• Galagodaatte Gnanasara, a Buddhist monk known for his Islamophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric, was sentenced to nine months in prison, marking his second conviction.
• Gnanasara has a criminal record, which includes a 2018 conviction for intimidation and contempt of court, for which he was later pardoned.
A Sri Lankan court has sentenced Galagodaatte Gnanasara, a politically influential and incendiary Buddhist monk, to nine months in prison for a second time. This follows his inflammatory remarks of instigating violence against Muslims in the Buddhist-majority country, where roughly 10% of the 22 million people follow Islam.
Gnanasara has close ties with Wirathu, an extremist monk based in Myanmar. He was out on bail appealing a four-year sentence when the latest ruling was issued.
A close ally of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Gnanasara was controversially appointed in 2021 to lead a panel tasked with reforming Sri Lanka’s legal system to promote religious harmony—a move opposition lawmaker Shanakiyan Rasamanickam famously described as “the definition of irony.”
Gnanasara’s legal troubles are longstanding. In 2018, he was sentenced to six years in prison for intimidating the wife of a missing cartoonist and for contempt of court but was pardoned nine months later by then-president Maithripala Sirisena. His political patron Rajapaksa, who resigned amid mass protests over Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic crisis, left Gnanasara increasingly isolated, leading to his current prosecution and diminished influence.
