Contrary to what Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) Islamophobic propaganda wants you to believe, the worst violence against Hindus in the last half century has neither been in Pakistan nor Bangladesh. It has been in Sri Lanka.
Beginning in the 1960s, manufactured Hinduphobia in Sri Lanka has seen dozens of major temples destroyed, priests burnt alive to send a message to the ‘alien’ Hindu community, thousands killed in ‘riots’ orchestrated by the Singhalese Buddhist majority and untold atrocities inflicted on the living.
In accordance with Newton’s Third Law, this led to a reaction that plunged Sri Lanka into a two and half decade long civil war where terrorism of the State and counter-terrorism monopolised and led by the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE) turned the nation into a hell whose crescendo – an all-out war - saw the direct killing of over 40,000 innocent Tamils and the indirect deaths of thousands more by hunger, famine, lack of basic medical facilities etc.
Last week, with the ousting of incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa who led the offensive against the Tigers that resulted in unaccountable human rights abuse, it seems the half-a-century long nightmare for Sri Lankans, especially its Hindu Tamils, might finally come to an end.
This turning of a new leaf by history and the rise of right wing Hindu nationalism in India that mirrors Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, makes this the perfect time to investigate the past and present of our neighbour.
Samarth Subramanian’s ‘This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War’ gives a complete, unbiased and yet poignant but simple account of the complexity of Sri Lankan life and politics that led to the Civil War and its final brutal culmination.
Somewhere in the beginning of the book, Samarth writes: “We all live now in societies inured to violence, but the violence of a full-fledged war is unique in its refusal to hide, in how openly it declares its intent to harm other men and women. I wondered how a country transformed when such violence started to feel routine instead of rare – or even whether it could ever feel routine – and how people tried to reclaim and lead an ordinary life out of all this extraordinariness.”
What emerges is an extraordinary story of violence and counter-violence, of injustice and greater injustice committed in the name of justice; of how - as the books inside flap says: “people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.”
The book is a journey into the heart of darkness of a nation devouring itself bit by bit; of practitioners of a religion of peace and justice - Buddhism - inventing a macho version of it to justify inhuman violence upon followers of another – Hinduism; of individuals caught in the cross fire deliberately choosing dangerous delusions; and of an entire nation and its masses adopting wholesale a history that has no roots in reality.