Tracing assassinations and economic anxiety from Sri Lanka to Myanmar and Thailand, Sonia Faleiro’s book reveals how Buddhisms moral authority is repurposed into a politics of fear, and violence in modern Asia
In September 1959, the then-Sri Lankan Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike was shot dead at close range by a young Sinhala Buddhist monk armed with a .45 caliber revolver. For global observers and commentators, this was probably the first occasion on which they were forced to confront the nature of Buddhist extremism. The West, which viewed Buddhism through a largely Orientalist-consumerist lens, was initially flummoxed at this seemingly contradictory idea: How could the clergymen of a religion that’s so particular about ahimsa or non-violence, ever condone violent acts, let alone of the cold-blooded, targeted variety? How could their followers, moreover, see no hypocrisy in Buddhist monks explicitly calling for violence around ethnic lines?
In recent years, however, there has been a surge of scholarly and journalistic interest around this subject, and Sonia Faleiro’s excellent new work of narrative nonfiction, The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism is Shaping Modern Asia (HarperCollins), is its culmination. Across three sections set in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, respectively, Faleiro blends deep reportage and an astute deconstruction of socio-political movements. The result is a slim yet substantial and thought-provoking contribution to South Asian Studies. And while I can see this book becoming a staple of university curricula, it is a highly recommended read for the lay reader as well.
‘It’s the economy, stupid!’
The book’s opening section, a nearly 40-page reported essay on modern Sri Lanka, details the role played by hardliner Buddhist monks of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), including Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, a charismatic and dangerous ideologue accused of inciting violence against Hindu Tamils, Muslims and other minorities. Gnanasara’s beliefs about Muslims are despicable and Faleiro makes sure that the reader comes face to face with the full scale of the BBS’s machinations. We are shown how he baselessly linked the halal certification of food to “Islamic terror” — and even after the Sri Lankan Muslim clerics decided to end halal certification “in the interests of peace”, Gnanasara and the BBS found new ways to marginalise and oppress Sri Lankan Muslims.
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The book is also very good with tracing the role of the 1921 colonial-era ethnic census in the Tamil-Sinhala conflict that eventually led Sri Lanka down the path of civil war. Faleiro notes that during colonial times, there were several reports and documentations of inter-religious camaraderie, Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus visiting each other’s holy shrines and so on. But parallel to these phenomena, economic discontent was making a bad political divide exponentially worse.
Faleiro writes: “But even as Buddhist and Hindu traditions mingled, the political divide between Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus widened. (...) Ceylon Tamils were climbing the colonial ladder. They learned English, secured civil service jobs, and came to be seen as favourites of the British. When the British withdrew in 1948, a baseless rumour began to circulate: that a Tamil takeover was imminent, backed by Tamils from across the strait in India. The claim had no basis in fact, but it stoked paranoia among the Sinhalese majority.”
‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ is a phrase popularised in 1990s America to depict the primacy of economic issues over social ones, at least in the eyes of the median voter. When it comes to the study of bigotry and socio-political ferment, too, it is a useful phrase to remember. Economic anxiety gives struggling, angry people the license to unleash widespread bigotry against those who are perceived to be doing well economically. The origins of anti-Bengali sentiments in North-East India, for example, are quite similar: like the Ceylon Tamils, the Indian Bengalis too were fluent in English, a dominant presence in the British civil service, and therefore perceived collectively (not to mention, unfairly) as colonial factotums.
The weaponisation of language
The second and third sections of the book are based in Myanmar and Thailand, respectively, with a fair bit of cross-pollination because ‘Abbot Zero’, the once-hardliner dissident monk protesting Buddhist extremism in Myanmar, now lives in the Thai city of Mae Sot, where Faleiro interviews him. The section of the book that follows him and his career is a potent reminder of how language is weaponised by bigots and political opportunists. Zero details how Ashin Wirathu, the leader of the 969 Buddhist movement in Myanmar, used the slur ‘kalar’ (used in Myanmar to refer to dark-skinned people and/or Muslims) to earn himself a legion of followers, and to then keep those followers in line. Wirathu’s actions are today seen as the tipping point for anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar.
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There’s a beautiful, devastating passage where we see how Wirathu became a kind of patriarch for the likes of Zero, using the weaponisation-of-language playbook. “Zero heard the word thrown around casually. To his dismay, it was sometimes aimed at him because of his own skin tone. When Wirathu began reserving kalar exclusively for Muslims, Zero felt an unexpected sense of relief. (...) Wirathu gave men like Zero a sense of belonging, identity and confidence. Whoever they were—whatever the quality of their lives—at least they were not kalar. By positioning Muslims as an existential threat, he trained his followers to hate. He was no longer just a monk—he was their benevolent father, looking out for their best interests.”
Once again, the parallels with India are not difficult to see. It is well-documented that in several instances of communal violence in independent India, a counter-intuitive phenomenon has been observed — Dalits and other lower-caste Hindus being at the frontlines of organised anti-Muslim violence and even pogroms. A naive observer might ask, why would an oppressed Indian demographic dish out the same oppression to an even more hapless demographic? It’s because of what Zero says in the passage above — when the slur is reserved for the new societal Other, oppressed communities feel a sense of unexpected relief and soon, that relief becomes confidence and eventually, impunity.
The Thailand section of the book, in comparison, reads like the most conventional part, not least because the issues with Buddhist monks in this part of the world have a universal feel to them — these are monks falling prey to greed and excess and the lure of the lucre. In other words, they come across much like the rest of us. Which isn’t to minimise the very real problems surrounding them, of course. As Faleiro describes, Buddhist monks in Thailand are not allowed to take part in politics — in return they get free education, free healthcare, zero taxes and basically every citizen is encouraged to donate to their temples.
However, in recent years there has been report after report of Buddhist monks partying hard, behaving like playboys and some of them have even been accused of molesting trainees in their own ranks. Remember those cutesy social media images in the late 2010s of robed Buddhist monks feeding milk out of a bottle to tiger cubs? Well, Thai police officers eventually had to rescue over 100 live tigers and dozens of frozen carcasses stuffed in a freezer from a Buddhist monastery that was discovered to be hand-in-gloves with the illegal wildlife trade.
Sacrificing neither rigour nor readability, The Robe and the Sword is a brilliantly written treatise on a decidedly modern problem. It is an invaluable resource for anybody interested in contemporary Asian history, and you’d be well-advised to pick up a copy soon.
