We want to say something about what this image makes possible, and where.

Indians & Pakistanis cannot meet any longer

The hard fact first. There is no longer any practical way for an ordinary Indian and an ordinary Pakistani to sit in the same room inside either of their own countries. Visa regimes have hardened to the point of farce. The land border is sealed in spirit if not in law. What remains are the smaller states of the subcontinent and the wider diaspora. Of the smaller states, Sri Lanka is the one that handles the meeting most gracefully: visa-on-arrival to both passports, no overland complication, no political theatre, and a civic culture that does not ask either side to perform a position.

Which brings us to the older question, whether Sri Lanka belongs to our civilisational space at all. Some friends north of the Palk Strait still treat the island as adjacent rather than constitutive. We think this is wrong, and the reasons are not sentimental.

Sri Lanka is Dharmic?

Sri Lanka is Dharmic in the strict sense. Theravāda Buddhism is its public religion and its constitutional cornerstone, and Buddhism is one of the four Dharmic traditions, alongside Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism. The Mahāvaṃsa narrates the island’s history inside a cosmology that any reader of the Purāṇas will recognise on first contact. The northern and eastern provinces carry an unbroken Tamil Saiva inheritance, with temples invoked in the Tevaram hymns of the seventh to ninth centuries. Sri Pada, the peak in the central highlands, is climbed by Buddhists for the Buddha’s footprint, by Hindus for Shiva’s, by Muslims for Adam’s, and by Christians for the same. Anurādhapura and Polonnaruwa are not adjacent to the Indic civilisational core. They are inside it. And the island sits at the heart of the Rāmāyaṇa itself, whatever one makes of that text’s geography.

Theravāda

We anticipate the strongest objection, since we have heard it again this week in our own comment thread. Theravāda Sri Lanka, the argument runs, is defined precisely by what it rejected of Indic-Hindu tradition: the Brahminical priesthood, the Manusmṛti, the institutionalisation of caste. To call the island Dharmic, on this view, is to drag it back into a fold it left at the foot of the Bodhi tree. We understand the force of this and do not think it succeeds. Dharmic is a family, not a unanimity, and reform inside the family is not exit from it. Buddhism’s repudiation of caste, Jainism’s radicalisation of ahiṃsā, and Sikhism’s rejection of idol worship are constitutive moves within the Dharmic tradition, not departures from it. The Triple Refuge that every Theravāda Buddhist recites is itself the proof. Buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi, Dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi, Saṅghaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi.

One does not take refuge in the Dhamma having walked out of the Dharmic tree. Dhamma is the Pali cognate of Dharma, and the cognate is not an accident of translation. It is the family resemblance speaking.

Kandyan Customary Law

The Manusmṛti objection in fact runs in our favour. Kandyan customary law in the upcountry permitted married women to hold and inherit property in their own right, the binna form of marriage preserving this most clearly, and the British codifying regime progressively narrowed those entitlements over the nineteenth century. That is a Dharmic achievement, not an exit from Dharma. It shows what the family produces when its reformist streams are ascendant. The Manusmṛti is one ancient text among many in a tradition that also contains the egalitarian Buddha, the property-rights Theravāda of Sinhala custom, the radical Sikh gurus, and the Jain refusal of hierarchy. The tradition is plural and self-critical. That plurality is its strength, not its disqualification.

So when we speak of the subcontinent as the Crown Jewel of the planet, from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean, from the great rivers to the Burmese Highlands, we mean Sri Lanka emphatically. It is not the periphery. On the present visa map it is the centre, the one room in the house where the family can still gather.

Oneness of Humanity

That brings us back to the photograph. The Bahá’í Faith teaches the oneness of humankind not as a slogan but as a structural principle. Bahá’u’lláh wrote that the earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. An Institutional Gathering, in which appointed Counsellors and elected Spiritual Assemblies consult together, is one of the most concrete expressions of that principle the community has. To hold one that brings Pakistani, Indian, and Sri Lankan friends into the same consultation, on Sri Lankan soil, in May 2026, is not a small thing. It is a working enactment of what the subcontinent’s politicians have not yet found a way to perform.