Certain sections of Colombo’s English-speaking, English-educated society just can’t seem to come to terms with what has happened with respect to the LTTE. For starters they couldn’t understand why Tamils are not celebrating in the streets (I commented on this last week). Now they are worried about ‘the attitude of the Sinhala Buddhists’. Somehow Sinhala Buddhists are not supposed to partake of the celebrations or claim a piece of the credit and worse, they have ‘attitude’.

I was alerted to this anxiety by a ‘status message’ of a friend on Facebook. I commented and she responded. The back-and-forth is interesting I believe because I’ve heard the same thing being said by others as well, all from Colombo, all English-speaking and probably believing they are somehow above or more cultured than those-guys-lighting-crackers. .

We haven’t had meet-and-debate because she is overseas right now, but this exchange got me thinking. I am not sure which Sinhala Buddhists she has been listening to and whether they are ‘representative’ enough to warrant the use of the word ‘typical’, ‘majority’ etc. On the other hand, I believe the sentiments give us an opportunity to really examine this entity called ‘The Sinhala Buddhist majority’.

For a long time, the Eelam lobby dubbed this a ‘Sinhala Buddhist state’. Mahinda Rajapaksa was called a hawk, a war-monger and a ‘Sinhala Buddhist nationalist/racist/chauvinist’ and described as pandering to such ‘interests’. The Sinhala Buddhists constituted the villains of the piece, the spoilers, the biggest obstacles to peace.

Well, if we are speaking ‘majority’ here (that is countable majority and not a figment of one’s imagination or a product of one’s personal biases), here are some things we could consider.

The vast majority of the security forces are Sinhala Buddhists, a natural outcome of demographic realities. The vast majority of those injured, disabled and dead, for the same reason were Sinhala Buddhists. If Sinhala Buddhists have ‘attitude’, it should in all fairness be acknowledged that the ‘attitude’ included them deciding that the LTTE should and can be militarily defeated (no one is apologizing for advocating the opposite point of view, we note). Their ‘attitude’ includes a willingness to put their lives on line to rid the country of a ruthless terrorist. Their ‘attitude’ included a readiness to risk their lives to save non Sinhala Buddhists fleeing the grip of terrorists who they once revered as ‘liberators’. Their sympathy for those who had been held hostage by the LTTE was not a face-contortion for the camera. It was real and it made a difference. Part of that difference is that the Tamil civilians began disbelieving the horror stories that the LTTE had convinced them to believe of what the Sinhala Buddhists would do to them if they fled.

I don’t know about majority of Sinhala Buddhists, but I am yet to come across a Sinhala Buddhist who, upon seeing on television what life with the LTTE has written on the faces of their Tamil brethren arriving in welfare centres, said ‘damn good for them!’ No, there was a marked sense of sympathy for what they had to go through.

Let us remember also that it was a (countable) majority of Sinhala Buddhists who elected this President if not for whose leadership, tenacity in the face of opposition both within the country and without, absolute faith in his people and unwavering commitment to the strategy chosen, all of us, Sinhala Buddhist and non Sinhala Buddhists would not have minds free of worry wherever we are at whatever time. Yes, the beneficiaries are not just the Sinhala Buddhists, everyone gets to enjoy the dividends of what the ‘majority of Sinhala Buddhists’ voted for, supported and cheered on May 18, 2009.

All these things that the Sinhala Buddhist ‘majority’ did, others did too. It is as much their victory as that of the ‘Sinhala Buddhist majority’. But if anyone is making nasty remarks about the Sinhala Buddhist majority and their alleged ‘attitudes’ then it is incumbent on that person to state what the majority of other social categories did or did not do all this time.

So when one talks about ‘deep-rooted complexes’ perhaps one should ask him/herself first what one’s assumptions are. And, why not, it would do no harm to ask what one has done by way of contributing to the process that ended on May 18. Are those who are worried about this allegedly ‘typical’ bad attitude of Sinhala Buddhists happy that the war is over, that the LTTE has been wiped out? Did they at any point doubt that the security forces could achieve what they did? Did they scream ‘war monger’ when some Sinhala Buddhist said ‘we need to take Prabhakaran out’? If they did, are they remorseful?

Does it matter now whether or not the troops were persuaded by some ‘Sinhala Buddhist urge’ to do what they did? Is anyone saying that ‘this is a victory for Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and therefore non Sinhala Buddhists can sit at home and be glum’? I think not.

I am not asking people not to be worried about Sinhala Buddhists or what they say, even if those who say what they don’t like to hear are not exactly a majority. No one should be given a blank cheque, after all. On the other hand, just because some people who don’t speak English with a BBC accent and who don’t know what a past participle is (I don’t know either, to be honest) did something you probably thought was impossible and are justifiably having that well-what-the-hell-do-you-know look, don’t generalize and vilify. It is not getting anyone anywhere.

I think we have gone beyond all that or, if not, we should go beyond it. If anyone places any value on democracy, then in the very least it should be acknowledged that we now have the space to move from imperfect to less imperfect if not perfect.

This is a victory for democracy. It is something that will make this island safe for all of us, for tourists and investors. It is an outcome that has served to remove layer after layer of anxiety regarding our tomorrows and those of our children, an outcome that improves our quality of life by several degrees.

I haven’t got the sense that the ‘majority’ of Sinhala Buddhists are upset that the Tamils are not out in the streets lighting firecrackers, waving flags and merry-making. I believe there is valid reasons for this and that we should not insist on anyone showing a ‘preferred’ reaction to what happened. We are talking about wounds that are 30 years old, festering wounds that have been opened and reopened.

No, I won’t even go to the other side of the story, i.e. analyzing and being worried about the ‘attitude’ of Tamils, majority or otherwise.

Someone may say we have to move quickly, that time is not with us. That’s a western thing. We are not a people who think in terms of a lifetime, but of lifetimes, i.e. in the plural, in sansaric proportions. And Sinhalese and Tamils (and I am excluding deliberately from these collectives those who see themselves as ‘elite’) are cultured people. They value patience. They value co-existence and mutual respect. They are human and are humanly susceptible to the machinations of power-hungry politicians. However, after the political waves have come and gone, they recover their ancient ways of being, becoming and relating. I am hopeful and my hope is founded as much on what I know of myself, as a Sinhala Buddhist, as I know of Sinhala Buddhists in general and what I know of other communities whose members are as Sri Lankan as anyone else.