MANAGING MULTICULTURALISM IN SRI LANKA

(Courtesy of The Island)

Very few countries can claim to be homogeneous. Most countries are made up of diverse communities often based on factors of birth, such as race, ethnicity, religion, language and caste or a combination of any of them. Consequently, state formations are made up of a multiplicity of cultural communities. The net result is that groups within states, whether majorities or minorities, see themselves as “us” and “them”, and “we” vs. the “other”. The inability to manage the demands and aspirations of cultural communities within states has become the primary cause for conflicts in the world. This has led most countries to explore strategies to ‘manage’ multiple cultural communities within their states in order to develop inclusive and stable societies.
Stable democracies, particularly in the West had managed to evolve inclusive and stable societal states until the arrival of immigrants from various parts of the world to meet labour shortages in these countries following the conclusion of World War II. Newly independent countries too that had been stable prior to and during colonization were affected by issues of multiculturalism and its problems. Faced with the common problem of dealing with cultural diversity, many countries began to label themselves as multicultural states, going to the extent of calling themselves multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious etc.
However, according to Kenan Malik (“The Failure of Multiculturalism”, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2015, p. 21), the appeal of multiculturalism is fast fading today because its “…policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes – into singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example – and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage”.
This has led “…mainstream politicians including Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor Angela Merkel, to publicly denounce multiculturalism and speak against its dangers. It has fueled success of far-right parties and populist politicians across Europe, from the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands to the National Front in France”. These three countries had attempted to manage diversity through different strategies with vastly different outcomes. For instance, “United Kingdom has sought to give various ethnic communities an equal stake in the political system. Germany has encouraged immigrants to pursue separate lives in lieu of granting them citizenship. And France has rejected multicultural policies in favour of assimilationist ones. The specific outcomes have also varied: in the United Kingdom, there has been communal violence; in Germany, Turkish communities have drifted further from mainstream society; and France, the relationship between authorities and North African communities has become highly charged” (Ibid).
MULTICULTURALISM in UNITED KINGDOM; GERMANY and FRANCE
UNITED KINGDOM.
Strategies adopted by UK to manage multiculturalism “…came to (an) explosive climax in a series of riots that tore through the United Kingdom inner cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At this point, British authorities recognized that unless minority communities were given a political stake in the system, tensions would continue to threaten urban stability. It was in this context that multicultural policies emerged”. The City Council’s plan was to “…assign every member of a minority to a discrete community, defined each group’s needs as a whole, and set the various organizations in competition with one another for city resources…In October 2005, two decades after the original Handsworth riots, violence broke out…between blacks and Asians” (Ibid, p. 27).
GERMANY
As had happened with the UK, the start of German multiculturalism was due to a labour shortage following World War II. Immigrant labour was primarily from around the Mediterranean and later from Turkey. With time a temporary need became a permanent presence. “Beginning in the 1980s, the government encouraged Turkish immigrants to preserve their own culture, language, and life style. The policy did not represent a respect for diversity so much as a convenient means of avoiding the issue of how to create a common, inclusive culture. And its main consequence was the emergence of parallel communities” (Ibid, P. 27).
FRANCE
“France’s policy of assimilation is generally regarded as the polar opposite of multiculturalism, which French politicians have proudly rejected. Unlike the rest of Europe, they insist, France treats every individual as a citizen rather than as a member of a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural group. In reality, however, France is as socially divided as Germany or the United Kingdom and in a strikingly similar way…French politicians had long held multicultural policies responsible for nurturing homegrown jihadists in the United Kingdom. Now they had to answer for why such terrorists had been nurtured in assimilationist France, too…The riots that swept through French cities in the fall of 2005 exposed the fractures in French society as clearly as has those that engulfed British cities two decades earlier…” (Ibid, p. 29).
LESSONS for SRI LANKA
Critics of multiculturalism attribute racism as being the cause of its failure in the West. However, the article cited above attributes its failure to non-recognition of diversities that exist within communities, although they appear externally as monolithic uniform cultural entities. The consequence of this approach has been to develop policies and entitlements on the basis of cultural communities. In Sri Lanka’s case this has led to treatment of Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim and Plantation Tamil communities as homogeneous groups, not allowing for the unique diversities within each of them. For instance, at the ethnic level members of the Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities are majorities in some parts of the country and are minorities in others. One could assume that such ethnic distinctions also mirror language distinctions as well. In addition, a variety of other distinctions exist within each of these three communities; a process that could be carried to an extreme. In such a setting, attempts to develop policies and entitlements based on distinct group identities (“cultural boxes”) such as Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim would marginalize large swaths within each community precipitating discontent and frustration. Furthermore, competition among cultural communities would be inevitable, and outcomes that lead to violence would be interpreted as racism. Therefore, the lesson for Sri Lanka from the failure of multiculturalism in the West is to not develop policies based on discrete group identities.
SRI LANKAN EXPERIENCE
Pre-colonial Sri Lanka was acknowledged and recognized by all who lived in Sri Lanka and by other nations, that as demographically and culturally Sinhala Buddhist and politically unitary, with a Sovereign as its Head. Those who were not Sinhala and Buddhist either accepted and assimilated with what was Sri Lanka, or retained their cultural distinctions but acknowledged, accepted and respected the cultural and political status quo that had prevailed.
Seeds of multiculturalism were planted in colonial Sri Lanka by the British. Following the brutal suppression of two Sinhala rebellions, the British adopted policies to suppress the majority Sinhala community by recognizing the concept of equality of all communities. The governance policies adopted during the British colonial period also encouraged other communities who were not Sinhala and Buddhist to enjoy positions of privilege and importance, and humiliated the Sinhala community that Sri Lanka had been identified and associated with prior to colonialism. With the Tamil community benefiting more than others from these policies, claimed that it was a distinct nation with the right to a homeland in which they could exercise the right of self-determination. This claim was articulated in the form of a resolution at Vaddukoddai in 1976. The aim of this audacious resolution was to divide the country between two communities; the reality of today’s context requires the need to nurture an inclusive and stable society where entitlements are shared collectively by all Sri Lankans, but with due acknowledgment to the Sinhala community as reflected in the special place given to Buddhism for their major and significant role in fashioning what the Sri Lankan nation had been in the past, and what it collectively hopes to aspire to become in the future.
THE WAY FORWARD
The way forward towards fostering an inclusive and stable society would be to free the individual to choose whether to assimilate and identify with the values of the larger nation, or to retain cultural identities to the extent that their manifestation would not disturb or disadvantage the identities of others, and commit to a single unitary state with a common political arrangement founded on the immutable principles of Republican Democracy. The strategy is not to institutionally recognize multiple cultures through formal recognition of cultural separateness of communities, whether Tamils,
Muslims or any other, because the inevitable consequences of such trends would be for the emergence of nationalist factions within communities similar to developments in UK, Germany, France and other parts of the world. Institutionalized communities would compete for entitlements and resources based on the strength of their separateness. Such competition could be interpreted as Racism. Separateness carried out to extreme extents traps individuals and confines them within defined communities leaving no room for freedom to express individual needs and perceptions of themselves in the larger context of a national identity as well as democracy.
For instance, Sri Lankan parents should be free to decide the kind of education they opt for their children as in Article 26 clause 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not compel children to seek instruction based on mother tongue (i.e., Sinhala or Tamil), as currently practiced, because it institutionalizes separateness. Similarly, land should be allocated on the basis of individual need and not in order to protect ethnic concentrations in defined areas. Attempts to institutionalize separateness by seeking international support to organize a referendum for the Tamil community to exercise the right of self-determination should fail constitutionally since per Article 4 (e) of the 1978 Constitution, franchise is “exercisable …..at every Referendum by every citizen” and not by a select few.
CONCLUSION
Advocates of multiculturalism in Sri Lanka are unaware that its appeal in the West is fast fading and that mainstream politicians in the West denounce it and speak out against its dangers. Despite such warnings, the present Sri Lankan Government is engaged in attempts to institutionalize separateness in order to fulfill the aspirations of the Tamil community to be equal with the Sinhala community; a notion that emerged and matured during the British colonial period. Since the degree of equality sought by the Tamil community can only be realized with the creation of a separate state on the grounds of Tamils being a separate nation with a homeland with the right of self-determination, the international community led by USA is proposing federalism as a compromise solution to satisfy Tamil aspirations. However, both options are unrealistic because of vehement opposition by the Sinhala majority to any structural arrangement other than a unitary state, that would make the territorial integrity of their cherished homeland which their forefathers had forged over many centuries to be subjected to external and/or internal vulnerabilities; a prospect that threatens their very existence because of the inherited fusion between them and their beloved country.
Pragmatism requires the Tamil community to recalibrate their aspirations and forsake misguided notions crafted by their leaders that the Tamil community is a separate nation entitled to claim a part of the island as a separate homeland, and the freedom to exercise the right of self-determination. Having failed to realize their objectives through three decades of war, their current approach is to achieve their misguided objectives using grounds of genocide, with a view to de-legitimize Sri Lanka in the eyes of the international community; another misbegotten notion that will fail.
As with France, UK, and other countries beset with the problem of having to manage multiple cultures, Sri Lanka too, since independence has been struggling to define a common identity that encapsulates clearly the ideas and values that characterize the Sri Lankan nation. The way forward is NOT to put them into “ethnic and cultural boxes” that create competition for resources that invariably are described as racial clashes between communities, but to free the individual to make the choice whether to assimilate by identifying with the values of the larger nation or to be culturally separate to an extent that does not deny or disturb the cultural separateness of ‘others’. The collective commitment should be to a common political formation and a common self-determination based on the will of the Peoples. By basing such a political formation on the District as the devolved unit, not only would the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka be guaranteed but it would also ensure the freedom of the People to exercise choices that would serve their interests, thereby creating an inclusive and stable society. This is the approach that a future administration should encourage and pursue.