Colombo (AsiaNews) - The Bodubalasena, an organization of Buddhist monks, is calling on the government of Sri Lanka to ban vasectomies and tubectomies "to increase the Buddhist population." According to the association in fact, the national laws do not protect or safeguard the rights and identity of Buddhists, but campaigns promoting family planning in exchange for money. Yet, Sri Lanka has a total population of over 20.2 million people, of which 70% are Buddhist.

The Bodubalasena prohibition of male and female sterilization came during the group's first national conference, held last July 28 at the Bandaranayake Memorial International Conference Hall (Bmich). Besides this issue, the association has addressed other questions, mostly related to proposals in the field of education. However, they only concern the Buddhist community, secular and religious.

Several times the Buddhist community in Sri Lanka has been shown to have "two souls": on the one hand, there are those who seek dialogue and the encounter with the Christian and Muslim minorities in the country, on the other, there are many who want to "preserve" a position of greater power and strength within society, given the fact that they are the religious majority. Thus, the country is no stranger to incidents of discrimination - sometimes resulting in reprisals and violence- by radical Buddhist groups and parties.

However, this trend is associated with a problem of ethnic and cultural nature, which contrasts with the poorer Tamil population (12.6%), concentrated in the northeast of the island, the Sinhalese (74%), richer and widespread in the rest of the State. (MMP)