A Buddha statue was already placed there by the occupying Sinhala military, at 200 metres near the Saiva temple in a forcefully confiscated private land. Meanwhile, the entire Mannaar district has been brought under the Anuradhapura administrative circle of genocidal Sri Lanka’s Archaeology Department. While existing Muslim and Hindu places of worship are demolished and removed from Dambulla, claimed to be a Buddhist centre, the Sinhala government encroaches a pivotal Saiva sacred centre in the country of Tamils.
The local population of the Mannaar district is entirely of Tamil speakers, comprising of Christians, Muslims and Hindus.
The Sinhala GA now spearheads a movement to bring in the Sinhala Buddhists, as part of genocidal Sri Lanka’s agenda specified in the LLRC recommendations, to make no territory in the island as belonging to the nation of Tamil speakers.
The Sinhala-Buddhists have to occupy the entire island to justify the claim that the island belongs to the Sinhala-Buddhists only, is the thrust of the LLRC recommendations and the recommendations envisage to achieve it by 2020.
By upholding the LLRC recommendations at the Geneva level, both the USA and India, and the others tagged behind one or the other power, have deprived the nation of Eezham Tamils from raising any voices against the structural genocide.
Even though both these adamant international abetters of the Sinhala state say that they stand only for the ‘positive’ recommendations of the LLRC, what the genocidal state implements are going to be ‘positive’ only for its agenda.
The Sinhala GA has recently founded a Buddhist association for the Mannaar district.
In January this year, a ‘request’ was made to the GA seeking permission for the construction of a Buddhist temple at the precincts of the Saiva sacred centre of Thirukeatheesvaram.
The permit he issues now not only legalises the placement of the Buddha statue near the Saiva temple but also allows for the construction of a stupa, Buddhist temple and a vihara in the location.
Using the Indian money allotted for the development of Thirukkeatheesvaram, already a ‘Buddhist pilgrim centre’ has been constructed at Thirukkeatheevaram with the sole aim of laying foundations for the Sinhalicisation of the site.
In the pretext of celebrating 2600 year of Buddha, the entire Mannaar district is decorated and the day was chosen to give official permission for the construction of the Buddhist temple at Thirukeatheesvaram. A large number of Sinhala-Buddhists are visiting Thirukkeatheesvaram on Saturday, news sources in Mannaar said.
Jaffna and Mannaar were the two major cities of the Tamil-Saivaite Kingdom of Jaffna at the time of the advent of Portuguese colonialism in the 16th century.
Mannaar for a long time, until it became a separate administrative district in the Northern Province, was directly under the administration of Jaffna.
The act of Sri Lanka’s Archaeology Department to bring Mannaar under its Anuradhapura circle is a major conspiracy to culturally delink Mannaar from Jaffna and to alienate the Tamils of the district, social activists of the north said.
Mannaar is also the closest landmass to Tamil Nadu. Culturally linking it with Anuradhapura is a significant move of structural genocide, they pointed out.
In the last few decades, whatever archaeological finds were discovered in the Mannaar district were taken to Anuradhapura, and thereafter Eezham Tamils never get a chance to see their heritage in their land. Significant finds related to the heritage of Eezham Tamils usually go ‘missing’.
The genocidal Sinhala Army and the Archaeology Department of the Sinhala state working in tandem has been pointed out by many in recent times.
Many things happen in the island due to genocidal Sri Lanka’s ability to ‘purchase’ politicians, bureaucrats, intelligence officials, media persons and academics in India, including in Tamil Nadu, and due to the inability in Tamil Nadu to bring in the right kind of public pressure to squeeze out righteous results from the corrupt lot in India collaborating with Colombo, political observers in Chennai said.
Tamil Nadu Muslims mobilised a demonstration in front of genocidal Sri Lanka’s diplomatic mission in Chennai protesting the demolition of a mosque at Dambulla.
A Tamil-Saiva temple complex of key importance in the country of Eezham Tamils is neither of ‘Dravidian’ interest, nor of Marxist interest, and nor of Brahmanical Hindutva interest, commented Saiva religious circles in Jaffna.
Meanwhile, Prof John Carswell, who excavated the Maanthai archaeological site where Thirukkeatheescaram is located is said to be shortly bringing out a monograph on Maanthai, co-edited by Sinhala archaeologist Siran Deraniyagala, after 28 years of the excavations.
Prof Carswell recently went on record saying that Maanthai “was never the prerogative of any ethnic or religious group.”
“It was a city built on a collaboration of commercial and political interests, coming from east and west, north and south,” Carswell said, adding that ancient cities like Maanthai were “windows on a large, complex, and above all ‘dynamic’ system.”
His ‘cosmopolitan’ projection of Maanthai may be in tune with those who try to rediscover the unity of the island through Colombo-centric Cosmopolitanism and with those powers and corporates that invest more and more towards the same. But it doesn’t serve the people of the land whose productive capacity generated and sustained civilisation at Maanthai and who now face structural genocide by a state that habitually misinterprets history and archaeology, commented Eezham Tamil academic circles in the UK that had listened to Carswell’s brief video speech at a recent book release function in London.
TN
