By TCN News
About 90 Sri Lankan academics, civil society members and students issued a statement to show support to the protests currently underway in India and condemned the institutional murder of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula.
“For decades, Sri Lanka has witnessed persecution, oppression and violence borne from a hierarchical State structure, built to consolidate a dominant ethno- religious community’s domination. As people who have shouldered the cost of majoritarian political ideologies, we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters protesting the most visible rise of majoritarian politics in India in recent times,” the statement said.
“While acknowledging that Rohith was not the first to fall victim to Hindutva tyranny, we hope that the struggle that he was part of, would now gain national importance and not be subdued by the narrative of the State and criminalized by the establishment, or be appropriated by vested interests pursuing their own ends,” the statement added.
Importantly, the signatories added that they were able to draw “eerie parallels to the criminalisation of groups, individuals and opinions related to, but not limited to, the Dalit struggle and Kashmiri self- determination to events in this island where Tamils, journalists, activists and academics have been branded and continue to be labelled as “terrorists”, “traitors” and “extremists”.