Indian Defence Review

Sri Lanka witnessed its first brutal experience from the Islamic fundamentalism in 2019 April, which was known as “Easter attacks” resulted in more than 250 civilians’deaths including foreign tourists. This was the bloodiest carnage that the island nation experienced since the civil war ended in 2009 and the domino effect of the Easter massacre made many structural changes in the state apparatus of the country such as the unprecedented political victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the 2019 presidential election. Also, the attacks added further challenges to the deteriorated Sri Lankan economy dogged its currency pressure from a growing national deficit. All in all, Easter attack carried out by the Islamic terrorists in 2019 played a catalyst role in pushing the country to its current instable juncture.

However, recently Sri Lankan government has made an irrational, injudicious decision to lift up the ban on five of the eleven banned Islamic organizations namely Jamiatul Ansari Sunnatul Mohammadia (JASM), Sri Lanka Tawheed Jamaat (SLTJ), All Ceylon Tawheed Jamaat (ACTJ), Lanka Tawheed Jamaat (CTJ), and the United Tawheed Jamaat (UTJ). Those organizations were banned through a gazette notice issued by former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in April 2012 as the nature of the organizational structure of these entities remained dodgy.

The nature of the Islamic fundamentalism in Sri Lanka and radicalization of the Muslim youth is a phenomenon linked with the external support given by Middle Eastern countries, especially Saudi Arabia. The ideological development of Islamic fundamentalism in Sri Lanka was fostered by foreign preachers such as Afghanis, Indians and Arabs who stayed in the island as religious scholars. The first reported Muslim who went to join ISIS in Sri Lanka in 2015 was educated in an Islamic University in Pakistan and many of his links with the foreign Muslim preachers in Sri Lanka have been disclosed.

In 2010, one of the Muslim organizations named “Jammiyathush Shabab” took an initiative to invite the notorious Muslim preacher Zakir Naik, whose radical Islamic preaching has provoked many Muslims around the world thereby damaging the ethno religious harmony among the communities. The stringent mechanism developed by local Muslim organizations has undermined the most peaceful Muslims and their cultural heritages on the East Coast such as Sufis and Ahamadiyas. Emboldened by the foreign support that infiltrated the Sri Lankan space, those local organizations played a key role in radicalizing the Muslim youth in Sri Lanka.   

Given such visible evidence showing the robust involvement of Muslim organizations in the process of radicalism, the government should have been more deliberate before lifting the ban on those organizations. On the contrary, the current government has taken a naïve approach based on short-term political gain, which would inevitably lead to a greater debacle in the long run as the above-mentioned organizations were mainly responsible for nourishing the Islamic radicalization among the Muslims in Sri Lanka.Especially, the links developed by Sri Lankan Islamic fundamentalists with Saudi Arabia date back to the ’90s, which shows how astutely Wahhabism began to grow in the country and it sabotaged the harmony maintained by the Muslims with other ethnic groups in the country. In fact, the emergence of certain Muslim organizations stirred the Muslim community through their ideological influences.

From a vantage point, lifting the ban on those Muslim organizations contains political expectations as the presidential election is supposed to be held in 2024.  The vote bank of the Muslim population in Sri Lanka in the Eastern and North Western provinces becomes a decisive factor in deciding the outcome of the election.

A statement issued by the government indicates that this decision will not undermine the national security. Also, the representatives of the banned organisations pledged to the government officials that they would take responsibility for the actions of their members. It raises a legitimate question How would radicalisers admit the liability for their own deeds? Moreover, some of those organizations and their lead cadres were directly involved in inviting foreign Islam preachers to Sri Lanka and their organizational activism took much aggressive stances towards traditional Sufi Muslims. Successive governments and Muslim leadership may have neglected Muslim radicalization too. Unlike other countries that addressed Muslim radicalization swiftly and robustly through comprehensive community engagement and rehabilitation initiatives, the local government appeared reluctant to admit there were problems and all these trajectories paved the path for Easter tragedy in 2019.

The path that led to the Easter carnage was not an abrupt one as it twisted with the clandestine structure of the Muslim radical organisations funded by Saudi Arabia. Prof Rohan Gunaratna has provided a comprehensive analysis on the rise of radical activism and the negligence of the Sri Lankan governments since 1977, which created a chasm between peace-loving Muslim community and the other ethnic groups.The current decision taken by the Sri Lankan government to lift the ban on those extremist Muslim organizations adds one more brick to the further expansion of Islamic fundamentalism in Sri Lanka, which would be an unmitigated disaster for the whole South Asian region by virtue of the strategic location of Sri Lanka. It is important to note that the perpetrators of the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka in 2019 had connections with the ISIS cells in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Thus, any revival of Islamic radicalization in Sri Lanka will alter the security nexus of South Asia to a bitter end.