Emperor Ashoka the Great saw the sufferings of people in the Kalinga war to accept the basic fact that suffering is part of life, then went on to adopt Buddhisum and peace dawned on all communities.
In 262 BCE the Kalinga War one of the largest and bloodiest battles in Indian history, was fought between the Maurya Empire under Ashoka and King of Raja Anantha of the state of Kalinga, an independent feudal kingdom located on the east coast, in the present-day state of Odisha and north of Andhra Pradesh .
The Kalinga War is the only major war Emperor Ashoka the great fought after his accession to the throne and marked an end to empire building and military conquests of ancient India, for the bloodshed of this war had prompted Ashoka to adopt Buddhism.
Whereas in the spring of 2009 as the Sri Lankan civil-war intensified about 350,000 Tamils civilians in the north were funnelled into a narrow tract of coastland on the marshy shores of the Nandikadal lagoon on the northeasten coast.
These civilians were trapped in the cage caught between Tamil fighters on one side, who shot anyone attempting to flee and heavy artillery bombardment on the other sides from the State security forces resulted in loss of many civilians and heavy destruction.
An estimated 80,000 remaining took their chances and left their dead at ground zero, traversing no man’s land, fearful of being shot in the front or the back.The world looked away from these bedraggled wretches and the hordes left behind. Mangled corpses of babies, shredded by shelling, hung from palm trees. Families clambered for scant shelter behind mud bunds and inside bunkers, parents using their bodies to shield their children, lured cruelly into no-fire zones that were promptly fired upon. The ground, boggy with blood, was littered with severed limbs and tatters of charred flesh. This ‘Hell on Earth’ was a spit that measured three kilometers by one kilometer and nobody to date has an exact number of people who died in the final battle, while those remaining were finally marshaled into detention camps by the government security forces.
Unfortunately in 2009 the President of Sri Lanka failed to see the hell on earth created on the marshy shores of the Nandikadal to bring the civil war to finish with lots of assistance from friendly nations, to cause a decade of negative peace in the land. For the ruling community had failed to accept the sufferings of the ruled communities, in particular the sufferings of the Tamils civilians living in the previous war zones.
Had the then President of Sri Lanka followed the footsteps of Emperor Ashoka the great of India, Sri Lanka would have not got into the mess it is today!
Northern Breeze 