Opinion

Revisiting Humanism in Education: Insights from Tagore – II

Published

2 years ago

2025/02/18

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Panduka Karunanayake

Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine and former Director, Staff Development Centre,
University of Colombo

The 34th J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Lecture

14 February 2025

SLFI Auditorium, Colombo

(Continued from 17 Feb.)

Tagore and humanism

Tagore was born to a wealthy Bengali family in British colonial India in the year 1861. This was a time of great social transformation in India, involving political, social, religious and literary movements. In his youth he saw the organisational structure that I described in its formative days, and immediately realised how it is unsuited for anything except the British colonial plans. In particular, he appreciated the strengths of traditional Indian education such as the gurukula, ashrama and tapovana systems, the value of the aesthetic sense to human growth and the role of the environment in our lives. He placed a huge importance on emotions and social values, and decried a materialistic or hedonistic approach to life. Always explaining his ideas through brilliant similes, he said: “The timber merchant may think that flowers and foliage are only frivolous decorations for a tree, but he will know to his cost that if these are eliminated, the timber follows them.”

But he also saw the value of the science and technology that the British were bringing in. He wasn’t a simplistic indigene fighting to chase the British out. He wanted to combine the good of both the old and the new, both India and the world. The best description that we can give of the man is call him a great harmoniser of ideas and an incorrigible optimist.

According to Subhransu Maitra, who is a well-known Indian intellectual who translates Bengali works into English, Tagore’s experimental journey on education lasted approximately fifty years, from the 1890s to the 1940s, and evolved through three phases. In the first phase, roughly from the 1890s to the 1910s, he thought of education as ‘freedom to learn,’ in contradistinction to the kind of straightjacketed rote-learning that British colonial education had introduced to India. He also fought for education in the mother tongue instead of English. This was the time Tagore set up the Brahmacharyashrama, a school for boys in Santiniketan. In the second phase, from the 1910s to the 1930s, he thought of education as ‘freedom from ignorance and want’ and as a powerful tool to emancipate humanity from poverty, superstition and suffering. This was the time when he set up the Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, his version of a university, as well as Sriniketan, his effort at rural upliftment. And in the third phase, from the 1930s until his death in 1941, which was the time when Visva-Bharati was flourishing, he thought of education as an internationalist, humanist project or ‘freedom from bondage’, in contradistinction to nationalism. I will follow Tagore’s journey in this sequence, and at each stage try to highlight the lessons his educational philosophy gives us today.

But in toto, I feel that the common thread that runs through this journey is his commitment to humanistic education – a term that actually became popular only after his death, following the work of educational psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. So let me start by briefly explaining what humanistic education means.

Humanistic education is the application of the principles of humanism or humanistic philosophy to education. I am sure that many in this audience already know what humanism means, but bear with me when I try to explain it. I want to highlight the fact that humanism is not the same as some concepts with which it is often conflated – such as humanitarianism or humaneness or the humanities. In essence, humanism believes in the primacy of human agency, or the belief that humans are in charge of their own destinies; it is an Enlightenment idea that took agency away from divinity and placed it in the hands of the human being. (But of course, it is also very much part of some ancient philosophies.) But it identifies this agency as a responsibility both to oneself and one’s society, rather than as a libertarian licence. The ideal of humanism is human flourishing – not hedonism, nor any goal in the afterlife.

In humanism, human beings are considered independent, inherently good and capable of positive growth. One might look at these assumptions somewhat cynically – but it is hard to deny these qualities to a newborn child who has arrived on this world in all its innocence. As Tagore once famously said, “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”

As Ratna Navaratnam (1958) wrote in New Frontiers in East-West Philosophies of Education:

“Humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity…The child is put at the centre of the picture and the educator judges the truth of any theory and the success of any system, by the contribution it makes to the transformation of creative childhood into creative manhood.”

In humanistic education, several features can be identified:

* The student is given a free choice to decide what to study, how and for how long, within reason. As a result, the motivation to learn is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic goals such as exams, grades or certificates.

* The educational experience is left open, exploratory and self-driven. There is little or no emphasis on a curriculum, syllabus or what we today call ‘intended learning outcomes’.

* The setting for learning is safe. What the teacher does is provide the student with the resources to quench curiosity and play a supportive and facilitatory role, as a resource person and guide. There is no coercion, judgement, criticism or corporeal punishment.

* The learning environment focuses on both cognitive and emotional aspects of the learning experience; in other words, both ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ are considered valid and important to the learning process.

* And finally, at least a significant portion of the learning time is spent in contact with nature and the environment, rather than inside a classroom.

With that background, let me now turn to the three phases in Tagore’s journey in education.

Phase 1: ‘Freedom to learn’

Tagore was urged to experiment with education because he saw the unsatisfactory nature of schools, which he described as “…educational factories, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls, staring like eyeballs of the dead…It provided information and knowledge for the intellectual growth and it neglected the aspects of human growth.”

Let me quote Tagore at length:

“The way we understand it, the word school means an education factory or mill of which the schoolmaster is a part. The bell goes off at half past ten and the mill begins to work. As the mill starts, the master also keeps spouting off. The mill closes at four o’clock. The master too, stops spouting and the students return home, their heads stuffed with factory-made lessons. Later, at the time of examinations, these lessons are evaluated and stamped.

“The advantage of factory production is that the products are exactly made to a standard and the products of different factories differ but little from one another. So, it is easy to grade them. But individuals differ a great deal from one another. Even an individual may not be the same from one day to the next.

“Even so, a man cannot get from machines what he gets from another man. A machine produces, it can’t give. It can supply oil, but it can’t light a lamp.”

Tagore’s journey was dedicated to find a suitable alternative to such factory-style education

You can see that he disliked uniformity and intellectual dominance in education, and he preferred freedom to do, experience, feel and learn. This is especially noteworthy today, because educational psychologists have since found the importance of the affective domain for learning: the so-called cognitive-emotional model of learning.

Importantly, the reason he liked a more active style of learning is not merely because it is better for assimilation or long-term memory – as we are accustomed to think today – but because it promoted the growth of individual talents and tastes and imparted a communitarian rather than an individualistic outlook to life.

He also preferred a more idyllic, rural setting to educate children, because he felt that cities and towns rob the students of their bonding with nature, which was necessary for the growing mind to grow freely, wholistically and strongly. This also included creating opportunities for social contact with the rural folk, and trying to help the villagers at least in small ways. So he was especially keen that school and society were welded together. That was his way of teaching two things: first, communication skills, and second, a sense of social service. It would be interesting to compare this to a similar local experiment: Dr C.W.W. Kannangara’s Handessa rural education scheme. (For an excellent account, see Gunasekara [2013].)

To Tagore, the school-society link was also necessary to impart moral virtues: “It is utterly futile to expect that the preaching of a few textbook precepts…at school will set right everything when countless varieties of dishonesty and perversity are destroying decency and taste every moment in today’s artificial life. This only results in different kinds of hypocrisy and insolent flippancy in the name of morality…”

All around us today, we can see how textbook-based teaching of virtues has led to hypocrisy among those who do wrong with impunity, flippancy among those who allow wrong to happen as if it is the norm, and cynicism among those who try to reconcile what they see with what they were taught in classrooms.

I am sure you will appreciate that some of Tagore’s humanistic ideas are being put into practice in pre-school and primary education even today, for instance following the teachings of Maria Montessori. In Sri Lanka, however, because of the bottleneck effect of exams, they are being throttled by the competitiveness and the rush to obtain certificates. This has enormous implications to our own education system. What Tagore taught us – by not judging learning through exams – is that if we had exams, much of what we expect students to learn would be ignored because they are not specifically assessed in the exams. The reason we want exams is because we want to compare student with student. But how can we compare student with student if each student is a unique person? What do we value greater: the comparison or the uniqueness? We must be careful when answering this question, because often it turns out that our answer is actually not that of the educationist but that of the industrialist, and not that of our society’s but that of the countries in the core of knowledge production.

Phase 2: ‘Freedom from ignorance and want’

This is perhaps the phase of his work that is hardest to pin down to a few fundamentals. But I will try.

To me, it appears that his first lesson is to tailor education to our own needs, rather than to import and transplant an educational system from elsewhere. (Tagore himself was, of course, warning about the dangers of blindly following the British system.) This is an excellent testament for what we today call contextual knowledge or conditional knowledge.

Looking around, I cannot help feel that this is such an important lesson for us too. I wish that as educationists we paid more attention to this. We cannot do so if we merely ask our teachers to do what international experts advise. We must study our own society, our own past practices and experiments, how they have succeeded or failed and why, what would work for us now and so on. Tagore said:

“Only when we are able to channel the current of education in our country through the numerous experiments of numerous teachers, it will become a natural thing of the country. Only then will we come across real teachers here and there, now and then. Only then a tradition, a succession of teachers will naturally follow. We cannot invent a particular educational system by labelling it as ‘national’. We can call ‘national’ only education of that kind which is being conducted in a variety of ways through a variety of endeavours by a variety of our countrymen…When a particular education system seeks to fasten a static ideal on to the country, we cannot call it ‘national’. It is communal and therefore, fatal to the country.”

To me, such a uniform education system is worse than communal – at best it would facilitate pedantry, at worst it could even facilitate totalitarianism and fascism.

Importantly, Tagore was keen to point out that when times change, the same energy needs to be spent on amending our systems and practices. In one speech he used a beautiful simile: he likened time to a river, and said that people who don’t change with changing times are like the people who would not change the position of the ferry even after the river has changed its position. He asked, How can they cross the river from the old ferry? This would be great advice for a country that still runs its educational system dictated to by policies that are over eighty years old.

The next crucial lesson is his trust in science and technology – but only appropriate technology – as well as his disdain for outdated traditions, superstitions and rituals. In this sense, he was remarkably modern. He said:

“When in the East we were busy calling upon the ghostbuster in case of disease, the astrologer to placate hostile planets in case of trouble, worshiping the goddess Sitala to ward off smallpox and similar epidemics, and practising home-grown black magic to get rid of enemies, in the West a woman asked Voltaire: ‘I have heard one can kill whole flocks of sheep by chanting a mantra?’ Voltaire replied: ‘It can certainly be done, but an adequate supply of arsenic along with it is also required.’ It cannot be absolutely ruled out that a modicum of faith in magic and the supernatural still persists in isolated pockets in Europe, but a trust in the efficacy of arsenic in this connection is almost universal there. That is why they can kill us whenever they want to and we are liable to die even when we do not want to.”

Tagore was wise enough to note that the British colonial government was actually quite keen to deny Indians this gift of science and technology. He pointed out that the colonial colleges and universities actually functioned with many constraints and limitations imposed by the colonial government. One of the main hopes that Tagore had in establishing Visva-Bharati was overcoming this. He knew that foreigners, both western and eastern, yearn to come to India to learn about her strong and vibrant achievements in the humanities. He welcomed them. In return, he also created space for Indians to come there and learn what the West had to teach – which, of course, was mainly science. This was the confluence of East and West that Tagore envisaged for Visva-Bharati. And I think that one
of the reasons why Visva-Bharati failed later on was that after Independence, India had an alternative, perhaps better way to forge ahead with science, when Jawaharlal Nehru set up the Indian Institutes of Technology. But I wonder whether Tagore’s plan in combining the strength in our humanities with the strength in science and technology of other lands within our educational system could still serve us here.

Tagore also created Sriniketan and its Institute of Rural Reconstruction, a rural upliftment
programme using what would later come to be called ‘appropriate technology’. This was not a
blind exercise in importing European machines and gadgets like washing machines or floor polishers. Instead, it was an attempt to solve the problems faced by the rural folk by the use of scientific knowledge and appropriate technological tools. It included components such as rural education, village sanitation, roving dispensaries, anti-malaria and child welfare schemes, cooperative societies, scientific
agriculture, experimental farming, dairy farming, weaving, tannery, smithy, carpentry and other
projects. It was designed to promote selfconfidence and self-help and eliminate ignorance and superstition among the villagers. As Tagore described his educational mission:

“Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of intellectual life of India, but the centre of her economic life as well. It must cultivate land, breed cattle, to feed itself and its students; it
must produce all necessaries, devising the best means and using the best materials, calling science to its aid. Its very success would depend on the success of its industrial ventures carried out on the co-operative principle; which will unite the teachers and students in a living and active bond of necessity. This will also give us a practical, industrial training, whose motive is not profit.”

When the time came for Tagore to send his son Rathindranath for higher education, he sent him not to Oxford but to learn agricultural science at Illinois: “Indians should learn to become better farmers in Illinois than better ‘gentlemen’ in Oxford”. Similarly, he sent the children of his relatives and friends, including his son-in-law, to learn other skills, such as scientific dairykeeping, the cooperative movement and rural medical systems.

We can see that Tagore’s educational philosophy was not merely bookish but also practical, not merely ideological but also pragmatic, not merely effective but also of quality, and not merely focused on the individual but also on uplifting the community. We can see that it was not pedantic but contextual, not blind but appropriate, and not profit-oriented but promoting human flourishing.

(To be concluded)

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Opinion

Who committed genocide and created mass graves in Sri Lanka?

Published

7 hours ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

A painting depicting the Uva- Wellassa genocide of 1818

by N. A. de S. Amaratunga

At a time when the word genocide is used with political motive and defensive war misconstrued as genocide, and a brutal genocide is taking place on a global scale with impunity, one should reflect on genocide committed by those who falsely accuse the Sri Lankan armed forces and the government for such crimes. The British who systematically annihilated people including “babies suckling”, in Uva-Wellassa in 1818 and the LTTE, which carried out numerous massacres to drive away the Sinhalese and Muslims in the so-called border villages are now shamelessly levelling unsubstantiated allegations of genocide against the Sri Lankan military. The British, jointly with the US, massacred about a million people, including children, in Iraq on a fabricated charge of possessing weapons of mass destruction. The British helped the LTTE continue their genocide of the Sinhalese and Muslims in the North and the East in an attempt to drive them away and grab their lands, and such crimes constitute genocide according to 1948 Genocide Convention.

“Slaughter every man, woman and child”

“Slaughter every man, woman, and child (including babies suckling at the breast)” was the order given by Governor Robert Brownrigg (3rd British Governor of Ceylon from 1813 – 1820) to Maj. Gen. Hay MacDowell in 1818. The British left the entire Uva-Wellassa region in a state of famine and starvation. The British used the scorched earth policy including mass murder and genocide of Sinhala civilians to crush the rebellion. British human rights campaigners now pointing accusing fingers at Sri Lanka have forgotten the Madulla Massacre, which led to razing and annihilating entire villages. In the entire Uva region members of the male population above the age of 18 were killed in revenge for resisting British imperial occupation under Governor Brownrigg.

Britain at present is leading a core group at the UNHRC Geneva, which bashes Sri Lanka for alleged human rights violations. Britain seems to have no remorse about its genocidal violence in Sri Lanka and happily leads the way in castigating Sri Lanka on unsubstantiated allegations of human right violations during the war against the LTTE. The US, which is the biggest war criminal in the world, is supporting these neo-colonial strategies to control and exploit the poor countries.

The Chemmani mass grave

The Chemmani mass grave has become a political tool liberally used by the pro-LTTE groups and their supporters in the West and also their local agents to pressure the government to take action against the war winning armed forces. Let the government be urged to get to the bottom of the mass graves found in the North and elsewhere. People of this country owe it to the armed forces who saved their country to ensure that the name of the national military is cleared. And if there are any war criminals among them, punish them after conviction. Sri Lanka is not Israel, the US or the UK.

The Genocide Convention was conceived largely in response to World War II, which saw atrocities such as the Holocaust that lacked an adequate description or legal definition. Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in 1944 to describe Nazi policies in occupied Europe and the Armenian genocide, campaigned for its recognition as a crime under international law. Lemkin also linked colonialism with genocide, mentioning colonial genocides outside of Europe in his writings. The Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” These five acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

Genocide in Gaza

However, Israel in collaboration with the United States, which has the worst record in genocidal warfare, has violated this Convention with impunity in Gaza, knowing that the rest of the world cannot act against it except condemn its actions. The UN has miserably failed to take any action against Israel, though it has the necessary tools like the Convention mentioned above. Its Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk visited the Chemmani mass grave and issued a strongly-worded statement calling for investigation under international supervision. He has not visited the place where genocide is currently taking place in broad daylight. Neither has the UNHRC made any worthwhile response in respect of Iraq, Syria, Libya and other parts of the world, where the US and Europe have been engaged in genocidal warfare. This type of double standards will further erode the credibility of the UNHRC, and if countries tend to ignore its writ, it has itself to blame.

We still don’t know the identities of the people whose skeletal remains have been found in the Chemmani mass grave. It was a prolonged war situation that created these graves. There were allegations of killings, including civilians, by both parties to the war.

The Office of Missing Persons has received about 10,000 complaints about missing persons from the north and east and investigations into these complaints are ongoing (source – reports of the OMP). Apart from verbal complaints there is very little incriminating evidence, if at all, against the armed forces. A few isolated incidents where excesses were committed have been investigated and action is being taken against the suspects.

Campaign by Pro-LTTE groups

Pro-LTTE groups are trying their utmost to connect the missing persons with the mass graves. They claim that the people who went missing were buried in the Chemmani mass grave. The Island journalist Shamindra Ferdinando dealt with this matter comprehensively in the Midweek Review on 9 September. He shows that the narrative built up by the pro-LTTE groups and the Western imperialists regarding the alleged disappearances could be more myth than fact.

The LTTE massacred hundreds of civilians in cold blood in many places, such as Sri Maha Bodhi, Aluth Oya, Aranthalawa (where the victims were Buddhist monks), Kattankudy mosque, Palliyagodella, Eravur, Gonagala and Kebethigollewa. Most of those killings, committed outside the war zone, were aimed at terrorising the ordinary people, and that amounts to genocide according to 1948 Genocide Convention. The LTTE carried out many bomb attacks on civilian targets, such as the Central Bus Station in Pettah, the Central Bank, crowded trains and buses. In the eastern villages people were bludgeoned and slashed to death so that ammunition could be saved.

Apart from killing and injuring, the LTTE chased away Muslims and Sinhalese from the Northern province, which amounted to ethnic cleansing, an act of genocide according to the above mentioned Convention. The people who were chased away have not yet returned to their homes and property, perhaps because of the memory of terror they had experienced in the North. Aren’t these acts of genocide ? The 1948 Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

Attacks on centres of worship like temples and mosques and killing of priests are unpardonable acts of terror aimed at destroying religious groups. Similarly murdering surrendered police officers is butchery of the worst kind. It was such acts of naked terrorism and insane mass murder that made the FBI label the LTTE “the most brutal terrorist organization in the world”.

Silence of UNHRC

Isn’t the UNHRC keen to ensure that justice is done for the victims of genocide committed by the LTTE? Perhaps, we should not make such a request to an organisation that keeps mum while genocide is rampant in the contemporary world ? Palestinians are being systematically murdered and driven away from their country with the UNHCR doing nothing to protect them. The US President is threatening the countries which support the Palestinians.

Sri Lanka must call for an international investigation into genocide committed by the LTTE.

Opinion

From Galkissa (Mount Lavinia) to Tambuttegama

Published

1 day ago

2026/09/14

Thilina Walpola

‘Before I took this position, I knew so little about them that I didn’t even know their names. I had not met them in any context outside the present.’ (My translation.) President Dissanayake, recently speaking about judges of the Supreme Court and of the Appeals Court.

by Usvatte

Nothing announces more loudly the gaping distance between the social strata from which our rulers, prior to 2024 came, and those of the present government come. That response came from President Dissanayake when he was accused of raising the age of retirement of judges to help his favourites. He could not possibly have had favourites among persons wholly strangers to him. That charge, therefore, prima facie, must fail.

Those who ruled this country as politicians and senior public servants, judges, lawyers and other professionals, generally prior to 2024, commonly went to schools in Colombo or its neighbourhood. Leaders even from Jaffna, Anuradhapura, Kandy, Ratnapura and Galle had been educated in schools in Colombo or their equivalents in other urban centres. They had met each other either as relatives, friends, school mates, debaters or competitors on playgrounds. Three of four who were our first prime ministers attended S. Thomas’ College, Galkissa; the other Royal College, Colombo. Of the first four prime ministers, two went to Cambridge and one to Oxford. There, then followed a family, two of whom attended the highly reputed St. Bridget’s Convent, in Colombo, two others having attended S. Thomas,’ and Oxford, and one, the redoubtable Sciences Po in Paris. Two more came from Royal College, Colombo, and a third claimed that he attended St. Joseph’s, Maradana. So, did we spend the first near-half-century of an independent country. These ladies and gentlemen, together with many others, with roughly similar backgrounds, established a form of government new to our society. A part of the achievements of that leadership was an excellent (within the resources they had) public health scheme and a school system that, in time, reached almost every child.

Unlike the earlier rulers, Dissanayake attended government schools in Tambuttegama and Kelaniya University. He studied science and mathematics. He can differentiate an equation for you and speak intelligently about Paul Dirac and Higgs boson with the same felicity as accusations against former politicians. There is a Prime Minister who can talk to you impromptu on August Compte and Claude Le`vi-Strauss. She did go to prestigious schools in Colombo but decided to throw her lot with those that had not. (That was not uncommon in periods of radical change in several societies in the past.) There are ministers in this government who have travelled regularly by train, without snatching gold necklaces on women passengers. Others have pushed themselves into crowded buses, to get home before dark on roads unlit for miles. Many have taught in rural schools in Pooneryn or Nikaweratiya. Few have travelled by motor car to schools in major towns including Colombo and its environs. Few have lived in or have homes in major towns including the national capital. One MP says that she was born in a ‘line room’ in a tea plantation. One must know the poverty, squalor and violence of these habitats to measure the social distance she has travelled. The new political leaders are culturally very different from the old. (I avoid the term class because the term has connotations which are not seen here.) Those people are the salt of this earth, representative of common people in this country. We now have in Parliament a House of Representatives full of Commons. We look forward to them for leadership to move this society from the morass it is in.

A coterie of people from the deep south of the country, who were elected to office with much optimism, turned out to be a deep disappointment and turned this country into a kleptocracy and a haven for druggists and gangsters. The offspring of leading politicians in the group that went to those same good schools that I mentioned above, have been accused in our courts of heinous crimes. Some crowd our prisons. They evidently plundered the public purse, pushed the country into debt both local and foreign, corrupted processes of governance including the judiciary and let the country into a venomously poisonous murky backwater from which young people flee as soon as they can collect the airfare for a one way ticket to Dubai or obtain a visa to South Korea.

The present government was formed by young people who have yet to be tried. The electorate, by an overwhelming majority, elected them to Parliament. The President was elected by a thin margin. In my understanding, this government has yet to suffer sinking damage. They have faced several squalls and one or two have been thrown overboard but the ship has survived and plunged ahead in heavy seas. A major storm has been brewed and the government has been battered. But the rudder is in place, the engine room is dry, there is ample fuel and the crew is fresh and willing. On the radar, I read heavier storms developing ahead and these will severely test the skills of the captain and his mates. Despite loud and wide claims to the contrary, I do not see a sharper captain or more skilled and less tainted sailors who can guide this ship safely over choppy seas over the next few years. A capacity to speak English fluently, hold a firm handshake and wear a necktie neatly do make a good brown sahib (Tarzie Vittachi) but not necessarily a Manmohan Singh or a Zhu Rongji or, indeed, a Lee Kwan Yu. Those that batter the government, except for a few outstanding scholars and fine lawyers, are laden with so much foul lead that any vessel carrying them must instantly seek the bottom. The new politicians have not been tested with temptation. Who can, I certainly cannot, give them a carte blanche of good behaviour? Time will test them? The government has demonstrated competence ample to win that chance.

There is much talk that the government did not consult stakeholders when they introduced legislation to raise the age at which judges in courts will retire. Who expects a government to foresee every emergency and write it into its election manifesto? What indeed is at stake and who holds the stakes? The government holds forth that what is at stake is the administration of fair justice to both those who come to courts accused of crimes and those who seek redress for harm inflicted on them by those who broke the law. They are the janathava who hold the highest stakes. ‘Will my case be heard to a close and the accused be duly punished? And where is justice? Will the accused die before the case will be heard to a close in 2038, when I myself might be dead? Will those who plundered the government Treasury and their progeny live in splendid luxury while those who lost loved ones, limbs and all they possessed suffer both misery and penury? Is that not foul justice? Is that just at all?’ The government, both in public and implicitly, has consulted these stakeholders amply. The fast disposal of cases of where politicians and others had committed serious crimes was a major plank in the platform on which the JJB sought election. I don’t recall that any party either at a general election or the one to elect a president challenged that course. True enough, they did not seek a mandate to paint the east window of the magistrate’s court in Meegahakotuva.

How many of you have read in an election manifesto in the United Kingdom, Angola, Paraguay or Mongolia an undertaking to raise the wages of judges of the supreme court? Lawyers are not stakeholders in this principal contest. They, of course, are more than amicus curiae.

Highly regarded scholars in law, eminent lawyers in practice, trade unions and politicians who want to test the last chance they have to come to power now protest that the rule of law is at risk of loss, that the executive and legislative branches of government may subject the judicial branch under their subjugation and with that bury democratic governance. Like most eventualities that are possible. But what is the probability that that eventuality will come about? (An unkind professor once said, ‘It is possible that all of you will win first class honours. But what is probable is that one will.) Were the government to raise the age of retirement of judges, in what manner is the rule of law denied; in what manner will democracy cease to be? The probability that any political party that may come to power will kill the independence of the judiciary, deny the rule of law and establish a dictatorship is exactly the same as the NPP government may do so. The president of BASL made a declaration, a few weeks back, that the 22^nd Amendment to the Constitution, which is the offending piece of legislation, would no longer be inimical to democracy, if it were to be effective from 01 January 2027. Is there a long rahu kala in kethu dasa inimical to democracy from September 01 to December 31, 2026? What is the poison in the proposed 22^nd Amendment that will be wafted away between now and 01 January 2027? In the absence of a satisfactory answer to that question, what is the objection to the proposed Amendment?

Among the three branches of government, the judiciary is the weakest. It has no tanks; it has no money. The executive branch appoints them and the legislative, may lawfully, remove them. Yet the judiciary branch is so important for democratic governance that the fundamental laws of governance (the Constitution), courts themselves under the law and long custom, bind the other two branches and the general public to good behaviour. Democratic governance is possible only when those three branches check each the others’ excesses and support their good functioning. The judicial branch is no less important than the other two.

A well-functioning judiciary is at stake. The government has put out the beginning of a solution. BASL and the learned professors with it, possibly could not have a stake in delaying judicial procedures and denying justice to close perhaps to 5 million citizens. The stakes they play for must be different. The public will be grateful if they would disclose them.

In time, I expect new casus belli and more violent skirmishes, because the lines now have been drawn.

Opinion

Ashraff: From the SLMC towards the National Unity Alliance

Published

1 day ago

2026/09/14

Thilina Walpola

Ashraff

By Mohammed Ismail Mohammed Sadaath

(Continued from the Sunday Island Sept. 13)

By the late 1990s, Ashraff was beginning to speak differently about his political future. Published historical accounts record that he argued a political party representing a minority community had reached certain limitations and needed to expand into national politics.

The National Unity Alliance was subsequently created and formally registered on 23 August 23, 1999.

This should not be exaggerated. The NUA had not existed long enough before Ashraff’s death for us to describe it as a completed ideological transformation. It could also be interpreted as an electoral strategy. Ashraff was ambitious, and a politician seeking influence beyond a minority constituency would naturally benefit from a wider platform.

But I came to understand the NUA differently because of a conversation I had with Ashraff at the time.

A plate of rice and a question I wanted to ask

At that period, I was attached to the Department of Political Science at the University of Colombo as a lecturer. One day, I received a telephone call asking me to come and meet the leader. I went to his ministerial bungalow in Colombo.

When I arrived, M.M. Mohideen, Sammanthurai Yaseen and several other senior SLMC leaders were there. The atmosphere was relaxed and celebratory. They were marking the registration of the National Unity Alliance and eating kiddu rice together.

Ashraff noticed me and asked that a plate be brought for me. I had already had lunch. But when the Leader himself invited me to join the meal, refusing did not seem appropriate. I therefore took a little rice and joined them.

It was a surprisingly ordinary setting for what would become one of my strongest political memories. There was no stage, no microphone and no formal political speeches. Just the Leader, senior party colleagues, food and conversation. But I had a question.

I had watched Ashraff build the Muslim Congress. I had myself worked within the movement. I knew how much political strength the SLMC had given him. He had reached Parliament and become one of the country’s most powerful Muslim Cabinet Ministers. Why, then, another political organisation?

I asked him respectfully, “Sir, may I ask you a question?” He agreed.

I asked, in substance: You have built the SLMC into a powerful political force. Through this party you have reached one of the highest positions attained by a Muslim political leader in Sri Lanka. Why, then, have you registered the National Unity Alliance? His answer has remained with me for more than two decades.

Ashraff reflected on the atmosphere that had been created during the process of building Muslim political power. He spoke about the language used in political mobilisation, including ethnic appeals and community-centered slogans that had helped mobilise and unite Muslims.

But he was worried about where such politics might eventually take the younger generation. The very political atmosphere that had helped create Muslim political consciousness, he suggested, could become volatile if it continued without change.

His concern was especially about Muslim youth. He feared that they could eventually be taken in a direction he did not want them to go. He wanted to correct that course. He wanted Muslim youth to move towards a broader national agenda.

I do not present this conversation as a verbatim transcript. I was not recording him, and more than two decades have passed. What I recount is my recollection of the substance and meaning of that exchange.

What struck me was his willingness to reflect critically on his own politics.

Re-reading the NUA

Political leaders are generally comfortable describing the mistakes of their opponents. It is much rarer for a leader to ask whether the political language that helped him acquire power may itself have produced unintended consequences.

Ashraff was not saying that Muslim political mobilisation had been unnecessary. Nor was he abandoning Muslim political rights. What he appeared to be recognising was something more complex: the politics required to awaken and organise a marginalised community may not be the same politics required to lead the next generation of that community.

The SLMC had told Muslims that they needed their own voice, that others could not decide their political future without them, and that they had to organise. That message transformed Muslim politics.

But once a community possesses political confidence, what comes next? Can young Muslims be taught to defend their identity without being politically separated from the rest of the country? Can Muslim political confidence become part of a larger Sri Lankan citizenship?

My conversation with Ashraff suggested that these questions were occupying his mind.

The NUA may therefore also have represented an element of political self-correction. Ashraff had used identity to build representation, but he appeared increasingly unwilling to allow identity to become a permanent political prison.

Once a community has been successfully mobilised around its identity, how does a leader prevent that identity from becoming a permanent boundary between that community and the nation? Ashraff never had the opportunity to answer that question fully.

Then came September 16

On September 16, 2000, Ashraff’s helicopter crashed near Aranayake. His death ended not only a political career but also an unfinished political experiment.

There would be no opportunity to see how the NUA developed. There would be no Ashraff at the negotiating table during the 2002 peace process, no Ashraff to respond to the final stages of the war, and no opportunity to see whether the man who had built the country’s strongest autonomous Muslim political movement could genuinely move beyond it towards a broader national political platform.

History stopped Ashraff at perhaps the most interesting point in his political evolution.

The party survived, but did the vision?

Ashraff’s death exposed an important weakness in the movement he had created. The SLMC possessed an exceptionally powerful leader, but it had not developed an equally strong succession system.

Leadership disputes followed. Fragmentation became a defining feature of post-Ashraff Muslim politics. There is an obvious irony here: Ashraff spent much of his political life consolidating Muslim political strength, while after his death political actors increasingly competed over different pieces of that inheritance.

The SLMC survived. Other Muslim parties emerged. Muslim politicians continued entering governments. Cabinet portfolios continued to be obtained. Coalition bargaining survived extremely well.

But the question is whether Ashraff’s method survived more strongly than Ashraff’s purpose.

Political leverage can secure ministries and appointments, but it can also create institutions, correct structural inequalities and influence national policy. Political success must eventually be measured by what remains when the politician leaves office: institutions, policies, rights, educational opportunities, administrative reforms, security, social cohesion and a stronger generation.

If bargaining repeatedly changes who holds office without changing the structural conditions affecting the community, bargaining has lost its transformative purpose.

Remembering Ashraff without making him a saint

Ashraff should not be transformed into a politician who never made mistakes. He was a political actor operating in a deeply divided country. He sought power, used powerful community-centered rhetoric, and led in a highly personalised manner. His political mobilization attracted criticism for communal and ethno-religious tendencies.

Acknowledging these contradictions does not diminish his historical importance. It makes the final stage of his political journey more interesting.

A leader who had used identity politics appeared to be asking whether identity politics had reached its limits. A leader who had taught a community how to stand separately was beginning to ask how that political confidence could be taken back into a national space.

For me, this journey is captured in two memories. The first is Maruthamunai: I was a district-level party activist, I spoke at the Masoor Moulana Grounds, Ashraff listened, and he later promoted me to a national youth role. That was Ashraff the political organiser, building a movement and strengthening Muslim political consciousness.

The second memory is Colombo. Years had passed. The NUA had been registered. I was sitting with Ashraff, M.M. Mohideen, Sammanthurai Yaseen and other senior SLMC leaders, sharing a simple celebratory meal. I asked why he needed the NUA after achieving so much through the SLMC. I heard a leader worrying about where mobilisation might eventually lead Muslim youth.

Only much later did I realise how closely those two encounters were connected. At Maruthamunai, I saw a leader determined to build a generation of politically conscious Muslim youth. Years later in Colombo, I heard the same man worrying about where that political consciousness might lead if it remained permanently tied to ethnic slogans. That change in Ashraff’s thinking has stayed with me.

More than a photograph on a September stage

Every September, commemorating Ashraff is easy. His photograph can be displayed, a stage can be decorated, speakers can call him Thalaivar, his achievements can be listed and his speeches replayed.

But political inheritance is not measured by how often a dead leader’s name is mentioned. It is measured by what later generations do with the political space he created.

Ashraff helped give Sri Lankan Muslims an independent political voice. What has that voice produced during the 26 years since his death? He demonstrated the power of coalition bargaining. How much of that bargaining has been converted into durable policy rather than temporary office? He helped build institutions. What comparable institutions will the present generation of Muslim politicians leave behind?

And if Ashraff himself became worried that communal political rhetoric could lead Muslim youth in an undesirable direction, who continued his effort to bring that generation into a broader national agenda?

These questions should not be treated as criticism of one particular Muslim political party. They concern the direction of Muslim political leadership as a whole.

From Sammanthurai to an unfinished national journey

Sri Lanka in 2026 is very different from the Sri Lanka Ashraff left behind in September 2000. The war has ended. The LTTE no longer exists. The traditional political system has undergone dramatic change. A younger generation has grown up without direct memories of much of the violence that shaped Ashraff’s political career.

Yet many underlying issues remain. Land remains sensitive in the East. Administrative boundaries remain politically contested. Tamil-Muslim relations periodically become strained. Religion can rapidly become politicized. Questions of minority representation remain unresolved.

Sri Lanka continues struggling with one of its oldest democratic challenges: how can communities maintain their identities and political dignity while simultaneously building a common citizenship?

Ashraff did not solve that problem. History should not pretend that he did.

But several times during his political life, he recognised when an existing political model had become insufficient. When traditional Muslim representation seemed inadequate, he helped create an autonomous Muslim political movement. When demographic weakness appeared to condemn Muslims to the political margin, he transformed organised votes into national bargaining power. When political representation alone seemed insufficient, he used political influence to build institutions. And when the language of identity politics itself appeared capable of producing consequences he feared for a younger generation, he began exploring a broader national political platform.

Then the helicopter fell. The leader disappeared. The SLMC survived. The tree survived. Coalition politics survived. The politics of bargaining survived. But the larger journey from identity, to representation, to political confidence, and finally towards a broader national citizenship remains unfinished.

Perhaps that is why, 26 years after his death, the most meaningful question on September 16 should no longer simply be: Who inherited M.H.M. Ashraff’s party? A far more important question is: Who understood where Ashraff was trying to go next?

(Concluded)

References

Yusoff, M.A., Sarjoon, A., Hussin, N. & Ahmad, A. (2017), “Analyzing the Contributions of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and its Founder–Leader to Muslim Politics and Community in Sri Lanka,” Social Sciences, 6(4), 120.

Yusoff, M.A., Sarjoon, A. & Mohd Zain, Z. (2018), “Analyzing the Fragmented Sri Lankan Muslim Politics in Post-Ashraff Era,” Journal of Politics and Law, 11(3).

Johansson, Andreas (2019), Pragmatic Muslim Politics: The Case of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. Palgrave Macmillan.

Parliament of Sri Lanka, official profile of M.H.M. Ashraff.

D.B.S. Jeyaraj, “Remembering SLMC Leader M.H.M. Ashraff,” Daily FT.

D.B.S. Jeyaraj, “MHM Ashraff: From Muslim Leader to National Statesman,” Daily Mirror.