Tamils Asked Modi to Help Remove Illegal and Racist Sinhala Buddhist Symbols from the Tamils’ Homeland in the North-East of Sri Lanka: Tamils for Biden
Tamils in Sri Lanka and in the Tamil diaspora community are extremely angry that Sri Lankan Buddhist priests, through the support of the country’s Sinhala Buddhist-dominated Archaeological Department, have been illegally taking by force the Tamils’ ancient cultural religious sites. With the aid and complicity of Sinhala military and Sinhala police, the Hindu temples that were seized have been replaced by Viharai and racist Sinhala Buddhist symbols. The Tamils’ religious freedom and their cultural heritage are under attack.
According to the Ramayana, the Hindu Tamil King Ravanan lived in Ceylon about five thousand years ago, circa 3000 BCE. The original ancient inhabitants of this Island were Tamil speaking. The Tamil language has continuously existed in this Island for over three thousand years.
The so-called Sinhalese only became a race and developed a distinct language about seven hundred years ago. The Sinhalese language is quite recent. It was formed around the 6th and 7th centuries CE. Its first grammar, the Sidat Sangarawa, did not appear until the 13th century. There cannot even be said to be a Sinhalese people before the birth of the Sinhala language, which is a mixture of Tamil and Pali. There were no Sinhalese Kings or anything we could call Sinhala history until the 7th century CE.
All the histories that have been created by the Mahanayaka (high-ranking Sinhalese Buddhist monks) are incorrect, arguably nothing but fabrications or even intentional propaganda. Yet the Sri Lankan Archaeological organization justifies its illegal appropriation of Hindu temples and Tamil lands based on dubious Mahanayaka accounts and implements this with the help of the military, police, and the Sri Lankan kangaroo court judiciary system.
A Hindu temple in Kurunthur Malai was destroyed, and the military immediately began to build a Buddhist vihara. During this period, Kurunthur was declared a security zone by the military and Tamils were banned from going to the temple.
The Mahanayaka erroneously claim that the Kurunthur Malai temple does not date back to 300 BCE and the land is instead a Buddhist holy site. The Mahanayaka monks lie to undermine Tamil centers of spiritual authority and to destroy the Tamils’ culture.
The Sinhala chronicle the Mahavamsa was created to attempt to aid in the conversion of the whole island to Sinhala race and Buddhist religion.
The Mahavamsa says that their great-great-grandfather was a lion. It is absurd. This myth and the text as a whole was created to threaten the Hindu Tamils in the 6th century. The chronicle also says that non-Buddhists can be killed like animals and flies.
According to the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Tamil King Ravanan built several hot water springs 5000 years ago to perform his mother’s rites. Now Buddhists claim that the springs were built by a Buddhist. They disregard the Ramayana and its story entirely despite no evidence or support.
The Tamils want to remind Indian Prime Minister Modi that after the end of ethnic war the Sinhalese destroyed more than a thousand Hindu temples. Most of them were transformed into or replaced by Sinhala Buddhist viharas, with Buddhist symbols supplanting holy Hindu ones. The expropriation of Tamil Hindu temples by the Sinhalese is a clear violation of the 13th Amendment, which was added in 1987 to the Sri Lankan Constitution when India intervened in the Civil War.
The Tamils ask Mr. Modi to visit these Tamil areas and do what he can to remove the Buddhist symbols that are psychologically destroying the Tamils.
These Buddhist symbols are a constant reminder to the Tamils of the continuous human rights violations being perpetrated by the Sinhalese regime—the tens of thousands of Tamils that have been killed or “forcibly disappeared” as part of the decades-long genocide, the endless aggression, oppression, rapes, white van abductions, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and the attempted systematic destruction of Tamil religion and culture.
As the dominant power of the region and self-styled “big brother” to Sri Lanka, India should do what it can to put stop the lies of the Sinhalese lies and remove all the Buddhist viharas from the Tamils’ homeland.
