Religious and political leaders have also employed “defense of the sasana” arguments in contemporary democratic contexts in order to justify bloody, anti-democratic policies, particularly violence against non-Buddhist religious groups perceived as a threat to Buddhism.
In contemporary Sri Lanka, some nationalist monks exhorted the Sinhala Buddhist–led government to press the prosecution of the war against the Hindu and Christian Tamil insurgency group the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), using imagery that invoked the legacy of Dutthagamani (the war was brutally won by the government in 2009).
They were following in the footsteps of the controversial Sinhalese monk Walpola Rahula, who, in legitimizing monastic participation in politics in the 1970s, also commented approvingly on the belief of Dutthagamani’s arahant advisors that “the destruction of human beings [for the purpose of protecting the religion] was not a very grave crime”