ICC Note:

Under pressure from the country’s Buddhist nationalists, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka claimed that Buddhism will remain the country’s predominate religion under the new constitution. Attacks on religious minorities and their places of worship are often perpetrated by radical Buddhist nationalists seeking to maintain Buddhism as Sri Lanka’s dominate religion. Christians and Muslims have both suffered at the hands of these radicals. By bowing to their pressure, the Sri Lankan government has only perpetrated the cycle of persecution religious minorities must endure. 

07/20/2017 Sri Lanka (Asia News) – Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wikremasinghe said that Buddhism will remain the predominant religion in the new Constitution.

He spoke last week to silence the protests of some 70 radical Buddhist monks who had threatened serious consequences in case the new fundamental charter, which should replace the 1978 constitution, did not include special guarantees for their religion. Sadly, the issue is likely to divide even more a country already torn apart by 30 years of civil war.

With this in mind, Asia News spoke to a number of Christian and Muslim leaders. All reiterate the inalienable right to profess one’s own faith for “We are human beings, too.”

Minorities want the government not to ignore them. For Rev Samuel J Ponniah, Anglican vicar at St John the Baptist’s Church in Chundikulii, on the Jaffna Peninsula, “everyone has the right to express their opinion. The monks have done it in a democratic context. ”

The “government elected in 2015 promised to change the Constitution,” he explained. “What would happen if it broke that promise? People in the past have already been cheated enough. The ideal would be to separate state and religion.”

For Methodists and others, “Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country. It is true that the Buddhists account for 70 per cent of the population (of 21 million), but it is equally true that there are many Muslims (9 per cent) as well as Christians and Hindus. The country must be secular. Only then will there be equality and unity.”

According to Christian Migara Doss, a Christian lawyer, the prime minister’s words will only perpetuate “the dictatorship of the majority. We must understand our history and the national context. Promoting a single ethnic or religious group has always damaged the unity of the country.”

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