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# We Can No Longer Afford to Hate Each Other
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/we-can-no-longer-afford-to-hate-each-other/
- Published: 2026-08-22T04:29:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-22T04:29:16.000Z
- Author: Aruliniyan Mahalingam
- Tags: Editorial, August 2026

In one small town, in one month, two Tamil-speaking minority communities, both of which have endured discrimination, insecurity and the pressures of majoritarian politics, managed to hurt each other twice.

We can no longer afford this.

When nine young Muslim women were prevented from beginning work at Kalmunai North Base Hospital this month because of a dispute over their headscarves, the Ministry of Health responded in what has become an increasingly familiar NPP fashion: it managed the immediate problem without resolving the underlying one. It did not investigate whether the order was lawful. It did not test the decision against any circular governing religious attire in the public service. Instead, it transferred the nine women to Ashraff Memorial Hospital, a few minutes down the road.

The state looked at a dispute between a Tamil administrator and Muslim employees inside a public institution and chose the most expedient way out: move the Muslim women to a hospital identified with the Muslim community. Nothing was resolved. No principle established, no question of rights answered, no precedent clarified for the next Tamil administrator, the next Muslim employee or the next public institution confronted with the same dispute.

Azath Salley, the former governor, stated the obvious in an open letter to the health minister: transferring the workers does not solve the problem, it merely moves it from one institution to another. He is right, and it is worse than that. It sets a precedent — that when two Tamil-speaking communities come into conflict, the answer is not to establish what is right, but to separate them.

We already know where that road ends, because we built it ourselves.

## **What actually happened**

The nine women, newly appointed health assistants, most of them entering government service for the first time, were told on Aug. 10 to remove their hijabs before beginning their shifts at Kalmunai North Base Hospital. Their lawyer filed five complaints with the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka on Aug. 13, while preparations began for a fundamental-rights petition to the Supreme Court.

The hospital's position is that this is simply a matter of uniform policy: the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of ethnicity, religion, caste or language. The deputy health minister has broadly echoed that framing, noting that among the nearly 300 professions in the health sector, some have prescribed uniforms while others do not. The foreign minister, after meeting Muslim civil-society representatives, offered a rather different interpretation: that there is no legal barrier preventing health workers from dressing in a manner that preserves their religious identity within the existing legal framework. Two ministers of the same government, two readings of the same dispute.

There is a fair argument on the hospital’s side. Hospitals need clear rules about clothing, particularly when staff are working close to patients. But other countries have dealt with this without asking Muslim women to give up the headscarf. In Britain, Canada and Gulf countries, hospitals use fitted headscarves that are treated as part of the uniform and washed accordingly. Kalmunai could have found a similar solution. Instead, the women were transferred.

Hardly a month earlier, another story unfolded in the same town.

During this year's Kataragama Pada Yatra, a stray dog attached itself to the pilgrims walking south to Kataragama and would not leave. They named him Subramani and fed him biscuits, rice and milk. Videos of the animal padding alongside the procession for hundreds of kilometres moved a great many people.

In Kalmunai, a young Muslim man was filmed kicking the dog. He was widely condemned, including by Muslim religious leaders. He was arrested, apologised and was released on bail. That should have been the end of it, and in a healthier country it would have been.

Instead, the argument spilled onto social media, where abuse came from both sides. Then it took a far more serious turn. Anojan, a Sri Lankan Tamil migrant worker from Kalmunai, was convicted by the Criminal Court in Al-Ahsa in Saudi Arabia over a comment deemed insulting to the Prophet. According to a Foreign Ministry consular letter dated July 31, and to accounts relayed by his family, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, calculated from the date of his initial detention, fined three million riyals and ordered to forfeit the device used. The government has since sought a royal pardon.

Muslims were reportedly among those who brought his comments to the attention of the Saudi authorities. Muslims have also been among the loudest in appealing for mercy.

The man who kicked Subramani was arrested and released on bail. Anojan faces five years away from his family and a fine of a magnitude he could scarcely hope to pay. And Subramani, the stray that somehow became the spiritual centre of this entire quarrel, has simply walked on.

That is what communal hatred does. It rarely lands on the people who trade in it.

## **Who benefited**

Who gained when some 75,000 Muslims were driven from the North by the LTTE leadership in October 1990, in an operation that emptied the province of its entire Muslim population in a matter of days? Certainly not the Tamils. Who gained on the night of Aug. 3, 1990, when LTTE cadres opened fire on worshippers at evening prayer inside the Meera Jumma Mosque in Kattankudy and the Hussainiyya Mosque in Manchanthoduwai, killing more than 140 men and boys? Certainly not the Tamils.

We lost natural allies. We handed the world acts of injustice committed in the name of the Tamil struggle, including an expulsion that bore all the marks of ethnic cleansing. In claiming to fight injustice, we inflicted grave injustices on another minority.

And who gained on Aug. 12, 1990, when Muslim home guards, armed, paid and organised by the Sri Lankan state, forced their way into the Sinthayaathirai Pillaiyar Kovil and the Ramakrishna Mission Tamil Vidyalayam at Veeramunai, where Tamil families from the surrounding villages had taken shelter, and killed fifty-five of them, women and children among them? More than two hundred people were killed or disappeared in Veeramunai and the villages around it that season, and more than two thousand homes were destroyed, as University Teachers for Human Rights and NESOHR documented at the time. Who gained when Tamil families were forcibly driven from villages they regarded as their ancestral homes, and those places became predominantly or exclusively Muslim, leaving behind disputes over land, memory and demography that persist to this day?

Certainly not the Muslims. Ordinary Muslims gained no more from atrocities committed in their name than ordinary Tamils gained from the expulsion of Muslims from the North.

## **The arithmetic**

The 2024 census puts Sri Lankan Tamils at 12.3 percent of this country, Malaiyaga Tamils at 2.8 percent, and Moors at 10.5 percent. Together, that is 25.6 percent. One in four people on this island belongs to a Tamil-speaking community.

The figure is not permanent, and that is part of the point. The Malaiyaga share has fallen from 4.1 percent in 2012, through emigration and through changes in how people declare themselves. A bloc that is not used tends, over time, to stop being a bloc.

A quarter of a country is not a minority anybody can afford to overlook. It is a bloc that has to be counted before a constitution is drafted, a budget priced, or a decision taken about which language a government form is printed in.

That quarter has been available to us, on paper, at every election since independence. Apart from a few brief and grudging arrangements, we have almost never collected it.

Instead, the energy went sideways. Tamil politicians too often treated Muslim aspirations as an obstruction to be managed rather than a legitimate political claim to be reckoned with. Muslim politicians, in turn, often discovered that more could be extracted from Colombo by maintaining a visible distance from Tamil demands than by standing alongside them. And the men with guns on both sides settled the argument in the way men with guns settle arguments.

None of that changed the arithmetic. It only ensured nobody in Colombo ever had to confront it.

Every Kalmunai quarrel performs the same operation. It takes one bloc and converts it into two clients. Seventy years of separate maximalism have delivered neither Tamil Eelam nor secure Muslim autonomy. What they have delivered instead is the Prevention of Terrorism Act — used against Tamil youth in the Vanni and against Muslim traders in Kattankudy with precisely equal enthusiasm.

## **Others have done this, and faster than we are**

France and Germany fought three wars in seventy-five years and killed one another in numbers we cannot conceive of. Eighteen years after the last of those wars ended, Adenauer and de Gaulle signed the Élysée Treaty. It committed the two states to teach each other's language, and it created a Franco-German Youth Office which has since put more than ten million young people through some 400,000 exchange programmes. In the years immediately after 1945, French opinion of Germany was close to irrecoverable; polling from the period found trust in the German neighbour confined to a small minority. By 2012, the Pew Research Center found that 84 percent of the French viewed Germany favourably and 80 percent of Germans viewed France favourably.

And in 2003, at a joint youth parliament in Berlin, five hundred French and German schoolchildren proposed that the two countries write a single history textbook together. Their heads of government agreed on the spot. Histoire/Geschichte has been in classrooms since 2006, telling both nations the same story about what they did to each other.

Rwanda is closer to our case than Europe is. Hutu and Tutsi speak the same language, practise the same religion, share the same customs, live in the same villages and marry into one another's families. The distinctions between them were older than colonialism, but it was colonial rule that hardened them into something close to race, wrote them onto identity cards and made them a basis for governing.

After 1994, twelve thousand community courts heard close to two million cases. But note the flaw, because it is the one we would repeat: the gacaca courts were forbidden from examining crimes committed by the victorious side, and so to a great many Hutu they looked like victors' justice rather than justice. Any Tamil–Muslim truth process that opens the Kattankudy file without opening the Veeramunai file on the same morning will be read, correctly, as a weapon.

And then there is Northern Ireland, which is the warning. Twenty-eight years after the Good Friday Agreement, Catholics and Protestants, same island, same language, indistinguishable on the street, still live in parallel, still school their children separately, still divided by peace walls. Many of those walls are still standing, and some of them went up after the agreement rather than before it.

Belfast at least had the honesty to build walls. In Kalmunai we built duplicate institutions. Two divisional secretariats for one town, the Tamil one created in 1989 and still, thirty-seven years later, without the land and financial powers a Cabinet promised it in 1993, despite three hundred official letters. Two base hospitals. Two of everything, in a municipality you can cross in fifteen minutes.

## **What must happen**

Goodwill will not repair this. Five things can be done within a year.

**One**. The Ministry of Public Administration should issue a single, unambiguous national circular governing religious head coverings in the public service. It should do so within weeks, not months. The state has attempted this ground once before and made a mess of it: Public Administration Circular 13/2019, issued in the anxious weeks after the Easter attacks, prescribed the saree and osari for female public servants, was found by the Human Rights Commission to be arbitrary and in violation of the Constitution, and was suspended within days. A Muslim woman entering government service should not have to discover her rights according to the interpretation of whichever administrator happens to be sitting behind the desk.

**Two.** Rescind the transfers. The nine women should be allowed to return to Kalmunai North Base Hospital. Whatever policy ultimately emerges, the precedent that intercommunal friction can be resolved by sorting public servants along communal lines must not be allowed to remain in a Sri Lankan personnel file.

**Three.** Resolve the Kalmunai administrative question. The government should finally settle the decades-old dispute over the Kalmunai Tamil Divisional Secretariat, including the land and financial powers at the heart of the controversy. A grievance left unresolved for more than three decades does not become less dangerous with age; it becomes easier for politicians on both sides to exploit.

**Four.** Begin a joint history project, drawing on the Franco-German experience. Tamil and Muslim historians should sit at the same table and produce a shared account of the years in which our communities turned against one another. Put both communities' calendars of grief into the same volume: the expulsions, massacres, disappearances, displacement and dispossession. Publish it in Tamil. Put it in the hands of students across the North and East. It would cost comparatively little, and may prove more durable than a hundred reconciliation conferences.

**Five.** Tamil political parties and Northern local authorities should issue an institutional statement of regret for the expulsion of Northern Muslims, accompanied by a transparent public accounting of resettlement, restitution and unresolved property claims. Anton Balasingham offered an apology to the Muslim people at Kilinochchi in 2002, after talks with the SLMC leader Rauff Hakeem, and the movement described the expulsion as a political blunder. In 2015, M.A. Sumanthiran proposed that the Northern Provincial Council pass a resolution of regret. It was never done. Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Kilinochchi. Many of the people who made that history are dead or dispersed. There is no point waiting for somebody from the past to return and apologise on our behalf. The obligation has fallen to the living — which is to say, to us.

I write this first to my own community, because that is where my obligation begins. But the arithmetic belongs to both of us. One in four people on this island speaks Tamil, and nothing has ever obliged us to arrive in Colombo as two supplicants rather than one bloc. We chose that, and we have gone on paying for the choice — in the North, in Veeramunai, and this month in a hospital in Kalmunai.