By

Meera Srinivasan

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s recent remarks that Buddhism would be given the foremost place in Sri Lanka’s new Constitution has sparked concern among sections.

“As a state, the President, I and all of us protect Buddhism, not through words, but through action,” Mr. Wickremesinghe said recently, the State-run Daily News newspaper reported.

Mr. Wickremesinghe said all political parties and religious leaders across faiths had “no issue in giving priority to protect Buddhism in the country.” He added the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main political grouping here representing Sri Lanka’s northern Tamils, agreed to retain those articles protecting Buddhism in the existing Constitution unchanged.

Exclusionary move

However, TNA parliamentarian and senior human rights lawyer, M.A. Sumanthiran, said he would oppose such a move. “If equality is a provision, then you cannot give primacy to one religion,” he told The Hindu on Wednesday. Terming the move “exclusionary”, he said while the TNA would not mind “some kind of recognition to Buddhism or Buddha’s teachings”, giving the religion the foremost place, explicitly, was discriminatory.

Buddhists are Sri Lanka’s majority religious group, accounting for about 70 per cent of the island’s population. Hindus are the largest religious minority, constituting 12.6 per cent of the population, while Muslims and Christians, respectively, make up 9.7 per cent and 7.6 per cent.

Following the January 2015 Presidential elections that brought about a regime change in Sri Lanka, the country embarked upon drafting a new constitution that, a section of lawyers and civil society hoped, would be “secular”.

Mr. Wickremesinghe’s remarks have made evident that the newly-elected government would retain the special place given to Buddhism in the 1972 and 1978 constitutions.

Senior constitutional lawyer Jayampathy Wickramaratne, who currently chairs a government-appointed committee to guide the Constitution-making process, said Sri Lanka is a “secular state” on the basis that there is no state religion. “To that extent, giving Buddhism the foremost place does not necessarily make the Constitution anything other than secular,” he told The Hindu.

Debate on secularism

If a country does not have an official state religion, it is secular, Mr. Wickramaratne said, giving examples. “India does not have a state religion, so it is secular. But Islam is the state religion of Pakistan, therefore Pakistan is not a secular state.”

The debate over giving primacy to Buddhism in the Constitution comes amid concerns over apparently growing religious intolerance and alleged Sinhala-Buddhist colonisation in post-war Sri Lanka.

Cautioning that “such an exclusionary” provision might spark tensions and old fears, Mr. Sumanthiran said it should be remembered that it was a similar constitutional provision that privileged one language over the other that eventually became a cause for Sri Lanka’s civil war.

“It was a turning point. That happens when you give the foremost place to one religion or language,” he added.

Courtesy:The Hindu