Lanka bomb blast echo in Campaign 2019

Any mass violence in Sri Lanka has, historically, found immediate as well as long lasting reverberations in the larger landmass to its north. The brutal tragedy that befell its people on Easter Sunday has echoed through India. Its people, themselves often the victims of religious, caste and ethnic terror, have shed empathetic tears with the Sri Lankans, Christian, Buddhist or Hindu. Four of the hundreds dead were our own, from Karnataka, on a holiday like many other foreigners who died when their hotels too were bombed together with the packed churches in Colombo and other cities. 

The government and political leadership of Sri Lanka, which face huge ongoing crises of their own, have shown remarkable maturity in handling the situation after the serial explosions that ripped the decade long peace after the bloody end of the traumatic civil war. I covered the early phases of that war in the 1980s in the island. 

But the explosions have also blown away the last vestiges of propriety and restraint from the political leadership here in India, now locked in the last phases of the electoral campaign for Power 2019. No innocents in the campaign, but our prime minister, serial offender in misusing the name of the military forces and strategic issues, has reached stratospheric heights. After his barely hidden nuclear rhetoric against Pakistan in speeches he delivered wearing medieval martial turbans, Narendra Modi directly called on the people of India to vote for him if they did not want to face what the people of neighbouring Lanka had faced.

The President, Kovind, and the external affairs minister, the possibly soon retiring Sushma Swaraj, will surely send Colombo their diplomatic despatches of solace, and assurances of forensic help, possibly even joint operations to hunt down the perpetrators of the bombings who may have subcontinental or global linkages.  But for Modi, this was an excuse to fulminate indirectly  against his pet foe, ‘that” religious identity. 

Islamaphobic rhetoric was always a part of the Campaign 2019 for the BJP. TV spokespersons, ticket hopefuls and the  big wigs in the campaign army have  sued communal rhetoric and religious targeting with impunity. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath, who seems to be building his own place for 2024, has led the pack. But Modi, abetted by Amit Shah, sledge hammered whatever illusions the middle class had about him by nominating  Pragya Thakur to challenge Congress leader and two time chief minister Digvijay Singh in Bhopal. Thakur is eligible because she has not been sentenced, but she still  is in an accused in a terror trial.

Which is why Modi’s rhetoric on Sri Lanka becomes a cruel and ironic. While all terror is equal, some terrorists are more equal than others.

The world sees the Lanka tragedy in context, both for what it means to the incomplete healing process in the island and its economic well being so highly dependent on tourism. It is, after all, Serendip.

As many have pointed out, the Sri Lanka explosions are latest attacks against places of worship around the world. In January, Open Doors, a Christian advocacy group, revealed a 14 per cent increase in persecution of Christians worldwide between 2017 and 2018, impacting 245 million people. Last month in New Zealand, a White supremacist killed people at prayer in a mosque, while in the US three African American churches in Louisiana were set on fire. France alone has seen a 17 per cent rise in  vandalisation and arson against Christian churches and symbols in just one year. Elsewhere, Easter and Christmas weeks are favoured by terrorists. In 2017, at least 45 people were killed in Egypt as two Churches were bombed by ISIS on Palm Sunday. In Lahore on Easter of 2016, 75 people were killed in a bomb explosion near a church.

Sri Lanka will surely trace the killers, Islamists acting by themselves, or in conjunction with terrorist groups of other religious and racial identities. But that alone will not mean the end of terrorism there, or anywhere else. Eternal vigilance, trite though it may sound, is the only precaution any people or government can take.

Macho promises and aggressive rhetoric ring shallow in this context. Sri Lanka needs help to revive its economy and rebuild social structures shattered in the civil war. That process has been slow because of the continued Sinhala militarism in the northern and eastern parts of the country, and the recent targeting of its small Tamil-speaking Muslim population. 

In India, this looks like a weak attempt to take the focus away from the real issues of Election 2019, which are not Pakistan and the ISIS, but employment, agrarian reforms, a social security net for the poor, the sick and the unemployed. The people awaits Acche Din, and those are not  hidden in the  Buray Din, bad days, of our neighbours.

(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist. He lives in New Delhi.)