By Rohana R. Wasala

Professor Michael K. Jerryson of Youngstown State University, Ohio, USA,  testified on the subject of ‘Human Rights Concerns in Sri Lanka’ before the ‘Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, House Committee on Foreign Affairs (of the U.S. House of Representatives) on June 20, 2018. While delivering his statement, Jerryson submitted a written testimony into the record. He thanked Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Bass, and other Members of the Committee  for ‘addressing a very important issue facing Sri Lanka, which is also a larger issue of peace and stability for South and South Asia today’.

The witness described himself as ‘a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University’ who had ‘worked on Buddhism and violence for over 20 years’ from 1998 until then (2018). He claimed that he had travelled, and done his fieldwork, in Asia. His work involved ‘living and interviewing Buddhist civilians and monks involved in Buddhist-supported violence’ (!). Then he mentioned a list of his then recent publications including his ‘Mongolian Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of the Sangha (Silk Worm, 2008)……….., and ‘Violence and the world’s Religious Traditions (Oxford, 2016).

Jerryson explained that his ‘position’ as a scholar of religion was ‘not to judge a religion or its adherents, but rather to illuminate the ways in which religious values motivate or influence people and social patterns’. He said that, in his work, he ‘found that religion is one of the most undervalued and misunderstood causes for violence and for reconciliation in the contemporary world’. Moving towards his central topic, he identified ‘strong pervasive identifications’ as the basic cause of the current problems in Sri Lanka. Jerryson asserted that for many Sri Lankan Buddhists ‘a true Sri Lankan is a Sinhala Buddhist’.  He arbitrarily concluded that this was ‘a powerful normative influence throughout Sri Lanka’, and that the same social conformity inducing Buddhist influence was found within the larger South and Southeast Asian societies at present. So he avers that ‘the change necessary in Sri Lanka……… requires a systemic shift in the way Sri Lankans identify themselves and their concept of the nation (and, concurrently, patriotism)’. He told the Committee that, while drawing on the information that he gathered from scholars, journalists and NGO workers, he expressed his own (independent) views in his testimony.  

I (RRW) was surprised to find that he mentions my name in a footnote with an extract from an article of mine published in the online news forum Lankaweb/June 17, 2018, that he uses as an example of what he alleges to be ‘Buddhist propaganda’ (something that I would have confidently challenged, had I known it at that time); but I came across Jerryson’s statement quite by chance only a couple of months ago while scouring the internet for any information about a possible letup in the strong bias against Sri Lanka that still persists in Western countries for no other reason than successfully overcoming mindless separatist terrorism in 2009 against their domestic votebank based unholy expectations. 

The footnote number 8 pertains to the following paragraph in the section of the written testimony under the heading ‘The power of Buddhist monks’:

‘The power behind Buddhist propaganda are Sri Lankan Buddhist monks. The more public and vocal conservative monks have stroked (sic) Sinhala Buddhist fears and angers of minority and marginalized identities. This behavior is distinctly modern. Prior to British colonialism (1815 1948), Buddhist monks legitimated Sri Lankan governments; however, they did not directly participate in any political system. This historic role explains the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk’s  symbol as society’s moral foundation. When Buddhist monks publicly speak, they do so not only as religious voices, but also as political moral authorities.’

The footnote (8) is as follows:

‘A recent editorial by Rohana R. Wasala exemplifies this. Rohana writes, Buddhist monks feel compelled to respond to what they perceive as aggressive acts by non-Buddhist religious extremists that adversely affect the rights of the exceptionally tolerant, accommodative Buddhists. Anti-Buddhist propaganda with an academic veneer – III,” LankaWeb, June 11, 2018,…….’

The word ‘this’ at the end of the first sentence here refers to what is said in the paragraph above, beginning ‘The power behind……’ quoted from Jerryson’s attestation. He says there  that Sri Lankan Buddhist monks, through their ‘Buddhist propaganda’, spread fears among Buddhists while at the same time infuriating ‘minority and marginalized identities’. But he argues that this behaviour of the monks is a new development. Jerryson takes a sweeping view of the Buddhist monks’ relationship with the Lankan state before the period of British colonial rule (1815-1948) as one of ‘legitimating’ governments without participating in any political systems. So the alleged new element in Sri Lankan Buddhist monk’s conduct is that they have started interfering in politics fomenting social unrest to the detriment of so-called minorities and marginalised groups. (This implicit allegation is totally false.) He refers to my Lankaweb article cited above, which he erroneously calls ‘an editorial’ (implying misleadingly that I was the Editor of Lankaweb that he probably saw as a pro-Buddhist website carrying out ‘Buddhist propaganda’). The truth about me is that I am not a professional journalist. I can’t be called a freelancer either, for I don’t write for money. It’s only a post-retirement hobby for me. I write about these things purely  because I love my Motherland. Jerryson has arbitrarily let me be taken for the Editor of Lankaweb. I don’t know why he did that. Further, I abandoned religion at age 15 or 16, when I realised that Buddhism is not a religion at all, except in a cultural sense. I may be called a cultural Buddhist. I don’t subscribe to any particular political or economic ideology. But I believe that the secular democratic system of government is most compatible with Buddhist moral and ethical values. 

I must say at this point that everything that Jerryson maintains against Buddhist monks is false. He relies almost exclusively on questionable sources/biased non-Buddhist informants, while taking casual remarks made by persons like Piyadassi Thera and Dilanthe Vithanage who are highly knowledgeable about the issue involving Buddhist monks vs minority religious extremists as serious but false assertions. It is incredible that a professor who claimed to have done over twenty years’ research about the ridiculously implausible subject of ‘Buddhism and violence’ occurring in many Buddhist countries including Sri Lanka, showed so little knowledge of Buddhism, its history in Sri Lanka, and its vital importance for the majority Buddhist Sri Lanka. Shouldn’t the Sinhalese Buddhist community also enjoy the basic human right of freedom of religion. Buddhism co-exists with any other religion provided that extremist adherents of  other religions do not tread on Buddhists’ toes. 

  Jerryson mentions in his affidavit that, in 2013, he participated in a panel discussion with A.R.M. Imtiaz at the Association for Asian Studies (I found that this is a Michigan/USA based academic NGO, and that Imtiaz, a researcher with an impressive array of academic qualifications acquired in the West, had been teaching in the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, but is currently, in 2025, serving as a professor at Delaware Valley University, Pennsylvania, USA). At that discussion, Imtiaz read a paper on ‘the persecution of Sri Lankan Muslims in the post-civil war era’, where he argued that ‘the Sri Lankan flag serves as a harbinger for the Sri Lankan ethno-religious strife throughout the last four decades’ (that is, since 1972, the year that Sri Lanka declared itself an independent sovereign republic completely free from British colonial influence, an epoch making event for all Sri Lankans). ‘In his conference presentation, Imtiyaz explained that the Sinhala Buddhists first turned their sword” to the Sri Lankan Tamils during the 26-year civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, 1983-2009). After the Sinhala Buddhist government conquered the last strongholds of the LTTE, they turned their sword” to the next largest minority in their country: the Sri Lankan Muslims.1 For the last five years,….’ 

I quoted this piece of Imtiaz’s academic brilliance to prove that Jerryson’s testimony about alleged Buddhist propaganda and violence against ‘minority and marginalised identifications’ (there has never been any such problem in Sri Lanka) was not worthy of that august body in America, which claims to the only superpower in the world. Imtiaz’s argument was not original, though probably he didn’t tell Jerryson about it. ‘The lion turning its sword menacingly towards Tamils and Muslims’ meme  was popularly known in Sri Lanka before 2013. When an ordinary Muslim articulated this argument to his Sinhalese friend, the latter retorted: ‘Then let’s ask the government to reverse the picture of the lion, but then, won’t you grumble, saying that the lion is turning its tail-raised backside to Tamils and Muslims?’ 

Incidentally, before I conclude, let me point out a very real form of discrimination or even harassment that the majority Sinhala speakers were or probably still are being subjected to by the powers that be, due to anti- Sinhalese Buddhist prejudice (apparently repeated in Jerryson’s own thesis): the appointment of a local office to keep tabs on Sinhala language FB content during the Yahapalanaya of 2015-2019. The Island newspaper published (Thursday, May 3, 2018) an article by me criticizing this anomaly under the title ‘A local office to monitor FB content: Is it a wise move?’

Following this, I wrote a long article about ‘Anti-Buddhist propaganda with an academic veneer’, which was carried in the online Lankaweb in three installments I, II, and III, respectively on June 5, 8, and 11, 2018. It was prompted by the writing of a similarly ill informed Swedish intellectual

mentioned in the opening paragraph of my ‘Anti-Buddhist propaganda with an academic veneer – I’ published on June 5, 2018, thus:

‘A recent  article titled ‘Why Violent Buddhist Extremists Are Targeting Muslims in Sri Lanka’ by Andreas Johansson of Lund University in Sweden available at ………… is a classic example of the relentless anti-Buddhist propaganda carried on by the Western and allied media outlets for a long time now. Johansson’s inexplicable antipathy towards the Sinhalese Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka is clearly reflected in both the title and the opening paragraph ……’ 

It’s as if Michael K. Jerryson of Youngstown State University, USA, responded to my reply to Andreas Johanson of Lund University in Sweden with a better example of anti-Buddhist propaganda with an academic veneer. 

Whatever social unrest took place in the past in the field of interreligious relations in Sri Lanka, it was not initiated by Buddhists; it was always triggered by non-Buddhist extremists bent on proselytising and on encroaching on the traditional Buddhist religious space. The Tamil Hindu minority faces the same threat from those extremists, who promote separatism and proselytisation, pampered and manipulated by the global geopolitical puppet masters in the Indo-Pacific Ocean region where Sri Lanka is located at such a geostrategically sensitive point. It goes without saying that unity between the religiously nonrigid Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the similarly religiously nonrigid Tamil Hindu minority joined by the non extremist majority of mainstream Christian and Muslim communities is the eminently feasible ideal solution to Sri Lanka’s existing problems, if only our pan-Sri Lankan national political leaders develop the collective will to do so without  unnecessarily succumbing to the temporary regional and global hegemonies that try to exploit our internal divisions and rivalries to their advantage and to our detriment.