The Anti-Conversion Bill: Political Buddhism, ‘Unethical Conversions’ and Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka

7KH$QWL&RQYHUVLRQ%LOO 3ROLWLFDO%XGGKLVP 8QHWKLFDO&RQYHUVLRQV DQG5HOLJLRXV )UHHGRPLQ6UL/DQND 0LFKDHO+HUW]EHUJ Dissertation for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of Bergen Dissertation date: 3 © Copyright Michael Hertzberg The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Year: 2016 Title: The Anti-Conversion Bill: Political Buddhism, ‘Unethical Conversions’ and Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka Author: Michael Hertzberg Print: AiT Bjerch AS / University of Bergen 4 Acknowledgements Colleagues and friends have been involved in reading, commenting and discussing various chapters and pieces of this thesis. First and foremost a sincere thanks to my supervisors Kari Telle and Knut Jacobsen for continual support, engaging discussions and constructive criticism. Compassionate thanks to all my informants and helpers in Sri Lanka. Without your time and enthusiasm for the project, this thesis would not have been possible. Although none are named, none are forgotten. We will see each other again. The vivid conversations at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and in the research cluster “The Politics of Violence and Security” have been an everyday pleasure. Thanks to Gunnar Sørbø, Are Knudsen, Arne Strand, Astri Suhrke, Kjetil Selvik, Mari Norbakk, Karin Ask, Torunn Wimpelmann, Iselin Strønen, Nefissa Naguib, Anne Bang and Liv Tønnessen. Others at CMI also deserve to be mentioned: Chris Jacob, Reidunn Ljones, Åse Johanne Roti Dahl, Steinar Hegre, Guri Stegali and Merete Leby. At the institute for archaeology, history, religion and cultural studies (AHKR) at University of Bergen (UiB) several employees and fellow PhD-candidates have contributed along the way: Michael Stausberg, Knut Aukland, Marie von der Lippe, Sissel Undheim, Knut Melvær, Håkon Tandberg, Stefan Olsson, Håkan Rydving, Jane Skjoldli, Arne Mykkeltveit and Magnus Halsnes. An additional thanks to the research group “Transnational History and Cultural Encounters, 1850 – present” at AHKR, UiB, and in particular the coordinators, Camilla Brautaset and Christhard Hoffmann. Thanks to the Bergen South Asia Forum (BSAF), and their annual PhD- symposiums. Kavitha Søreide, Moumita Sen and Malini Bhattacharjee have all contributed to a stimulating debate on South Asia. Others also deserve to be mentioned: Samantha Smith, Hans Geir Aasmundsen, Bjørn Ola Tafjord, Stine Bruland, Kathinka Frøystad, Christine Jacobsen, Peter Danchin, Michael Feener and Philip Fountain. A special thanks to Peter Schalk for commenting upon my first draft of this thesis. All shortcomings are upon me. 5 I would like to thank the Norwegian research council for funding the project Regulating Religion: Secularism and Religious Freedom in the Global Era, and to Kari Telle for including me in its fold. Thanks also to the Meltzer Research Fund and the Norwegian Burma Committee for funding additional fieldtrips, and to the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) for hosting me two weeks in Copenhagen in 2014. A warm thanks to my family: Agnethe, Jonathan and Andor Falk. We are in this together. 6 Abstract Allegations that missionaries and aid workers are active in inducing conversions by means of aggressive external pressure have led to discussion of anti-conversion legislation in many countries, and the region of South Asia has emerged as the nexus of argumentative repository for such laws. In simplified terms, Christians claim that anti-conversion legislation violates the rights to proselytisation, and thus limits their religious freedom to manifest their religion, while Buddhist nationalists claim that aggressive and enticing missionary efforts violate the targets’ right to maintain their religion. The study of anti-conversion legislation involves a variety of issues including religious pluralism, politicised religion and the politics of religious freedom. The issue of (anti)conversion throws light on the dynamics between religious groups, how religious groups are regulated by the state apparatus and how to understand proselytisation within international human rights instruments. This thesis is not about religious conversions as such, but about how acts of conversion are interpreted and circumscribed by various encounters with the ‘political’. ‘The political’ should here be understood in a Schmittian sense of a friend- enemy distinction, and not as politics in a narrow sense of party politics. My aim is to answer the following questions: How is conversion understood not only as a shift of religious allegiance, but also of political allegiance? What role do the issue of conversion have in electoral mobilization? How can we understand how the issue of proselytisation is negotiated within national and international legal instruments? The anti-conversion bill has spurred different and various encounters both within and between religious communities in Sri Lanka, and these encounters have taken place in different forums, both nationally and internationally. One can argue that anti-conversion laws originate from a threefold objective. First, the dislike of religious gifts in particular and proselytisation in general has made anti-conversion laws a potent tool for religio-political mobilisation, especially for ‘religious nationalists’. Second, such laws can be an effective regulatory mechanism against religious minorities. Third, most anti-conversion laws make a tacit assumption of state patronage, privileging the majority’s religion. Hence, the 7 issue of anti-conversion laws elucidate a potent dynamic between religious nationalists, minorities and the state, and can be seen as an adjudicator of how religious pluralism is negotiated within a given nation-state. Moreover, anti- conversion laws challenge our understanding of religious freedom, not as something you either have or do not have, but in which ways practices are protected under the fold of human rights instruments. By taking a micro-historical approach to the policy process of the anti- conversion bill, my focus has been to reveal how agency, affiliations and networks coalesce into political repertoires. An important aspect here is how these political repertoires evolve and develop in a particular context, with an aim to either support or oppose a given legislation. Taking place amidst a long-ranging civil war, the legal proposal in Sri Lanka has been through political turmoil, challenged various legal definitions both nationally and internationally, led to discussions and monitoring of religious freedom. However, this is not a commission report designed to document ‘unethical’ conversions or to measure the levels of ‘religious freedom’ in Sri Lanka today, but rather an analysis of why and how these encounters over proselytisation and ‘unethical’ conversions have taken place in Sri Lanka. Anti-conversion legislation criminalises proselytisation by ‘force, fraud and allurement’. While the terms ‘force’ and ‘fraud’ are already covered in the penal codes, the vital term here is that of allurement. Buddhist nationalists claim that evangelicals deliberately target vulnerable people for conversion, and that they engage in these processes either by direct bribery and allurement or more subtle forms of gaining the trust, usually of ‘poor villagers’. Moreover, while it is precisely the practice of what is termed enticing and alluring conduct that religious nationalists find provocative in terms of proselytisation, it is the same terms that pose difficulties for explicating a clear legal formula for anti-conversion legislation that would find international consent, under the aegis of human rights instruments. Asma Jahangir, the UN Special Rapporteur of freedom of religion or belief, noted that it was especially the notions of “inducement or allurement” that are the source of contention of how anti-conversion legislature is seen as explicated in “broad and vague terms”. 8 It was the Buddhist nationalist party Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), consisting solely of Buddhist monks, which submitted the anti-conversion bill in May 2004. However, when doing so, they side-lined another initiative by a Hindu-Buddhist committee that already had begun working on a draft of their own. The result was that the other religious communities on the island, even those earlier in support an anti- conversion law, perceived the submitted anti-conversion bill by Jathika Hela Urumaya as an oppressive mechanism of Buddhist nationalism. In the eyes of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists the official state patronage promised in Article 9 in the constitution, which guarantees Buddhism the ‘foremost place’, should be formalised and substantialised through the anti-conversion bill, as the practice of ‘unethical’ conversions are seen to bring an immediate danger to Buddhism in Sri Lanka. While the Sri Lankan state has been reluctant to enact anti-conversion laws, both Buddhist nationalists and evangelical Christians have been adamant in their activism to enact and oppose the bill. By approaching anti-conversion legislation as a political repertoire wielded by religious nationalists, we see how the tensions surrounding religious pluralism are responded to and negotiated by the state. In short, anti-conversion laws challenge religious pluralism and notions of religious freedom, and are often, but not necessarily oppressive. The politics of conversion is often framed in the binary logic between religious pluralism and government regulations. (Anti) conversion can be understood in international, national and local dimensions, and a study dedicated to the policy process of the

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