By Vishwamithra –

“Religion is for man and not man for religion.” ~ B. R. Ambedkar

Does Galagoda Atte Gnanasara Thera deserve what the law has finally imposed upon him?

The answer is yes.

Not because imprisonment should ever become an occasion for celebration, nor because the fall of a controversial public figure should provide entertainment for his opponents. Prison is a serious exercise of state power and should always be regarded as such.

 

The more important question is different.

What happens to a republic when religious identity begins to confer political power, social intimidation and an expectation of exemption from the ordinary consequences of law?

For someone born into a Buddhist cultural environment but whose outlook has become essentially secular, the issue requires no theological judgment. There is no need to determine whether Gnanasara Thero is a “good Buddhist” or a “bad Buddhist.”

That is almost beside the point.

The real question is whether a modern republic can permit religious status—Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian or otherwise—to alter the relationship between the citizen and the law. Gnanasara matters, therefore, not merely as an individual. He matters as a phenomenon.

The Man Is Less Important Than the Phenomenon

Sri Lanka has spent decades allowing religion, ethnicity and politics to invade one another’s territory. The consequences have hardly been glorious. The country has experienced ethnic conflict, communal suspicion, riots, civil war and recurring political campaigns in which minorities have been portrayed as demographic, cultural, economic or religious threats.

Different communities and political actors have participated in that history at different times. No community possesses a monopoly upon prejudice.

But Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian politics occupies a particular position for an obvious reason: it operates from within the country’s majority community and consequently possesses access to political leverage unavailable to minorities.

Gnanasara Thera understood that landscape remarkably well.

His public significance did not arise principally from theological scholarship. It arose from his ability to occupy that combustible territory where religion, Sinhala identity, political grievance and fear of minorities intersected.

Reducing the discussion to whether one monk behaved badly therefore misses the larger point. The more important question is why Sri Lankan society allowed such behavior to acquire political significance in the first place.

The Politics of Permanent Insecurity

There is something intellectually curious about a majority behaving permanently as though it were a besieged minority. Sri Lanka is a country in which Buddhism enjoys extraordinary cultural and constitutional standing. Buddhist festivals shape and decorate the national calendar. Temples form part of the physical and cultural landscape. Political leaders routinely seek the blessings of monks. The Constitution itself accords Buddhism the “foremost place.”

Yet periodically the country is warned that Buddhism is endangered.

Endangered by Muslims. Endangered by Christians. Endangered by conversions. Endangered by birth rates. Endangered by foreign conspiracies. Sometimes, it appears, endangered by almost everyone except Buddhists themselves.

This politics of permanent insecurity is enormously useful. Fear is politically productive. Create an enemy and solidarity becomes easier. Create a sufficiently frightening enemy and awkward questions about corruption, inequality, incompetence and governance can temporarily be pushed aside.

This is hardly a uniquely Sri Lankan invention. History is crowded with political movements that discovered how easily economic and social anxiety could be redirected towards another race, religion or tribe. The vocabulary changes. The technique survives.

Then There Is the Law

Gnanasara Thera’s present incarceration arises from his 2018 contempt-of-court conviction following his conduct at the Homagama Magistrate’s Court during proceedings concerning the disappearance of journalist Prageeth Ekneligoda. He received an effective six-year term of rigorous imprisonment.

President Maithripala Sirisena pardoned him in May 2019 after he had served only part of that sentence. In September 2026, the Supreme Court invalidated that pardon, and the Court of Appeal subsequently ordered that the remainder of the sentence be enforced.

There have been other convictions as well, including cases concerning inflammatory remarks about Islam. Those facts matter. But another question matters even more.

Why did a President of the Republic consider this particular prisoner deserving of presidential intervention? That question takes the argument beyond Gnanasara. It leads directly into the psychology of Sri Lankan political power.

The Politician and the Monk

For decades, Sri Lankan politicians have performed an elaborate ritual before the Buddhist clergy. They visit temples, kneel before monks, offer atapirikara, receive blessings before elections and ensure that cameras record the encounter. Some then return to Colombo and practice a form of politics bearing remarkably little resemblance to any recognizable moral philosophy.

The transaction can benefit both parti s. The politician acquires religious legitimacy. The politically active monk acquires proximity to secular power. That is where matters become dangerous.

The problem is not that monks hold political opinions. They are citizens. They may think about taxation, constitutions, foreign policy, education or anything else.

The difficulty begins when religious status itself becomes political currency. At that point, disagreement with a monk can conveniently be portrayed as an insult to Buddhism. Questioning clerical intervention becomes hostility towards religion. And enforcing the ordinary law against a monk can be transformed into alleged persecution.

That is not religious freedom. It is political leverage derived from religious identity.

The Pardon Was More Revealing Than the Offence

The 2019 presidential pardon may therefore tell us more about Sri Lanka than Gnanasara’s original conduct. One individual can behave irresponsibly. Institutions are supposed to contain individual excess. But when political power intervenes after the judiciary has acted, the problem ceases to concern merely one individual. It becomes institutional.

The message transmitted to the public is dangerous: some identities may carry greater political weight than others. Consider the obvious counterfactual. Had the person convicted of contempt been an obscure citizen possessing neither religious standing nor an organized political constituency, would presidential mercy have arrived with equal enthusiasm?

The question almost answers itself.

This is why the invalidation of the pardon matters. Not because Gnanasara must suffer. Because institutions must matter more than personalities.

A functioning republic cannot operate according to a system in which one citizen enters prison through the front gate while another leaves through a political side door.

No Scripture Is Required

There is no need to invoke the Buddha to make the case against communal intimidation. No scripture is required to establish that a Muslim Sri Lankan possesses the same civic dignity as a Buddhist Sri Lankan. No theological doctrine is necessary to conclude that a Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and unbeliever must stand equally before the courts.

Reason is sufficient.

That is one of the great achievements of the secular state. Secularism does not require citizens to abandon religion. It does not demand hostility towards Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism or Islam. It demands something simultaneously simpler and more difficult:

The state must not have favorites among them.

A secular republic protects the Buddhist precisely because it protects the Muslim. It protects the believer because it protects the unbeliever. And it protects religion itself by refusing to allow any religion to become an unofficial department of political power.

A Robe Is Not an Argument

There remains an uncomfortable cultural reality. The saffron robe commands instinctive respect among millions of Sri Lankans. That respect has deep historical roots and enormous emotional force. But respect becomes dangerous when it disables judgment.

A robe is not evidence. A robe is not an argument. A robe cannot transform prejudice into patriotism. And a robe cannot convert unlawful conduct into religious service. None of these propositions should be controversial.

Yet in Sri Lanka they sometimes are. That alone tells us how thoroughly religious authority and political identity have become entangled.

Gnanasara Is Not the Real Question

Eventually Gnanasara Thero will complete his sentence. Sri Lanka will move on. Another controversy will occupy the headlines. But if the country concludes that the problem has therefore disappeared, nothing will have been learned.

Gnanasara did not single-handedly manufacture the social conditions that made him politically significant. Sri Lankan society did. Politicians who courted religious nationalism helped create them. Media institutions that discovered the commercial value of outrage helped amplify them.

Citizens persuaded that another community’s advancement represented their own community’s decline helped sustain them. And governments unwilling to establish a firm boundary between religious authority and secular power allowed the confusion to deepen.

So yes, Gnanasara deserves the consequences imposed upon him by law.

But imprisonment is the least interesting part of this story. The far more important question is whether Sri Lanka has finally become mature enough to distinguish religious freedom from religious privilege.

The first is indispensable to democracy. The second is corrosive of it. No monk should be punished because he is a monk. No monk should be protected because he is a monk. No Muslim should possess fewer rights because he is Muslim. No Buddhist should possess greater civic standing because he is Buddhist.

And no President should confuse religious popularity with entitlement to exceptional justice. That position is neither anti-Buddhist nor pro-Muslim. It is neither anti-religious nor anti-clerical. It is simply the elementary proposition upon which a modern republic must ultimately stand:

Before the law, take off the robe, remove the cross, put away the scripture and forget the surname.

What remains is the citizen.

And that should be enough.

*The Writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com