We had made it to Kandy in record time, a little over two hours. On a normal day, it would have taken nearly double the time in traffic, to get to the city in Central Province from the capital, Colombo. But it wasn’t a normal day.
The roads were empty because of a police curfew declared in the district following a rampage the previous day. A mob, reportedly Sinhalese, set fire to dozens of Muslim homes and Muslim-owned shops in the area — an incident that has since been referred to as the “ Digana riots ” of 2018.
Triggered by a road rage incident a few days earlier, after which a group of Muslim youth fatally beat up a Sinhalese driver, it escalated into a full-blown communal riot.
Seeing the incessant news of the violence in Delhi over the past few days and reading about colleagues being attacked for trying to do their job, I am reminded of those tense days in Sri Lanka.
I travelled to Digana with a couple of journalist-friends to get eyewitness accounts from the spot, and details of the attacks carried out the previous day. Trapped inside his burning home, a 27-year-old young Muslim man had died.
But even before we met some of the affected people — the driver’s bereaved family, the young man’s father, and many others whose homes and shops were destroyed in the fire — we witnessed a fresh round of violence in Akurana, not far away. It erupted despite a police curfew in place. It went on amidst heavy police presence in the vicinity and a familiar risk of greater violence, given that Sri Lanka had witnessed similar anti-Muslim attacks in the preceding years.
Responding to the crisis, then President Maithripala Sirisena declared a national emergency, allowing the army to be summoned into action. Except that by then, much damage had been done.
Muslim shop owners watched helplessly as their assets went up in flames. Many had lost their homes. And worse, a few had lost a loved one. The Sri Lankan government blocked social media, citing inflammatory videos — some with hate speech by instigators from hard-line Sinhala Buddhist groups — and rumours as having potential to heighten tensions.
Mainstream media had access to the turbulent areas. Neither the police nor the army stopped us, unless we were too close to a building that was burning. The fact that we could see the trail of violence, its ashes and aftermath meant we could tell the story with some specifics and make some inferences with the available information.
It was obvious that the perpetrators had marked the Muslim households and shops and set them to fire, leaving out the other homes in between. It was clear that police had not intervened soon enough. The violence, which investigators later said caused losses amounting to millions, was undoubtedly communal. Names and details of some of the instigators, who were arrested and out on bail, would come up again, during the spate of anti-Muslim attacks following the Easter terror bombings in 2019. The pattern was hard to miss.
If we hadn’t been able to visit the spot, we might have been forced to maintain that it was a “Sinhala-Muslim clash”, which it was just after the accident, and not the mob attack on Muslims that it eventually turned into. Access was crucial to understand that.
