The Bells Tolled Fear

ISIS or not, the failure to stop the Easter Sunday attacks brings Sri Lanka’s fractured polity into focus. They must now maintain peace.

- Pranay Sharma

SRILanka is no stranger to bloodshed. In its seven-decade history as an independent nation, it has gone through long spells of violence, losing prominent leaders to suicide bombers—pioneered by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE)—and consumed by a 26-year period of ethnic strife that convulsed SriLankan society and tore it asunder. That dark chapter seemed to have ended in 2009, when the Sri Lankan military eliminated most LTTE fighters along with their chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, after a protracted civil war.

The resultant Sinhalese triumphalism that arose from its ashes brought some ultra-nationalist Buddhist outfits to the fore. Several had been responsible for the rising communal tension between Buddhists and Muslims. Last year in Kandy, when a truck driver succumbed to his injuries following a fight with some Muslim boys, ultra-nationalist Buddhist outfits whipped up communal passion, resulting in a riot in which one Muslim was killed and several others injured as their shops and property were destroyed.

Therefore, Easter Sunday’s mind-numbing terror attacks, directed mainly at Christians, come as a surprise. Christians comprise about seven per cent of Sri Lanka’s total population (22 million). Unlike Hindu Tamils and Muslims, who have been victims of communal attacks, Christians were never a target.

That peace was shattered on April 21, when seven well orchestrated and synchronised bombs were detonated by explosives-carrying bombers on a number of churches and high-end hotels in Colombo and elsewhere in the island. The blasts trampled upon the tranquility of Easter Sunday, killing 359 people, over 45 of them children, and injuring 500 others as they gathered to celebrate one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar.