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After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

Nira Wickramasinghe
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Extract

On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: “The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory … we have completely defeated terrorism.” The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over—this endless war that had pitted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the security forces of the government of Sri Lanka since 1983. It had sunk deep into the psyche of the people of all communities, and its terrible violence had elicited much international attention and reprimand. President Rajapaksa then addressed his citizens in the Tamil language, promising reconciliation and embracing the Tamil-speaking people in his program of recovery for the ravaged North. A “northern spring” would soon come. On the streets of Colombo, there was a feeling of trepidation, while celebrations, some spontaneous and others orchestrated by sycophantic politicians, peppered the capital. The day had been given as a special holiday for the war-weary people to celebrate by eating kiribath (milk rice) and launching (peaceful) rockets, as fireworks are commonly called. People waved the Lion Flag and compared the president to the famous second-century bce Sinhalese hero Dutugemunu, another son of the Ruhuna (Southern Sri Lanka) who succeeded in conquering Anuradhapura from the Tamil king Elara, whom he famously slew with a dart. King Dutugemunu has long been a folk hero in Sri Lanka for uniting the country under a single rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 68 , Issue 4 , November 2009 , pp. 1045 - 1054
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2009

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References

1 Daily News, May 14, 2009.

2 Kemper, Steven, “J. R. Jayawardena: Righteousness and Realpolitik,” in History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Spencer, Jonathan (London; Routledge, 1990), 193Google Scholar; and Hennayake, Nalani, Culture, Development and Politics in Postcolonial Sri Lanka (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 Canovan, Margaret, “Patriotism Is Not Enough,” British Journal of Political Science 30, no. 3 (July 2000): 413–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 According to the Vamsa literature, Sri Lanka is the Dharmadvipa (island of the faith), consecrated by the Buddha himself as the land in which his teachings would flourish. The Mahavamsa, a sixth-century court chronicle, states that on the very day of the Buddha's death, Vijaya—the founder of the Sinhala race—landed in Sri Lanka, as if to bear witness to the Buddha's prediction.

5 For an analysis of the events in 2007 and 2008, see Wickramasinghe, Nira, “Sri Lanka in 2007: Military Successes, but at Humanitarian and Economic Costs,” Asian Survey 48, no. 1 (January–February 2008): 191–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Waging War for Peace,” Asian Survey 49, no. 1, (January–February 2009): 59–65.

6 Gladney, Dru, ed., Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1Google Scholar.

7 Wickramasinghe, Nira, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

8 See Nira Wickramasinghe, “Politics of Nostalgia: The Citizen as Peasant,” Occasional Papers (New Series) no. 2, 2005, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi Series.

9 See Jenkins, Simon, “David Milliband's Piccolo Diplomacy,” The Guardian, May 19, 2009Google Scholar, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/19/david-miliband-sri-lanka-diplomacy [accessed July 8, 2009].

10 Daily News, May 25, 2009.