By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Attn Editors: This is the fourth in a series of stories related to Sri Lanka’s 60th year of independence, falling on Feb 4.
Colombo : Sixty years after it peacefully got independence from Britain, Sri Lanka is still battling with fundamental issues relating to its unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Torn by ethnic strife, terrorism, insurgencies and endemic political disunity, the island country’s nearly 20 million people are yet to develop a “Sri Lankan identity”, sociologists and academics say.
“We have been a miserable failure in forging a Sri Lankan nationhood,” Gunadasa Amarasekera, author of the seminal nationalist agenda “Jathika Chintanaya” and a leading light of the Patriotic National Movement (PNM), a grouping of Sinhalese nationalists, told IANS.
“We are still in search of a Sri Lankan identity. The problems of Sri Lanka, including the ethnic issue, will not be solved till we have discovered ourselves and found an identity,” Amarasekera told IANS.
Sri Lanka has its plus points too. It may not have achieved great agricultural and industrial development, but there is no grinding poverty of the kind seen in other countries of South Asia.
It is also a postcard beautiful country that have made it a tourist paradise.
However, the lack of a common, overarching identity is a major handicap. There is the Sinhalese identity, the Sinhalese-Buddhist identity, a Tamil identity and a Muslim identity.
The term “nationalism” does not mean a common Sri Lankan nationalism but “Sinhalese” nationalism or “Tamil nationalism”. And the various “nationalisms” are scared of each other, and at war.
The conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil “nationalisms” has subjected the country to war and terrorism for three decades, weakening it economically and politically, and throwing it open to foreign interference and intervention.
Since 1983, around 70,000 people have been killed in violence linked to the Tamil separatist campaign that has now become the world’s longest running armed conflict – showing no signs of ending any time soon.
S.T. Hettige, a Colombo University sociologist, said that if Sri Lanka had not taken off economically like India or the East Asian Tigers, it was because, since independence, political leaders had subverted all the basic institutions.
Narrow political and communal agendas and wrong notions of nationalism, both among the Sinhalese or the minority Tamils, have disabled institutions necessary to keep the country together and ticking.
“Sinhalese nationalism failed to address the concerns of the Tamils. It abolished English and replaced it with Sinhalese and Tamil, depriving the two major communities of a medium to communicate with each other. The result is that hardly anything is common now. People are living innocently in their separate ethnic worlds,” Hettige observed.
Others feel that due to over-politicisation and communalisation, Sri Lankans cutting across ethnicities and economic classes seem to be losing faith in public institutions.
Some experts feel that the conflicts in the country are by no means native to Sri Lanka. They are a product of certain pernicious modern influences, and are aggravated by a lack of awareness about the 2,500-year-old civilization.
The absence of a freedom movement in Sri Lanka has also been an important factor furthering alienation from tradition.
“If India has been able to achieve a measure of composite nationhood, it is because the freedom movement revived traditions and memories of a great Indian civilization,” Amarasekera pointed out.
The revivalist leader said the basic problem in Sri Lanka was not the Tamil Tigers leader Velupillai Prabhakaran but the growing influence of foreign “neo-colonial” interests particularly India.
“India has been hegemonic. Prabhakaran was basically its creation. Even now India is trying to interfere in Sri Lanka by exploiting the so-called Tamil Nadu sentiment. I am sure that Sri Lankans, cutting across ethnic lines, will one day unite to resist pernicious foreign influences,” Amarasekera said.