The Sri Lankan civil war has been one of the great tragedies of our times. It has touched India directly in the deaths of 1,200-odd Indian soldiers, more than three times that number were injured in the course of our unfortunate intervention as peacekeepers during 1987-90, and in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
There have been many other victims in this war — Tamils killed in the race riots of the early 1980s, Sinhala civilians and soldiers killed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — but, undoubtedly, the greatest suffering has been borne by the Sri Lankan Tamils. They have had to suffer at the hands of their alleged protectors, the LTTE, as well as the overwhelmingly Sinhala army of Sri Lanka.
The portrait of modern Sri Lanka that Subramanian has sketched is not flattering, the consequences of the long war have transformed the nation for the worse. There is a coarseness and violence in the current discourse on the island, which even today has some of the highest living standards in SAARC. There was a time when the Sri Lankans were noted for their easy-going ways, but no longer.
As for India, once friend of the Tamils, there is indifference, brought on by what the LTTE wrought on the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and Rajiv Gandhi. Numerous Indians believe that the Sri Lankan parties brought it on themselves. The 1987 India-Sri Lanka Accord opened up the possibility of a unified Tamil-majority northern and eastern province. But the distaste for India was so great, not just in the LTTE but also the Sri Lankan government headed by President R Premadasa, that they actually combined forces to undermine the IPKF mission.
Subramanian tells the story of this terrible period, whose roots go back to the history of modern Sri Lanka and its racial antagonisms, fanned by politicians on both sides. The war and its various phases set the stage for the book, which is a story viewed through the eyes of various protagonists who were participants, observers or victims, not the leaders or public men, but ordinary folk caught up by the history of their times. This is clearly not a quickie travelogue of an Indian journalist, but a longer meditation based on repeated visits and a deep desire to lay bare the anatomy of the beast that the civil war has wrought, or to put it in his own words, “in the spirit of a forensics gumshoe visiting an arson site to examine the ashes and guess at how the fire caught and spread so cataclysmically, but also to see if any embers remained to ignite the blaze all over again.”
The otherwise layered story is told with a pithy precision which is helped by his construction of a three-cornered matrix of the LTTE, Jaffna and the Buddhist faith through which to tell the tale. All three are vital to the story without Jaffna’s geographical location and the history of its Tamils, there would have been no LTTE. But without the frightening totalitarianism of the LTTE, the Sri Lankan war would not have been as vicious as it turned out to be. The peculiarly militant kind of Buddhism that the Sri Lankans practise has provided its own leavening to the tragedy.
People in India are familiar with the Tigers and with Jaffna, both of which have been reported on in great detail in the past years. But Subramanian’s more disturbing portrait is of Sri Lankan Buddhism, which seems to have mutated because of the war into a faith that does not have much in common with, say, the Buddhism of a Dalai Lama.
What is striking is the role that Buddhist monks played in the war against the LTTE and the use that politicians like Mahinda Rajapaksa have made of them. Perhaps it is too early, but neither the defeated Tamils nor the victorious Sinhalas seem to be thinking in terms of reconciliation. The relationship between Buddhism and the government is, as a nationalist politician tells the writer, more akin to that “between the Vatican and Catholicism, or between Saudi Arabia and Islam.” Subramanian has drawn a fascinating portrait of the role the faith plays in the life and politics of the island through his conversations with Baddegama Samitha, a politician and head of the Sripada Chaitya Viharaya, and another nationalist monk and archaeologist, Omalpe Sobitha, a founder of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), a party of Buddhist monks. While Buddhist nationalist fervour against the Hindu Tamils is understandable in the context of the civil war, the chauvinist nature of Buddhism in Sri Lanka today is well brought out by Subramanian’s descriptions of the tensions stoked between the Buddhists and Muslims.
The tragedy of Sri Lanka has not ended. There are too many “disappeared”— not just the LTTE who were captured, but Sinhalas who oppose the Rajapaksa family and journalists who wrote truthfully. There is little in this account to suggest that the future will not be as bleak as the past. There is a deep gulf between the Tamil despair and Sinhala triumphalism, and no one, especially not the Sri Lankan political leadership, is making an effort to bridge it.
(Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)