By Ananda-USA
August 22, 2010
I am presenting below the text of a talk I was invited to give at the Independence Day Celebrations at a Sri Lankan Cultural Institute in San Francisco's East Bay area, on February 9, 2002, nearly a decade ago.
The content of that talk is as relevant today as it was then, as Sri Lanka continues its struggle against great odds to recreate the glories of her storied past. Although my Principal Concern then, the imminent disintegration of Sri Lanka, has been alleviated by the monumental victory achieved by the Patriotic Forces of Sri Lanka comprising its Patriotic People, the Armed Forces, and the Government of Sri Lanka headed by President Mahinda Rajapakse, there are yet global forces arrayed against Sri Lanka attempting to undermine and reverse the benefits of that victory; the victory that has now set the stage for Sri Lanka to become the New Wonder of Asia.
As long as the flame of PATRIOTISM burns bright, and endures etched deep within the hearts and minds of Sri Lanka's sons and daughters, nothing can prevent their achieving that goal, their Day in the Sun.
The Next Fifty Years of Sri Lanka's Independence
A Historical Perspective
February 9, 2002
Fifty four years ago, on February 4, 1948, Sri Lanka shook herself free from 134 years of colonial bondage, to be reborn an independent sovereign nation, a nation with a storied past spanning 2,250 years.
We, the sons, daughters, and friends of mother Lanka, are gathered here today to commemorate and celebrate that reawakening, to pay homage to her hallowed name, and to rededicate ourselves to protecting the motherland and our common heritage. I am grateful to you all for inviting me on this important occasion, to give voice to our love, our common goals, and our uncommon aspirations for the future of all Sri Lankans.
Unsteady on her feet in the beginning, but gradually gaining confidence, Sri Lanka has achieved much since independence. However, many opportunities for rapid progress as a country and a people have been squandered as well. Freedom, is a double edged sword; the freedom to succeed gloriously is inextricably married to the freedom to fail disastrously. It is a sword to be wielded with wisdom, with vision and courage – for the future of our country and our people depends upon it. As a people, we are not entirely innocent of the essential ingredients of good governance and national survival; we have inherited that wit from our ancestors in ample measure. We will prevail only if we temper our enthusiasm with the lessons drawn from our own history.
Our Past
About 3,500 years ago, around 1,500 BC, an Indo-European nomadic people, the Aryans, began to migrate into Northern India from central Asia. Gradually they occupied the northern half of India, above the Godavari river, displacing the ancestors of the native Dravidian peoples to the south. During the course of the next five centuries, they had little impact except for the development of a body of myths and epic stories of their migrations and wars with the native peoples. These form the basis of the orally transmitted Vedic Hymns of the Hindu religion that were first written down in the 6th century BC.
By 1,000 BC the Aryans had developed metal tools and settled down into communities of rice farmers that grew into small tribal republics (janapadas) and kingdoms (mahajanapadas) by 600 BC. By 500 BC Magadha, the kingdom of king Bimbisara who reigned from 540-490 BC, was the most important of these. The Buddha lived for 80 years from 563-483 BC and was a contemporary of king Bimbisara. According to the Mahavansa, written in the 6th century AD, prince Vijaya (483-445 BC), the founder of the Sinhala civilization of Sri Lanka, left this region of India to colonize Sri Lanka with 700 followers in the year that the Buddha attained nirvana. Vijaya’s arrival in Sri Lanka is documented in a large number of rock inscriptions dating from the 3rd to the 1st century BC. The Ajanta cave murals, painted in the 5th Century AD, depict King Simhala’s arrival and consecration in Lanka. We can surmise that Vijaya was a Hindu by religion and that he spoke a derivative of Sanskrit. While there is significant evidence that the present day Sinhalese are a mix of the original immigrants from North India and the original natives of Sri Lanka, the dominant civilizing influences in the country - linguistic, agricultural, military and religious - were of North Indian origin.
The origin of the name “Sinhala” of Vijaya’s people deserves some comment, but it is clearly related to the lion. Although the story of Sinhabahu is an unrealistic embellishment that must not be taken literally, the association of kings and their ancestry with lions and lion hunting was a common place tradition in Aryan lands, especially in murals, flags, coats-of-arms and on coins. For example, in addition to Sri Lankan sources, the stylized Sinhala lion appears on Asokan Mauryan pillars, Persian flags and sculptures, and on Greek coins.
The next epochal event in Sri Lanka’s history was the rise of the Mauryan Emperor Asoka (273-232 BC) in India who having adopted Buddhism as the state religion of his empire, dispatched his son thera Mahinda to Sri Lanka to convert his friend king Devanampiya Tissa (210-250 BC) of Sri Lanka and his people to Buddhism. Asoka’s immortal message to Devanampiya Tissa was “I have taken refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha; I have declared myself a lay-disciple in the religion of the Sakyamuni; seek then even thou, O best of men, converting thy mind with believing heart, seek refuge in these best of gems!” When thera Mahinda died in Sri Lanka sixty years after he had been ordained, he had done his work well: the ordination of new bhikkus of Sri Lankan descent and the Buddhist religion was firmly established in Sri Lanka as a government supported institution.
Thus, in the early history of Sri Lanka, the two epochal events that set the course for its subsequent history: the arrival of the original Sinhala Aryan settlers from North India with king Vijaya (483-445 BC), reputedly in the year the Buddha attained nirvana, and the conversion of the people of Sri Lanka to Buddhism by thera Mahinda in the reign of Devanampiya Tissa (210-250 BC). The significance of the conversion of the Sinhala people of Sri Lanka to Buddhism, and its impact on the history of Sri Lanka, cannot be overstated. From then until now, a period of over 2,250 years, it has given form, substance and continuity to its culture, its art, its architecture, and its politics; it has moulded the moral character and the emotional disposition of its people; their very sense of justice and morality; it has influenced the laws of the land as they apply to both subject and king; and again-and-again it has served to rally the people to the defense of the country against foreign invaders. Every significant achievement of the Sri Lankan people, can be traced to the twin influences of the military, agricultural and engineering skills of the Sinhala immigrants, and the moderating, stabilizing, progressive influence of the Buddhist Dhamma.
The next salient feature of the history of Sri Lanka is the attractiveness of its advanced hydraulic civilization to plundering invaders and its inability to effectively counter and protect itself against such invasions. From the time of king DutuGamunu (161-131 BC), to the time of the end of the Polonnaruva period (1,200AD) Sri Lanka was beset by repeated invasions from South India, ultimately leading to the abandonment of its great garden cities of Anuradhapura and Polnonnaruwa. With the decline of these great civilizations supported by irrigated agriculture, the country became divided into several smaller warring kingdoms, which never acquired sufficient strength to ward off a determined invader. The only exceptions were brief periods in the reigns of the powerful warrior kings VijayaBahu I (1055-1110 AD) and Prakrama Bahu the Great (1153-1186 AD) when Sri Lanka had powerful navies to protect its shores and carry war overseas. During these periods, not only did a navy exist to defend against invasion, but the sea borne trade also resided in Sri Lankan hands. After the Polonnaruva period, the South Indians were confronted by the Muslim Moghuls and by internal conflicts and were not a serious threat to Sri Lanka. However, with the destruction of the Raja Rata civilization, Sri Lanka could only sustain smaller populations and became divided into several small kingdoms in the southeastern, central and the southwestern parts of the country that were constantly at war with each other.
With the arrival of the Portuguese in 1,505 AD , Sri Lanka was again confronted by a naval power they could not match, and an enemy whose homeland, unlike those of its former South Indian enemies, was beyond Sri Lanka’s reach. Although the Sinhalese quickly became adept at manufacturing guns, cannons and gunpowder better than the Portuguese themselves, they never acquired an effective ocean-going naval capability. Although, they repeatedly defeated the Portuguese on land, they could not expel them permanently from their fortifications defended by naval gunfire and supplied from abroad by sea. Not even Sitawaka Rajasingha could accomplish that.
Making the same mistake that Sri Lanka has historically made in inviting foreign help, instead of becoming self-sufficient in all things, in 1636 AD Rajasingha II requested Dutch assistance to expel the Portuguese. They complied, expelling the Portuguese in 1656 AD; but then they occupied the fortifications themselves and settled down for a long stay in Sri Lanka. Although central Sri Lanka retained its independence under successive Sinhala kings, they now had an enemy occupying the seaboard of Sri Lanka that was even more difficult to expel than the Portuguese. As a result of the weakening of Holland in European wars, the Dutch were easily expelled by the British in 1796 AD in a classic demonstration of how naval power can be effectively employed against other naval powers. Now we Sri Lankans had the British to contend with.
Although several British armies were destroyed by Kandyan kings, the final demise of Sri Lanka’s royal line came in 1815 as a result of betrayal by the king’s own ministers. In the Kandyan Convention signed on March 2, 1815, the British promised to allow the Kandyan kingdom to remain autonomous and to protect and foster Buddhism. These promises were promptly broken. A long period of darkness descended that day on Sri Lanka, when Sri Lanka could no longer claim to be a sovereign nation, a veil that lasted 134 years until 1948. In the intervening years, the Sinhala people lost political power, were gradually ousted from their lands, were relegated to the bottom rung of the citizenry, and lost the protection and government patronage for Buddhism, their religion. In these years speaking Sinhala, being a Buddhist, and using our ancestral Sinhala names became disqualifications for economic and social progress of Sinhala people in Sri Lanka. With the loss of sovereignty, the profits of British planters became the paramount concern, and millions of Indian laborers were imported from India into the hill country, against the wishes of the Sinhala people. The restoration of the rights and privileges of a free and sovereign people is what we celebrate on Independence Day.
Now, Sri Lanka is engaged in a war against internal separatist forces in the country. Regarding this war, I can do no better than to quote that greatest, and most kindly, of all American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln. A compassionate man, he was, without a doubt the most ardent advocate of an outright victory in the American Civil War as the only means of preserving the Union. Referring to the war in his 2nd Inaugural Address, he said:
Our Present
“Both parties deprecated the war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept the war rather than let the nation perish, and the war came.“
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“To strengthen, perpetuate and extend their interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”
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“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
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Let me note here that, to end the war, Lincoln made no offer that compromised the integrity of the Union. Instead he wanted to ‘finish the work we are in’ which was the war to reunify the nation. Indeed, throughout the war he urged his generals to spare no effort and to conduct total war with a ferocity yet unmatched in the history of warfare, because that would hasten its end. In his wisdom, he knew that to do otherwise, would only perpetuate the war and endanger the nation and generations yet unborn. At the conclusion of the war, he urged leniency and compassion for the defeated South. Ultimately, the civil war ended in the abject and total surrender of the Confederacy, in a bloody but short period of four years. The wisdom of his decision is evident for all to see.
Compare that war to the civil war in Sri Lanka that has now raged for 18 long years, misdirected and mismanaged by a succession of weak-kneed vacillating governments. Compare Lincoln’s clear understanding of the benefits of an undivided nation to his people, his iron-willed single-minded determination to pursue total victory as the only way to guarantee that end, against the pusillanimous pundits at the helm of Sri Lanka. As we speak now they are again calling for international mediation and negotiation for peace, with pieces of Sri Lanka as peace offerings.
Why are we so blind to the lessons to be learned from our own history? Are we also ignorant of the lessons of world history that aggression and terror must be met head on and not appeased? Have we no compassion for our long suffering people? Why have they not recognized and grasped the opportunity to support the global war against terrorism now being waged by the United States, and to leverage it against LTTE terrorism? In the light of Sri Lanka’s history, do they not know that we dare not fail, that we must not fail, and that if we stand firm, we shall not fail? The re-emergence of colonial indignities, the creeping alienation of our fundamental rights, will be among the inevitable consequences of the loss of control of the coastal border, and any territory within Sri Lanka, to a group that is both ill-disposed towards the Sinhala people and has established a common cause with a foreign ethnic community.
Our Successes
Our Successes
I have briefly reviewed our distant history, the emerging danger of separatism and our failures as a nation. But, in the past 54 years of independence we have also achieved much. Contrary to LTTE propaganda, every statistic on Sri Lanka speaks volumes in praise of the egalitarian virtues of the society that has taken root in Sri Lanka since independence. Let us note that India, which attained independence one year before Sri Lanka, has yet to achieve this level of equity for its people. In Hindu majority India, discrimination on the basis of caste and creed is endemic. Indeed, the government of India has instituted affirmative action programs to uplift the so called "untouchables" and these programs have been violently opposed by people of the higher castes. In the United States, only in the 1960's was progress made on enfranchising and bringing african americans and other minorities into the main stream of society - a goal that has not yet been fully attained. When Sri Lanka became independent, the Sinhala people were the disadvantaged, disenfranchised, and suppressed people in the country who needed affirmative action. Yet, in Sri Lanka, the programs instituted were not directed towards the Sinhala people only, but towards all disadvantaged communities in the country, Sinhala, Tamil, and Moslem alike.
What, then, is the reason for the much greater progress towards social justice made in Sri Lanka compared to India? An analysis of this disparity between Sri Lanka and India has made it clear to me that the great strides made in Sri Lanka are due to the general environment of compassion and tolerance engendered by the Buddhist traditions and values of the majority Sinhala community. In every country, it is the majority community that sets the tone for social progress and economic equity. The Sinhala Buddhist community has established an enviable record for social justice in Sri Lanka as documented by both domestic and international bodies such as the United Nations (UN) and International Labor Organization (ILO). Today, Sri Lanka enjoys a literacy rate above 90%, compulsory education for all its children, a children's mortality rate comparable to those of developed countries, free universal healthcare, affordable rail and bus transportation, electricity in most rural homes, widespread land ownership, full representation of women and minorities in the labor force and in government, a system of labor laws acknowledged to be a model for developing nations, the highest per capita income and lowest birth rate in the South Asian region. These are the attributes of a caring society, that exemplifies not only Buddhist values but also the teaching of every extant religion.
O Lanka, Mother Sri Lanka,
I dream a dream of a glorious future for thee,
O Lanka, Mother Sri Lanka,
I am haunted by the shining vision of what will be!
O Lanka, Mother Sri Lanka,
I am haunted by the shining vision of what will be!
