Sinthujan Varatharajah

When Western missionaries invaded the lands of the later to be colonialized people, their mission was to abide by their belief of supremacy of Christianity and Western culture and propagate it to the so-called “uncivilized” people of the Southern and Eastern world, who were perceived to live under a cover of darkness. The Westerners strong sense of duty towards the mission of proselytizing Christianity and Western norms was funded in Christianity’s most holy book, the Bible, and therefore developed to become a sacred obligation to most devotees of Christ. It did not only promote colonialism by eventually theologically legitimizing it under certain interpretations, but it also delivered a moral justification and ethical incentive for the entire quest.  Many colonial administrators were in fact personally driven to their positions in the colonies by their ideal of proselytizing the “one truth” to the misguided colonialized people and believing it to be a benevolent act. Their rapid spread throughout the Southern and Eastern hemisphere led to a wave of mass-conversions in different parts of the region. These were often accelerated through economic, social as well as political incentives that were given to the colonialized.

In the case of Sri Lanka, large parts of the Sinhalese and Tamil population were converted throughout the colonial history of the island to different Christian denominations. With each new colonial power attaining power over the people of the island, they were directly or indirectly forced to change (at least by name) their belief according to the new colonizer’s majority belief.  Though the majority retained later their traditional belief in the case of Sri Lanka, few – whether among Tamils or Sinhalese – remained to become the reminiscent and legacy of the colonial past in post-colonial Ceylon. Many developed to become the Western ideal of the colonialized people: being detached from their “uncivilized native culture” and having adapted Western cultural norms and ideas. Ironically and also tragically this often also included prejudices and beliefs of supremacy over the non-converts or faith returnees that were passed on from the Western colonializers to the native converted colonized, who embraced the Western way of living, believing and thinking for various different reasons. Tamil lands were considered as especially fertile grounds by missionary groups such as the American Ceylon Mission, which was based in Jaffna since 1813, because of the social as well as topographical pre-conditions of the area.  Education, the prime source of social and economic mobility in the arid Tamil homeland increased the impact and success of missionary groups in relation to the Tamil population during colonial history and was used extensively by the colonial powers to realize their quest of conversion and westernizing the indigenous populations. Schools were monopolized by the Christian clerks, who declared Christianity as the admission criteria to their schools. As being a convert brought greater advantages than disadvantages to the colonized and oppressed people, many were driven by economic, social and political motives to embrace the faith of the oppressors. Having been rendered to a situation, where their material needs drove them towards the arms of Christianity was simply another manifestation of the policy of distributing rice with one hand to the hungry and providing a bible with the other to the needy.

Decades after the end of colonialism, a new wave of conversions of Tamils took place 1000 of kilometers away from the island – based on the very same concept. The large exodus of hundreds of thousands of Tamils shifted the often penniless refugees on the shores of several Western foreign countries. Tamils were after gaining refugee status being sheltered in asylum camps, where they were in urgent need of financial, economical as well as social assistance and improvement. Christian charities such as the Caritas or equally the Red Cross were helpful without the motive of spreading their religious beliefs unlike the colonizers, but acting solely by religious ideology. However, a large number of other Christian groups behaved quite differently by returning to old patterns of colonial control and incentive politics. These groups mostly consisted of Baptist Church communities or other Christian sects, who specifically targeted asylum seekers such as the Tamil community because of their dire situation and their large amount of needs. As a result, many Tamils have converted out of in essence similar reasons as in colonial times to one of the many churches that are actively trying to recruit new members in the present period of Tamil exile. One of the many successful churches has been the Pentecostal church, which to date has several thousands of Tamil members worldwide. These do of course not remain passive members of the congregation, but more than often become one of the most active members to proselytize amongst non-church member. Differently expressed, they became the indigenous arm of the Western churches who try to gain increasingly more members of the community they have unique forms of access to – their very own.

The problem lies however not in the conversion of the individual per-se, which largely remains a matter of personal choice that none should be able to criticize, but in the objective of the policies and means used. Numbers of course play a larger role than the quality of adherents amongst proselytizing religions, thus baptizing as many people as possible is the main aim that is being used instead of often profoundly indoctrinating the core principles of the belief and making sure that it is being rigidly followed. Selfish motives are in some – if not many – cases the main reason for Tamils to join one amongst many congregations, which do provide various means of aid through its tight-knit community. Others however, do find sincere conviction and guidance in their newly embraced religion and some do even go one step further by outsourcing their quest of proselytizing from their immediate place of residence to the country they fled from: Sri Lanka.

In other words, they return as neo-missionaries from an Occidental world carrying a Semitic faith on an Oriental face to an “uncivilized” “Near-Other”.

The Pentecostal church, which has been active in Sri Lanka since the early 20th century, has one of the most radical approaches amongst the group of missionaries in regards to the church’s mission of proselytizing the native population of the island. This includes their collaboration with the Government of Sri Lanka – a Government that openly embraces the Therevada Buddhist state religion and opposes any form of foreign or native “threat” to the religion’s supreme status in the country.  This of course raises the question, why a Government that is so particular about fencing the Sinhala Buddhist hegemony from any outside influence (whether culturally, socially, politically or religiously) would broker a deal with an enterprise, which is based upon the belief of supremacy towards any religion including Therevada Buddhism and the conversion of mankind as a whole – thus also citizens of Sri Lanka. A state, which has a history of deliberate and systematic destruction of several hundreds of churches and the assassination and abduction of church ministers, would have difficulties to defend any actions taking to aid raising the number of adherents of this particular church in the country.

Nonetheless, there is a significant grey area, where different policies apply: namely the Tamil lands. Whilst Sri Lanka shields itself off from any outer influence that may alter the current dominance of Sinhala Buddhism – which is simultaneously being enforced through Buddhist colonial settlement, the construction of Buddhist stupas in non-Buddhist areas as well as policy of overtaking ancient Hindu sites and declaring them Buddhist – it holds different prospects for its Tamil population.

After the detention of more than 300 000 Tamil civilians by the Government of Sri Lanka in inhumane conditions behind barbered wire, the vulnerable and defenseless population was/is being exposed to not only military and government harassments, but also religious harassments.  Remarkably though it was/is not the “far-Other” who entered the scene, but the near converted Tamil Other who took over the role of the colonial missionary groups by collaborating with the contemporary colonizer of the Tamil population. These Tamils, who arrived in numbers from the Diaspora, were quick in engaging with the Sri Lankan Government by claiming to bring humanity and hope to the “uncivilized” and hopeless people who lived like animals compressed in a can – the epitome of how the colonial missionaries regarded the barbaric indigenous populations of the Southern and Eastern hemisphere. When INGOs and even the UN had severe issues and restrictions to access the IDPs in mass detention, Tamil missionaries from the Pentecostal church did have exclusive and almost unrestrictive access to the imprisoned population. Moreover, they were given comfortable means to travel to the area funded by Government of Sri Lanka.

While the ancient colonial missionaries provided food and education in order to lure the subaltern to conversion, the contemporary colonial missionary uses as incentives adaption to the battered reality their Tamil compatriots have been reduced to: wheelchairs and limb amputates for the thousands of victims (physical wracks) of war. Consequently, the formerly economic and social incentives for conversions were altered to practical physical and medical incentives for a broken people in the camps and beyond.

Some simple-minded people might argue that it’s a positive immediate improvement for the situation of hundreds of Tamils, but the point really is that why is it not possible to distribute these well needed aid materials to the wounded free of religious constraints. Why do there need to be underlying conditions put upon the aid given? Did these people not suffer enough? Do they now need to also be emotionally, medically, physically, psychologically and economically exploited by the very same people who claim to share – at least in origin – the same culture, tradition and values as them?

The most important question however remains, what does the Government of Sri Lanka bargain out of this collaboration with the missionaries from the Pentecostal Church?

In a statement from July 30th, 2008, Niranjan Joseph de Silva Deva Aditya, a dual citizen of Sri Lanka and the UK, but also MEP and close associate of the Rajapakse establishment issued a statement after a Sri Lanka tour with a group of MEPs from Brussels that “whether Sri Lanka would have been a much more peaceful and much more homogenous place if say 40% or so of the Tamil speaking population had been Buddhists and not exclusively Hindu or Christian. Is taking the Buddhist religion to Tamil people such a difficult task?” His statement in transcription implies that the Tamil’s majority religion of Saiva Hinduism is a major reason for the conflict, which is based on Tamil demands for equality, freedom and self-determination. Simultaneously, he believes that the current religious distribution among Tamil needs to be challenged in order to dissuade Tamils from the roots of the conflict:  the demand for Tamil rights. In other words, Hinduism is considered as a main obstacle to the Sinhala Buddhist dominance and needs to be fought against. As a close associate and practically extended unofficial ambassador and lobbyist for the Sri Lankan regime in Brussels, his views have significance, relevance as well as interlinking to the overall mindset and perceptions of the current establishment in Colombo.

As Therevada Buddhism and its clergy have been identified by most Tamils as the main force that brought genocide upon them, the prospects of advertising a highly resented and severely negatively connotated religion among Tamils would be marginal and prove to be a failure. This however, brought the ideas of the Christian colonizers back on the plan. Having seen their success rate among Tamils during colonialism, who were by far more receptive and vulnerable to conversion than Sinhalese were, a revitalization of the conversion experiment could be taken into consideration. Ideally, in the eyes of the Sinhala establishment, this should produce hollowed out Tamils, who as many other converts detach themselves from their origin and its prime concerns and rebase their core life around their newly embraced religion and its interlinked Westernized lifestyle and values. Though this approach is contrary to the reality of Christian Tamils being equally engaged in the Tamil rights movement and resistance as Hindu Tamils, it is still an adaption to the reality of the modern Baptist movement’s impact on newly converts.

Hence, I argue that conversion with the help of baptized Tamils from the Diaspora is a means of the Government of Sri Lanka to eliminate the idea of Eelam and the demand for equal rights and freedom for Tamils. They should not only be pushed to the notion of being a secondary or a tertiary issue, but wiped out completely through a cultural and identity based detachment from the original Tamil culture, history and identity by creating a new identity based on a transnational religious community, which is largely Western and will therefore in the Non-West, the East, idealize Western ways of living and values with further disregarding and trivializing the native lifestyle and ideals of a Non-Western culture and people. The issue of Tamils should therefore be rendered for baptized Tamils to the issue of the Near-Other, the non-Pentecostal Tamil. This becomes especially imminent in light of the belief that the imprisoned Vanni population has been subject to intense propaganda, brainwashing and consists of hard-core followers and believers of the LTTE and is therefore even more difficult to rehabilitate into the mainstream society than non-Vanni Tamils already are. Thus, the drive to convert Tamils in the homeland by the Pentecost Tamils falls right into the arms and convenience of the Rajapakse regime, which uses them shamelessly. Contraditictory to usual Sri Lankan state policies, the foreign religious force is not considered an alien intruder, but convenient partner to fight Tamil’s emancipation from oppression and occupation

On the other hand, these Tamils from the Diaspora are driven by morally corrupt ideas, which enable them to aid the Sri Lankan Government in its long-term goals of erasing Tamil demands by focusing solely on their so-called religious duty, which is apparently superior to the actual needs of the people. They have already successfully proven to be the ideal product the Government wants to see flourishing among the IDP and overall Tamil population, namely hollowed out Tamils who do not care nor feel attached to the political and legal struggle Tamils are fighting on various social levels. As they are Tamils from the Diaspora, another question should be raised: why is there no outrage against them and their mission?

Unfortunately, the legacy of colonialism continues today in the form of neo-colonialism by the natives, upon the natives and against the natives. Their victims continue to date to be pushed by the neo-missionaries (with the help of the states) on wheelchairs away from their Tamil heritage with ideally reaching the Sinhala Buddhist state’s haven: Tamil subjugation through social and political apathy.