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”
(Rahula 1974)