By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

Sri Lanka’s racism problem is not a relic of the past; it is a live political and social issue that keeps resurfacing in public debate, online spaces, and institutional practice. The NPP government has publicly pledged to defeat political racism, but the persistence of Islamophobia, communal deflection, and social-media hate show of political power, shows how deeply entrenched the problem remains. Sri Lanka’s racism problem is not fading with the change of government. It is mutating, adapting, and finding new life in social media feeds, opportunistic political commentary, and the cowardly silence of institutions that should know better.

The country’s political history has long been shaped by ethnic outbidding, communal fear, and the strategic use of identity to mobilize support, and those habits do not disappear simply because a new administration takes office. The NPP’s anti-racist commitment matters because it directly challenges that older pattern.  After years in which communal fear was normalized, weaponized, and rewarded, a government that says there is “no space for racism” is at least speaking the language of principle. But principle, by itself, is not power. And power is exactly what racist forces in Sri Lanka still understand. The challenge is larger than a cabinet statement or party pledge. Racism and Islamophobia may not be reflecting politically in the highest echelons of political establishment, but they are still embedded in institutions, popular discourse, and digital platforms, where they are often normalized as opinion or “patriotism” rather than recognized as harm.

The latest public controversies show how quickly the country slides back into its oldest habit: racializing everything. Recent case was when Sri Lankan activist Sameera Mahboobdeen joined the Global Sumud Flotilla mission, as part of an international humanitarian effort to deliver aid to Gaza, and Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry later said it was seeking consular access after the flotilla was intercepted.

Sameera Mahboobdeen’s participation in the Global Sumud Flotilla should have been reported as an act of humanitarian solidarity. The event should have been discussed for what it was — a humanitarian and political act connected to Gaza and international solidarity. Yet in online commentary, much of the coverage and online commentary reduced it to a spectacle of suspicion, demonisation of Sameera, distortion, and abuse. Yet, such stories get pulled into wider ideological battles, including anti-Muslim hostility. Rather than treating her as a citizen taking part in a lawful aid mission, hostile voices and weak media framing helped recast her courage as provocation, and in some spaces even as something dangerous or illegitimate.

The moment was easy prey for anti-Muslim insinuation, online abuse, and the tired, toxic recycling of “loyalty” questions that Sri Lankan Muslims have been forced to endure for years. In a healthy public sphere, a citizen’s political or humanitarian activism would not become an excuse for communal suspicion. In Sri Lanka, too often, it does. This is not accidental bias; it is a pattern in which sections of the media, through omission, tone, and selective emphasis, become enablers of anti-Muslim sentiment instead of challengers of it. The result is a public sphere where prejudice is not only circulated by fringe actors but normalised through mainstream repetition, especially when journalism fails to distinguish reporting from communal insinuation.

And this is where the role of external propaganda matters. Israeli hasbara-style public diplomacy does not need to convince every Sri Lankan directly to be effective; it only needs to seed a narrative through selected journalists, curated study tours, and privileged access, after which that framing is carried into local media and social platforms. Hasbara operates less through overt persuasion than through narrative management. It relies on selecting sympathetic voices, providing curated access, packaging complex political realities into emotionally charged talking points, and encouraging those frames to circulate through journalists, influencers, and social-media users who repeat them without scrutiny.

In Sri Lanka’s already polarised information environment, such messaging easily spills into Sinhala social media as suspicion toward Muslims, especially when support for Palestine is recoded as extremism, disloyalty, or foreign influence. What begins as diplomatic outreach abroad therefore ends up deepening communal hatred at home, not necessarily by explicit instruction, but through repetition, simplification, and the quiet transfer of prejudiced frames into everyday political conversation. It blurs Gaza solidarity with extremism, cast Muslims as suspect, and turn humanitarian activism into a target for ridicule or hostility. The danger is not only propaganda itself, but the way propaganda merges with pre-existing Islamophobia, making prejudice appear like common sense rather than manufactured hostility.

That tactic is also visible when cases involving religious authority, sexual abuse, or public morality are discussed. In the Hemarathne Thero matter, the only morally serious position is that allegations involving a child must be handled through due process, evidence, and child protection. Full stop. Yet Sri Lankan public discourse rarely stays serious for long. A criminal allegation is quickly converted into a culture-war weapon. The conversation is no longer about the child, the evidence, or the law. It becomes about which side can shout loudest, which community can be defended most aggressively, and which opponent can be smeared more efficiently. That is not justice. That is theatre.

That environment encourages whataboutism: social media focus on raising questions like how about ‘those’ child abuse cases by Christian priests and Moulavis? How about Muslims and their religion? As hate monk Gnanasara said it is only a ‘simple matter’ and happens in other religious settings too. Thus, the attention shifts away from the actual issue and toward a different controversy that can be used to deflect scrutiny or inflame communal sentiment. This is where the country’s racism reveals itself most clearly: not only in open hate, but in selective outrage. Not only in the language of abuse, but in the language of deflection. The moment a racist current is challenged, the response is often whataboutism — a scramble to drag in some other scandal, some other identity, some other controversy, so that the original prejudice can hide behind the noise. The public is not invited to think; it is invited to point fingers.

Social media has made the situation worse, not because it created hatred from nothing, but because it has given racist actors a faster, cheaper, and more theatrical way to circulate it. A lie can now travel as community defence. An insult can masquerade as analysis. A conspiracy can look like courage. The algorithm rewards the loudest prejudice, and in Sri Lanka that prejudice is still overwhelmingly communal. Muslims are too often cast as a threat, a suspect category, or a convenient object of collective irritation. That is not accidental. It is the product of years of conditioning, repeated enough that many now mistake it for ordinary political speech. Besides, in Sri Lanka digital hate does not stay online; it spills into street-level prejudice, public pressure, and the way institutions respond to minority grievances. When hate becomes normalised in the feed, it becomes easier to justify exclusion in everyday life.

Sri Lanka’s traditional politics was built around political racism. Communal fear has long been used as a shortcut to power. Racism has not just been tolerated by major parties; it has often been one of the scaffolds holding up the political order. Islamophobia, in particular, became grotesquely normal after the Rajapaksa years, when suspicion of Muslims was allowed to move from the fringe into the mainstream. Once that happens, prejudice no longer needs to announce itself. It becomes background noise. It becomes common sense. It turns into Chinese whispers and becomes the kind of thing people say “everyone knows” even when it is false, vicious, or plainly racist.

The deeper issue is that racism is not only expressed by extremist voices; it is sustained when institutions fail to consistently challenge it. Courts, schools, political offices, media organisations, and administrative bodies all shape whether prejudice is treated as unacceptable or simply routine. If anti-Muslim narratives are repeatedly tolerated, excused, or ignored, they become part of the social common sense rather than a clearly rejected form of discrimination. Racism in Sri Lanka survives because it is often given the disguise of patriotism, cultural concern, or public morality. Strip away the disguise, and what remains is the same old prejudice.

Sri Lanka can also no longer afford a culture in which racist crimes are treated as background noise or allowed to drift endlessly without resolution. Impunity is one of the main reasons racism survives: when hate speech, intimidation, and communal targeting are not investigated promptly and punished decisively, they signal that such conduct is tolerable. The state must therefore ensure that investigations into racist crimes are pursued quickly, transparently, and without political interference, so that victims see justice done and perpetrators understand that prejudice carries real consequences. Sri Lanka cannot keep asking its minorities to endure suspicion, its citizens to mistake prejudice for patriotism, and its institutions to look away while hate is repackaged as duty. Terrible Easter attack was one example. A society that allows fear to speak in the language of nationhood will eventually lose both its conscience and its credibility. What is needed now is not another slogan, but the courage to protect dignity, to call hate by its name, and to build a country where no community has to live under the shadow of being blamed for the nation’s anxieties

That is why the NPP’s stance is important: The NPP’s anti-racist commitment matters. It signals an intent to push back against racism at the level of state legitimacy, not only at the level of public messaging. Yet, the NPP cannot be judged only by its declarations. It must go further than symbolism. It must be judged by whether racist public discourse is confronted when it appears, whether officials name Islamophobia without hesitation, and whether institutions stop treating hate as merely another opinion in the marketplace of ideas. It must begin to tackle institutionally entrenched Sinhala supremacism and stop Media sensationalisation of hate politics, dressed up as national concern. It must be aware of Israeli Hasbara tactics, including selective media access, curated narratives, and digital amplification that can feed local prejudice. And it must act against hate speech while safeguarding freedom of speech, because the answer to racism is not censorship of dissent, but the firm rejection of incitement, dehumanisation, and communal targeting.

That requires institutions to change, not merely slogans. Media must stop recycling communal frames as sensational content. Education must teach civic equality and critical media literacy, not inherited prejudice. Policing must respond to hate speech and threats consistently, not selectively. Public administration must refuse to mirror the biases of the loudest crowd. Otherwise, the same old communal habits will keep returning under new labels, with new messengers, and with the same consequences.

Yes! Sri Lanka now needs sustained enforcement, public education, and responsible digital governance so that anti-racism becomes more than a slogan. It must ensure that hate is not camouflaged as national concern, and that every institution — from the newsroom to the classroom, from the police station to the ministry — is part of the solution rather than an accomplice to the problem. Besides, Sri Lanka has missed too many historic opportunities to nurture a genuine sense of Lankan-ness that embraces all communities as equal stakeholders in the nation. It should not miss this one. With an NPP government now in power and publicly committed to building an inclusive Sri Lanka and ending racist politics, there is a rare chance to move beyond the old patterns of division, suspicion, and communal opportunism. That opportunity must be seized not with rhetoric alone, but through consistent action that affirms equality, protects minorities, and makes shared citizenship feel real in everyday life.