Sunday Punch 2

cal fast stunt. Thus scorned and shunned, he left. Neither did he turn up at the police station following day as promised. Ever since then he has gone missing. And the police say they have no clue as to where this burly black bear of bigotry may be hibernating to ward off the chills and fevers of a sparse remand cell.

Speaks volumes, doesn’t it, for the tracking skills of the Lankan police that they are unable to locate the whereabouts of this unmistakable, readily identifiable and notoriously well known figure within the small heartland of Lanka?

For the last five years, since he crawled out of the deadwood, this marauding monk who wears the sacred robe of the Buddha and seeks protection in it but does not expound the Buddha’s gospel of tolerance to all faiths and creeds and loving kindness and compassion to all beings on earth but beats his own drum of intolerance and hate has succeeded to become an international icon of religious hate. Buddhism’s Lankan Ayatollah.

The damage he has caused to Buddhism cannot be overestimated. The damage he has caused to the Sinhala people whose proudest boast for over two thousand years had been to trumpet that they were the custodians of Buddhism in its pristine form cannot be quantified. In the eyes of the world, the question arises: Is this the result of 2000 years of Buddhism in Lanka? And makes the world approach Buddhism with suspicious eye in the same manner Taliban made the world look Islam in the eye with a squint?

For two years the Rajapaksa regime granted him immunity to wage his campaign of racial hate which ultimately brought its own downfall in the 2015 presidential election. With the advent of Sirisena’s Yahapalana government Gnanasara was sent to Coventry and remained silent and comatose lacking state patronage for his agenda of hate. But these last two months have seen the monster rise from the ashes of the Rajapaksa pyre. This time, perhaps, to doom the Sirisena government to the same fiery fate.