Archaeology Is Not Title Deed: Oppose the Use of Ancient Ruins and Mythology as class weapons against Living Communities!
Against the communal weaponization of archaeological claims, against the mythologization of history as a tool of dispossession, and against the judicial ratification of communal violence as a source of legal title, the following principle must be stated with full clarity and defended without compromise:
No community can claim exclusive rights over land inhabited by another community today, based on historical or archaeological claims, however ancient. Land rights are established by habitation, use, and social possession by living communities — not by dynastic chronicles, religious mythology, or the ruins of civilizations whose relationship to any living community is itself a matter of historical dispute and political fabrication.
The Tamil communities of the North and East of Sri Lanka have an inalienable right to
their traditional lands, their villages, their communal property — rights that no Buddhist ruin, however ancient, can extinguish, and that no military occupation, however prolonged, can legitimately override. The Muslim community of Ayodhya had an inalienable right to the Babri Masjid — a right that was criminally violated in 1992 and judicially ratified in 2019. The legal principle that could have — should have — governed both cases is not complicated: a living community in continuous possession of its property has rights that supersede all archaeological or mythological counter-claims.
