The EconomistJune 29th 2019 Asia 552
Banyan Them v everyone
“T
hey,” likeits cousin “them,”
sounds an innocent word. Given
the wrong context, though, even a simple
pronoun can turn insidious. Since a pack
of suicide-bombers, claiming to act in
the name of Islam, killed 261 people on
Easter morning, Sri Lanka’s 2m Muslims
have collectively felt that turn. After a
thousand peaceful years as a minority in
the island country “they” have quite
suddenly become aliens, perhaps to be
tolerated, but not to be trusted.
The signs of rejection can be stark,
such as when rioters have torched Mus-
lim property. But mostly they appear by
whisper and insinuation. Lists ripple
across Facebook, detailing shops and
businesses to avoid because they are
Muslim-owned; rumours circulate that
the free meals served by a Muslim-run
charity at public hospitals are doctored
to make non-Muslims infertile. On June
24th officials in the small town of Wen-
nappuwa barred Muslims from trading at
its weekly market because citizens ob-
jected to their presence. Lending sanc-
tion to the mood, a Buddhist monk noted
on YouTube how some devotees had
suggested that a Muslim obstetrician
accused of secretly sterilising patients
should be stoned to death. “Now I am not
saying that that is what we should do,”
the Most Venerable Sri Gnanarathana
Thero Mahanayake cautioned, “but I say
that is the punishment they deserve.”
Sri Lanka’s current, acute intolerance
is a reaction to a terrorist death cult. But
it has older, deeper causes, too. Since
independence in 1951 the country has
struggled to replace the divide-and-rule
of the colonial era with a more all-em-
bracing notion of shared citizenship.
One “unifying” political trend sought to
impose the language of the dominant
group, Sinhala-speaking Buddhists, oneveryone else. The second-biggest group,
Tamil-speaking Hindus, violently resisted,
provoking 26 years of civil war. Partly as a
result of this failure, what has prevailed is
a tacit ghettoisation, where each of the
main religious and ethnic groups lives
largely in its own space.
This is compounded by a school system
that perpetuates division. Most Christians
and Muslims go to “their” schools, while
Tamils and Sinhalese are naturally sepa-
rated by the language of instruction. Sin-
halese students learn that the great war-
rior-king Dutugemunu defeated a foreign
ruler, Elara, protecting Buddhism and
uniting the country. Tamil students read
instead that Ellalan—as he is known in
Tamil—was a wise and just king who ruled
Sri Lanka from 205bcto 161bc. As a result,
the inhabitants of a rather small island
grow up knowing surprisingly little about
their own neighbours. It is not just Mus-
lims; there are many versions of “them”.
The same may be said of Sri Lanka’s
immensely bigger, kaleidoscopically more
diverse northern neighbour, India. De-
cades after establishing a secular constitu-tion and abolishing caste—and with it
such categories as the “criminal tribes”
and “martial races” beloved of the British
Raj, India remains addicted to its habit of
othering others. A simple glance at re-
cent headlines is revealing. A hit-and-
run driver ploughs into a family at high
speed when they stop him from dragging
their daughter into his car. Surprise!
They are Dalits, formerly known as un-
touchables. Five men are freed after
spending 13 years on death row for mur-
ders they did not commit. Surprise! They
belong to a nomadic group once categor-
ised as a “criminal tribe”. Villagers tie a
suspected motorbike thief to a pole and
beat him to a pulp as they force him to
shout “Jai Sri Ram”, a Hindu chant. The
villagers film it all. He later dies. Sur-
prise! The man is a Muslim, one of sever-
al score of “them” that similar mobs have
lynched in recent years.
And as in Sri Lanka it is not just igno-
rant people who partition “us” from
“them.” When India’s freshly elected
parliament convened in mid-June, and
one of its handful of Muslim mps stood
to take his oath, taunting cries of “Jai Sri
Ram” rose from the ruling party’s bench-
es. Eroding the secular basis of citi-
zenship, the government plans to speed
the naturalisation of Hindu, Buddhist,
Sikh, Jain and Christian refugees, but not
Muslims. It also proposes prison terms
for Muslim men who practise “triple
talaq”, a kind of instant divorce that the
courts have banned. Lawyers argue that
such cases represent a tiny fraction of the
more than 2m Indian women—mostly
Hindus—who have been abandoned by
husbands without support. So why not a
law to protect all Indian women, rather
than to punish a few Muslim men? The
answer, never stated, is that it is not a law
for us, it is for them.Too many South Asians like to divide their neighbours by religion or castetourism. Warming waters have killed
much of its coral since 2016. Adani would
export its coal from a port on the reef’s
edge. Contaminants leaked from an adja-
cent facility have already harmed the sur-
rounding wetlands, activists say. They fear
that dredging and heavier maritime traffic
will damage the reef, too.
But many towns along the coast of
Queensland, although far from the coal
seams, still benefit from mining because
they are home to lots of fly-in-fly-out work-
ers. Cavalcades of anti-Adani activists from
other parts of Australia have not been wellreceived in the state. Supporters of the
mine argue that preachy greens from Syd-
ney and Melbourne also benefit from the
resource business. Last year coal overtook
iron ore as Australia’s biggest export.
Activists insist the mine can still be
stopped and continue to demonstrate
against it. Adani has yet to finalise a royalty
agreement with Queensland’s govern-
ment, or obtain a licence to build its rail-
way. They cite other big projects that were
halted after work had started, such as a
dam on the Gordon river in Tasmania
which was stymied by protests in the 1980s.Companies following Adani into the
Galilee Basin may have trouble financing
their investments, since banks are reluc-
tant to support controversial mines. Adani
is having to fund the first, A$2bn ($1.4bn)
phase of the Carmichael mine itself. As
countries try to cut their emissions, the
market for thermal coal is shrinking. Even
in Australia, which still relies on coal for
most of its electricity, the three biggest
power producers have cancelled plans for
new coal-fired plants. In the end it may be
economics, not activism, that stops the de-
velopment of the basin. 7