Human remains marked no. 429, uncovered on 19 July 2026 at the Chemmani mass grave. Image courtesy of Kumanan Kana.
A skeleton (429th) excavated yesterday (19) — Day 37 of Phase 3 of the excavation at the Chemmani mass grave — was found buried in a sitting position: legs folded, arms resting on the lap, body oriented toward the northeast. This is the second such discovery. An identical posture was found in the 227th skeleton during Phase 2 in 2025. None of these findings became news for any of the established media stations in the South.
Someone buried this person with deliberate, specific orientation. That detail is a wound that refuses to close.
Chemmani-Sittupatti is now Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including 18 children, six of them infants. Excavations began only because construction workers accidentally struck bones while digging a crematorium foundation in February 2025. The dead literally surfaced from beneath the earth.
The graves trace back to 1995–96, when the Sri Lankan army retook Jaffna. An army corporal convicted for the rape and murder of Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy confessed in court in 1998: hundreds of Tamil civilians — “suspects,” abductees, the disappeared — were executed and secretly buried here on the orders of senior military officers. Warrants were eventually issued for seven military personnel. All were released on bail. By 2004, the entire case was quietly interred.
For nearly three decades, successive governments — UNP, PA, SLFP, UNP again, SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP which celebrated the 2009 military “victory” — have guaranteed one thing above all else: impunity for the killers.
Today the JVP Justice Minister visits the site (19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. With 400 dead beneath the soil of a Hindu cremation ground, with six infants among them, with bodies buried in clusters at a depth of barely 1.6 feet, with a convicted army corporal’s sworn court testimony naming senior officers who ordered the killings — to call this a “normal graveyard” is the language of a cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken in plain sight.
And it could not be more fitting that it comes from a minister of the JVP — the very party that spent the entire 26-year war waging a communalist campaign for military victory, that actively strengthened the hand of Rajapaksa whose forces committed the documented atrocities now being disinterred from this earth, and that celebrated the 2009 “triumph” despite the killing of 40,000 Tamil civilians. This is the same government that halted Phase 2 excavations for eight months by refusing to release funds, that maintains over 100,000 troops occupying the North and East, and that rejected the UN Human Rights Council’s call for an international war crimes investigation just last year. The minister’s doubt is not incidental — it is the government’s policy, expressed without shame.
And Chemmani is not alone. Mannar. Thiruketheeswaram. Kokkuthoduvai. Kalavanchikudy. The North and East are a landscape of unmarked graves.
No justice will come from this capitalist state — not under the JVP, not under the UNP, not under the SLFP, not under any formation of the Sinhala bourgeoisie whose entire political order was built on anti-Tamil communalism. Nor will justice come from Tamil nationalist parties that appeal to the same “international community” — Washington, London, Brussels — that armed, trained, funded and politically backed the Sri Lankan military throughout the war, then looked away as 40,000 died in the Vanni in 2009. These same imperialist powers are today backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
And let there be no illusion: justice is equally owed for the crimes of the LTTE and its breakaway factions — the forced recruitment of child soldiers, the assassination of Tamil political opponents, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the north, the bombings of Sinhala civilians. Those crimes too will never be honestly reckoned with under a capitalist order in which the Tamil bourgeoisie has its own interest in suppressing any genuinely independent working-class accounting of the war.
The sitting skeleton, legs folded, arms at rest, facing northeast — buried in haste by soldiers following orders, covered up for thirty years by generals protected by presidents — is a testament to what capitalism produces when it governs a multi-ethnic society divided against itself.
The buried will will not stay buried. But justice will not emerge from within this system.
It will come only when Tamil and Sinhala and Muslim workers unite — not behind any bourgeois party, not behind the imperialist “international community” — but in a common struggle to overthrow the capitalist order that made Chemmani possible, and to build a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
By the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA).
A prison guard shooting indiscriminately at the inmates through a hole of the gate during the Negombo prison riot on 7 July 2026. Image from social media.
The carnage at Negombo Remand Prison on July 5–6, which left at least 28 dead and nearly 100 wounded, is not an aberration. It is the latest and most lethal expression of a penal system that functions, by design, as an instrument of class war against the most impoverished and marginalized layers of Sri Lankan society. The massacre lays bare, with the clarity that only blood can provide, the essential character of the capitalist state: a body of armed men, deployed against the poor, in defense of property relations that produce immiseration as their normal condition.
The postmortem evidence now emerging from Negombo General Hospital and preliminary judicial examinations confirms what the government’s hastily assembled narrative of “underworld drug gang rivalries” was constructed to conceal. The 20 deceased inmates were killed overwhelmingly (14 inmates) by high-velocity gunshot wounds to the head, chest, and upper torso — the signature of a deliberate, lethal shoot-to-kill policy, not crowd control. The seven prison guards and officials who died (a toll that rose to eight when a sergeant succumbed to injuries on July 8) were killed by blunt instruments, shattered bricks, and iron rods — the weapons of the utterly dispossessed, wielded in explosive, visceral rage. Two distinct modes of death, produced by one class system.
The state’s tactical choices confirm that de-escalation was never the objective. No loudspeaker warnings were issued. No tear gas, water cannons, or rubber bullets were deployed. No attempt at dialogue or negotiation was made. Instead, the police, military, and Special Task Force (STF) — the same notorious paramilitary unit responsible for the 2012 Welikada prison massacre — opened fire indiscriminately into crowds of prisoners trapped inside a walled compound. The area around the prison was transformed into what could be witnessed as a war zone, with heavily armed security forces, armored vehicles, military jeeps, and drones deployed to intimidate the hundreds of relatives — mothers, wives, children of prisoners, most of them poor villagers — who gathered outside, weeping and screaming for information as gunfire echoed through the complex.
The killing did not end on July 6. Amnesty International confirmed on July 9 that at least two inmates died after being transferred from Negombo to secondary facilities, amid severe allegations of retaliatory torture and beatings by guards. The Committee for Protecting the Rights of Prisoners warned that five inmates accused of leading the unrest have been placed in secret isolation, creating “a severe threat to their lives.” The massacre continues in the form of organized reprisals.
The Lie Machine
The government’s explanation for the carnage is a lie from start to finish, and it is a lie with a well-documented genealogy. Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara claimed the violence erupted from a dispute over a prison drug-trafficking network. The prisoners, in this telling, were “underworld criminals” and “drug residue” — a dehumanizing lexicon that functions to prepare public opinion for the acceptance of state murder. Acting Commissioner General of Prisons Prasad Hemantha Kumara defended a prison officer filmed firing through a narrow opening in the main gate, claiming the shots were “necessary to prevent a catastrophic prison breach.”
This narrative is a political cover for killings that fold neatly into the JVP/NPP government’s escalating “war on drugs” — itself a well-worn mechanism for criminalizing poverty and justifying the expansion of police-state powers.
The genealogy of official lies is instructive. After 11 inmates were shot dead at Mahara Prison in 2020, the Rajapaksa government blamed psychiatric drugs and drug-dealer conspiracies for the incident — claims the College of Psychiatrists debunked as baseless, and the postmortems confirmed that all victims were shot. The 2012 Welikada prison killings of 27 inmates followed the same script: the government blamed a “hard-core criminal” riot, but a prisoner’s BBC Sinhala account showed STF commandos themselves provoked the confrontation — cuffing, beating, and tear-gassing inmates — before carrying out the massacre.
The pattern is invariant across decades and across regimes: provoke, kill, lie, investigate — where “investigate” means appoint a committee of retired judges to produce a report that suppresses the truth and exonerates the killers. Nanayakkara’s announcement of a three-member committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge is the latest iteration of a ritual so predictable it scarcely merits the name of politics.
Who fills these Prisons?
The Negombo dead were not “underworld criminals.” They were, overwhelmingly, unconvicted remand prisoners — members of a class that constitutes approximately 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s total prison population. They were held in a facility built for 900 that currently warehouses nearly 2,400 human beings. Nationally, Sri Lanka’s prisons — built to accommodate 11,762 inmates — now hold more than 42,000, nearly four times their intended capacity.
Some of the victims who succumbed to injuries during the Negombo prison riot and shooting. Image from social media.
These are not people serving sentences for proven crimes. They are people who have been arrested — overwhelmingly on drug-related charges — and then held in indefinite judicial limbo, often for years, because they cannot afford bail or legal representation. They are punished not for what they have been proven to have done, but for who they are: poor, marginalized, and surplus to the requirements of capital. The remand prisoner is the purest expression of the class logic of bourgeois “justice.”
The conditions in which they are held constitute systematic torture. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka’s 2021 report documented prisoners forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, and survive on food that, as one inmate stated, “even cats and dogs” would reject. Negombo Prison was a pressure cooker of systemic injustice — severe overcrowding, starvation-level nutrition, non-existent sanitation, and daily violence from guards — waiting to explode. And when it exploded, the state responded not with reform but with bullets.
This is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed. The state maintains conditions of deliberate, calculated brutality so that when the inevitable explosion occurs, it can be met with overwhelming lethal force. The explosion provides the pretext for the massacre, and the massacre serves as a demonstration effect for the working class outside the prison walls.
The Guards: Workers in Uniform
The seven prison guards and officials killed at Negombo — beaten to death with bricks and iron rods — were themselves drawn from impoverished rural families and lower-middle-class strata. They took these dangerous, degrading jobs because they had no alternative. But they were not merely passive victims caught in the crossfire of an explosion they did not create. They were the immediate, daily instruments of its production.
The guards were the vehicle through which the hellish torture, the degrading and inhumane treatment, and the systematic mistreatment of the inmates were implemented. It was their hands that administered the beatings. It was their voices that delivered the abuse. It was their bodies that enforced the starvation, the suffocating overcrowding, and the denial of medical care. The explosive, visceral rage that killed them — the shattered bricks and iron rods driven into their bodies — was not an abstract or misdirected fury. It was a rage whose immediate object was precisely those who had, day after day, week after week, month after month, made the prisoners’ existence a living torment.
This is the deepest tragedy of the capitalist penal apparatus: it does not merely place workers in the line of fire. It systematically dehumanizes and militarizes them, psychologically preparing them for violence, conditioning them to torture, brainwashing them to hate their own class brothers. The guard who beats a starving remand prisoner is himself a product of the same rural immiseration that fills the cells. But the state has broken him, stripped him of solidarity, trained him to see the prisoner not as a fellow victim of the same system but as an enemy — “drug residue,” “underworld scum,” a criminal presumed “non-human” (contrary to the sham slogan emblazoned on the perimeter walls of Welikada prison declaring that “prisoners are also human”) — deserving of whatever violence is inflicted upon him. While in uniform, the guard is consciously and fully in the service of the capitalist ruling class and its oppressive apparatus. The ruling class, which never sets foot inside the prison, has successfully constructed a machinery in which one layer of the poor is conscripted to brutalize another, and both are destroyed in the process.
The prisoners’ rage was not misdirected. It struck those who had made themselves the immediate face of the system’s cruelty. The tragedy is that the system is so constructed that the prisoners’ only available targets were other workers — men who, in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, would be their allies against the bourgeoisie that immiserates them both, and who, under a workers’ state, would no longer be set against them as enemies at all. The guards who died at Negombo were perpetrators and victims simultaneously — killers and killed, instruments of class oppression who were themselves oppressed, dehumanized by the same machine they were paid to operate. The ruling class, which orchestrated this fratricide from a safe distance, will mourn neither the prisoners nor the guards. It required both their deaths to sustain the order of private property.
The Historical Trajectory of State Violence
The Negombo massacre must be understood within the unbroken history of penal violence maintained by every successive bourgeois regime in Sri Lanka. The list is staggering: Mahara in 2020 (11 shot dead), Welikada in 2012 (27 killed by STF commandos), Anuradhapura in 2011, Kalutara in 2000, Bindunuwewa in 2000 (27 Tamil detainees hacked to death by a Sinhala extremist mob while the state stood by). At Welikada in 1983, during the Black July anti-Tamil pogrom, 53 Tamil political prisoners were murdered by Sinhala racialist inmates aided by prison authorities.
This trajectory of prison massacres is inseparable from the broader history of state violence against the working class and oppressed. During the JVP insurrection of 1988–89, state forces killed tens of thousands of rural youth in the island’s south — a campaign of mass murder for which no political nor military leadership of the state has ever been held accountable. The JVP itself carried out a fascistic campaign of assassinations during that same period, targeting workers, trade unionists, and political opponents, in the name of defending the motherland. The current JVP/NPP government — whose general secretary Tilvin Silva recently declared that “there will be no other governments after this government” — has never confronted this history within its own ranks, nor has it ever been compelled to do so by the bourgeois media and political establishment that now treat it as a legitimate party of government.
The 26-year civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam concluded in 2009 with the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone, under the direction of then-Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, enacted in 1979 and retained — despite explicit campaign promises to abolish it — by the current JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has been used for decades to detain, torture, and disappear political opponents. Human Rights Watch has documented severe abuses, including rape and other torture methods. Government figures from 2017 indicated that 70 prisoners had been held in pretrial detention under the PTA for more than five years, and 12 for over 10 years.
This is the state that now presents the Negombo killings as a regrettable but necessary response to a “prison drug network.” The state that tortures, disappears, and massacres is the same state that lies about what it has done. The lie is not incidental to the violence; it is an essential component of it. The killing cannot proceed without first preparing public opinion to accept that the victims are not fully human.
The Ideological Offensive: Dehumanization as Class Warfare
The corporate media’s deployment of terms like “underworld criminals” and “drug residue” to describe the Negombo dead performs a precise ideological function. It constructs a subhuman category — people whose deaths are not murders but a form of social sanitation — and mobilizes upper-middle-class public opinion behind the state’s lethal operations. This is the logic of fascistic reaction, and it directly mirrors the xenophobic demonization of immigrants by figures like Donald Trump internationally. The purpose is identical: to criminalize poverty, to justify state terror, and to obscure the class relations that produce both the “crime” and the punishment.
The “war on drugs” in Sri Lanka, as internationally, has never been a public health initiative. It is a mechanism for the criminalization and warehousing of surplus population — young people, overwhelmingly from the poorest layers of society, whose labor is not required by capital and whose existence therefore constitutes a threat to social order. The drug cases that fill the remand prisons are, in the vast majority of instances, frame-ups. They serve the same function that vagrancy laws served in the period of primitive accumulation that Marx analyzed in Capital: the use of penal law to discipline the expropriated poor and enforce the conditions of capitalist exploitation.
The JVP/NPP government has made the “war on drugs” a centerpiece of its political offensive. At the May Day rallies this year, President Dissanayake boasted that “2026 will go down in Sri Lanka’s history as the year when corrupt individuals, fraudsters, and thieves were sent to prison.” This anti-corruption and anti-drug rhetoric serves a dual purpose: it diverts popular anger away from the capitalist system that produces immiseration and toward individual “criminals” who can be blamed for social decay, while simultaneously expanding the repressive apparatus that will be used against the working class when austerity-driven opposition intensifies.
The JVP/NPP: Continuity in Repression
The Negombo massacre took place under the JVP/NPP government elected in 2024 on promises of “systemic change,” a mandate rooted in the 2022 Aragalaya uprising that ousted Gotabhaya Rajapaksa but was politically derailed by trade union bureaucracies and the JVP/NPP itself, which redirected mass struggle into parliamentary channels rather than revolutionary confrontation. That betrayal led to Wickremesinghe’s premiership, the IMF’s austerity loan, and ultimately Dissanayake’s election — with the promised “change” proving to be continuity of the same capitalist class rule. In office, the JVP/NPP has faithfully executed IMF austerity dictates: mass privatizations, casualization of employment and job losses, subsidy cuts, retention of the PTA despite pledges to abolish it, new repressive legislation, emergency powers, and violent suppression of workers’ protests.
The Negombo massacre is the logical expression of a government that represents the same capitalist class as its predecessors and defends the same property relations. The JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva’s declaration at this year’s May Day rally that “there will be no other governments after this government” is not hyperbole. It is a threat — directed not at opposition politicians but at the working class itself. Faced with mounting social opposition as the economic crisis deepens and the US-NATO war on Iran disrupts global energy supplies, driving fuel and food prices still higher, the JVP/NPP is preparing for class war.
The Crisis of Sri Lankan Capitalism
The prison system is a concentrated expression of the broader social catastrophe produced by Sri Lankan capitalism. The country is among the most unequal in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2016, the richest 10 percent earned the equivalent of the total amount earned by 70 percent of all households. The 2022 default on foreign debt — the result of decades of parasitic capitalist development, corruption, and subordination to international finance capital — triggered an economic collapse that pushed the poverty rate sharply upward. The UN reported that at least 70 percent of households were reducing meals, including skipping one meal a day. Officially, food inflation reached 57 percent.
The plantation workers of the central hill country — the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India by British colonialism — continue to live in conditions of abject poverty, earning wages that scarcely permit survival, housed in decrepit “line rooms” unchanged for over a century. The urban poor of Colombo’s slums, the rural farmers crushed by debt and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, the youth who face permanent unemployment — these are the social layers from which the prison population is drawn.
They are the human products of a system that subordinates human need to private profit. And when they resist — when they protest, when they strike, when they explode — the state answers with bullets. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system.
The Marxist Understanding of the State
Lenin, in The State and Revolution, defined the state as “the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” It is not a neutral arbiter, not a mechanism for resolving social conflicts, but an instrument for the organized suppression of one class by another. The state, he stressed, was fundamentally composed of “special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc. at their command.” The prison is the state in its most naked form — stripped of the democratic-parliamentary veneer that normally obscures its class character. When guards and commandos open fire on unarmed prisoners demanding PCR testing during the COVID pandemic, when the state deploys the army, navy, air force, STF, and armed drones to surround a prison and intimidate the families gathered outside, the mask falls away entirely.
The capitalist penal system cannot be reformed. The Human Rights Commission reports, the promises of prison modernization, the committees of inquiry — all of it is a mechanism for absorbing popular outrage and channeling it back into the dead end of bourgeois legality. The conditions that produce these massacres — overcrowding, poverty-driven remand detention, the criminalization of the poor, impunity for security forces — are not dysfunctions of the system. They are the system functioning exactly as it is designed to function.
Successive governments have responded to prison violence with the same empty ritual. Mahinda Rajapaksa promised rehabilitation. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa promised five-year reform plans. Sirisena promised transitional justice. The JVP/NPP promised “systemic change.” Committees are appointed, plans are published, and the conditions that produce violence — overcrowding, remand without trial, starvation, torture — only worsen. They worsen because the capitalist state requires them. The prison exists to discipline the poor, to warehouse surplus labor, to terrorize the working class into submission. It cannot be reformed because its function is irreducibly repressive.
The Revolutionary Answer
The Negombo dead — prisoners and guards alike — were killed by a system that pits the oppressed against each other while the ruling class looks on and calls it justice. The prisoners were killed by a state that views their lives as worthless because their labor is worthless to capital. The guards were killed by the same system, conscripted into a role that placed them in the path of an explosive rage of which they were only the final instruments of creation and which they could not escape.
The only answer to Negombo, to Mahara, to Welikada, to the entire bloody history of the capitalist penal system, is the mobilization of the working class as an independent political force against the capitalist state in its entirety. This means building a revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism, that fights for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers across ethnic divisions and builds an alliance of the working class with all oppressed layers, the peasantry and the youth against the ruling class that foments divisions among them to divide and strengthen capitalist class rule.
Workers across the country — in the factories, offices, plantations, and rural communities — must form their own action committees, independent of all capitalist parties and their affiliated trade union bureaucracies. These committees must be the basis for a democratic and socialist congress of workers and rural masses, advancing a program that begins from human need, not corporate profit: the repudiation of foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under workers’ democratic control, the indexing of wages to the cost of living, guaranteed jobs for all, and the cancellation of debts for poor farmers and small business holders.
The fight against the capitalist penal system is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. The prison can only be abolished through the revolutionary overthrow of the class society that requires it. The task of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) is to build the political leadership capable of organizing the working class for that struggle — in Sri Lanka and across South Asia, as part of the international struggle of the the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of socialist revolution.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
On 2 February 2026, residents and farmers of Nedunkerni, Vavuniya, held a protest against the Sri Lankan government’s revival of proposed Kivul Oya Reservoir Project, alleging that it would facilitate Sinhala colonization and alter the demographic composition of the North-East. Image courtesy of Sri Lanka Breaking News fb page
At a media conference held at the Jaffna Press Club premises on July 3, 2026, a Sinhalese speaker voiced a widely-held Sinhala-Buddhist communal argument: because Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims live together in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, Sinhalese could likewise be peacefully settled in Jaffna and the North and East. This is a misconceived justification for the state-sponsored Sinhalisation of Tamil-majority areas. The argument is a fraud. If accepted as a general principle, it would equally justify the state allocating land to Tamils in Matara, Weeraketiya, Dikwella, Tangalle, Ambalantota, Mirissa, Galle and Deniyaya — predominantly Sinhala areas of the south. The speaker would never accept that, because he exactly knows that state-sponsored settlement is not an invitation to voluntary coexistence, but is an instrument of power. What is being presented as a principle of multi-ethnic coexistence is in reality a justification for state-sponsored ethnic domination of the Sinhalese. The issue is not a matter of ethnicity, not whether Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims can live together voluntarily. The issue is the political character of state-directed demographic engineering and the communal strategy of capitalist rule it serves.
The historical record
Since the sham independence of 1948, successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued demographic engineering in the North and East as a core pillar of communal rule. One of the first acts of the D.S. Senanayake government was to disenfranchise over a million Tamil-speaking plantation workers. The UNP applied from the outset the communal principle that, as Colvin R. de Silva prophetically declared in his 1948 speech opposing the Citizenship Bill, “the state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race.” He warned that this was “an outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy,” adding: “It is precisely under Fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state.”[1]
The pattern intensified after the 1953 hartal, when the general strike shook bourgeois rule to its foundations. Bandaranaike concluded that only the stirring up of anti-Tamil prejudice could counter the influence of the Trotskyists in the working class. But the communal project was not confined to legislation and administrative discrimination. It was pursued with equal vigour through the physical transformation of the country’s demographic map.
From the 1950s onward, successive governments used state-sponsored irrigation and land colonisation schemes to resettle Sinhalese peasants from the wet zone into the dry-zone Northern and Eastern provinces. The Gal Oya project, initiated in 1949 under D.S. Senanayake, settled tens of thousands of Sinhalese colonists on land developed through the diversion of the Gal Oya river. The Sinhalese population of the combined Batticaloa-Amparai district, a mere 4,702 in 1911, had swelled to over 150,000 by 1981 — an increase far exceeding any possible natural growth rate, achieved through the systematic allocation of state land, irrigation infrastructure and cultivation rights to settlers brought from the Sinhalese-majority south. The administrative separation of Ampara from Batticaloa in April 1961 was presented as a measure of bureaucratic decentralisation necessitated by the region’s growth. In reality, it was the political consolidation of more than a decade of engineered demographic transformation. The redrawing of district boundaries carved a new Sinhalese-majority interior out of what had been Tamil- and Muslim-majority territory, severing it administratively from the coastal areas where Tamils and Muslims remained concentrated. By reshaping electoral boundaries to manufacture Sinhala parliamentary representation in what had been a Tamil-majority province, the Ampara partition was not an incidental by-product of development policy but an integral mechanism of the Sinhala bourgeoisie’s nation-building project — confirming that what was presented as technical administration and rural development was, from its inception, bound up with the ruling class’s strategy of fragmenting the working class along communal lines.
A similar dynamic unfolded at Kantale (Kanthalai), where the state settled peasants drawn from outside Trincomalee District in what had been a Tamil-majority village. The same logic was extended north-west into the Tamil-speaking areas of Anuradhapura District through the Padaviya Tank scheme, 65 km from Anuradhapura town. Across these projects, the pattern of land allocation was consistent and unambiguous: the Allai scheme assigned 65 percent of settler plots to Sinhalese colonists, and Kanthalai assigned 77 percent, in each case relegating the existing Tamil and Muslim population to a residual share. The cumulative demographic effect was stark — Trincomalee District’s Sinhalese population rose from roughly 15 percent in 1946 to 33 percent by 1981 — an increase that cannot be attributed to organic demographic growth and that testifies instead to the systematic character of state-directed colonization as an instrument of Sinhala-Buddhist nation-building.
The Mahaweli Development Programme, whose modern phase began under Dudley Senanayake’s government in the late 1960s following a 1969 UNDP/FAO master plan and was dramatically compressed from a planned thirty years into seven after the UNP’s return to power in 1977, took this process of engineered demographic transformation to a qualitatively new level. Settlement in Systems B, C, H and L brought overwhelmingly Sinhalese colonists into the Eastern and Northern provinces: in Systems H and C, 90 percent of settlers were Sinhalese and 10 percent Muslim, with no Tamils allocated land at all, despite the territory lying within the Eastern Province, then a majority-Tamil area. This composition was not incidental; a former senior Mahaweli Authority bureaucrat later acknowledged that the settlement of System L in Weli Oya (Manal Aru) in particular was designed to “destroy the land basis for the very existence of Eelam,” inserting a loyal Sinhala population into the narrow strip separating Tamil areas of the north from Tamil- and Muslim-inhabited areas of the east and driving a permanent geographic wedge into the claimed Tamil homeland.[2] Weli Oya was the most militarized expression of Sinhala colonization, and was settled clandestinely from the mid-1980s under a Buddhist-monk-led mobilization backed by President Jayewardene’s inner circle, with settlers armed and deployed as home guards alongside the army.
A 1985 government-appointed “study group” explicitly recommended — reported in Tamil Times, November 1985 — using Sinhala colonization to sever the territorial link between the Tamil-majority north and east. “The area [Trincomalee District] forms an ethnic bridge and colonization of this region by Sinhalese population can break this inter-district ethnic [Tamil] link”, the report proposed. Eight recommendations reported include transformation of the ethnic composition of the Tamil areas of the north and east in order that Sinhalese would constitute the majority by redrawing Sri Lanka’s map with boundary changes of provinces and by creating new districts. Jayewardene himself announced — reported in Los Angeles News on January 21, 1985 — plans to colonize the Northern Province with enough Sinhalese: “We consider Sri Lanka as one land belonging to all citizens, consisting of 75% Sinhalese and 25% other races. As such, we will settle Sri Lankans in this proportion throughout the island on state land”, he said at a public meeting at Anamaduwa.
This was not a program confined to the war years. It resumed after the LTTE’s military defeat in 2009, when the Mahaweli Authority and the military brought new waves of landless Sinhalese, mainly from Hambantota, into Weli Oya in the same clandestine manner as before. And it continues into the present, with the Sri Lankan cabinet of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake approving the revival of the Mahaweli System L’s Kivul Oya reservoir project in January 2026 — a scheme reported to confiscate over 1,600 acres of Tamil paddy land and settle more than 7,000 people, reportedly all Sinhalese, with no land allocated to the Tamil communities who have farmed the area for decades.
On 2 February 2026, residents and farmers of Nedunkerni, Vavuniya, held a protest against the Sri Lankan government’s revival of proposed Kivul Oya Reservoir Project, alleging that it would facilitate Sinhala colonization and alter the demographic composition of the North-East. Image courtesy of Tamil Guardian
These programs were administered under the banner of national development and land reform. They were nothing of the kind. They shifted the ethnic composition of entire districts, fragmented the geographic contiguity of Tamil-majority territory, and became one of the central grievances underlying Tamil nationalist politics and, later, the armed conflict. The war that erupted in 1983 and the military occupation of the North and East provided cover for accelerated settlement. In the post-war period, as the WSWS reported in 2012, the Rajapakse government pursued a systematic policy of “Sinhalisation” — changing Tamil place names to Sinhala, erecting Buddha statues, and moving Sinhalese settlers northward “to change the population balance in politically and socially significant ways.” [3] The military controlled land allocation and barred displaced Tamils from returning to their villages.
The Sinhalese peasants settled in the Northern and Eastern provinces through these colonisation schemes were themselves victims of the same communal strategy. Granted land and state assistance as initial inducements, many were subsequently left to endure severe hardship. Established in militarily exposed frontier zones, they were repeatedly subjected to deadly attacks by the LTTE and other armed groups, while the state frequently failed to provide either adequate protection or long-term economic security. For many settler families, the promised improvement in living conditions never materialised. Yet these same schemes profoundly and permanently altered the demographic composition of historically Tamil-majority areas — an outcome that was not incidental but, as a substantial body of research has documented, a central political objective of successive governments. The objective record demonstrates that the Sinhala-chauvinist state subordinated the welfare of poor Sinhalese settlers, no less than that of the Tamil population, to its broader strategy of consolidating territorial and political control through communal division. Sinhalese peasants were deployed not as the principal beneficiaries of these schemes but as instruments of a reactionary state policy whose overriding purpose was the preservation of bourgeois rule through ethnic polarisation.
On 5 February 2026, residents of Keppapulavu held a protest for the 12th consecutive day, demanding the return of their “ancestral lands” and community properties that have remained under military occupation since 2009. Image courtesy of Kumanan Kana
Tamil Eelam is Sri Lanka’s Gaza
The continued militarisation of the North and East, the land grabs and settler colonisation sponsored by the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist state, and the atrocities committed against Tamils since the early 1980s draw a sharp parallel between occupied Palestine and the North and East of Sri Lanka. The parallel is not incidental. It is verifiably reported that the Sri Lankan ruling class studied and adapted Zionist settler-colonialism as a precedent, with direct advisory contact between Israeli and Sri Lankan state agencies in the 1980s. The ideological foundations are strikingly similar. Just as Zionist ideology since the Nakba of 1948 has been built on the colonial assertion of a divine and historical claim to land, erasing the presence of the indigenous Palestinian population, Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism rests on the anachronistic and false claim that Tamils were historically invaders of the island — a mythology that denies the centuries-long presence of Tamils in the North and East and provides the ideological cover for their dispossession. The material manifestation of both ideologies has been the same: state-sponsored settler colonisation. In Palestine, Zionist settlements have been systematically implanted to fragment Palestinian territory, seize water and land resources, and make the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. In Sri Lanka, from the Gal Oya project of 1949 through the Mahaweli Programme to the post-war military colonies, the state has resettled Sinhalese peasants in historically Tamil-concentrated areas to alter the demographic map, fragment territorial contiguity, and “destroy the land basis for the very existence of Eelam”. In both cases, the political objective was not merely territorial acquisition but the deliberate strengthening of communal divisions to prevent the unity of the working class. In both cases, the major imperialist powers — above all the United States — provided political cover, military support and diplomatic protection for the project. In both cases, the civilian population was subjected to military onslaught when it resisted: the slaughter of tens of thousands of Tamils at Mullivaikkal in 2009, like the genocidal assault on Gaza, was the bloody culmination of decades of occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing. Tamil Eelam is Sri Lanka’s Gaza — not as a rhetorical flourish, but as the product of the same logic of the capitalist nation-state, which, whether in Palestine or Sri Lanka, resorts to settler colonialism, communal war and permanent military occupation to suppress the democratic rights of oppressed peoples and to divide the working class along ethnic lines.
The class logic of communalism
The policies of demographic engineering have not promoted unity between Tamil and Sinhala workers. They have deepened mistrust and communal division. This serves the interests of the Sinhala ruling class by weakening the independent unity of the working class, while simultaneously providing Tamil nationalist bourgeois leaders with political ammunition to reinforce ethnic divisions and strengthen support for separatism. The Sinhala ruling class and the Tamil bourgeois nationalists are not genuine antagonists. They are symbiotic. Each feeds on the other, and both depend on preventing the unity of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers on a class basis.
The demographic restructuring of the North and East serves a precise class function. It provides land and patronage to Sinhala settlers, creating a social base with a material stake in the communal order. It fragments the working class along ethnic lines, making it far harder for Tamil and Sinhala workers to recognise their common interests. And it provides the Tamil nationalist bourgeoisie with precisely the grievance around which to mobilise ethnic solidarity, reinforcing the very divisions that prevent the emergence of an independent working-class politics.
This was not inevitable. The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), the Trotskyist forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party and the Socialist Lead (SLLA), commanded the allegiance of the most class-conscious workers in the 1940s. On February 4, 1948, it mobilised 50,000 workers — Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim — on Galle Face Green to reject the fake independence arranged in the British Colonial Office. The BLPI warned that disenfranchising Tamil plantation workers would set a chain of discrimination in motion. The disaster came with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party’s political degeneration. Encouraged by the Pabloite revisionists in the Fourth International, the LSSP leaders increasingly adapted to Bandaranaike’s Sinhala populism, entering the SLFP government in 1964. By 1972, the former Trotskyist de Silva was drafting a constitution that enshrined Buddhism as the state religion and a Sinhala as the sole official language — a direct repudiation of everything he had fought for in 1948. The LSSP’s betrayal blocked the development of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class, opening the door to the JVP among Sinhala rural youth and the LTTE among young Tamils.
The way forward
The democratic rights of all communities cannot be secured through state-directed demographic manipulation. They require the conscious political unity of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers against communalism and the capitalist state that has systematically exploited ethnic divisions for its own survival.
Where communities have been relocated through politically motivated settlement schemes, any future solution must uphold democratic rights, be voluntary, provide adequate compensation and livelihood guarantees, and be determined in consultation with the affected people — not imposed by the state in pursuit of communal objectives. But even such democratic measures can only be fully realised through a broader political struggle against the capitalist system that generates communalism as an instrument of rule.
The working class must reject all forms of nationalism and communalism — whether Sinhala supremacism or Tamil separatism. In solidarity with the socialist internationalist programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the SLLA fights for a workers’ and farmers’ government and the convening of a genuine constituent assembly to abolish decades of discrimination and oppression on the basis of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender. Democratic rights can only be assured by ending social inequality through the socialist transformation of society.
The ICFI advances the perspective of a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and [Tamil] Eelam, as part of a United Socialist States of South Asia. The ICFI’s “Tamil Eelam” is not the LTTE’s capitalist Eelam — it is a constituent part of a voluntary socialist federation, a socialist Tamil Eelam, guaranteed by a workers’ state. This is not a diplomatic formula for negotiations between capitalist nation-states. It is a guide to revolutionary action — the unification of Sinhala and Tamil workers in a common struggle against their common class enemy. As the 1987 statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International explained, the working class fights for the democratic rights of oppressed peoples “not as an appendage to the national bourgeoisie, but rather as its implacable enemy.”[4] The right of nations to self-determination cannot be realised through bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements, no matter how courageous or militant. It can only be achieved as a by-product of the socialist revolution led by the proletariat, which, having established its dictatorship, guarantees to all oppressed peoples their legitimate democratic rights within a voluntarily united socialist federation.
What, then, is the way forward for the Sinhalese peasants who have been settled in the North and East under these reactionary programmes? For those already settled and granted title deeds over the years — many of whom have lived there for decades, raised families and know no other home — any resolution must be democratic and voluntary, not punitive. They must be guaranteed security of person and property, full democratic rights, and equal participation in the economic and social life of the region alongside their Tamil and Muslim neighbours. For those who were settled but never granted formal title deeds, the state must either regularise their tenure on terms determined in consultation with all affected communities, or provide adequate compensation and livelihood guarantees should they choose to relocate. For those Sinhalese presently being lured by the state into new settlement schemes — the most active front of the ongoing communal project — the answer is to refuse. Sinhalese workers, youth and peasants must reject the role the Sinhala-chauvinist state has assigned them as demographic pawns. The state that offers them land today will abandon them tomorrow, as it has abandoned generations of settlers before them, once their political utility is exhausted. The genuine interests of Sinhalese peasants lie not in accepting stolen land at the expense of Tamil and Muslim working people, but in joining with those same working people in a common struggle against the capitalist system that exploits and divides them all.
The working class has no interest in drawing borders on exclusive ethnic lines, nor in the demographic manipulation of one community against another. They should reject the idea that different ethnic groups must be separated into different states. The territorial referent of “Tamil Eelam” in our usage is the Northern and Eastern provinces — the areas where the Tamil population has historically lived as a concentrated community, where national oppression has been most acute, and where the demand for a separate Tamil state has been historically raised by the Tamil nationalist movement. But, we do so within the framework of a United Socialist States, on the basis of the democratic right of self-determination and the struggle for socialism — NOT on the basis of ethnic exclusivity of Tamils, nationalist “homeland” claims of a primordial birthright grounded in ethnic identity, or the cartographic pretensions of the Tamil bourgeoisie. The interest of the working class lies in abolishing the entire system of capitalist communal rule through the socialist transformation of society. Sinhalese workers, youth and peasants should recognise the reactionary character of state-sponsored settlement policies and the devastating consequences they have produced over decades. The allies of Tamil workers are not to be found in the separatist leaderships of the Tamil bourgeoisie, but among their Sinhala and Muslim class brothers and sisters. The fight against communally driven demographic engineering is inseparable from the fight for socialism.
Let us be clear
Seventeen years after the war, the democratic right of Tamil people to reclaim their occupied lands must be upheld without qualification. Whether or not individual Tamils possess formal title deeds is irrelevant to the legitimacy of their claim. These are historically Tamil neighbourhoods — areas where Tamils were historically concentrated, where their homes, Tamil villages and cultural places were situated. The absence of state-issued documentation does not extinguish the right of a people to the lands on which their community has lived for generations. On the contrary, the systematic denial or destruction of title deeds by the occupying state is itself an instrument of dispossession, not a legitimate basis for denying restitution.
The democratic right of Tamils to their own neighbourhoods must be recognised and restored. This is not a claim to ethnic exclusivity. No member of any other ethnic community is prevented from residing in these areas of his or her own will, without the intervention of the state. The right being asserted is not the bourgeois-nationalist demand for an ethnically pure territory, but the inviolable democratic right of a historically oppressed people to return to and live in their traditional neighbourhoods, their historical villages and towns — the places from which they were driven by communal war, military occupation and state-sponsored colonisation. There is no exclusive ethnic right to lands that Marxists recognise. But people of the same ethnicity who have shared a culture in traditional neighbourhoods of a community, recognised as their historical villages and towns, have an inviolable right to reside on those lands.
This distinction is fundamental. The Sinhala-chauvinist state has systematically violated this right for decades — through the Gal Oya and Mahaweli colonisation schemes, through the mass expulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, through the military land seizures that followed the 2009 slaughter, and through the ongoing policy of settling Sinhalese colonists on lands from which Tamil families have been barred from returning. The state invokes formal legal title to justify these seizures, but the legal framework itself is the product of the same communal project. To accept the state’s legal title as the arbiter of rights would be to accept the legitimacy of the dispossession.
The restoration of Tamil neighbourhoods, villages and towns is a democratic demand that the working class must champion. It requires the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the military from the North and East, the dismantling of high security zones and army camps established on seized land, and the return of occupied lands to their traditional Tamil inhabitants. It requires that Sinhalese settlers who were implanted through state-sponsored schemes — particularly those who never received formal title — not be used by the state as a human shield to perpetuate occupation. Where settlers have been present for decades and know no other home, solutions must be democratic, voluntary and negotiated with the affected Tamil communities whose rights are primary. But the principle is clear: the democratic right of Tamils to their historical villages and towns is inviolable, and the state that violated it bears the responsibility for redress.
[2] The Lure of Land: Peasant Politics, Frontier Colonization and the Cunning State in Sri Lanka, Thiruni Kelegama and Benedikt Korf (2023) Modern Asian Studies 1, Cambridge University Press <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X22000506>
[4] The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League, Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North, Keerthi Balasuriya (19 November 1987) <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fi-15-1/05.html>
The silence — and in many cases, the open enthusiasm — of institutionalized journalists toward the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals (CIMP) Bill is a political scandal that must be exposed. Rather than recognizing the bill as a direct assault on their own democratic rights, a significant layer of established media professionals has greeted it as an opportunity for personal advancement. They see in the Chartered Institute not a cage, but a club: a state-operated institution that will certify their professional status, distinguish them from the unwashed masses of “content developers” and social media commentators, and — most importantly — open the door to the material privileges that state recognition can confer. Pensions. Insurance schemes. Bank loans at preferential rates. Foreign visa facilitation. Access to government advertising and contracts. A seat at the table with the powerful.
This is the outlook not of defenders of press freedom but of a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum seeking to secure its position through collaboration with the capitalist state. It is the mentality of the courtier, not the journalist.
The Bribe and the Chain
On 17 February 2026, Deputy Minister of Mass Media Kaushalya Ariyarathna of NPP/JVP government told Parliament that the government would establish a chartered institution to promote journalists’ job security, professionalism, health insurance and welfare, and that it would continue the scholarship schemes.
The Dissanayake government is not offering these inducements out of generosity. It is executing a classic strategy of bourgeois statecraft: buy off a strategic layer of the profession, bind their material interests to the survival of the regime, and in doing so, fragment any potential opposition to the throttling of democratic rights. The journalist who today receives a state-certified accreditation, a facilitated bank loan, or a government pension scheme becomes, tomorrow, a hostage. The same state that grants these privileges can revoke them — and under the CIMP Bill, the mechanism for revocation is already built into the architecture. Section 24 empowers the Council to “disenroll any member” for “professional misconduct,” a term left deliberately undefined in Section 23(2), to be filled in later by rules made by the same Council. The journalist who believes they are securing a pension is in fact putting their head in a noose.
This is not hypothetical. We have seen this dynamic play out repeatedly. In 2023, the Government Medical Officers’ Association — the trade union of Sri Lankan doctors — agreed to government censorship* of its own members’ communications, demonstrating how professional associations function as the industrial police for government and corporations. The union bureaucrats who negotiate such arrangements secure their own positions at the expense of the rights of their members. The CIMP Bill extends this model to journalism: create a chartered body, staff it with compliant figures, and use it to discipline the profession from within.
The Class Character of the Betrayal
The journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill are not acting out of ignorance. They are acting out of class interest — the interest of a privileged layer that fears the independent mobilization of the working class and the unregulated democratic discourse of the internet more than it fears state censorship. The mainstream corporate media in Sri Lanka is already tightly controlled by oligarchs and the state. Its senior practitioners have long since made their peace with power. What terrifies them is not the government’s repression but the rise of independent online media — the bloggers, the social media commentators, YouTubers, the citizen journalists, the socialist publications — who operate outside the established hierarchies of the profession and who give voice to working-class anger against IMF austerity, privatization, and imperialist war.
The CIMP Bill, by bringing “content developers” under the disciplinary apparatus of the state, promises to eliminate this competition. For the institutionalized journalist, the bill is not a threat to press freedom — it is a moat around their professional castle. They will be certified. Their rivals will be disenrolled. The democratic right of free expression will be converted into a licensed privilege, and they will be among the license-holders.
This is a reactionary posture of the most dangerous kind. It is the same mentality that led the trade union bureaucracy to suppress strikes by postal workers, electricity workers, and health workers — sacrificing the interests of the broader working class to preserve their own positions within the state apparatus. It is the mentality of the labor aristocracy, the privileged stratum that imperialism cultivates in the colonial and semi-colonial countries to serve as a transmission belt for the dictates of finance capital.
A Trap, Not a Shelter
The journalists who imagine they will benefit from the CIMP Bill are deluding themselves. The state that grants privileges can withdraw them. The Interim Council appointed by the Media Minister — consisting of the Ministry Secretary and six political nominees — will write the rules that define “professional misconduct.” Those rules will not be written to protect the integrity of journalism. They will be written to silence criticism of the government. The journalist who accepts accreditation today may find themselves disenrolled tomorrow for reporting on a strike, exposing a corruption scandal, or publishing an article critical of the IMF program. The pension, the bank loan, the visa facilitation — all will vanish the moment the journalist steps out of line.
The only reliable guarantee of press freedom is not a state-issued certificate of professionalism. It is the organized power of the working class. The journalists who seek to insulate themselves from state repression by collaborating with the state will find that they have merely made themselves more vulnerable to it. They will have traded their independence for a mess of pottage, and they will be devoured in due course.
Journalists Must Ally with the Working Class
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) calls on all honest journalists — including those who may have initially viewed the CIMP Bill as an opportunity for professional advancement — to break decisively from this reactionary orientation. The fight against the CIMP Bill is not a fight for the privileges of a professional elite. It is a fight for the democratic rights of the entire working class, of all the “content creators”. Journalists cannot defend their right to publish by seeking patronage from the capitalist state. They can only defend it by allying themselves with the class that has the power to overthrow that state.
Reject the bribe! The government’s promise of insurance, pensions, loans, and visas is the price of your chains. No material inducement is worth the surrender of press freedom!
Break from the institutionalized journalists who are collaborating with the state! Their “professionalism” is a cover for class betrayal. They do not speak for journalism — they speak for their own careers!
For the unity of journalists with the working class! The fight for press freedom is inseparable from the fight against IMF austerity, against imperialist war, and for the socialist reorganization of society!
Build rank-and-file committees of media workers! Independent of the corporate media owners, the trade union bureaucracy, and the state — to fight for the right to publish without interference!
Defeat the CIMP Bill! No to state licensing of journalists! Freedom of the press is a right, not a privilege!
The pen that serves the state will be broken by the state. The pen that serves the working class will be defended by the working class. Journalists must choose which side they are on.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Editor, theSocialist.LK | Member, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA).
Kurunthurmalai (Kurundi Archaeological Site) in Mullaitivu has become a severe ethnic flashpoint, with Tamil nationalist leaders condemning state-backed efforts to erase their claims to traditional Tamil ownership and the ancestral Athishivan Aiyanar worship at the site. Conversely, the Sri Lankan Department of Archaeology and Buddhist monks invoke majoritarian chronicles to claim the hill exclusively as an ancient Buddhist reserve, weaponizing heritage preservation to seize surrounding lands and prohibit Tamil worship. Image from Facebook
The ruling classes of every epoch have reached into the past to justify the crimes of the present. When the political and ideological representatives of the bourgeoisie invoke ancient scriptures, chronicles, and mythological epics — the Hebrew Bible, the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahavamsa — to claim territories, dispossess living peoples, and incite communal violence, they are not engaged in a scholarly recovery of history. They are performing a class function: converting the contested and often mythological record of the distant past into a weapon against the working class in the present.
The working class must categorically reject this reactionary logic on principled grounds. No event from millennia past — no migration, no conquest, no divine promise inscribed in a religious text — can constitute a legitimate claim against the rights of communities living today. The decisive criterion is not what allegedly occurred in the age of myth or chronicle, but the incontestable right of populations to the lands they actually inhabit in the present and in recent history. To displace, dispossess, or delegitimize a living people on the basis of a text of contested authorship and indeterminate antiquity is not the recovery of historical justice — it is the manufacture of present injustice in the name of the irretrievable past.
This principle is confirmed, not contradicted, by the broader record of human civilization. The legacies of ancient Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt are not the exclusive national property of the contemporary states that occupy those territories. They are the common inheritance of all humanity. Civilizations across recorded history determined their reach through conquest, displacement, and war — methods which the modern world, through hard and bloody experience, has recognized as barbaric and repudiated in international law. The Westphalian principle of territorial sovereignty, and the post-1945 international legal order built upon it, rest precisely on the recognition that conquest confers no permanent title, and that the rights of present populations cannot be overridden by the claims of the dead over the living.
It is therefore not merely wrong but utterly reactionary — a politically manufactured regression — to label communities as “invaders” on the basis of ancient texts, or to evict them from lands they have inhabited for generations on the grounds that a scripture or chronicle awarded those lands to someone else. The myths and narratives contained in the Old Testament, the Vedas, the Mahavamsa, or the Ramayana are part of humanity’s literary, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. They are not title deeds. Their selective appropriation by any ethnic or religious group to justify present-day dispossession is not a defence of identity — it is the exploitation of the past in the service of a definable and identifiable class interest in the present.
The Core Logic: Whose Interests Does It Serve?
The starting point of any serious political analysis of this abuse of history is not “is this historically accurate?” but rather “who benefits from this narrative, and why now?” When ruling classes in South Asia reach back millennia into myth, chronicle, or scripture to manufacture territorial or ethnic claims, they are not engaging in scholarship — they are performing a class function. They are diverting the rage and anguish of exploited workers and peasants, who face mass unemployment, dispossession, caste degradation, and social collapse, away from the class enemy at home and toward a manufactured communal enemy.
This is the essence of what Marxists call communalism: the mobilization of religious or ethnic identity to mask class antagonisms. The Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahavamsa, the Mahabharata and Torah did not spontaneously leap into political life. They were conjured there by ruling elites at precise historical moments when class contradictions sharpened to the point of threatening bourgeois order.
India: Hindutva, Ancient Myths, and the Fascist Project
The most developed and dangerous example in South Asia is the project of Hindutva — the Hindu supremacist ideology pioneered by V.D. Savarkar and institutionalized through the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and its political arm, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). The BJP-RSS nexus [1] is not a religious movement but a political one — rooted in the interests of a section of the Indian bourgeoisie that found secular nationalism too broad, too accommodating of the Muslim minority, and too threatening to its social hierarchy.
The Hindutva project rests on the claim that the Indian subcontinent is essentially, primordially, and eternally a Hindu civilization — and that Muslims, Christians, and others are therefore either foreign intruders or permanent guests with no legitimate roots. This mythology is constructed directly from ancient texts and religious narratives: the Vedas as “original” Indian civilization, the Ramayana as a historical record of Ram’s territorial dominion, the Mahabharata as a founding epic of Hindu nationhood. The mythology serves a precise political purpose — to retroactively delegitimize the presence of 200 million Muslims who have lived on the subcontinent for over a thousand years and whose ancestors were, in the vast majority, not “invaders” at all but local converts.
The most revealing concrete expression of this was the Babri Masjid campaign. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and BJP argued that the 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya had been built by the Mughal emperor Babur on the birthplace of the mythological Ram — a site identified on the basis of a text of dubious historicity. In 1992, a BJP-orchestrated mob tore down the mosque, triggering nationwide pogroms that killed thousands. Three decades later, India’s Supreme Court, in what the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) rightly called an act of judicial capitulation to fascism [2], awarded the site to the Hindu communalists, and in January 2024, Modi personally inaugurated [3] the new Ram temple in a spectacle explicitly designed to fuse state power, religious myth, and electoral mobilization ahead of the 2024 general election.
What is happening here is precisely what we stated above: a myth — in this instance, not even a verified historical claim, but a story from a religious epic — is transformed into a territorial deed. Ram’s “birthplace” in a text of unknown authorship becomes grounds for demolishing a standing structure inhabited for centuries and dispossessing a real community living in the present. This was placing one historic crime atop another — the 1992 mob demolition being the first, and the 2024 state sanctification of it the second. The ruling class has not merely tolerated this political theology; Modi and the BJP have made it the organizing principle of the Indian state.
The class function is transparent. As the WSWS noted, “Modi and his BJP have ratcheted up their communalist offensive as the social crisis has deepened.”[4] India under Modi has seen accelerating inequality, mass unemployment, the devastation of peasant livelihoods (hence the enormous farmers’ protests), and the catastrophic mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The louder the Hindutva mythology, the more the BJP needs to silence the class questions underneath it.
Furthermore, the imperialist powers — Washington, London, and others — have not only tolerated but embraced this. The Hindu rashtra project—transforming India from a constitutionally secular republic into an explicitly Hindu nation— is not an obstacle to global capital; it is perfectly compatible with it, because it disciplines, divides, and suppresses the Indian working class while keeping India safely within the orbit of US geopolitical strategy. Ancient mythology in the service of communalism is, in this sense, also in the service of imperialism.
Pakistan and the Region: Partition and Its Legacies
The entire Indian subcontinent was reshaped by the catastrophe of the 1947 Partition — itself a product not of inevitable ancient hatreds between Hindus and Muslims, but of the specific political choices of the Indian bourgeoisie (Congress), the Muslim League, and above all the British imperialists, who used divide-and-rule as the mechanism of their exit. The “two-nation theory” — the claim that Hindus and Muslims constitute two fundamentally separate nations that cannot coexist — is precisely the logic our argument critiques: it takes religious and cultural difference and makes it an ontological, quasi-historical, territorial destiny. It was politically manufactured, not historically inevitable. And the consequence — over one million dead in weeks, fifteen million displaced — was entirely real and entirely contemporary.
The legacies of that choice continue to generate the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, the perpetual wound of Kashmir, and the periodic eruption of communal violence within India itself. Every BJP-orchestrated anti-Muslim pogrom — Gujarat 2002, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests of 2019-20, the ongoing persecution of Muslims through mob violence and “love jihad” anti-conversion laws — is a continuation of that logic: the use of religious identity to territorialize, to mark populations as belonging or not belonging, to claim that some people’s present habitation is illegitimate because of the distant past.
Zionist Israel’s “Promised Land” Myth as a political weapon
The case of Zionist Israel is perhaps the most consequential, and certainly the most intensely debated, instance of the phenomenon analyzed throughout this essay — the weaponization of ancient religious texts to justify the dispossession, subjugation, and now the genocidal destruction of a living people in the present.
Zionism’s founding mythology rests on the proposition that the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) — the Old Testament, the Torah — constitutes a divine land grant to the Jewish people — a title deed that supersedes the rights of those who have actually inhabited Palestine for centuries. The territory of historic Palestine was, according to this reading, “promised” by God to the Jewish people. Crucially, Zionism’s origins were secular: Theodor Herzl’s project was a bourgeois-nationalist response to European antisemitism, and the biblical connection was instrumentalized purely for political utility, to mobilize a geographically dispersed population around a cohering myth.
Over decades of state-building, however, this secular nationalist project was transmuted into a theologically and racially supremacist one. The settler movement — which now holds direct governmental power through Itamar Ben-Gvir’s National Security Ministry and Bezalel Smotrich’s Finance Ministry — operates entirely within the framework of biblical land entitlement [5]. The settlers do not argue in the language of post-1948 international law, or of UN resolutions, or of the Westphalian system. They argue in the language of Genesis and Joshua. The map of “Greater Israel” encompasses Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It is the explicit territorial program derived from maximalist readings of the biblical Promised Land. The Palestinians “should leave and go to other countries,” Settler leader Daniella Weiss declares. The entire civilian population of Gaza is to be expelled to make way for Jewish settlement — “Our mission is to settle Israel.” Weiss dismisses the argument that this act is a war crime by referring to it as “a light felony.” In this worldview, international law is simply irrelevant: a divine mandate cannot be constrained by “the whims of legislation”. Ancient scripture trumps the entire post-1945 international legal order constructed to prevent a repetition of the Holocaust.
Netanyahu’s invocation of the Amalek doctrine — an Old Testament commandment for total extermination of the Amalekites — to kill every man, woman, child, and infant, and to spare nothing — as justification for the Gaza assault represents this theology in its most operationally explicit form [6]. The “Theology of Revenge” elaborated by Meir Kahane, brought into the highest levels of state power, frames Palestinians as a mythical enemy whose destruction is a religious obligation. This application of a biblically-grounded, racially supremacist, exterminationist ideology to a real, living civilian population is nothing but fascism.
The Nakba of 1948, in which 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled through at least 31 documented massacres [7], represents the foundational material translation of this mythology. The systematic weaponization of antisemitism charges to silence criticism constitutes what the ICFI identifies as semantic inversion — suppressing the most principled traditions of the Jewish workers’ movement itself, which was overwhelmingly internationalist and socialist rather than Zionist.
The Marxist analysis [8], however, insists that the Hebrew Bible is not the cause of genocide but its ideological cover. Zionism from inception served imperial interests — from the Balfour Declaration to Israel’s current role as a garrison state for US imperialism. The only genuine alternative is the unity of Jewish and Arab workers in a unified socialist state, which alone can break the chains that nationalist mythology forges for all.
Sri Lanka: The Mahavamsa and the Catastrophe of Sinhala Buddhist Supremacism
The post-colonial history of Sri Lanka stands as a blood-stained testament to the weaponization of history in the service of capitalist class rule.
The island of Sri Lanka has never been, at any point in its recorded history, the exclusive domain of a single ethnic or religious civilization. Its ancient history is one of continuous migration, cultural interchange, and political entanglement between Sinhala-speaking and Tamil-speaking peoples, between Buddhist and Hindu traditions, between the island’s populations and those of the South Indian subcontinent. Any claim to ethnic exclusivism is not merely politically reactionary — it is historically illiterate.
The Mahavamsa — the ancient accretive, redactional Pali chronicle, compiled by monk Mahanama in the 5th century CE, and subsequently continued in the Culavamsa — is the primary literary source through which Sinhala Buddhist supremacism constructed its founding mythology. It presents the island as the divinely ordained sanctuary of the Buddhist Dhamma, with the Sinhalese as its appointed guardians. Sinhala Buddhist supremacism rests on the implicit claim that Tamils in Sri Lanka are essentially a recent foreign implantation, a product of invasions and migrations from South India that disrupted an originally Sinhala Buddhist civilization. The historical record, including the Mahavamsa itself, demolishes this claim. Tamil-speaking and Dravidian peoples had a presence in the island that is contemporaneous with, and in some respects antedates, the Sinhala Buddhist cultural formations that the chronicle celebrates. The island’s ancient history was one of thoroughly entangled Sinhala-Tamil interaction, and the ancient kingdoms were constituted across ethnic lines that were fluid, not fixed. The Mahavamsa’s own hero, Dutugamunu (161–137 BCE), fought his celebrated war against the South Indian king Elara with Tamil commanders in his army — and had Elara buried with full honors. The chronicles record Tamil kings ruling Anuradhapura, South Indian mercenaries serving Sinhala rulers, and Buddhist monasteries receiving Tamil patronage. Archaeological evidence from Anuradhapura includes Tamil-language Brahmi inscriptions from as early as the 3rd century BCE, testifying to a multilingual, multi-ethnic urban community at the very outset of recorded history. The ethnic boundary that supremacism projects onto ancient history simply did not exist in the form it requires.
Into this already complex historical landscape, Sinhala supremacists have inserted the Kalinga Magha invasion of 1215 CE as their most potent political weapon. According to the Culavamsa, Magha was a prince from Kalinga — modern coastal Odisha in eastern India — who arrived with a large mercenary force, captured Polonnaruwa, and ruled for approximately two decades. The chronicle records systematic devastation: the destruction of Buddhist temples, persecution of monks, and the collapse of the elaborate northern irrigation civilization. The demographic consequence was catastrophic — a mass southward migration of the Sinhala population, the abandonment of the great hydraulic infrastructure of the northern dry zone, and the permanent shift of Sinhala Buddhist civilization toward the island’s southwest.
The supremacist argument constructed upon this event runs as follows: the north and east was originally Sinhala Buddhist territory; the Kalinga invasion destroyed that civilization and created a demographic vacuum subsequently filled by Tamil settlers from South India; therefore the Tamil claim to a “traditional homeland” in the north and east is historically fraudulent, and the Sinhala state is historically entitled to assert sovereignty over those territories.
Every element of this argument is a falsification. First, Kalinga Magha was not Tamil. His army was a multilingual mercenary force recruited from across the subcontinent — Keralans, Chola soldiers, various South Indian contingents. To retroactively brand his invasion a “Tamil” conquest is a 20th-century political projection onto a 13th-century reality in which such ethnic categories carried no such meaning. Second, the Tamil presence in the north and east long predates 1215 CE. Archaeological and inscriptional evidence establishes continuous Tamil-speaking habitation in the Jaffna peninsula going back at minimum to the early centuries of the Common Era. The Chola kingdoms had maintained settlements and networks in the north for centuries before Magha’s arrival. The Tamil kingdom of Jaffna emerged from an already-existing population, not from a post-invasion colonial implantation. Third, and most decisively: even if the demographic argument were entirely conceded, it would provide no political or legal foundation whatsoever for present dispossession. The Tamil communities that built their civilization in the north and east over the subsequent centuries — constructing the Jaffna kingdom, developing Tamil literature and learning, establishing agricultural communities across generations — possess an incontestable claim to those territories grounded in centuries of actual, documented, continuous habitation.
The Mahavamsa was the ideological reservoir from which this communalism drew its cultural legitimacy. The story of Dutugamunu’s war against Elara — rewritten in the supremacist reading as a heroic Sinhala Buddhist struggle against Tamil invasion — became the template for presenting the island’s entire political history as an eternal civilizational conflict between Sinhala Buddhism and South Indian/Tamil aggression. The Kalinga Magha invasion fitted neatly into this framework: here was documented proof, from the chronicle itself, of a catastrophic invasion from India that had “destroyed” the Sinhala civilization of the north. The 800-year gap between 1215 and the present, during which Tamil communities had built their own deep-rooted civilizational presence in those territories, was ideologically collapsed — rendered irrelevant by the supremacist insistence on the “original” Sinhala claim. To argue that one medieval displacement justifies a contemporary dispossession is precisely the reactionary logic this entire essay demolishes. Projecting present-day ethnic categories of “Sinhala territory” and “Tamil territory” onto the pre-modern past is an anachronism that falsifies the actual historical record.
The modern political operationalization of this mythology was a deliberate ruling-class construction, not an organic cultural development. The Buddhist revivalist movement of late 19th-century colonial Ceylon was organized by wealthy Sinhala landowners and businessmen who felt threatened by the colonial hierarchy’s preference for the English-educated, Christianized elite. Their principal ideologue, Anagarika Dharmapala, fashioned from the Mahavamsa an ideology proclaiming the Sinhalese a unique Aryan race — an ideology whose followers in the 1930s explicitly invoked Nazi racial doctrine [9]. The decisive political deployment came in 1956, when S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, confronted with the revolutionary potential of unified Sinhala-Tamil working-class struggle demonstrated in the 1953 hartal, reached for communalism as the only available weapon against socialist internationalism. The “Sinhala Only” Official Language Act transformed communal tendency into state doctrine, systematically excluding Tamils from public employment, higher education, and civic life.
The only alternative to the communalism of the ruling class was provided by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which had, through the 1940s and into the 1950s, built a genuinely unified working-class movement across communal lines on the basis of socialist internationalism. It was precisely the subsequent degeneration and betrayal of the LSSP — culminating in its joining the bourgeois SLFP coalition government of Sirima Bandaranaike in 1964, and its co-authorship of the 1972 constitution enshrining Sinhala Buddhism as the state’s official foundation — that removed the working-class alternative and allowed communal ideology to fill the vacuum.
The consequences of this communal trajectory were not mythological. They were spelled out in state policy over subsequent decades: the 1948 disenfranchisement of Tamil plantation workers; the 1956 Official Language Act; the systematic discrimination against Tamils in university admissions, public service, and economic life; the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, 1981, and the catastrophic 1983 “Black July” in which hundreds of Tamils were killed by state-organized mobs; the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, destroying irreplaceable Tamil manuscripts — a cultural act of devastation whose parallel with the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was noted by the WSWS, with the observation that Sri Lankan political and Buddhist hierarchical reactions were “mixed with a good deal of rank hypocrisy.” Each of these acts was accompanied by ideological justification drawn from the Mahavamsa’s narrative of Sinhala Buddhist civilizational priority and existential threat from “Tamil invaders.” The state built on the Mahavamsa’s narrative of eternal civilizational siege — amplified by the weaponized memory of Kalinga Magha — reached its logical terminus in mass killing and permanent military occupation of the north and east, the archaeological and cultural erasure of Tamil heritage in the north, and the accelerated Sinhala colonization of territories with centuries of Tamil habitation and cultural development.
The Mahavamsa did not cause this catastrophe, nor did the Kalinga invasion of 1215. The correct political conclusion from all of this history is not that the Mahavamsa is factually wrong about ancient invasions, that the Kalinga Magha invasion did not happen, or that the suffering inflicted on the Sinhala Buddhist civilization of the northern dry zone in the 13th century was not real. The Sinhala Buddhist civilization of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa was genuinely great — and it was also genuinely interpenetrated with Tamil, South Indian, and pan-Buddhist cultural currents that the supremacist reading must airbrush out of existence. None of this — however real and however terrible — provides any political or legal or moral basis for the present subjugation, discrimination, dispossession, or mass killing of Tamil people who have inhabited the north and east of Sri Lanka for centuries of documented, continuous, and deeply rooted civilizational life. The class interests of the Ceylonese / Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, serving international capital, wielding Sinhala Buddhist communal ideology as an instrument against working-class unity, caused the present catastrophe. What the ruling class of Sri Lanka has done is seize upon the genuine complexity and genuine suffering of the island’s ancient history and weaponize it in the service of a thoroughly modern project: the construction of a communal state that divides the working class, legitimizes the exploitation of both Sinhala and Tamil workers by the same capitalist class, and perpetuates a fratricidal war whose only beneficiaries are the ruling elites on both sides of the ethnic divide. The ancient chronicles were its chosen costume.
Today, the ICFI’s perspective — the United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Eelam, unifying Sinhala and Tamil workers against their common class enemy — remains the only politically coherent answer to the Tamil National question. It is not an answer that springs from ignoring history, but from understanding it: understanding that the working class of Sri Lanka, across all the ethnic lines drawn by its rulers, shares a common class interest that is more powerful than any ancient chronicle, and that the realization of that interest is the only path out of a tragedy that ancient myths did not create and ancient myths cannot resolve.
The Deadly Anachronism: The Nation Projected Backward, the Past Conscripted to Murder the Present
Every ethnonationalism examined in this essay — Sinhala Buddhist supremacism, Tamil separatism, Hindutva, Zionism — rests on a common act of historical falsification. Before a temple is demolished, before a language is banned, before a militia kills in the name of ancient right, modern national identity is projected backward through time. The claim is made that “the Sinhalese,” “the Tamils,” “the Hindus,” “the Jewish people” have existed as cohesive, politically self-conscious nations across millennia, so that contemporary political claims acquire the appearance of immemorial, transhistorical right superseding the actual lives of actual populations in the present.
This is the deadly anachronism: the imposition of a historically specific, relatively recent category — the modern nation — onto social formations organized on entirely different material foundations, in which “national identity” as modern politics understands it was literally inconceivable. It is deadly not metaphorically but concretely: this anachronism has triggered pogroms, civil wars, and genocide against people whose actual crime is existing in the present.
The Marxist materialist tradition supplies the tools to demolish it. The modern nation is not eternal; it is a historically specific product of capitalism, forged through bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism, established formal legal equality, created national markets, and standardized language through state institutions [10]. None of these preconditions existed in pre-modern Sri Lanka. The ancient hydraulic state organized social life through caste, monastic landownership, and tributary obligation, not through horizontal national citizenship. A peasant in an Anuradhapura village could no more have conceived of themselves as part of a unified “Sinhalese nation” than a medieval English villein could have conceived of modern English nationhood. Their social world was bounded by village, caste, and the immediate apparatus of revenue extraction. Language was not yet national identity; Old Sinhala was no more the vehicle of a continuous “Sinhalese nation” than Anglo-Saxon was of modern Englishness.
This is confirmed by the Mahavamsa’s own content. The chronicle’s boundaries between “Sinhala” and “Tamil” were political and dynastic, not ethnic in the modern racial sense: a South Indian king who patronized Buddhism could be absorbed into the island’s political culture, while a Sinhala king who failed the Sangha was condemned regardless of ethnicity. The categories were religious and customary, not national.
This is precisely why the Kalinga Magha invasion of 1215 functions so effectively as supremacist ideology despite being, on close examination, nothing of the sort. Magha was not Tamil; his mercenary army was multiethnic, drawn from across the subcontinent. To brand his conquest a “Tamil invasion” is to retroactively impose/project twentieth-century ethnic categories onto a thirteenth-century political event that did not operate by them. And even granting the chronicle’s account of devastation and southward migration in full, this establishes nothing about the present: the Tamil communities that subsequently built the Jaffna kingdom, its literature, and its agricultural civilization over the following eight centuries possess rights grounded in that continuous, documented habitation — not in whatever happened, or did not happen, in 1215.
One should ask the following questions to delve in further: Did a racial identity of “Sinhalese” actually exist in ancient Sri Lanka? Was this identity recognized across all strata of the social hierarchy? And could a low-caste peasant or an “untouchable” laborer in the feudal Anuradhapura system identify themselves as part of a unified “Sinhalese” racial community alongside the king, the Buddhist monk, and the landowning aristocrat? The answer to all three questions, from the standpoint of historical materialism, is an unequivocal and demonstrable no. What Sihala actually designated in the ancient chronicles was primarily a dynastic-linguistic-religious complex rooted in the legitimation needs of the monarchy and the Buddhist Sangha — not a biologically or even culturally homogeneous population understood to possess a common heritable destiny across all social strata. Examining why this is so takes us to the very foundations of the ideological fraud of modern ethnonationalism, revealing its class function with clinical precision. These issues demand separate and complete treatment, beyond the space of this essay.
The same anachronism operates with identical structure, and identical falsity, in Tamil nationalism. The LTTE’s claim to an eternal “traditional Tamil homeland” mirrors the Sinhala supremacist claim it opposes — both require projecting modern ethnic-territorial categories onto a past that did not contain them. As the ICFI has insisted, the demand for Tamil Eelam did not arise from some immemorial national consciousness finally awakening [11]; it arose from the betrayal of socialist internationalism by the LSSP, leaving Tamil workers to the mercy of Sinhala chauvinism and channeling justified grievance into a bourgeois separatist project serving the Tamil capitalist class, not the Tamil worker.
The grammar is identical across every case examined: an ethnic or religious category is first essentialized as unchanging across history; this essence is then extended backward and forward through time, collapsing the real discontinuities produced by changing modes of production; it is then anchored to a territory as an eternal homeland; and finally, any population currently inhabiting that territory outside the dominant category is delegitimized as intruder or invader, however long their actual residence. Marxism answers each step: human beings are constituted by historically specific social relations, not immutable essence; the ancient and modern bearers of an ethnic label are not the same people; no ancient claim overrides the rights of the living; and the population targeted for displacement is a present community possessing full contemporary rights.
The class function is decisive. The Mahavamsa was not weaponized by Sinhala peasants but by the Ceylonese bourgeoisie, above all Bandaranaike, to defeat the threat posed by Sinhala-Tamil working-class unity demonstrated in the 1953 hartal. As Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution anticipated, the bourgeoisie of belated capitalist development, incapable of delivering genuine democratic transformation, substitutes communal mystification — ancient chronicles, eternal homelands — for the program it cannot fulfill.
The answer is not a counter-anachronism, asserting Tamil priority to match Sinhala priority. It is class analysis: the worker in a Colombo factory, the Tamil plantation laborer, the Jaffna fisherman share a present social reality of exploitation that no ancient chronicle can illuminate and no mythology can resolve. The ancient Sinhalese are not the modern Sinhalese; the ancient Tamils are not the modern Tamils. To identify an ancient identity with a modern identity is a fiction—a dangerous anachronism that serves the present bourgeois class interests. What unites the working people of the island today is not blood inherited from a thousand years ago but the shared necessity of overthrowing the capitalist state that manufactures their division — the perspective embodied in the fight of ICFI and SLLA for the United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
The Westphalian system, the right of self-determination and other principles
The invocation of ancient mythology and pre-modern history to deny the rights of a living community of people constitutes a reactionary abuse of history and an affront to well-founded political, philosophical and legal principles.
The post-1648 and post-1945 international imperialist order does rest on the principle of the inviolability of borders and the illegitimacy of conquest as a title to territory — which is precisely why it is reactionary and legally absurd to argue that a mythological event from three thousand years ago or a medieval conquest constitutes a present-day territorial claim. The populations of the present have rights derived from their present existence, not from their ancestors’ movements over millennia.
However, from a Marxist standpoint, we must go further than the Westphalian framework. The system of nation-states itself is a product of the bourgeois epoch, and in the imperialist period it has become a structure for the division of the world working class along national lines, for the subordination of smaller nations to great powers, and for the containment of socialist revolution within national borders. The ultimate answer to communal chauvinism is not the liberal nation-state — which can always be captured by communalists, as India demonstrates — but the international unity of the working class across all the lines that bourgeois ideology draws between them.
All peoples have the right of self-determination—the right of a population to determine its own political existence, to choose its own governance, and to exercise sovereignty over the territory it inhabits. This principle has both a bourgeois-democratic and a Marxist dimension. This right attaches to the people presently inhabiting and constituting the political community of a given territory — not to an ethnic, religious, or genealogical group claiming descent from ancient inhabitants. The right is grounded in present, actual, social existence. [12] A population that lives on a territory, builds its social life there, has its families and institutions and culture rooted there, is a “people” in the operative sense — and that status cannot be dissolved by a rival claim based on texts written thousands of years ago.
The principle of effective occupation (occupatio) is the basis for territorial sovereignty in cases where other grounds are disputed. The doctrine holds that sovereignty is acquired and maintained through actual, continuous, and peaceful administration of a territory, while a military occupying power does not acquire sovereignty over the territory it occupies.
The principle of jus sanguinis (right of blood descent — the principle that one’s ancestry determines one’s nationality) — cannot be applied to create an entitlement for an alien community to physically displace the people who have the right of the soil
(jus soli — the principle that one’s actual habitation, actual birth on the land determines one’s nationality).
Bourgeois international law correctly identifies the principles — self-determination, prohibition of territorial conquest by force, the illegality of genocide, the rights of present populations — but it has no mechanism of enforcement that operates independently of the great-power balance.
The Class Alternative
The fundamental point is this: the invocation of ancient myth and pre-modern history to justify present dispossession, discrimination, or ethnic hierarchy serves a ruling-class function. The Hebrew Bible is not the cause of the genocide. It is the ideological cover for a project whose real motor forces are material and geopolitical.
The biblical mythology of the Promised Land serves this imperial project in precisely the same way that the Mahavamsa served the Sinhalese ruling class and Hindutva serves the Indian bourgeoisie: it provides a transcendent, quasi-sacred justification for arrangements that are, in their actual content, the product of class interest, colonial history, and great-power geopolitics. The Israeli ruling class does not wage genocide against Palestinians because it is driven by sincere religious conviction, any more than Modi demolished the Babri Masjid because he genuinely believed Ram was born on that precise spot. The ideology is functional. It mobilizes a population, suppresses internal class opposition, and legitimizes externally what would otherwise be recognized as — and is recognized internationally as — a crime against humanity.
The ancient myth or pre-modern history is a weapon of the bourgeoisie against the working class — not a survival instinct of oppressed peoples. Hindu workers in Gujarat and Muslim workers in Dhaka share more materially with each other than either shares with Modi or the Bangladeshi garment factory owner. Sinhalese and Tamil plantation workers on the same estates were repeatedly united in strikes before the communalists — backed by the bourgeoisie — broke that unity. The myths of the Mahavamsa and the Ramayana are deployed precisely to shatter that unity and to ensure that exploited workers look sideways at the neighbor of a different religion or ethnicity—“Othering” process— rather than upward at the class that exploits them both.
The working class of the subcontinent — Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi — faces the same enemy: the domestic ruling class operating within the framework of global capitalism. The answer to Hindutva, Sinhala Buddhist supremacism, Pakistani religious nationalism, and all other forms of communalism is not a counter-mythology, not a rival ancient claim, but the political organization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program.
We must be based on the principle that the ancient heritage belongs to all of humanity, not to a single community that may be misled to identify with it, that no ethnic group can appropriate it as a title deed of present-day dominion, and that living populations have rights based on their present existence. This principle must be defended. It must be defended not in the abstract liberal terms of “tolerance” or “pluralism,” which have proved utterly impotent before the fascist onslaught of the BJP and the Rajapakse and his successor regimes. It must be defended on the basis of working-class solidarity, socialist politics, and the fight to overthrow the bourgeois states that manufacture and deploy communal mythology as a weapon of class rule.
[3] Modi inaugurates a Hindu supremacist temple on the site of the razed Babri Masjid: One historic crime atop another, Wasantha Rupasinghe, Keith Jones, 21 January 2024 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/22/zmxv-j22.html>
[4] Facing an international outcry, India’s Hindu supremacist government cynically distances itself from top BJP officials’ anti-Muslim incitement, Wasantha Rupasinghe and Keith Jones, 12 June 2022 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/13/cmew-j13.html>
[8] Mario Kessler’s Socialists against Antisemitism and Leon Trotsky on Antisemitism: The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism, Clara Weiss, 2 July 2025 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/03/ajbz-j03.html>
[10] History in the service of ideology—Review of The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, by Adrian Hastings, Ann Talbot, 30 April 1999 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/04/hist-a30.html>
[12] Marxism does not simply endorse the bourgeois principle of self-determination at face value. Lenin’s treatment of the national question — the most sophisticated Marxist analysis of it — insists on the conditional character of the support socialists give to the right of self-determination. The working class supports the democratic right of oppressed nations to self-determination not as an absolute metaphysical principle, but as a concrete democratic demand in the struggle against national oppression, which itself is a product of imperialism and capitalism. Lenin’s conditional approach means that support for self-determination is always subordinated to the question: does this serve the international unity of the working class and the struggle against capitalism? The point is always to end oppression, not to create new nationalist frameworks that will themselves become instruments of class exploitation. The Palestinian right to self-determination is not supported by Marxists because of some absolute national principle, but because the Palestinian people are a colonized, brutally oppressed people whose democratic rights — to live on their land, to govern themselves, to be free from mass murder — are being systematically violated by an imperialist settler-colonial project. Supporting those democratic rights is a condition of the internationalist unity of the working class.
