Sri Lanka’s constitutional policy regarding religion affords a ‘foremost place’ to Buddhism and obligates the State to protect and foster the Buddha Sasana, whilst assuring the rights and freedoms of the other religions. By explicitly creating a special status for Buddhism, the constitution has produced the category of ‘The Other’. The creation of this distinction has a potential to discriminate in a pluralistic society and to undermine the fundamental principle of equality.
By examining the public proposals on religion and the debates of the Constitutional Assembly with the Constituent Assembly debates (1970-71), this study retraces the evolution of the Buddhism Chapter and identifies the contestations and their role in deciding a constitutional arrangement. This is particularly salient given the immense interconnection of the religious and ethnic identity in Sri Lanka. In a time when Sri Lanka is forging her Third Republican Constitution, this study hopes to contribute to the public and scholarly debate on constitution-making in deeply divided societies embedded with intense discord on a state’s religious or secular identity.