Sri Lankan Post-war public sphere was constructed with the aspiration of plural coexistence. Nevertheless, within a decade of the civil war’s end in 2009, coordinated suicide bombings on Easter Sunday in 2019 targeting Catholic churches and luxury hotels shattered that aspiration and exposed structural failures beneath it. This study investigates why ethno-religious intra-state conflict persists in post-war Sri Lanka despite sustained peacebuilding efforts, taking the Easter Sunday attacks as its analytical fulcrum. Using qualitative fieldwork at Katuwapitiya in Western Province, including in-depth interviews, discussions, observations, newspapers and academic articles, this study argues that the attacks cannot be understood outside the longer history of Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony structuring Sri Lankan statecraft since independence. Based on Gramsci’s hegemony, Ted Gurr’s relative deprivation theory and Gellner’s nationalism framework, the research demonstrates that the Easter Sunday bombings functioned simultaneously as a social declaration, a political instrument and an expression of unresolved ethno-religious tensions that post-war administrations failed to address. The findings highlight that political actors instrumentalized the attacks to consolidate majoritarian power, that extremist social movements depended on communal divisions, and that justice for victims remains systematically deferred. The research also reveals that although relations between Catholic and Muslim communities were seriously challenged by the attacks, grassroots solidarity and cooperation between neighbors remained resilient. This demonstrates a form of everyday pluralism that challenges narratives of permanent communal conflict often promoted by political actors.