuraliyē Rathana, Bengamuwe Nālaka, Elle Gunawangse
and thousands other Saṅgha who demanded a military solution. Second:
China- Lanka’s regional super power guardian. Recent World Bank report
says that China has already invested/loaned up to 40 billion US $ to
Lanka. While the accountability of such amount of funds has never been
open in Lanka, at least China may be enjoying its aims in Lanka.
However, it appears that the rulers have only fulfilled one expectation
of the warrior-Saṅgha in defeating the LTTE. The wider ambition of
(re)establishing an ethno-religious Sinhala-Buddhist state is pending or
slower than their original hopes. It is this backdrop, within which a
force of the ‘Buddhist Power’ (BBS) comes into demonstration.
Trans-localizing Buddhist politics
The intrinsically interwoven dialectical relationship between the
Theravādin Saṅgha and their states is a well-researched and confirmed
fact in power politics of South(east) Asia. Such dynamic is historicized
by the deeply influencing Vaṃsa literature in Lanka. I have elsewhere
added to such research to contextualize the modern Sangha-State nexus in
Lanka.[1]
The epiphenomenology of the post-LTTE Sinhala Saṅgha resistance and its
political mobilization have inherited two historical factors. First,
the political heritage of Saṅgha genealogy: from venerable Mahānāma of
Mahāvihara, the first author of the Mahāvaṃsa to venerable Gaṅgoḍawila
Sōma- the modern crusader of a semi-urban charismatic Buddhist
evangelism- there remains a self-defined cosmological responsibility and
an uncontested authority bestowed with Sangha to (re)define the Sinhala
state. Late professor venerable Walpola Rāhula has articulated such
continued political dynamic in his Bhikshuwakage Urumaya
(භික්ෂුවගේ උරුමය) which is in its ninth edition and is considered the
manifesto for modern Sangha politics. Second: the Sinhala Saṅgha have
historically adopted, imported and exported an ethno-religious template
of interpretation to understand and respond to the changes in their
society. They have borrowed and localized concepts and modalities from
other Theravādin contemporaries. When challenging the deeply colonized
state in the 1800s they worked with the Burmese and Thai Saṅgha. An
independent self-rule thesis was followed from their Bengali
counterparts. Anagārika Dharmapāla while not a Saṅgha, deeply influenced
to project a ‘protestant Buddhism’ creating the concept of
‘Sinhala-Bauddaya’. Dharmapāla with the help and advice of American war
veteran Colonel Olcott borrowed his agitation and its models from the
protestant Christian missionaries. Even the media based Buddhist
evangelism done by venerable Sōma (and continued by others like the
venerable Inamaluwe Śrī Suṃaṅgala of Rangiri vihara of Dambulla) is in
the footprint of British/American religious preachers who exploit the
public space via the modern media and worldwide internet. Ann Blackburn
in her Locating Buddhism (2010) has investigated such history.
This trans-localizing process and its density depend on internalizing
and cross -problematizing of the socio-political transformation around
them. Such internalizing produces a set of ontological insecurities
further deepened by forces such as the market based liberal democracy,
its globalization of a western value schema, growth of newer religions
(especially Pentecostal Christianity) or a set of new trader class like
the Muslims in Lanka. I have argued that the concepts such as minority
rights and federalism have fallen victims of such Saṅgha
internationalization that fuelled not only the just war thesis but also
rejected the total discourse of federalism or power sharing and reserved
the state to a recentralization. Such Saṅgha worldview has generated
varied types of violent and non-violent responses. BBS appears to be a
classic development in this context.
Building a Buddhatvā
Scholars agree that nation state formation in South Asia had taken on
opposite direction to its development in Europe. In South Asia, the
struggles for independent from long periods of colonization did not come
with the aim to build an overarching state led by a civic society under
one ethno-religious cultural identity. The multi-nation, multi-lingual,
multi-religious and multi-cultural nature of the South Asian societies
prevented such uniformity and civic consciousness in their society. The
post-colonial struggles for democracy in these states in South Asia
bears witness to the fact that independent was perceived as an
opportunity for a particular ethnic group than to the entire state. In
Lanka, The Sinhalas considered independence to be their chance of
majority rule. This is proved by the subsequent illdemocratic acts such
the disfranchising of the Indian Tamil, language rule, supremacy of
Buddhism and university entrance discriminations etc. On the other hand,
the Tamils seemed to have dreamed of a largely autonomous, confederated
or even an independent region for them after the colonial rule. Such
unfulfilled diagonally opposing political ambitions and demands
eventually led to the 30 years of civil war.
The Sinhala Saṅgha, in spiritual terms have renounced this world and
are helping the others to find nirvāna. However, they have had a
historical socio-political mandate too. That is building and maintaining
a state in which the ethno-religious ideology of Sinhala Buddhism is at
the center of political and social definition. Their textualized aim in
the various Vaṃsa literature is political not religious, at least very
different to what the Theravada teachings of the Pāli texts. This
political Buddhism is designed and often projected against an identified
‘other’. For the Sinhala Saṅgha, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Hinduism,
Catholicism, Christian missionaries, Islam, and the peoples of those
faiths have often provided such otherness. Some have argued that the
Sinhala Saṅgha agitation against the other and the political project of
building a Buddhist state has taken the same path as its Hindu
nationalist mobilization- the Hindutva. While there is a large body of
literature on Hindutva, in Lanka the Saṅgha resistance politics is still
under studied. My own research had revealed the fact that many
scholars (Gananatha Obeseykere, H. L. Seneviratne, S. J. Tambiah and
many western academics) have investigated the Sinhala Saṅgha politics
from an anthropological perspective than of political science lenses.
Modern political science is limited in explaining some of the
transitional transformations happening in ethno-religious politics in
societies like Lanka. The contemporary Western scholarship that claims a
‘return of religion’ (Appleby 2000, Juergensmeyer 2003) is not able to
explain our conditions as religion never left our politics or us. So it
is not a return but a reassert and a reminder how deeply religious our
politics is. Limited scholarship in understanding religious politics of
Lanka is also using popular western discourses such as (post)modernism
(Abeysekara 2002, 2008). Are the resistance waves of Sangha politics in
Lanka showing signs of a ‘Buddhist Zionism’? That is, beside the
eschatological belief that the Sinhalas are a chosen race for the
redemptive role of Buddhism, and Lanka is a Buddha’s land, a
neo-militancy is attached to the urgent and if necessary a violent need
to protect and defend the Buddhist land. Historical evidence such as
the Tamil/Hindu/Indian invasions as well the modern LTTE terror campaign
neatly fitted into the idiosyncratically selected portions of Mahāvaṃsa
and other such epics. Such Buddhist Zionist interpretation naturally
will search for every possible sign of the Mahavamsic prophecies to
identify the ‘enemy’ of the dhamma and Sinhalas as its custodians. The
Sinhala Saṅgha and their ultra-nationalist lay politics have readily
provided a long list of such ‘enemies’ from the colonial British to UN
funded INGOs and to the Chief Justice of the supreme court in the recent
days. Jonathan Fox, a world authority on ethno-religious violence has
doubted that democracy cannot take root where the religious beliefs
justify political violence at societal level. I suspect 1948 produced
two such ‘Zionist’ states: one Israel- built on the Judeo-Christian
faith and the other Sri Lanka- very surprisingly based on some
interpretation of Buddhism. Defending the purity of their land in both
these states is directly amount to defending their faiths. Israel
expands into a Biblical boundary searching for the Promised Land, while
Lanka holds the boundaries of the dhammadeepa cleansed and given by
Buddha , its rule even temporarily with her own citizens who are the
other. These societies and their religio-politics are constructed on a
cosmion basis: That perceives their country as the physical metaphor of
the eternal resting place and their contemporary political structure as
representing the divine order. It is in this context they could see
their political leaders as divinely appointed (or relatives of Buddha)
and their army as sons of eternity engaged in a divine war of
Armageddon. Venerable Elle Gunawangse’s 50 odd war-songs written,
produced and distributed amongst the soldiers during the peak stage of
the war textualized this.
It is in this context that an outfit like BBS whose raison d’eˆtre is
against to the Muslim expansionism under a corrupt and unfair
trade/economic system. It is statically true that the Muslims in Lanka
have grown, numerically, economically and to a great extend politically.
However, why should such growth be an actual or perceived threat to
Sinhala Buddhism? What (in)actions of the wider Muslim community are
generating such ontological fears in Sinhala mind especially as the
Sangha interpreted them? One thing positive about BBS is that the
organization is constantly calling for a reform within the entire Śāsana
of the Sinhala Buddhism beginning from an accountability and wealth
sharing of the Dalala maligawa and the Atamasthana. This is a historical
call and if done a turning point in modern Sinhala Buddhism. Can the
Muslims, Christians and the Hindus understand this Buddhist Zionism and
deal with it without contributing to the natural desire for reactionary
political violence? What is the role of the government and the cross
ethnic civil society in fostering such urgent understanding? Such
questions are at the fundamental level to avoid the growing mistrust,
antagonism and rivalry that is amplified by BBS. Southeast Asian
Theravāda states such as Burma, Thailand and Laos had already developed
some full-blown Buddhist-Muslim conflicts that are threating those
states. Can Sinhala Buddhism afford to repeat a Buddhist-Muslim riot as
happened a century ago in 1915? Can the Saṅgha in Lanka not find a way
to address and answer their fears and concerns in a more dialogical
manner? What can the Muslim religio-political elites and their trading
communities (not)do towards this?
Dr. Suren Raghavan (raghavansuren@gmail.com) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for
Buddhist Studies of University of Oxford and teaches politics at
University of Kent-Canterbury. (Groundviews)
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