(MENAFN- Colombo Gazette) By N Sathiya Moorthy
Minister of Buddha Sasana, Vidhura Wickremanayake, has made a new 'revelation' in Parliament. Responding to a question, he said that the falling birth-rate in the country has meant that families do not want their children to become Buddhist monks. There are 42,122 registered Buddhist monks in the country, and there is no dearth of monks to run the 12,235 Buddhist temples, 743 'dasasil matha' monasteries and 38 'devales' registered with the authorities, he said.
What Minister Vidhura said about Sri Lanka is for long true of other religions elsewhere. Christian nations have been reporting poor in-take of novices, both male and female, for some years now. In countries like the US of A, occasional reports and analyses indicate how neighbourhood churches are getting shut for want of attendees for various services. Of course, no serious study seems to have been done to correlate this to the migration of rural youth to urban centres even in developed countries, and such big numbers, even if over decades.
In Third World nations like Sri Lanka, such internal migration has been happening for long. But there has also been a transformation of the rural-setting, not always in terms of physical infrastructure – but social infrastructure. This is seen in the form of greater urbanisation of rural areas, slow in the beginning and faster as time progresses. Coupled with the forward-looking policies in health-care and education – not necessary in that order, lower birth-rates are being reported with almost every decennial census.
In due course, it's not only monasteries of every religion and community that would increasingly report lower in-takes of novices for taking to monkhood or their equivalent. Over time, there is a shortage of labour, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. In between, Third World nations like Sri Lanka also report 'economic migration' to developed nations, some taking the legal route, some going as illegal migrants, either knowingly or otherwise – still some others take the devious route, calling themselves 'political refugees'. The
The latter has been happening among the nation's SLT population. Since the Aragalaya, 'economic migration' without having to cite 'political causes' has been happening possibly even more among the majority Sinhala community, starting with mainstay Buddhism. Recent reports indicated that the trickle of exodus by doctors has become a flood, as medical associations have put the figure at a high one thousand and more.
It was sad that the government itself set the mood and the trend by offering five years of unpaid leave for government servants wanting to take up overseas assignments on their own. In the aftermath of the Aragalaya protests and the impending economic reforms programme that the new rulers knew that the IMF would impose on them, there was no way to stop cutting down on public sector employees' numbers drastically.
Spreading religiosity
Higher the incidence of migration, first internally and then externally, greater are the chances of change in social priorities. Religion and the society's religious and community commitments take a hit, small initially but huge as times pass by. This is possibly what Minister Vithura was hinting at in his parliamentary response – though too much need not be read into it, especially just now.
Incidentally, time was when, say, in the early nineties or so, especially during the short-lived (interim) presidency (?) of Dingri Banda Wijetunga, the government encouraged young admittance into Buddhist monasteries, in what was claimed to be an earnest effort at spreading religiosity among the people. Some sociologists claimed that it also helped poverty-alleviation in a unique way, as there were one or two mouths less for families to feed.
The irony of it all is that in recent years, cardiologists and gastroenterologists have reported that many, if not most Buddhist monks in the country suffered from problems relating to their super-speciality medical care, in recent years. They also attributed it to possible 'over-eating', not that they were all gluttons. Invited by multiple devout families for the ritualistic 'dhana' ceremonies in their homes on the same day, they end up having to eat in every home to their 'full', lest the host would feel hurt and inadequately blessed.
Extinction, eradication
The remote question then and now is about the reasons for the same set of monks having to partake of 'dhana' feasts in more homes than one on the same day. Does it owe to the relative shortage of trained and acknowledged monks in each locality and village, as against the novices that may be accompanying them? Or, is in relative terms, there are fewer Buddhist temples than may be required to accommodate relatively senior monks, whose presence and blessings that the every devout family seeks for key celebrations and ritualistic observances?
When the larger discourse is about the fall in birth-rates, adequate attention has not been paid to the loss of the unborn child to the Buddhist population in the country, after the massacre of hundreds even if not thousands of them, in the two JVP insurgencies of the early seventies and the late eighties. In the latter in particular, some independent studies had claimed the death-roll to be in the range of 60,000-100,000.
They were both males and females, both in the re-productive age-group, especially youth. The wholesale extinction, if not outright eradication of close to a hundred thousand youth in the re-productive age-group in one generation would reflect in the birth-rate and population-growth in subsequent generations. Once again, this is another area where no adequate sociological studies seem to have been undertaken.
War and war-widows
Incidentally, a similar fate befell the nation's Tamil population, through nearly three decades of four rounds of ethnic wars. No official, or provable figures have been produced, but there again, the number of those dead in the reproductive age-group can be safely put at tens of thousands, both male and female. Suffice to recall that about a year after the end of the war, the government itself claimed that there were 90,000 Tamil war-widows in the North and the East. Many, if not most/all of them, too, would have been in the reproductive age-group.
This is only one part of the story. During the war years, and even before that, from the days of 'Sinhala Only' law and the attendant attacks on the protesting SLT youth since the mid-fifties, the mass-exodus of Tamil youth of both genders. The numbers peaked in the eighties and nineties. Today, Tamil youth, especially boys, are keen to go away as 'economic migrants' to wherever there is job security and personal security – and in that order. It is a reverse from the war era.
Because the Tamils, both here in the country and among the Diaspora, made religious teachings, especially in the language a unifying force, and the 'kovil' premises, again locally and overseas, the focal-point of their cultural resurgence and re-assertion, and did not at the same time link priesthood to societal religiosity and commitment, they have not faced the kind of problems that Minister Vithura indicates that the Sinhala-Buddhist majority may face in the coming years and decades. That is a different story altogether.
No questions asked
Yet, there are questions about population and population figures. The post-war 2012 census in the war-regions, the first in three decades, showed there were more Sri Lankan Tamils, despite thousands of war-deaths and mass migration than the Malayaha Tamils or Tamils of recent Indian Origin (IOTs). In fact, the IOT population had inexplicably come down in percentile terms than the other – when the general expectation was that they would be vying for the second place with the Muslim community, for the second place, after the Sinhala-Buddhist majority, in terms of ethnicities. Neither of the latter communities protested when only a sketchy report of the Census was provided by the government, then and since.
There is another unanswered question: At the conclusion of the war, there were reports of up to 8,000 orphaned Tamil children, possibly up for adoption. There were also reports of INGOs wanting to provide for them. Claiming that the INGOs would convert mostly Hindu children into Christianity even without their knowledge, and for good, the government then declared that it would take care of those children – and bring them up as what they were born as (mostly Hindus).
Then and since, no Tamil leader, who is talking in defence of Tamil culture and Tamil cultural identities, has asked about the fate of those children, whose numbers the government however had put at 2,000-3,000 (but never came up with a final figure, to the last digit). Barring a visiting official of the Amnesty International (AI), no one nearer home or afar – that includes the UNHRC – has questioned the government about the fate and future of those children. At least at the time of the controversy close to 15 years back, some Tamil leaders claimed that if the government took charge of those innocent kids, they would be brought up as Buddhists, not Hindus. But even they have not raised their voices since.
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: ...)
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