Inside Downing Street Continue reading →
Tamil and Sinhalese politics in Britain today
Inside Downing Street Continue reading
Defenders of the Faith? or Voices of Intolerance?
Courtesy of Foreign Policy … taking a leaf from the work of International Crisis Group … http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/sri-lanka/253-sri-lankas-potemkin-peace-democracy-under-fire.pdf
Galagoda Atte Gnanasara and Ashin Wirathu exchange symbolic gifts
The photo of the two monks above looks innocent enough. One of the men presents the other with a birthday present. It’s difficult to make out, but it looks to be some sort of gold figurine on a red velvet base. In fact, the photo would be totally uninteresting if it weren’t for the fact that these men are two of the world’s most important leaders of a dangerously radical brand of Buddhism. Continue reading
Blundering Foreign Ministry and its Sinhala extremist siege mentality endangers the island in the UNHCR
Q and A with Rajiva Wijesinha ..courtesy of Ceylon Today where the title is different
Q: You were one of the six government parliamentarians, including four ministers, who sent a letter to the President regarding the forthcoming UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution. What was that letter about?
A: That letter was intended to draw attention to the dangerous situation the country was in, which we felt had not been conveyed accurately to the President.
Q: What did you urge the President to do? What did you warn him about?
A: We urged him to address international concerns strategically and have informed discussions to develop a counter-strategy to address what would be raised in Geneva this month. We need to convey systematically the work done by the government since March 2009 towards uniting this country, using competent communicators able also to deal with questions. Continue reading
Blundering tourists blunder with RAMBO and other elephants
Srilal Miththapala, in The Island, 12 March 2014, where the title is “Tourist injured by elephant at UdaWalawe”
Rambo at the fence gentle and greedy — Pic by Chitral Jayatilake
Last week news was received about a foreign tourist, who had been injured by a wild elephant closed to the Uda Walawe National Park. When I heard the news, I immediately felt a wave of apprehension wondering whether this could be Rambo, the elephant who frequents the Tanamallvila Road boundary fence, along the bund of the Uda Walawe reservoir. Continue reading
Pattini and Kannaki as Solace to Tamils & Sinhalese … and maybe a Pathway to Reconciliation
The Economist, I March 2014, where the title is “Seeing both sides”
THE end of their bitter war, nearly five years ago, has done little to unite Sri Lanka’s divided communities. In their modest way, a photographer and an anthropologist are working together to try bridging the distance that separates the country’s two largest ethnic groups—by showing them how they worship the same goddess.
Pics by Sharni Jayawardena
The majority, Sinhala-speaking Buddhists, call her Pattini while the minority Tamil Hindus name her Kannaki. For the most part, neither of the two communities knows that the other reveres her under a different name. But their beliefs are deeply syncretic, and point towards a shared history and traditions. Continue reading
Nationalism, the Past and The Present: The Case of Sri Lanka
Michael Roberts
This review article was drafted in 1991 and should therefore be assessed in the light of the literature available then. In those days it took at least two years for an article to be refereed and published. The essay discusses the following three books: Jonathan Spencer, A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble. Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990, 285pp; Jonathan Spencer (ed.), Sri Lanka. History and the Roots of Conflict, London: Routledge, 1990, 253pp; Manning Nash, The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, 142pp. It was origianally printed in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1993, 16: 133-161.
The ongoing ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused interest in both the reasons for the breakdown of its polity and the roots of Tamil and Sinhala identities. The resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe will encourage studies in the broader implications of the Sri Lankan data for social science theory.
As a result of the excesses of the Nazi upsurge, Western scholars have tended to regard nationalism as retrograde and potentially pathological (e.g. Kedourie 1960) or reprehensibly atavistic. In South Asia, in contrast, ever since the decolonization process got under way, nationalism has been viewed positively—as long as its goals were framed in terms of the existing (colonial) political boundaries. The recent upsurge of violence has encouraged Asian scholars to question this perspective. Such questioning is sometimes embodied in the term ‘chauvinism’ (e.g. Coomaraswamy 1987: 74-81). This term is not a novel addition to the Asian English lexicon. It was used in British Ceylon in the 1920s and 1930s to describe those who pressed for Tamil and Sinhalese sectional interests: these spokesmen were reviled as “communalists”, “chauvinists” and “tribalists” by both the moderates and radicals who espoused a Ceylonese nationalism.[1] Continue reading
Filed under authoritarian regimes, British colonialism, caste issues, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, heritage, historical interpretation, literary achievements, nationalism, population, power politics, religiosity, sri lankan society, Tamil migration, violence of language, world events & processes
Assassins at Large: The Rajiv Gandhi KILL of 1991
I- “Jayalalitha to release Rajiv Gandhi killers,” by S. Venkat Narayan, courtesy of Island February 19, 2014,
NEW DELHI, February 19: Twenty-three years after they were jailed, the Tamil Nadu Government headed by Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalitha today decided to set free within three days all the seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case after the Indian Supreme Court commuted the death penalty of three of them to life sentence. Besides Santhan, Murugan, the husband of Nalini, Perarivalan, who earned a major reprieve from the Supreme Court yesterday which spared them from gallows, Nalini, Robert Pious, Jayakumar and Ravichan-dran will walk out from prison. Four of the men who will be set free are Sri Lankan Tamils. They are: Murugan, Santhan, Robert Payas and V Jayakumar. Continue reading
Spreading its wings on water: Cinnamon Air
James Crabtree in the Daily News recently. with the title ‘A seaplane service that makes waves”
High in Sri Lanka’s hill country, Kandy has what must rank as one of the world’s most scenic airports. Ringed on both sides by lush jungle, it is pleasingly quiet as I wait by the patch of grass that acts as its main departure gate. Groups of schoolchildren hang around nearby, hopefully scanning the horizon. And in front of us lies the blue waters of Polgolla reservoir: the runway for today’s flight, which is due shortly to touch down from the capital Colombo. Continue reading
Cash-Strapped? Not on your Life! Tamils of Nandikadal Last Redoubt had loads strapped to their bodies
reporting speech by AJ Cabraal to Foreign Correspondents Association — The Island, 20 February 2014, where the title reads “Last stages of War: Tamils moved with billions of rupees strapped to their bodies – Cabraal”
Currency notes to the tune of billions of rupees, most of which were soiled as a result of being tied to the bodies of Northern Tamils who were forced to move about with the LTTE during the last stages of the war, had been deposited with state banks during May 2009, the Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal revealed yesterday.
Addressing the Foreign Correspondents Association, after its members had visited the Bank’s Currency Museum, Cabraal said that two days after the conflict had concluded, he and his officials along with staff of the Bank of Ceylon and Peoples Bank, visited the refugee camps in the North. “Initially the Tamils were reluctant to deposit their monies with us, since they did not know where it would go. But once we identified ourselves, the notes flowed in. It ran into billions of rupees. Containers had to be used to collect and transport them to the respective banks.” Continue reading
