The Muslim Health workers who were subjected to racialist vilification and institutional discrimination at the Kalmunai North Base Hospital . Photo obtained from social media.
Since last week, a chauvinist campaign has swept across Sri Lankan social media, targeting newly recruited Muslim female health workers and nursing officers at Kalmunai North Base Hospital and other state institutions. The immediate trigger was their wearing of the headscarf as part of their professional uniform. Hospital management barred them from duty, citing rigid uniform codes. Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist networks on Facebook seized on the issue, with Sinhala youth posting fascistic slogans demanding the exclusion of Muslim women from public-sector healthcare. The matter escalated to Parliament on August 18–20, with Health Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa chairing an emergency meeting alongside Muslim and Tamil MPs, and affected workers filing complaints with the Human Rights Commission.
The position of the working class on this question is clear. Muslim nurses have the democratic right to wear the headscarf as part of their professional attire. The campaign to strip them of this right is not a defence of “uniformity” or “secularism” — it is an expression of the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism [*] constitutionally entrenched in the Sri Lankan capitalist state, which has for decades used ethnic and religious divisions to fracture the working class. It is the same state that has designed worker uniforms with callous disregard to the multi-ethnic interests of the working class of the island and forcibly imposes the same upon them. Defending the Muslim community against state attack and fighting internal reaction are not contradictory — they are two sides of the same class struggle, and both require the revolutionary unity of the working class across ethnic lines.
The defence of this right, however, cannot be separated from the broader fight against all forms of oppression — including the patriarchal structures within all communities — and cannot be entrusted to the Muslim bourgeois parties that have consistently subordinated the interests of Muslim workers to their own deals with the ruling elite.
Below, we publish our response to an opinion piece made against this racist campaign by Muslim content writer Shifana Niyas. Her piece raises issues that go well beyond the immediate uniform controversy — the nature of the Sinhala-Buddhist state, the question of national sovereignty, and the relationship between communal oppression and gender oppression within minority communities. On each of these questions, her analysis leads to conclusions that objectively serve the interests of the Muslim bourgeoisie, not the Muslim working class.
Niyas directs her fire at the chauvinist campaign against Muslim nurses and correctly points to the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state as the framework within which this oppression operates. But she never identifies the class roots of that state. Instead, she substitutes ethnic categories for class analysis: the problem is “Sinhala men and women,” and the solution is Muslim “sovereignty.” From this flows a series of conclusions that objectively serve the interests of the Muslim bourgeoisie, not the Muslim working class.
Her central thesis is that “the enemy of Muslim women is not the Muslim man. The enemy is the Sinhala men and women.” This formulation replaces class analysis with ethnic bloc-thinking. It erases the class divisions that exist within both the Sinhala and Muslim communities. The Sinhala worker who has been systematically poisoned by decades of state-sponsored chauvinism is not the same as the Sinhala capitalist politician who constitutionalised Buddhism as the state religion. The Muslim landlord or businessman who cuts deals with the major bourgeois parties is not the same as the Muslim nurse facing discrimination. When Niyas declares an entire ethnic group — men and women — the enemy, she is doing exactly what Sinhala chauvinists do: treating an ethnic community as a homogeneous bloc. This is not a radical analysis; it is the mirror image of the chauvinism she opposes.
Her assertion that “Muslim men will defend Muslim women regardless of the reasons” and that the struggle against Muslim patriarchy is “not a Sinhala problem” is particularly reactionary. It subordinates the fight against gender oppression to communal solidarity. It tells Muslim women that their struggles within their own community must be silenced in the name of ethnic unity. This is not a defence of Muslim women — it is an attempt to conscript them into a nationalist project that leaves patriarchal structures intact.
But there is a deeper issue here. Niyas treats Muslim patriarchy as an internal communal affair that outsiders have no business addressing. This is the logic of every bourgeois-nationalist tendency: defend the community against external attack and leave internal hierarchies untouched. The working class has a fundamentally different approach. The oppression of women — in all communities — is rooted in the material foundations of class society: the privatised family, women’s exclusion from social production, and the property relations that turn women into dependents. The fight against Muslim patriarchal structures is therefore not a diversion from the fight against Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism — it is the same fight, because both forms of oppression are sustained by the capitalist system. The program of the working class fights for the complete social, legal and economic equality of women: equal pay, the right to work, socialised child care, reproductive freedom, and the full participation of women in political life. These demands apply to Muslim women no less than to Sinhala or Tamil women — and they can only be won through the common struggle of working women and men across all communities. When Muslim women workers fight against patriarchal controls within their own families and communities, they are not weakening the struggle against Sinhala chauvinism — they are strengthening it, by building the independent political consciousness and organisation of the working class as a whole. A movement that tells Muslim women to set aside their own oppression in the name of communal unity is a movement that will never free them from either.
This brings us to the question of national self-determination, properly understood. The working class of every oppressed nationality has the democratic right to determine its own affairs — including the right to wage the struggle against reactionary cultural and patriarchal practices within its own community. But this struggle cannot be carried out in isolation, under the banner of communal identity. It must be waged in conscious solidarity with the working class of all other nationalities, under the leadership of the united revolutionary movement. The Sinhala-Buddhist state has no right whatsoever to intervene in the internal life of the Muslim community — not on the question of dress, not on the question of personal law, not on any question. When the bourgeois state claims to “liberate” Muslim women from Muslim men, as it does with the nursing uniform controversy, it is not advancing women’s rights. It is using women’s oppression as a pretext to assert Sinhala-Buddhist domination. The working class as a whole — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — must oppose such interventions unconditionally. But this defence of the community against the chauvinist state does not mean suspending the class struggle within the community. On the contrary: the most powerful blow that Muslim workers can strike against Sinhala chauvinism is to build their own independent political organisation, break with the Muslim bourgeois leadership, and join with Sinhala and Tamil workers in the common fight against capitalism — the source of all national and gender oppression. Defending the Muslim community against state attack and fighting internal reaction are not contradictory — they are two sides of the same class struggle, and both require the revolutionary unity of the working class across ethnic lines.
Then we come to Niyas’s programmatic conclusion: the problem is that Muslims lack “sovereign status” in Sri Lanka. This is the language of bourgeois nationalism, not of working-class emancipation. The demand for Muslim “sovereignty” inevitably means a separate Muslim state — or at minimum, a territorially based Muslim political authority. This is the same logic that produced the LTTE’s demand for Tamil Eelam: the conviction that the only solution to ethnic oppression is for each ethnic group to have its own state. History has delivered its verdict on this program. Twenty-six years of communal war between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE produced nothing but devastation for ordinary Tamil and Sinhala working people, while the bourgeoisies on both sides entrenched their power.
The real enemy is not “Sinhala men and women.” It is the capitalist ruling class that has, since 1948, systematically used Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism to divide working people along ethnic and religious lines. The Sinhala-only language policy, the constitutional enshrinement of Buddhism, the discriminatory university quotas — all of these were measures consciously adopted by the bourgeoisie to prevent the emergence of a united working-class movement. The 1953 hartal demonstrated the power of workers when they fight on class lines, across ethnic divisions. The ruling class has spent the seven decades since doing everything in its power to ensure that never happens again.
The Muslim bourgeois parties — the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and others — have played their own role in this. They have formed alliances with successive governments, from the UNP to the SLFP to the Rajapaksa regime, trading communal representation for a share of the spoils for the Muslim elite. They have no interest in mobilising ordinary Muslims in a common struggle with Sinhala and Tamil workers, because that would threaten the capitalist system on which their own privileges depend. Niyas’s call for Muslim “sovereignty” — for Muslims to “politically organise and resist” as Muslims — gives legitimacy to precisely these bourgeois forces.
The only way to defeat anti-Muslim chauvinism is to build a united movement of the working class — Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim — on a socialist program. The defence of Muslim health workers’ right to wear the hijab cannot be separated from the defence of all democratic rights for all working people, which in turn cannot be achieved without the overthrow of capitalism itself. The demand is not for Muslim sovereignty, but for the unity of the working class in the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka, as part of the international socialist revolution. That is the perspective we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), advance in solidarity with the perspective the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fights for — the only perspective that offers a way out of the endless cycle of communal violence and oppression.
The root of all injustices against minority nationalities is the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist capitalist state. Any minority-nationalist program against it only strengthens that very state. Workers of all nationalities, unite and fight against the oppressive state and all forms of backwardness!
[*] An explanatory note on terms — Racism, Communalism and Sinhala-Buddhist Chauvinism:
Racism is the ideology that divides humanity into superior and inferior groups on the basis of supposedly biological characteristics, and demands the domination of the former over the latter. It emerged as a distinct doctrine with the rise of capitalism from the sixteenth century onward, elaborated by philosophers, scientists and statesmen to justify the transatlantic slave trade, colonial plunder and the subjugation of entire peoples. Its hallmark is the claim that inequality is inscribed in nature — that the inferiority of the oppressed group is a fact of blood and bone, not of history.
Communalism is the political mobilisation of religious or ethnic identity as the basis for organising political life and defining relations between communities within a single state. In the South Asian context, it treats religious communities — Hindus and Muslims in India; Sinhala-Buddhists, Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka — as monolithic, mutually hostile blocs whose interests are inherently antagonistic. Every member of a community is presumed to share a common political stake that overrides class divisions; a Muslim worker and a Muslim landlord are treated as having the same “Muslim interests.” The political program of communalism is the capture or retention of state power by one community at the expense of others.
The political program of communalism is the capture or retention of state power by one community at the expense of others. This is not a matter of prejudice alone — it is a program for the organisation of the state itself. The communalist conceives of the state as the property and instrument of his own community. Other communities are to be tolerated, at best, as second-class citizens, permanently excluded from the levers of power. The entire constitutional and legal apparatus — language policy, religious establishment, citizenship laws, employment quotas, the regulation of personal law and attire — is systematically designed to codify and enforce the supremacy of one community over all others. When this domination is challenged, the communalist does not appeal to democratic rights or legal remedies; he resorts to the mob and the pogrom, to the burning of homes and businesses, to the physical expulsion or liquidation of the minority — confident that the state he has captured will shield him from consequence. Communalism is therefore not a “cultural” or “religious” phenomenon. It is a political program of the bourgeoisie of the dominant community, which presents its own class rule as the collective interest of the entire community in order to secure itself against both the rival bourgeoisies of other communities and, above all, the united opposition of the working class.
The two ideologies differ in their raw material: racism constructs hierarchy around biology; communalism constructs it around religion, language and ethnicity. But they are identical in their social function. Both construct the minority as an alien, threatening “other”; both attribute inherent inferiority; both demand subordination or exclusion from public life; both produce pogroms, discriminatory laws, economic marginalisation and state violence. And both are weapons of the bourgeoisie, deployed to fracture the working class, prevent the emergence of a unified class movement, and provide a scapegoat for the social misery that capitalism itself creates.
Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is the specific, state-codified form that communalism takes in Sri Lanka. It does not require a doctrine of biological race — Sinhalese and Muslims are not distinguishable by skin colour or physiognomy — but it operates through identical mechanisms. The constitutional enshrinement of Buddhism, the Sinhala-only language policy, the discriminatory treatment of Muslim personal law and attire, and the periodic unleashing of anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil mob violence are the institutional expressions of a chauvinism that functions, in practice, exactly as racism does. The raw material is communal prejudice; the finished product is a chauvinist state. The working class fights both with the same weapon: the revolutionary unity of workers across all communal and racial lines against the capitalist system that breeds them.
The claim that an ethnic minority is violating the rights of the ethnic majority under a Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist constitutional framework and chauvinist political hegemony is false. It is nothing more than fear-mongering designed to racially intimidate minorities. Neither Muslims nor Tamils possess the state power to intimidate or discriminate against Sinhala-Buddhists. Their actions are strictly defensive reactions against an oppressive capitalist state. The chauvinist who howls that his “rights” are under threat is not defending a majority under siege; he is demanding that the state he controls crush a minority that has no state of its own. The majority’s “grievance” is the grievance of the oppressor who resents the very existence of the oppressed.
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Below we reproduce the opinion piece by Shifana Niyas, posted on her Facebook on 21 August, to which the above is a response.
“What we are witnessing today is an epic Sinhala patriarchal meltdown over the issue of the Muslim nursing uniform. One can also see how Sinhala women contribute to this conversation and indirectly strengthen their patriarchy. My position that Sinhala men and women are two sides of the same oppressive face of the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state can be seen in real-time social media conversations.
But beyond that, I want to stress something important. The attack on Muslim culture through AI-generated content is increasing at an alarming rate. The inability of Muslims to counter-generate content or confront this problem politically has put them in a position of real disadvantage.
To start with, what stops Buddhists from seeing content ridiculing their culture/religion is not any inherent superiority (far from it), but rather the fear of retribution and state persecution. Put bluntly, no one except Buddhists believes in the superiority of Buddhism or Buddhist culture—no one has to (the same goes for other religions). But the problem is that one group (Sinhala-Buddhists and Sinhala Christian Zionists) has the freedom, without consequence, to antagonize another group, while the other has to defend itself but cannot antagonize in return. This is the unequal relation of power between the Sinhalese (sovereign) and minorities (non-sovereign). One cannot resolve this by singing the national anthem before ifthar.
Then, Muslim women’s bodies are more regulated by the Sinhala-Buddhist state under the Sinhala male gaze. What does that mean? Most of these conversations about Muslim nursing attire are led by Sinhala men who want to impose their version of what a nursing uniform ought to be, informed by their cultural values, on Muslim women. I have said it before and will say it again: the enemy of Muslim women is not the Muslim man. The enemy is the Sinhala men and women. To scapegoat Muslim patriarchy for Sinhala patriarchal frustration is something that should be resisted. Muslim women’s struggle, or lack thereof, against Muslim patriarchy is not a Sinhala problem either. Muslim men will defend Muslim women regardless of the reasons.
Finally, it does not matter what dress code female nurses in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim countries wear. Florence Nightingale’s attire is irrelevant to this conversation. What is relevant and important is that Muslim female nurses require a certain uniform, and they have the right to it. You do not have to respect it or like it because the rights of Muslims are not dependent on your personal preference. The mandatory cremation policy and dress-code issues are both a result of Muslims not having sovereign status in Sri Lanka. Why Sinhalese can ridicule Islam but Muslims cannot insult Buddhism is a sovereignty issue, not an ethical question. So, instead of explaining to people who act on the power bestowed upon them by the state about the principles and benevolence of Islam, try to politically organize and resist. After all, you can sing the national anthem as loudly as you want, but unless you are a sovereign subject, you are under Sinhala-Buddhist social domination.”
On Friday, August 14, 2026, the Free Media Movement (FMM) is hosting a forum at the Sri Lanka Press Institute titled “Proposed Chartered Institute of Media Professionals, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of the Right to Expression.” The panel features human rights lawyer Lakshan Dias, right-wing political strategist Shiral Lakthilaka, and myself, representing the Trotskyist perspective of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
Our participation in this event may draw questions from journalists, workers, and youth as to why a representative of the revolutionary socialist-internationalist movement is sharing a platform with a right-wing strategist of the capitalist establishment and a liberal NGO-oriented human rights lawyer? Does this not imply a compromise with their politics, or a concession to the reformist framework of the FMM?
The answer is an emphatic no. We are intervening in this forum precisely to wage an uncompromised political battle: to expose the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois traps being laid before media workers, to draw the sharpest line of demarcation between revolutionary Marxism and the bankrupt politics of liberal reformism and bourgeois constitutionalism, and to present the working class with an independent, revolutionary strategy to defeat the National People’s Power (NPP)/JVP government’s Chartered Institute of Media Professionals (CIMP) Bill. We are stepping onto this platform not to seek consensus with Lakthilaka and Dias, but to politically destroy the positions they represent before an audience of journalists, media workers, youth, and intellectuals — and to win that audience to the independent class line of the Fourth International.
The Principle: Why Revolutionaries Intervene in Bourgeois Forums
The objection that revolutionaries should not share a platform with class enemies — that doing so implies political endorsement or compromise — is not new. It is a species of the same “Left” infantilism that Lenin demolished in his 1920 pamphlet, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, which rejected ultra-left abstentionism as sectarian passivity that leaves the working class under the unchallenged ideological influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies.
Abstentionism presents itself as revolutionary purity. “We will not soil ourselves by sharing a platform with class enemies.” “We will not enter reactionary trade unions led by social-chauvinists.” “We will not participate in bourgeois parliaments.” This posture feels radical. It satisfies the subjective need for political cleanliness. But its objective effect is the opposite of revolutionary: it vacates the field. It leaves the trade unions entirely in the hands of the reformist bureaucrats. It leaves the parliament to the bourgeois parties. It leaves the FMM forum to Lakshan Dias and Shiral Lakthilaka — to liberal legalism and bourgeois constitutionalism — without a single countervailing voice. The workers, journalists, and youth who attend that forum will hear only one side: the side that tells them to petition the state, to trust the courts, to seek redress within the framework of the very system that is strangling their rights.
That is not revolutionary purity. It is political desertion. It is abandoning the masses to the ideological hegemony of the class enemy at the very moment they are searching for an alternative.
The German “Left” Communists argued that revolutionaries should refuse to work in reactionary trade unions because those unions were dominated by social-chauvinist and counter-revolutionary leaders. They argued that revolutionaries should refuse to participate in bourgeois parliaments because parliamentarianism was “historically and politically obsolete.” Lenin’s response was devastating:
“If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the ‘leaders’… but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations — even the most reactionary — in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found.”
This is the fundamental principle. The revolutionary party does not choose its terrain of struggle according to its own convenience. It goes to where the masses are — or, in this case, to where the journalists, media workers, content creators, and politically conscious youth who are seeking answers on the question of press freedom will be gathered. The FMM forum, whatever its political limitations, will draw precisely this audience. To refuse to participate, to leave the platform entirely to Lakshan Dias and Shiral Lakthilaka, would be to abandon that audience to the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politics. That would be not revolutionary purity but political cowardice.
Lenin was even more explicit on the question of participating in bourgeois parliaments — institutions far more reactionary in their function than a civil society forum:
“Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers… follow the lead of the Catholic clergy… it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class.”
The same logic applies here. The journalists and media workers who will attend the FMM forum are not yet won to the revolutionary perspective. Many are undoubtedly attracted to the liberal-legalist arguments of Dias or the bourgeois-constitutionalist calculations of Lakthilaka. The task of the Trotskyist is to be present in that forum, to present the Marxist alternative, and through that intervention to educate, expose, and win the most advanced elements to the independent class line.
The Bolsheviks themselves provided the historical model. In 1905, they correctly boycotted the Bulygin Duma — a consultative “parliament” — because the objective situation was rapidly developing toward mass strikes and armed uprising. But in 1906, when the revolutionary tide had receded, the boycott of the Duma was a mistake, and the Bolsheviks rectified it. They participated in the most reactionary of parliaments, used its rostrum for revolutionary agitation, and built the party’s connection with the masses through that work. Lenin summarized the lesson:
“The Bolsheviks’ boycott of ‘parliament’ in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience… It would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other conditions and other situations.”
Today, in Sri Lanka, the situation is not one of mass revolutionary upsurge in which the working class is building soviets and the question of power is immediately posed. It is a period of mounting social crisis, deepening austerity, and the construction of an authoritarian state apparatus — in which broad layers of journalists, content creators, and youth are searching for a political orientation. In such conditions, to boycott a public forum on press freedom because it is organized by a liberal NGO and features bourgeois speakers would be to turn one’s back on the very layers we seek to win. The correct tactic is to intervene, to demarcate, and to fight.
No Compromise: The Sharpest Demarcation
To intervene is not to compromise. The distinction is fundamental, and confusion on this point is fatal.
A compromise, in the Leninist sense, involves a concession on program or principle — an agreement to subordinate the independent interests of the working class to those of the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie. The Popular Front — the subordination of the Communist Party to a bourgeois-led coalition — was such a compromise. The trade union bureaucracy’s no-strike deals with the Dissanayake government are such a compromise. The institutionalized journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill in exchange for pensions and bank loans are making such a compromise.
Our participation in the FMM forum involves no such thing. We have not modified a single position. We have not muted a single criticism. We have not agreed to any common platform, joint statement, or unified demand with Lakthilaka, Dias, or the FMM. On the contrary, we are appearing on their platform for the explicit purpose of exposing the bankruptcy of their politics and presenting the revolutionary alternative. We are not their allies. We are their political antagonists, and we will use the occasion to make that fact unmistakably clear to every person in the room.
This is the method of the united front as elaborated by the Fourth International — not the Popular Front of class collaboration, but the united front of political exposure. Trotsky, in his 1933 letter “The United Front for Defense,” argued that Communists and Social Democrats could undertake common actions against fascism — but only on the basis of complete organizational and political independence, and only for the purpose of exposing the reformist leaders’ refusal to fight and winning their rank-and-file supporters to the revolutionary party. The same principle applies here: we share a platform with Lakthilaka and Dias not to blur the lines between us, but to sharpen them to the breaking point.
The Political Biographies: Who We Are Confronting
To understand why our intervention is necessary, one must understand precisely whom we are confronting on this platform.
The Free Media Movement (FMM)
The FMM was formed in the early 1990s as a liberal civil society and media advocacy organization. While historically positioned as a defender of press freedom against state violence and censorship, its political foundation has always been bounded by the limits of bourgeois democracy and civil society reformism. The FMM operates heavily within an NGO framework, drawing funding and ideological orientation from Western liberal foundations. Rather than mobilizing the independent class power of media workers and the broader working class, its strategy relies on lobbying the capitalist state, petitioning bourgeois courts, issuing press releases, and appealing to “democratic norms” and international human rights bodies.
When faced with the systemic crisis of capitalism, the FMM seeks to negotiate minor procedural safeguards within the existing state structure. It avoids exposing the intrinsic link between the capitalist state’s drive for austerity — the IMF program enforced by the NPP/JVP government — and its necessity to strangle free expression. Its forum, while ostensibly a forum for debate, is structured within this liberal-reformist framework: the assumption that the problem is a bad bill that can be amended or defeated through advocacy, rather than a capitalist state that must be overthrown.
Shiral Lakthilaka
Shiral Lakthilaka is a veteran political strategist, constitutional lawyer, and commentator who represents the establishment of right-wing bourgeois politics in Sri Lanka. Having spent decades operating within the corridors of power, Lakthilaka has been closely aligned with major capitalist parties, including the United National Party (UNP) and the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). He served as a senior advisor to former President Maithripala Sirisena during the UPFA-UNP coalition government, helping to navigate state policy and constitutional manipulations.
Lakthilaka’s political role is that of a class-conscious defender of the capitalist state. His opposition to specific government bills, including the CIMP Bill, is strictly tactical and legalistic. He views press freedom not as an unconditional democratic right of the working class, but as an institutional mechanism necessary for elite political competition and bourgeois governance. His politics aim to preserve the stability of the capitalist order and protect corporate media interests. When his own parties were in power, they fortified their arsenal of oppression with the Press Council Act, parliamentary privileges laws, police violence, and emergency regulations against workers and journalists. His critique of the NPP regime is not a critique of state repression in principle — it is the grievance of one faction of the ruling class against another.
Lakshan Dias
Lakshan Dias is a well-known human rights lawyer, civil society activist, and liberal commentator. He has built a career representing victims of state excesses, religious minorities, and political dissidents in the courts, making him a prominent legal voice in civil society circles.
Despite his opposition to state repression, Dias operates within a liberal-procedural framework. His perspective assumes that the capitalist state and its legal apparatus can be reformed to protect fundamental rights through public interest litigation, constitutional advocacy, and international pressure. He treats democratic rights as abstract legal concepts separated from class relations and the socio-economic crisis. Dias’s framework ignores the fact that the legal apparatus is an instrument of class rule, ultimately encouraging workers and youth to seek redress within the very court system and state structure that enforces capitalist austerity. His is the politics of the supplicant — the belief that the state can be persuaded to restrain itself — and it is politically lethal for the working class.
By creating a state-controlled system of accreditation, a political “Interim Council” appointed directly by the Media Minister, and a Disciplinary Committee empowered to disenroll members for vaguely defined “professional misconduct,” the state is establishing a gatekeeper over public discourse. The definition of “media professional” in Section 27 — extending to “writers, content developers, content editors, anchors, presenters, broadcasters, journalists, editors, publishers, media owners, media managers, media educators, media researchers, media technicians and camerapersons” — is deliberately cast to sweep bloggers, social media commentators, YouTubers, and socialist publications into a state disciplinary net. Facing mounting popular anger against IMF-mandated austerity, privatization, and police-state measures — including the six-times-extended state of emergency and the essential services ban on Government Press workers — the NPP/JVP government views unregulated digital media as a mortal threat to its rule.
The Traps of “Opposition”
The crisis of press freedom in Sri Lanka is compounded by the political bankruptcies of those who claim to speak against the bill or who openly welcome it.
As exposed in our article “The Betrayal of the Pen,” a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum of institutionalized corporate journalists has greeted the CIMP Bill with enthusiasm. Seeking personal advancement — state-certified status, bank loans, pensions, and foreign visas — these courtiers of the capitalist state are willing to trade press freedom for material privileges. They see the CIMP not as a cage, but as an exclusive club that protects their professional status while the state muzzles independent content creators and working-class commentators.
On the other hand, the “opposition” mounted by the FMM, Lakshan Dias, and Shiral Lakthilaka offers no path forward for the working class.
The Liberal/NGO Trap: The FMM and liberal lawyers like Dias reduce the struggle against state repression to appeals, judicial petitions, and lobbying within the framework of bourgeois constitutionalism. They treat press freedom as an abstract legal issue, detached from the capitalist crisis and the IMF program. They foster the dangerous illusion that the capitalist state — or its courts — can be persuaded to protect democratic rights. This is a political dead end. The state that is constructing the repressive apparatus will not be persuaded to dismantle it by a well-argued legal brief. Democratic rights are not granted by the benevolence of judges; they are won and defended through the organized power of the working class.
The Bourgeois Establishment Trap: Figures like Lakthilaka represent factions of the capitalist opposition (UNP/SJB) whose critique of the NPP regime is purely tactical. They do not oppose state repression in principle. As stated before, while in power, their own parties deployed the Press Council Act, police violence, and emergency regulations against workers and journalists. Their goal is to exploit popular discontent to maneuver back into office — where they will execute the same capitalist austerity and the same attacks on democratic rights. The working class has no stake in which faction of the bourgeoisie administers the state. Its task is to overthrow that state entirely.
Our Strategy: The Independent Mobilization of the Working Class
We are intervening in this forum to explicitly break with the politics of the FMM, Lakthilaka, and Dias, and to present a Trotskyist line of demarcation to journalists, youth, and workers.
Press freedom is an unconditional right, not a state license. We reject the premise that the capitalist state has any right to certify, register, or discipline media workers or content creators. The CIMP Bill must be defeated in its entirety — not amended, not moderated, not subjected to “safeguards” negotiated by liberal lawyers, or mandated by bourgeois courts. Democratic rights are won and defended through class struggle, not granted by ministerial decree or judicial review.
Austerity requires repression. The assault on press freedom is directly linked to the crisis of global capitalism. The NPP government cannot enforce IMF-mandated destruction of living standards, health, and education without muzzling the channels through which working-class opposition is organized. The fight against the CIMP Bill is inseparable from the fight against the IMF program, against the state of emergency, against the essential services orders, and against the entire repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.
Break from the bourgeois state and its courtiers. We call on honest journalists and content creators to reject the state’s bribes of pensions and loans, and to break decisively from the institutionalized media elite collaborating with the regime. The pen that serves the capitalist state will ultimately be crushed by that state. The pen that aligns itself with the struggles of the working class against IMF austerity, imperialist war, and capitalist dictatorship will find an unyielding defense.
Build rank-and-file committees of media workers. Freedom of expression cannot be defended by appealing to capitalist courts or parliamentary committees. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class. Media workers, tech workers, and content creators must form independent rank-and-file committees, completely separate from corporate media owners, trade union bureaucracies, and the state apparatus. These committees must link their struggle to the broader fight of the working class — in the hospitals, the power stations, the post offices, the schools, and the plantations — against the common enemy.
For a workers’ government based on rank-and-file committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages. The ultimate guarantee of press freedom is the overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government, based on democratically elected rank-and-file committees, that will place the banks, major corporations, and the media under the democratic control of the working class.
For the socialist reorganization of society — the only foundation for genuine democracy and press freedom.
A Platform for Political War
We use this platform at the Sri Lanka Press Institute not to seek consensus with Lakthilaka and Dias, but to wage political war against everything they represent. We are not their colleagues. We are not their co-panelists in any meaningful sense. We are their irreconcilable political enemies, and we will use every minute of this forum to demonstrate to the journalists, media workers, and youth in attendance why the politics of liberal reformism and bourgeois constitutionalism are a trap, why the capitalist state cannot be reformed, and why the only force capable of defending press freedom is the internationally united working class, organized independently and armed with a socialist program.
The working class does not plead with its enemy. It mobilizes to defeat it. We call on media workers, youth, and the working class to join us in building an independent movement for socialism — the only real guarantee of true freedom of expression.
Sri Lankan singer, Umaria Sinhawansa performing on stage. Photo from Sinhawansa’s Facebook
The ongoing conflict between Sri Lanka’s singers, lyricists, and composers over royalties and copyright is not a personal quarrel or a legislative oversight. It is the music industry colliding with the irreducible logic of capitalist property relations — and the Intellectual Property Act No. 36 of 2003 lays that logic bare with brutal clarity.
The Act defines the “author” of a musical work as the physical person who created it — the composer of the melody and the writer of the lyrics. To the author belong the economic rights: the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform, broadcast, and commercially exploit the work. To the author also belong the moral rights: the right to be named, the right to object to distortion or mutilation prejudicial to honour or reputation.
The singer is not the author. The singer is a “performer,” relegated to a separate chapter on “Related Rights.” Under Section 17, the performer has limited exclusive rights over the broadcasting and fixation of an unfixed performance. But Section 17(2) extinguishes even these: once the singer authorises the incorporation of the performance into a recording, those exclusive rights cease. The singer’s sole remaining entitlement is Section 19 — a right to “a single equitable remuneration” whenever the recording is broadcast or publicly performed, shared with the producer. No moral right. No copyright. No ownership of the finished product.
The voice that gave the song its soul has no claim. The law can grasp what is fixed on paper — notation, words — as property. What is embodied in performance — the timbre, the phrasing, the breath, the interpretative intelligence that transforms marks on a page into music — is not recognised as “creative” in the legal sense. It is labour rendered unto the property of others.
This is the correct logic of bourgeois law. It is not a mistake awaiting correction. The law does what capitalist property law must do: disaggregate a collaborative artistic whole into assignable, tradable units of ownership. The composer and lyricist own the melody and the words. They can sell them — separately. Other singers will perform them. The lyrics can be set to a new melody. The melody can be synchronised with different words. Content creators will feed both into artificial intelligence to generate new works. The singer who first gave the song life has no legal standing to object, because the singer owns nothing.
And here Marxists must be precise. This recombination, this improvisation, this ceaseless transformation of existing cultural material — a song sung by a different voice, lyrics adapted to a new melody, a melody reimagined with new words — is how art has always developed. These are not violations to be legally restrained. They are the processes through which music breathes. Marxists do not oppose this. We do not defend the “moral right” of the original creator to freeze a work in amber. That moral right is itself a bourgeois legal construct. The tragedy is not that songs can be reimagined — it is that under capitalism, reimagination takes the form of dispossession, where one set of artists profits from the labour of another while the law sanctifies the arrangement.
Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), grasped the fundamental contradiction of art under class society. He observed that art under capitalism “flourished in the abundance and in the leisure of the governing classes, and remained in their keeping.” The artist was, in the final analysis, a dependent of the bourgeoisie — and when the axe of revolution cut down the old props, “the element of keeping which was almost intangible when social relations were undisturbed, was bared in all its crudity.” What Trotsky described for the writer and painter applies with equal force to the musician. The seeming independence of the artist is an illusion sustained by the market. When the market turns, the illusion shatters, and what remains is the brute fact of property.
The Sri Lankan Act merely codifies this dependency with juridical precision. The composer and lyricist may feel themselves secure in their ownership — but they too are dependent on the market, on publishers, on streaming platforms, on the very property regime that temporarily advantages them. The singer is one step further down the chain of dispossession. But the chain itself is the problem.
Trotsky insisted that “culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.” “Art needs comfort, even abundance.” Under capitalism, that abundance is channelled into private accumulation. The material security that would free artists to collaborate without fear is denied to them, and in its place they are given property rights to fight over. The lyricist sues the composer. The singer sues both. The record label takes its cut. The streaming platform takes the rest. Everyone fights everyone because the system forces them to. Former collaborators become adversaries. Art becomes an asset to be litigated.
A socialist society abolishes this entire framework. By overthrowing bourgeois property relations in art, it eliminates both the commodification that sets artists against one another and the ownership claims that restrict how culture can be reworked and reimagined. The socialist state guarantees the material security of all cultural workers — composers, lyricists, singers, instrumentalists, sound engineers — through public funding and democratic planning. Freed from the anxiety of survival, no artist needs to sue another over royalties. Freed from property claims over melody and verse, no artist can block another from reinterpreting, adapting, or transforming a work. Technology, including AI, becomes a tool of creative liberation for all, not a weapon to dispossess some for the profit of others. Creative energies, liberated from the tyranny of the market, are directed toward the enrichment of human life.
The crisis of Sri Lanka’s music industry is not a legal problem awaiting a better royalty formula. It is a class question. The working class must take up the fight — not to adjudicate between singers and lyricists under the existing property regime, but to overthrow that regime entirely. Only on the foundation of human need, not private greed, can art truly flourish — freely, collectively, without owners and without fences.
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.
Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake meeting with a visiting IMF delegation at the Presidential Secretariat on April 2, 2026. Image courtesy of midpoint.lk.
On June 5, 2026, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)/National People’s Power (NPP) government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake published a special gazette notification for a bill to establish the “Chartered Institute of Media Professionals of Sri Lanka (CIMP).” Tabled by the Ministry of Health and Mass Media, the bill is packaged in the soothing language of “introducing and maintaining professional standards” and “elevating quality.” This is a calculated fraud. A close examination of the bill’s provisions — its definitions, its institutional architecture, its disciplinary mechanisms — reveals an instrument of state censorship designed to discipline, silence, and ultimately eliminate independent journalism, above all the social media content creators and anti-government commentators whom the Dissanayake regime views as a mortal threat to its grip on power.
The working class and all defenders of democratic rights must reject this bill in its entirety. It is not a measure to improve journalism. It is a weapon for the suppression of democratic discourse, conceived in direct continuity with the long and bloody history of media repression in Sri Lanka, and fully consonant with the international offensive against press freedom being waged by capitalist governments across the globe.
The Architecture of State Control
The bill establishes a statutory body corporate — the Chartered Institute — whose design is transparently that of a state-controlled gatekeeper over who may legitimately practice journalism. Five features of the legislation expose its authoritarian character beyond any doubt.
First, the Institute introduces a system of state-created accreditation. Section 3(i) declares that one of the Institute’s objects is “to accredit the media professionals in media professionalism at the evaluation of their efficiency.” Section 4(o) empowers the Institute “to take necessary steps to introduce, develop, maintain and monitor professional standards.” Section 4(t) authorizes it “to maintain and publish a register of members.” Taken together, these provisions convert the fundamental democratic right of freedom of expression into a state-sanctioned privilege. The government positions itself as the ultimate arbiter of who may enroll, register, and be certified as a “qualified” media professional. Freedom of the press is an inherent right, not a license to be granted or revoked by the capitalist state. The very premise of the bill is an assault on this principle.
Second, the definition of “media professional” is deliberately vast and all-encompassing. Section 27 defines the term to include “writers, content developers, content editors, anchors, presenters, broadcasters, journalists, editors, publishers, media owners, media managers, media educators, media researchers, media technicians and camerapersons in the field of media.” The inclusion of “content developers” is particularly revealing. This wide net is cast with a specific purpose: to trap independent bloggers, social media commentators, and alternative left-wing media platforms under the disciplinary apparatus of the state. The Dissanayake administration is acutely threatened by unaligned online media. Mainstream corporate media networks in Sri Lanka are tightly controlled by oligarchs or the state itself. Working-class anger, exposures of government compliance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity, and socialist political analysis find expression through alternative content creators and independent social media channels. By bringing “content developers” under the heel of a chartered state apparatus, the government is building a weapon to silence precisely these voices.
Third, the bill establishes a state-vetted Disciplinary Committee empowered to investigate “professional misconduct.” Section 12(1)(c) provides for the appointment of a Disciplinary Committee. Section 23(1) mandates that this committee “shall hold an inquiry whenever the Council refers any matter to the Disciplinary Committee in respect of a professional misconduct of a member.” Section 23(2) then defines “professional misconduct” as “an act or omission which shall be determined by rules of the Council made under section 26” — a definition so circular and elastic that it amounts to a blank cheque for the political punishment of journalists who refuse to toe the government’s line. Section 24 empowers the Council to “disenroll any member,” or in the alternative to “warn, reprimand or suspend him from membership for such period not exceeding one year.” The power to strip a media worker of professional credentials is the power to destroy a career — and to send a message of intimidation to every other journalist in the country.
Fourth, the bill creates an “Interim Council” appointed entirely by the state. Section 5(4)(a) provides that until the Governing Council is elected, the Minister shall appoint an Interim Council consisting of “the Secretary to the Ministry of the Minister” and “six other persons who have distinguished themselves with proven knowledge, eminence and at least twenty years’ experience in the field of media, nominated by the Secretary to the Ministry of the Minister.” This Interim Council is granted the power under Section 5(4)(b) to make rules “in respect of the number of members to be selected and the criteria to select such members to the Institute” and “to elect and appoint members and the office bearers to the Council.” The Interim Council thus controls who gets into the Institute in the first instance and who may sit on its permanent Governing Council. The entire institutional architecture — the membership criteria, the internal rules, the definition of what constitutes an offense — will be shaped entirely by political appointees of the capitalist state. The Institute will be, from its inception, an instrument of the government.
Fifth, the bill conspicuously lacks any explicit guarantee that membership in the Institute will never be a prerequisite to practice journalism. This omission is not accidental. It signals that the Institute is designed to become a mandatory gatekeeper. Unregistered or deregistered journalists could rapidly find themselves legally blocked from entering press conferences, obtaining state accreditation, accessing public events, or securing employment. The Institute is a mechanism for the de facto licensing of journalism — and therefore for the de facto banning of journalists the state finds inconvenient.
A Continuum of Repression
The CIMP Bill does not emerge from a vacuum. It is the latest in a long continuum of state attacks on press freedom in Sri Lanka, stretching back decades and across every bourgeois government.
The Press Council Act of No. 05 of 1973, introduced by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led coalition government — which included the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Stalinist Communist Party — established a government tribunal (Press Council) with the powers of a district court, empowered to conduct inquiries that could lead to imposition of fines and jail terms against journalists. Its chairman and members are appointed by the president. Among its targets was Kamkaru Mawtha, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League — the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party. Last September, the cabinet spokesperson announced that the cabinet has approved to amend the Press Council Act to expand its regulatory scope to encompass modern digital, electronic, and online media platforms. The historical irony is sharp: the JVP, whose own cadres were slaughtered by the thousands after the abortive 1971 uprising, today deploys the same mechanisms of press control pioneered by the regime that repressed them, now directed against the working class and its political representatives.
The Rajapakse regime (2005–2015) escalated media repression to police-state levels. In 2009, it revived the Press Council Act. In 2012, it moved to gag websites, extending the Press Council’s reach to online media. In 2013, it unveiled a “Code of Media Ethics” whose vaguely phrased clauses — banning publications that “offend against the expectations of the public” or “contain information which could mislead the public” — gave the government unlimited scope to suppress criticism. During this period, 16 journalists and media workers were killed by pro-government death squads, and Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was murdered in broad daylight.
The Online Safety Act brought by the Ranil Wickremasinghe government in January 2024, purporting to counter “fake news”, attacked social media activism decisively. It dealt a major blow to freedom of expression by granting a government-appointed commission sweeping powers to police and censor online speech. Under the guise of preventing online harms, the law criminalizes legitimate dissent, investigative journalism, and social media criticism, threatening activists and content creators with severe prison sentences.
The JVP/NPP government is deepening this authoritarian inheritance, not breaking from it. In November 2024, within weeks of taking office, it announced it would not abolish the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), despite having pledged to do so during the election campaign. Instead, it introduced a new “Protection of the State from Terrorism Act” (PSAT) that broadens the definition of terrorism to encompass strikes, protests, and dissent. In November 2025, following Cyclone Ditwah, Dissanayake declared a state of emergency and issued regulations making it a criminal offense — punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment — to communicate or publish any supposedly “false” statements that could allegedly cause “public alarm.” Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala explicitly instructed police to treat social media critics “not merely as suspects but as offenders.” These powers were deployed to enforce deeper austerity under the guise of “rebuilding.” The state of emergency has now been extended six times,[1] giving Dissanayake sweeping dictatorial powers.
On May 28, 2026 — just one week before the Chartered Institute gazette — President Dissanayake issued a special gazette declaring the Government Press and State Media as essential services, effectively outlawing industrial strike action in those sectors. The Chartered Institute Bill is the ideological twin of this hardline measure. Together they form a pincer: the state attacks media workers’ right to withhold their labour, while simultaneously constructing a disciplinary apparatus to control what those workers may write and who may write at all.
The International Offensive Against Press Freedom
The Dissanayake government’s bill forms part of a global offensive by capitalist states to bring the press — and especially online media — under state and corporate control.
In December 2010, the Hungarian parliament under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán passed a comprehensive media law subordinating all public and private media to the control of a state “media council” composed of Orbán’s partisans. The council was empowered to impose fines of up to €730,000 for reporting deemed “politically unbalanced.” As the WSWS noted at the time [2], Orbán’s authoritarian course was not a “European oddity” but a preparation for “a new round of brutal social attacks” demanded by the international financial markets. The muzzling of the media and the bolstering of the state apparatus were undertaken in direct anticipation of the social conflicts that austerity would unleash.
Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which came into force in 2018, created a legal framework for internet censorship under the pretext of combating “hate speech” and “fake news.” As the WSWS documented, [3] the law was “part of an international offensive to attack free speech online, aimed at suppressing left-wing and socialist views.”
In 2022, Britain’s Ofcom revoked the broadcast licenses of RT, couching the ban in the language of “impartiality” and “freedom.” In 2025, the European Union’s 17th sanctions package against Russia extended to banning pro-Russia and pro-Palestine media, representing what the WSWS called [4] “an open attack on the democratic right to freedom of the press.”
The pattern is unmistakable. Across the world, capitalist governments facing mounting social opposition are constructing legal and institutional mechanisms to police public discourse. The language is always the same: “professional standards,” “ethics,” “combating disinformation.” The purpose is always the same: to suppress working-class opposition and anti-capitalist analysis.
Austerity Requires Repression
The Chartered Institute Bill cannot be understood in isolation from the broader trajectory of the JVP/NPP government. Dissanayake came to power in September 2024 on a wave of popular discontent, posturing as an anti-establishment outsider. Within days of the new parliament convening, the government jettisoned its election pledge [5] to renegotiate the IMF bailout and committed itself to implementing the austerity program in full.
The record since then has been one of relentless attacks on the working class. The government has restructured and privatized state-owned enterprises, sharply increased fuel prices by approximately 40 percent since February 2026, raised electricity tariffs by 32 percent, hiked gas prices by 31 percent, and maintained strict spending limits even as a quarter of the population has fallen below the poverty line. In April 2026, an IMF delegation lavished praise [6] on Dissanayake, commending his “strict adherence to IMF dictates.” The president boasted that “Sri Lanka has met all targets set under the programme.”
The government now faces a deepening crisis [7]: a worsening balance of payments deficit, a sliding rupee, soaring oil import costs driven by the US-Israeli war on Iran, and simmering resistance from workers and the rural poor. It has responded with essential services orders, police violence against protesters, the arrest of student activists, the deployment of the military as strike-breakers, and the repeated extension of emergency rule. The Chartered Institute Bill is the latest escalation in this authoritarian trajectory — a preemptive strike against the dissemination of truth, against the journalism that exposes the real conditions of working people and provides the political analysis necessary for the working class to cohere into a unified revolutionary force.
The JVP: From Death Squads to “Professional Standards”
The JVP’s present role as the enforcer of media censorship must be understood in light of its political history. As the ICFI and WSWS have documented over decades [8], the JVP is not and has never been a socialist or workers’ party. It is a right-wing, nationalist, and communalist movement, steeped in Sinhala populism. In 1988–89, it carried out a campaign of assassinations in which hundreds of left-wing political opponents, trade unionists, and workers — including members of the Revolutionary Communist League — were killed. It was the most trenchant advocate of the racist war against the Tamil minority that culminated in the May 2009 massacre of 40,000 Tamils.
The JVP’s transformation into a party of bourgeois rule — implementing IMF austerity, deploying police-military repression, and now constructing a state apparatus for media censorship — is not a betrayal of its original principles. It is the logical culmination of its class character as a petty-bourgeois nationalist formation. The same party that once physically liquidated its left-wing opponents now seeks to silence them through the bureaucratic mechanisms of a “Chartered Institute.” The methods have been modernized; the objective — the suppression of working-class political independence — remains the same.
The Pseudo-Left and the Trade Unions: Enablers of Repression
The working class cannot look to the pseudo-left organizations or the trade union bureaucracy to defend democratic rights. The Frontline Socialist Party, which falsely postures as a left-wing opponent of the government, collaborates with the union apparatus, whitewashing its betrayals and channeling workers into dead-end negotiations and appeals to parliament. The trade unions affiliated with the JVP/NPP maintain a deathly silence and actively block all anti-government action by their members. Unions tied to opposition parliamentary parties — the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna — call only limited actions aimed at defusing genuine working-class opposition.
None of these forces will mount a principled defense of press freedom, because all of them — government and opposition alike — support the IMF program that is immiserating the working class. All of them fear the independent political mobilization of workers and youth. All of them have an interest in controlling public discourse. The Chartered Institute of Media Professionals Bill is a bipartisan project in its essentials, just as the emergency regulations after Cyclone Ditwah were urged by opposition leader Sajith Premadasa before Dissanayake declared them.
Build the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class
The fight against the CIMP Bill is inseparable from the fight against IMF austerity, against imperialist war, and for the political independence of the working class. Freedom of the press is not a bourgeois luxury to be set aside until “economic demands” are won. It is a vital weapon in the class struggle. The working class needs unfettered access to information, analysis, and political debate — including and especially the revolutionary Marxist perspective advanced by the ICFI, the World Socialist Web Site andthesocialist.lk — to arm itself for the battles ahead.
The SLLA calls on workers, youth, journalists, online content creators, and all defenders of democratic rights to:
Reject the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals Bill in its entirety! This is not a bill to be amended — it is a bill to be defeated!
No to state licensing of journalists! Freedom of the press is a right, not a privilege granted by the capitalist state!
Defend the right of social media content creators and online commentators to publish without state interference!
Abolish the Press Council Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the proposed Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, and all repressive legislation inherited from previous regimes!
No to the essential services ban on Government Press and State Media workers! Defend the right to strike!
For the building of independent action committees across all workplaces to fight IMF austerity and the assault on democratic rights!
For the unity of Sri Lankan workers with their brothers and sisters in South Asia and internationally against the common enemy — global capitalism and its state institutions!
For a workers’ government based on workers’ committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages!
For the socialist reorganization of society — the only foundation for genuine democracy and press freedom!
The Dissanayake government is constructing the architecture of a police state because it knows that the social crisis it is deepening through IMF austerity will generate mass opposition. The working class must answer by constructing its own independent organizations — action committees in every workplace and neighborhood, democratically controlled and politically armed with a socialist-internationalist program. The fight against media censorship is a fight for the political independence of the working class. It is a fight that can only be won through the building of a revolutionary party and the mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system in its entirety.
We, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia, wage this fight in solidarity with the international programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International. We urge workers, youth, intellectuals and all defenders of democratic rights to join us in advancing this struggle and building the revolutionary leadership necessary for the fight for socialism.
