Under NPC’s project Consolidating Ongoing Multi-Level Partnership Actions for Conflict Transformation (COMPACT), refresher workshops on pluralism were conducted for selected District Inter Religious Committee (DIRC) members from Jaffna and Vavuniya and Kegalle and Kandy.

During the first session of the workshops, participants are told what pluralism was and how it could be practiced in their daily lives through different activities.

The next day was spent discussing the role of DIRC members in promoting pluralism through their day to day activities in the form of respect for diversity, tolerance of the other and not using the majority principal to overpower ethnic and religious minorities.

Participants said that they were able to understand the concept easily because of the simple methods used by the resource persons to explain the principles of pluralism.

They said that one of the biggest obstacles to spreading pluralistic attitudes within the society was political influence, so it was important to educate political leaders on pluralism and its value in a country such as Sri Lanka.

They added that religious leaders should also be told of pluralistic concepts and that religion could help in spreading the message to the public.