PLURALISM AND SUPREMACY - II
Is there any country, with a history, in the world where all cultures are treated equally? This is a question that H L Seneviratne, Shanie and others should answer before pontificating on pluralism. I presume that H. L. Seneviratne has been living in USA for some time now. Does he as a western sociologist, albeit without any concept or theory to his credit after all these years in the west, or as a plain human being aware of a culture in USA even on par with the American Christian culture? When one thinks that there had been many cultures in the Americas before the whites and Seneviratnes went there one has to wonder what happened to all those cultures. They are there for western Anthropologists such as Redfield to speculate on great tradition and little tradition but not for Bush or Obama and others to treat them equally.
So many foreign ministers have been visiting Sri Lanka in the past few days and they too perhaps preach pluralism. Among the countries they represent France, Britain and Australia have been very tough on Muslims. The Prime Ministers, the judiciary of these countries are on record, though not in the same words, effectively asking the Muslims to leave the respective countries if they could not live according to the Christian culture respecting the Christian law. Pluralism in these countries means that though there may be people of different cultures living, one culture is more significant than the other cultures. The cultures are never treated equally and when Obama took his oaths as the President of USA he did so as a Christian according to Christian culture. Leave alone the Presidency and the associated ceremony in USA. In Sri Lanka in Universities the convocations are conducted according to the Christian tradition with the Vice Chancellors, Deans, other officers, graduands and those who receive so called honorary degrees wearing the cloaks which represent nothing but the cloaks of the Christian clergy. Even Universities of Kelaniya and Sri Jayawardhanapura which were made so called universities fifty years ago by imposing a Christian university structure on them have to follow these western Christian traditions.
Where do we find pluralism in the western Christian world? We have repeated the above umpteen times without any response from Seneviratnes and Shanies who only repeat the word pluralism as if it was a panacea to all the problems. The national flag of United Kingdom represents the history of the country and one can see only the Christian crosses and not any other symbol of any other culture. Westminster abbey will not accommodate any Bhikkus if and when Charles Windsor becomes the king of Britain or UK. (Will the Irish accept him? I also wonder why they do not have a Duke of Ulster or a Prince of Ireland resembling the Duke of Edinburgh or the Prince of Wales.) English may not be the official language of Britain officially, meaning there is no official language act, but for all purposes English occupies a supreme place in the government and other institutions. USA supposed to be the most powerful country made English or American English the official language of the country a few years ago to undercut Spanish which the Anglo Saxon Americans thought would become a threat to English.
As we have said even individuals are not equal in the west or in any part of the world under western Christian hegemony. Surely H. L. Seneviratne enjoys more access to the press in Sri Lanka than an average Sri Lankan living in the country but on the other hand does not enjoy the same "equality" vis- a- vis the American press though he lives there as an academic. We do not hold DPL passports and we are not treated equal by the police. Equality and such concepts are only rhetoric introduced by the French revolution, and western Christian modernity with its hypocrisy has been happy to adopt them into the western Judaic Christian culture.
The British treat the Sri Lankan Tamils or the scattered Tamils living in that country more equal than most of the other communities. Which other community would be allowed to block a bridge over Thames disrupting traffic? Certainly the Tamils of Sri Lankan origin are more equal than the Sinhalas or the Arabs. Imaging what would have happened if an association of the Arabs attempted to block a bridge not over Thames but over some brook in the country demanding that bin Laden be allowed to travel freely. Poor Sadam Hussein, if he was born a Sri Lankan Tamil he would not have died, the mistake he or somebody else did was to make him an Arab. Let us face it. The Sri Lankan Tamils in Britain are a privileged group. They can block bridges, attack Sri Lankan and Indian High Commissions and still roam freely in London. There are some people who think when the Sri Lankan police is not taking any action against certain politicos or political groups it is due to corruption that prevails in the police service. Everybody should now understand that it is because the Sri Lankan police is following the traditions of the British police which is the parent body of the former.
The British and the other westerners want the Sri Lankan Tamils, who were created by them in order to attack the Sinhala Buddhist culture. Prabhakaran and the LTTE were only the instruments of the Sri Lankan or scattered Tamils, and unfortunately it was the ordinary Tamils such as those now trapped by the LTTE in Mullativu who had to sacrifice their lives on behalf of the scattered Tamils and the British. Now the suicide squad or the "billyboys" in local parlance have been defeated, it is back to the politics of the late nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth century where the "educated Tamils" had to work for the British to weaken if not to destroy the Sinhala Buddhist culture. The west would not have allowed Prabhakaran to die and he would now lead the scattered Tamils from abroad forming an Eelam in exile with the help of the British. The scattered Tamils are the darlings of the British and they will never be treated the way the Muslims are treated in Australia, Britain and France.
British who do not treat all the cultures equally and who would do everything to make sure that the Anglo Saxon Christian culture the dominant culture in the whole world including the academia want Sri Lanka to treat all cultures equally. They have their theoreticians as well as the "commentators" such as Seneviratnes and Shanies to work for them. Invariably the latter are products of the imitative western education with its rotten core (incidentally Gunadasa Amarasekera in his writings has criticized only the outer shell dealing with phenomena such as the tennis playing undergraduate from the central schools and not the knowledge system based on western Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya) we have in Sri Lanka, whether in Peradeniya or Vayamba, and they know only to repeat what their masters and mistresses want them to tell the world.
It is to protect this set of scattered Tamils and their cousins in Sri Lanka that Britain and its friends are interested in pluralism in Sri Lanka while not caring two hoots for the concept in Britain, and practicing supremacy. Their intention now as then is not to give the Sinhala Buddhist culture its due place in the country. They do not want the non Sinhala Buddhist communities living in Sri Lanka to accept the significance of the Sinhala Buddhist culture while maintaining the supremacy of the Anglo Saxon Christian culture not only in Britain but in the other parts of the world including Sri Lanka. There are some of my friends who want to know the reason as to why the British want to destroy the Sinhala Buddhist culture. I only request them to read the Vidusara series of articles available in www.kalaya.org. Of course it is not an academic website with "research papers" written in the jargon of the academics, and some third rate engineers turned third rate sociologists will consider the articles childish. The Sinhala Theravada Buddhist Chinthanaya is the most prominent Chinthanaya not based on a God or an objective reality and those intellectuals in the west and not those Sri Lankans in the western universities, who serve the west, know the strength of that Chinthanaya.
When Sri Lanka or Sinhale as it was known then entered into an agreement with Britain in 1815, the British promised to rule the country according to the Sinhale law or tradition and protect Buddhism. This may be the only occasion a Christian country undertook to protect a non Christian religion and a culture, and it speaks volumes for the strength of the Sinhala Bhikkus and of the leaders at that time. The British had no choice but to accept the significance of the Sinhala Buddhist culture and the Sinhala "law" even if it was done with the intention of deceiving the Sinhala leaders. The British parliament naturally did not approve what Brownrigg had done and there was protest in England against the so called Kandyan convention. The British did not want to protect or promote Buddhism, and they did not know that Brownrigg was to rig the convention. The British promised to uphold the significance of the Sinhala Buddhist culture in Sinhale but had no intention of doing so. With the so called educated Vellala Tamils they maintained the dominance of the western Christian culture by not giving the due place to the Sinhala Buddhist culture.
It is significant that no European colonial power entered into a similar agreement with the Tamils in the country. One could say that the so called Jaffna kingdom was defeated in the seventeenth century by the Portuguese and after that there was no need of an agreement. However according to late Mr. Gamini Iriyagolla there was an agreement between the Portuguese and the Arya Chakravarthins that was in Sinhala and Portuguese which did not recognize Tamil culture as a significant culture in the country. In any event it is easy to demonstrate that the present day Tamils in Jaffna are descendants of the Sinhala inhabitants, Velakkaras and the Tamils, especially the Vellalas who were brought by the Dutch for their tobacco cultivation.
If the Tamil racists and "academics" such as Seneviratne are hell bent on preaching unconditional pluralism without accepting the significance of the Sinhala Buddhist culture in the country, then I am afraid they are only serving the British and the other westerners. There is no unconditional or absolute pluralism anywhere else in the world and Sri Lanka does not need to be unique in practicing such pluralism playing into the hands of the British who have ulterior motives.
Professor Nalin de Silva
* This article has been edited when it publishing in the news paper. This is the unedited version of that article.
>
>
>