theSocialist.lk republishes the following statement by the WSWS Editorial Board published on WSWS.org on 10 August 2026. We call upon our readers to join the fight to ensure the immediate and unconditional release of Syrotiuk.
Bogdan Syrotiuk
On August 10, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The verdict, handed down by a district court in the Nikolaev region, also orders the confiscation of his property and electronic devices and the destruction of the socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents taken from him.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International denounce this verdict and call on workers, young people and all defenders of democratic rights around the world to demand Bogdan’s immediate release.
The verdict will be immediately appealed. Under Ukrainian law, the appeal must be filed within 30 days. We call on all supporters of democratic rights to back these legal actions and call for the annulment of the sentence.
Bogdan, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason … under martial law.” But the record of the case contains no act of treason—no espionage, no sabotage, no collaboration with any military force. The sole evidence presented against him consisted of his writings, published on the World Socialist Web Site, and his communications with the editors who published them.
The state’s experts examined 14 of Bogdan’s writings and included seven in the indictment. The court was then forced to drop one of the seven—an article on the military commissariats’ violent seizure of draft dodgers—after its own forensic commission could find nothing criminal in it. Bogdan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for six articles.
What was the subversive content? According to the court, the articles contained “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons with fascists and Nazis,” “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” and “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”
In fact, everything written by Bogdan is politically and historically accurate. The “legitimately elected political leadership” is a president whose term of office expired in May 2024. Zelensky remains in power more than two years past his legal mandate, ruling by decree under a state of permanent martial law. Elections have been canceled and basic democratic rights suspended. Bogdan has been convicted of failing to recognize “democratic processes” in a country where no democratic processes exist. His is a verdict handed down by a regime of illegality.
As for the “national heroes” whom Bogdan is accused of “reinterpreting,” they are Stepan Bandera and the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division—Nazi collaborators who supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and were implicated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. The court’s complaint about “comparisons with fascists and Nazis” refers to Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and celebration of these forces.
Among the “proofs” of treason cited by the court are Bogdan’s article “The crimes of the Banderovites against the Ukrainian people: Notes by a Ukrainian Trotskyist” and his 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” In any country where democratic rights retain the slightest meaning, such writings are protected speech. In Ukraine under Zelensky, they carry a 15-year sentence.
When Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on April 25, 2024, the state claimed he was functioning as an agent of the Russian government. In the more than two years since, nothing was produced to substantiate that libelous allegation. In fact, the articles that are cited in the conviction make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to the Russian invasion and the Putin regime.
The verdict refers several times to the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions. This exposes the fact that the prosecution of Bogdan is not about the manufactured pretext of support for Russia. Rather, it is aimed at the growing opposition to war and the Zelensky regime among Ukrainian workers and youth.
The evidence presented in Bogdan’s defense was never answered. A 65-page report by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, found in Bogdan’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” Rather than respond to it, the court ordered a new examination from a state forensic institute—which, even so, found in the articles no calls for the overthrow of the state, the seizure of power, subversive acts or the alteration of Ukraine’s borders.
The defense established that nothing in the record made out the elements of treason, and that Bogdan’s writings were political speech protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court swept all of this aside.
The verdict was not the outcome of a legal proceeding but the execution of a political directive from the Zelensky dictatorship. It states that Bogdan acted “on instructions from a representative of the World Socialist Web Site, under the pseudonym ‘David’”—identified in the judgment itself as David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS. The Ukrainian state is asserting the power to declare international socialist and antiwar publications criminal enterprises, and collaboration with them treason.
The decision to destroy the YGBL’s program, its brochures, leaflets and folders of printed articles exposes the real content of the verdict. The methods are those of fascist regimes: imprison the opposition, confiscate its materials, burn its writings. The court even ordered Bogdan to pay more than 178,000 hryvnia to cover the cost of the forensic “examinations” used to convict him.
The sentencing of Bogdan takes place in a country in which left-wing politics has been outlawed. Communist parties and symbols have been banned in Ukraine since the “decommunization” laws of 2015. In 2022, the Zelensky government suspended 11 opposition parties, including the largest opposition party in parliament, which was subsequently banned outright.
Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office, which reported in September 2025 that it “continues to document cases of torture and ill-treatment” of detainees held by the Ukrainian state. Human Rights Watch describes the collaboration laws as “overly broad and vague”; among those prosecuted are people who carried out “emergency services, construction, humanitarian relief and garbage removal” in occupied territory.
The World Socialist Web Site has been banned in Ukraine since June 6, 2024, six weeks after Bogdan’s arrest.
All of this has been buried and concealed from the public by the government and media outlets that claim the war is being waged in defense of Ukrainian democracy.
The frame-up of Bogdan is the act of a desperate regime. Opposition to the war is mounting within Ukraine itself. More than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against soldiers for desertion or absence without leave since 2022, the majority of them in the past year. In 2025, 69 percent of Ukrainians told Gallup that the country should seek a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal of opinion since 2022. Terrified of the growth of antiwar sentiment among workers and soldiers, the Zelensky government is intensifying repression at home while working to create the framework for the direct entry of the NATO powers into the war.
A sentence of 15 years in a Ukrainian prison is the equivalent of a death sentence. The conditions in Ukraine’s penitentiary system are well documented. At the United Nations Committee Against Torture’s review of Ukraine in April 2025, experts cited overcrowding, inadequate access to food and water, the absence of independent medical examinations and a rising toll of deaths in custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee, reporting on its October 2023 visit to Ukraine, described decaying facilities in which remand prisoners are confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day and found conditions in one pretrial detention center so degraded that it judged them potentially “inhuman and degrading.”
Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year, despite repeated promises from the prison administration. Every day behind bars is a threat to his life.
His fate cannot be left to the courts of a state that has just demonstrated its fascist contempt for democratic rights. Bogdan’s freedom will be won by the mobilization of the international working class, youth and all progressive organizations and individuals dedicated to the defense of democratic rights. We appeal to workers, trade unions, student and youth organizations, civil liberties groups, and socialist and anti-war movements in every country: Take up Bogdan’s case. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions, schools and universities demanding his release. Issue public statements of protest.
Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the World Socialist Web Site at freebogdan@wsws.org.
The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is a fight against imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism. Fill out the form below to get involved.
Relatives of the inmates demand not to shoot the prisoners, outside Mahara Prison on 1 August 2026. Photo credit: Ishara S. Kodikara
On August 1-2, 2026, a riot erupted at Mahara Prison, north of Colombo, causing severe damage to its already unlivable infrastructure and reportedly resulting in the death of one inmate. This is the second prison riot in less than a month and followed the massacre in the Negombo prison early last month.[1] The vast majority of detainees at Mahara — as throughout Sri Lanka’s prison system, where approximately 75 percent of inmates are unconvicted remand prisoners — are held in indefinite judicial limbo, warehoused in facilities built for 11,762 that now hold more than 42,000. The conditions are, by any objective standard, a form of systematic torture: prisoners forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, survive on food that “even cats and dogs” would reject, confined to as little as 1.2 square metres of space.[2] In 2023, 67.8 percent (31,822) of those imprisoned were jailed due to their inability to pay fines — a form of criminalization of poverty. A recent National Audit Office report finds that over 15,000 remain in prolonged remand custody due to delay in government analyst reports. The riot was not an act of criminality. It was an explosion of outrage of human beings subjected to torturous conditions that the capitalist state has deliberately created and deliberately maintains.
But it is not the riot itself that most starkly reveals the political trajectory of Sri Lankan society. It is the response — both of the state and of a significant and vocal section of the public.
In the hours following the Mahara unrest, as was in the aftermath of the Negombo prison incident, a significant segment of society — concentrated in the Sinhala middle class of the south and amplified across social media — began openly proposing measures that belong to the lexicon of fascism. “Break their limbs.” “Shoot them in the head.” “Exterminate the drug residue.” These are not the mutterings of isolated cranks. They are the publicly expressed, socially sanctioned political proposals of a layer of the population that has been systematically prepared over decades to regard certain categories of human beings as unworthy of life. The comments sections of mainstream news outlets and the feeds of social media platforms have become open forums for the advocacy of extrajudicial murder, for the vilification of grieving families, for the glorification of the STF and the military, deployed by the JVP/NPP government, to crush prison riots. The corporate media has done nothing to challenge this — because it cannot, because the media itself has been a primary vehicle for the ideological preparation that has produced it.
Military deployed at the Mahara prison on 1 August 2026. Photo credit: Ishara S Kodikara
Following the Mahara unrest, in a video of an elderly mother of a remand prisoner, published on Dasatha News facebook page, she demanded the release of the names of inmates affected by the riot and subsequent military crackdown — including those killed, transferred to other prisons, or hospitalized. In the video, she holds the ruling class and the police accountable for creating a society dominated by drug lords who prey on the sons of impoverished mothers. She explains that her son was framed through drug planting — a widespread practice by the Sri Lanka Police, a routine mechanism for criminalizing poverty and filling the remand prisons with the sons and daughters of the poor.
Military deployed at Mahara prison to crush the riot and intimidate the relatives and the working class.Image Credit: Ishara S. Kodikara
The video attracted hundreds of scathing, inhumane, and morally bankrupt comments. Commentators vilified her for giving birth to her son, blamed her entirely for his drug addiction, and condemned her for failing to raise him properly. The same hostile barrage was directed at parents, siblings, and other relatives who gathered outside the Mahara and Negombo prisons during the riots and crackdowns to demand the safety of their loved ones — mothers weeping at the gates while gunfire echoed within, wives and children pleading for information, families who had traveled from distant villages only to be met with the deployment of armed drones, armored vehicles, and the Special Task Force.
Facebook commentsSocial media reporting and comments
This is the face of the fascistic ideology now brewing in sections of the Sri Lankan middle class. It is not merely a political tendency expressed in abstract slogans about “law and order.” It is a social practice of systematic cruelty directed at the most vulnerable — at an elderly mother pleading for her son, at families demanding to know whether their loved ones are alive or dead. The same social media users who demand that prisoners be shot in the head are the ones who mock a mother’s grief, who blame her for the poverty into which her son was born, who insist that the state’s lethal violence is not merely justified but righteous.
This reaction reflects a profound moral decay. It is the ideological harvest of a society that has been taught, systematically and over generations, that lethal violence against the “enemy within” is not merely justified but heroic — and that those who love the enemy, who plead for the enemy, who gave birth to the enemy, are themselves contemptible. The elderly mother who demands to know whether her son is alive is not a grieving parent to be treated with compassion. She is an obstacle to the state’s campaign of terror, and the social media mob has been trained to treat her accordingly.
No public figure has yet gone on record in a formal media statement advocating the extrajudicial execution of prisoners. This tendency has not yet crystallized into an organized movement with a large social base. But it does not need to. The historical lesson of fascism — as demonstrated by the international resurgence of the far right — is that fascist movements are not mass movements from their inception. They begin as ideological currents within sections of the petty bourgeoisie, nurtured by the state and the media, that are activated and expanded when the ruling class requires a battering ram against the working class. The social media comments calling for prisoners to be shot, the mockery of a mother’s anguish, the vilification of families at the prison gates — these are the early ideological indicators of a tendency that the JVP/NPP government, facing mounting social opposition to IMF austerity, will seek to cultivate and mobilize.
The Genealogy of a Fascistic Ideology
The calls to shoot prisoners in the head did not emerge from nowhere. They are the latest expression of an ideological trajectory that can be traced with precision.
The 26-year communal war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), concluded in 2009 with the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone, was not merely a military campaign. It was a project of ideological mobilization on a mass scale. The state, Sinhala-Buddhist saffron forces, and the media jointly constructed a narrative in which the Tamil population — and by extension any population that could be designated as an internal threat — was dehumanized. The war was presented not as a conflict between the Sinhala and Tamil ruling classes, each seeking to exploit “their” workers, but as a civilizational struggle for the “Sinhala motherland” against a barbaric enemy. The Sri Lankan military mercilessly pounded the no-fire zone with artillery shells, deliberately targeting hospitals, aid centres and designated civilian areas. Grisly video evidence later emerged of Sri Lankan soldiers executing naked, bound and blindfolded men in cold blood. [3] When the LTTE defences collapsed, the military murdered surrendering LTTE leaders and herded some 300,000 civilians into army-controlled detention camps.
The Sri Lankan military was glorified as the savior of the nation. War heroes were celebrated in state ceremonies, their images plastered across billboards, their “sacrifices” invoked in political speeches. The military budget was expanded, not contracted, after the war ended. Military “leadership training” was imposed on university students. [4] The armed forces were integrated into the civil administration, including in schools, with retired and serving generals appointed to key government positions. The glorification of the military was inseparable from the cultivation of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism, which presented the Sinhala majority as the authentic nation and all others as threats to its integrity.
This ideological campaign did not end with the war. It was repurposed. As the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned in 2021: “The military and its brutal methods developed during the war are now being prepared for use against the working class, as unrest grows over the worsening social conditions facing working people.” [5] The “war on terror” became the “war on drugs,” which became the “war on the underworld.” The enemy was no longer the Tamil separatist but the drug dealer, the criminal, the “underworld figure” — categories that, in practice, encompass the poorest and most marginalized layers of the working class.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) explained the logic of these campaigns as early as 2009: the “war on the underworld” was launched “to divert growing popular discontent and to justify the further strengthening of the state apparatus in preparation for social unrest.”[6] The same analysis applies with equal force today. The JVP/NPP government’s escalating “war on drugs” is a rehearsal for police-state measures, the main target of which is the working class that come into struggle.
The middle-class social media users who now call for prisoners to be shot in the head are the products of this decades-long ideological conditioning. They have been taught to see the state’s lethal violence as legitimate, to regard due process as an obstacle to “security,” and to view certain categories of the poor as subhuman.
The Same Tendency, the Same Targets
But this tendency is not new. It is the same social layer, animated by the same ideology, that has for the past few years populated the comments sections of mainstream media with the glorification of the military and the dehumanization of its victims. When the daily excavations of skeletal remains at the Chemmani-Siththupaththi mass grave are reported — the bones of Tamil men, women, and children who were “disappeared” by state forces, buried in unusual positions, and dumped together in shallow pits — this same social media mob posts comments calling to “make soup out of their bones and have it.” When Tamil communities in the North and East protest the military’s continued occupation of their lands — a permanent network of army camps established during the war and never dismantled — this same tendency demands the deployment of the army to crush them. When Tamil families who have spent decades searching for their loved ones demand accountability for the tens of thousands slaughtered in the final months of the war, this same social layer mocks their grief and insists the killings were justified. When the skeletal remains of 136 individuals were unearthed in Mannar after 74 days of excavation, the same voices jeered, defending the military.
The calls to shoot prisoners in the head are not a departure from this chauvinist culture. They are its extension. The ideological machinery that was built to dehumanize the Tamil “terrorist” has been repurposed to dehumanize the Sinhala “criminal.” The mechanism is identical: construct a subhuman category, mobilize revulsion against it, and demand that the state kill without process, without mercy, without accountability. The war against the LTTE provided the template. The “war on drugs” provides the new target. The underlying logic — that certain categories of human beings may be killed by the state with impunity, without trial, without process, without mercy and that those who call for their killing are patriots — is the same.
The decades-long campaign of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism has prepared this social layer to serve as the shock troops of reaction. The glorification of war heroes, the celebration of military “victory,” the refusal to acknowledge war crimes, the mockery of mass graves — all of this has cultivated an ideological disposition that regards lethal state violence not as a crime to be prosecuted but as a virtue to be celebrated. The middle-class youth who posts “shoot them in the head” on Facebook is not expressing an idiosyncratic opinion. He is expressing the logical endpoint of an ideology that has been systematically inculcated through the education system, the media, and the political culture of the post-war period. He is the product of a society that has never held its killers to account and has instead elevated them to the status of national heroes.
The same social layer revealed its moral character with unmistakable clarity during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which since October 2023 has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians — men, women, and children slaughtered under the banner of “fighting terrorism.” Across social media, this section of the Sinhala middle class expressed vociferous indifference to the genocide and open support for Zionist Israel’s crimes. The same dehumanization mechanism was at work: Palestinians were “terrorists,” their deaths were “necessary,” their suffering was deserved. That the JVP/NPP government itself has conspicuously failed to condemn Israel’s planned seizure of Gaza, pointedly omitting any mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing from its official statements, is no coincidence. The ideological framework that justifies the slaughter of prisoners at Mahara or Negombo, the mockery of Chemmani’s dead, and the indifference to Gaza’s murdered children is one and the same: the conviction that lethal state violence against a dehumanized enemy is not a crime but a form of justice. This is the moral universe that decades of militarization and chauvinism have built.
The social base that the JVP/NPP government is cultivating is this. The party that opposed UN human rights investigations into war crimes, that integrated retired military officers into its political apparatus, that retains the Prevention of Terrorism Act and expands police-state powers — this party governs with the tacit support of the social media mob that demands bullets for prisoners and mocks the bones of the disappeared. It does not need to issue formal statements endorsing such sentiments. It needs only to continue what it is already doing: glorifying the security forces, refusing accountability for past and present massacres, and framing its “war on drugs” as a civilizational struggle against subhuman enemies. The social media tendency will do the rest, providing the popular ideological cover that the state requires to escalate its violence — against prisoners today, against striking workers and protesting youth tomorrow.
The JVP/NPP: Architects of Militarization
The present leaders of this militarization campaign are the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the National People’s Power (NPP) government. This is a fact of immense political significance that must be stated without equivocation.
The JVP campaigned for the 2024 elections on a platform of “systemic change.” It made promises to workers, peasants, and youth across every corner of society. It presented its program as a vision of social righteousness, of clean government, of a break with the corrupt and violent past. It rode to power on the back of the massive Aragalaya uprising of 2022, in which about a million working people rose up against the Rajapaksa regime and the unbearable social conditions produced by the crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism and the 2022 sovereign default.
Today, that same JVP/NPP holds power while actively driving militarization forward. It has retained the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which it explicitly promised to abolish. It has invoked essential services laws to criminalize strikes across key sectors. It has introduced the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA), vastly expanding state repressive powers. It has announced a plan to recruit 10,000 retired military personnel into the police force — many of whom have combat experience from the 26-year anti-Tamil communal war. It has established over 14,000 Public Safety Committees across all village officer divisions, institutionalized as a force operating under the police — a revival of the intelligence-gathering committees set up by Gotabhaya Rajapaksa during the war, with JVP members reportedly appointed to them in almost all areas.[7]
The JVP’s collaboration with the military apparatus is not new. During the war, the Sinhala chauvinist JVP was a virulent advocate of the military campaign against the LTTE, demanding an all-out military solution and vehemently opposing any concessions to Tamils. [8] [9] [10] In 2010, it formed a sordid electoral alliance with former army commander Sarath Fonseka, the general who oversaw the final military offensives. In 2023, as it prepared for government, the JVP/NPP established formal collectives of retired military and police officers — the Retired Tri-forces Collective and the Retired Police Officers Collective — integrating figures most likely including individuals connected to crimes and human rights abuses during the war into its political apparatus.
The betrayal of the Tamil population of the North and East is among the most damning indictments of the JVP/NPP government. During the 2024 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns, Dissanayake and the JVP/NPP made explicit promises to Tamil voters: the release of all political prisoners, the return of civilian land seized by the military, and the provision of information to families of the tens of thousands of missing persons. On the basis of these pledges — and driven by deep disaffection with the traditional Tamil bourgeois parties that had betrayed them for decades — a significant section of Tamil voters swung behind the JVP/NPP in the November 2024 parliamentary election, handing the party a plurality of votes in all but one district in the North and East. Every one of these promises has been broken. The government now claims that political prisoners were convicted on criminal charges and therefore cannot be released. Some land has been returned, but an estimated 2,600 acres still remain under military control, and tens of thousands of acres seized from ordinary working people during the war remain in the hands of the armed forces. Instead of revealing the fate of the disappeared, the government proposes limited financial reparations to victims’ families while protecting the perpetrators. The JVP/NPP has categorically rejected United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions calling for investigations into war crimes. Its opposition to any human rights investigation flows from its Sinhala chauvinist politics and ardent support for the protracted anti-Tamil civil war and is insisting on the lie that the military committed no war crimes. The Tamil masses who voted based on promises of “systemic change”— in spite of the long record of JVP’s anti-Tamil chauvinism — have instead received the same military occupation, the same denial of justice, the same criminalization of their dead.
Now, the JVP Justice Minister visits the Sittupattu mass grave site (on 19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. In another press statement, the Minister raised doubts as to who the perpetrators were, attempting to discredit strong allegations against the armed forces.[11] This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. This is the language of cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken aloud.
This is the party that now governs Sri Lanka. This is the party that presides over the prison massacres at Negombo and Mahara. This is the party whose media allies portray dead prison guards as “heroes” who “sacrificed their lives” — the right-wing Island newspaper declaring: “The drug mafia has flexed its muscle again. The government has embarked on an ambitious campaign to rid the country of narcotics, and rightly so.” [12] On August 3, its Sinhala language daily, Divina named the military-STF intervention in the Mahara prison as a “humanitarian mission”, which echoed the term used to refer to the military onslaught in the final phase of the civil war. This is the party that is precisely accountable for the massive inhumanity, savagery, and moral decay represented by the calls to shoot prisoners in the head.
The Middle Class and the Fascist Mobilization
The social media posts proposing the extrajudicial execution of prisoners are not evenly distributed across the population. They emanate disproportionately from the Sinhala middle class of the south — the petty bourgeoisie, the lower-level professionals, the small business owners, the university-educated and unemployed youth who have been traditionally taught to see themselves as the guardians of the nation’s moral order. This is the classic social base of fascist movements, and its emergence in Sri Lanka follows a pattern that Marxism has long understood.
The middle class occupies a contradictory position in capitalist society. It is not part of the bourgeoisie — it does not own the means of production on a scale that frees it from the necessity of work. But it is terrified of falling into the proletariat, of losing its precarious status, of being swallowed by the poverty that surrounds it. In periods of capitalist crisis, when its economic position is threatened by inflation, unemployment, and the collapse of small enterprises, the middle class becomes politically volatile. It can be mobilized either in alliance with the working class against the bourgeoisie — or, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, as the shock troops of reaction against the working class.[13]
The decades-long campaign of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism has prepared the Sri Lankan middle class to choose the latter path. The glorification of war heroes, the demonization of internal enemies, the constant invocation of “national security” — all of this has cultivated an ideological disposition that sees violence as the solution to social problems. What is developing among sections of the disgruntled Sinhala middle class is not a diffuse or generalized social conservatism. It is a far-right political current, bearing all the essential characteristics of fascism as the Marxist tradition has understood it: the glorification of lethal state violence as a social good, the systematic dehumanization of designated internal enemies, the contempt for due process and legal norms, and the conviction that extrajudicial killing is a legitimate instrument of “law and order.”
This tendency may not yet have a large social base. It is concentrated among a significant section of social media users — particularly youth and the middle class — who wage this militaristic, demoralized, inhumane campaign as a matter of defending law and order and security. The JVP/NPP government is its political beneficiary and its tacit patron — because it understands that when working-class resistance intensifies, this far-right current will be available for mobilization as the street-level enforcers of state terror.
The government and the ruling class are aware of these developments and are tacitly encouraging them. This is the decisive political point. The social media mob that calls for bullets in prisoners’ heads is not acting against the state. It is acting in harmony with a state that has itself just carried out a shoot-to-kill operation at Negombo, that has deployed the STF and the military against unarmed prisoners, that has subjected transferred inmates to retaliatory torture resulting in at least two post-transfer deaths.[1] The state kills; the social media mob applauds; the government appoints a committee of retired judges to bury the truth. Each element reinforces the others.
SLPP as the direct institutional patron of the far-right
This far-right current is not an amorphous social mood. It is being politically organized. Its most direct institutional patrons are the Rajapaksa family’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which has installed Namal Rajapaksa — the son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa — as its national organizer, and the Buddhist clergy that vociferously backs him.
The SLPP and its clerical allies portray the JVP/NPP government as betraying the Sinhala nation by granting concessions to Tamils in order to secure the support of the Tamil diaspora. This is a calculated distortion, but it contains a kernel of political reality. The JVP/NPP was indeed fully supported by sections of the Tamil diaspora — Tamil capitalist expatriates, the wealthy, and the elite — and continues to seek their backing. These layers in turn expect the government to deliver the full implementation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, including the devolution of police and land powers, as the price of their political loyalty. The JVP/NPP, however, has no intention of fulfilling these expectations. It has released only an insignificant extent of occupied lands, while military occupation of the North and East continues unabated.
The SLPP exploits this contradiction to posture as the savior of Buddhism and the Sinhala nation, directly encouraging far-right fascistic elements who wage Sinhala-Buddhist racist provocations in the North — such as the illegal expansion of the Tissa Viharaya temple on seized Tamil land, the erection of Buddha statues as deliberate communal provocations in Trincomalee, and the ongoing campaign by Buddhist chauvinist groups to assert Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy over Tamil and Muslim communities. The SLPP’s aim is transparent: to outflank the JVP/NPP from the right, to mobilize the most backward and violent sections of the Sinhala middle class, and to position itself as the political leadership of the fascistic tendency now brewing in Sri Lankan society.
The JVP/NPP, for its part, has repeatedly demonstrated that it will not confront this reactionary mobilization but will accommodate and appease it — because it shares its fundamental ideological premises and will require its services when working-class resistance intensifies. The middle-class social media mob that demands bullets for prisoners and mocks the Chemmani dead is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the raw material of a political movement that already has its leaders, its institutions, and its patrons — and that is being prepared for deployment against the working class.
The Trajectory: From Prisoners to Workers
The critical political question is: where does this trajectory lead?
The government will in due course direct these fascistic tendencies against working-class struggles. The middle class that today demands bullets for prisoners will tomorrow demand bullets for strikers. The social media mob that dehumanizes “drug residue” will be mobilized to dehumanize workers who defy essential services orders, youth who protest IMF austerity, peasants who resist land grabs. The ideological machinery that was built to prosecute the war against the LTTE and then repurposed for the “war on drugs” will be repurposed again for the war on the working class.
As the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) warned in November 2024, The JVP/NPP government is already preparing the ground. [14] The 14,000 Public Safety Committees, staffed with JVP members and operating under police supervision, are mechanisms for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and repression against political opponents and workers engaged in struggle. The recruitment of 10,000 retired military personnel into the police force is a direct preparation for the violent suppression of social unrest. The government expects strong resistance from youth and students and has already deployed the police to violently suppress teachers’ protests and student demonstrations. School Development Officers were beaten and detained by police in December 2024 for demanding their rights. Allied health science graduates were violently suppressed and arrested in March and April 2025.
The JVP/NPP is implementing the IMF austerity program to the letter. Dissanayake retains the main portfolios of finance and defence to ensure the government’s foremost task of ruthlessly implementing IMF austerity measures is directly in his hands. For 2026, the allocation of funds to the Ministry of Defence is 530 billion Rupees. On the very first day the majority-JVP/NPP parliament convened, the government jettisoned its election pledge to renegotiate the IMF bailout. The measures include significant tax increases targeting workers, the lowering of the income-tax threshold directly affecting the middle class, the slashing of vital public services and a fire-sale of state-owned enterprises, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs. Parliament unanimously approved these IMF austerity measures in December 2024. Dissanayake’s budgets were fully dictated by the IMF. The working class and the poor suffer heavily due to sky-rocketing prices of consumer items, including essential food items, while the JVP-controlled majority trade unions have artificially suppressed the working class struggles.
The government knows it sits on a social powder-keg. The austerity measures it implements will generate mass opposition. It is haunted by the 2022 Aragalaya. Its response is to build the repressive apparatus in advance, to cultivate the ideological climate in which lethal violence against protesters will be accepted, and to prepare the middle-class shock troops who will condemn and vilify the worker, hail the military-police crack-down and provide the political cover for state terror.
The JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva has declared that “there will be no other governments after this government.” President Dissanayake has said the government “cannot be shaken for decades.” These are not expressions of democratic confidence. They are threats. They announce that the JVP/NPP will not peacefully surrender power, that it is preparing to rule through force, that the fascistic ideology now being cultivated in the middle class is an essential component of its political strategy.
The Crisis of Sri Lankan Capitalism
The prison system — and the fascistic ideology that demands its victims be shot — is a concentrated expression of the broader social catastrophe produced by Sri Lankan capitalism. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the country was among the most unequal in the Asia-Pacific region by 2023. The Super-Rich comprise just 1 percent of the population but command a massive 31 percent of the total personal wealth in the country. The Working Class and the Poor comprise half of the entire population but collectively own less than 4 percent of the overall national wealth.
The plantation workers of the central hill country — the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India by British colonialism — continue to live in conditions of abject poverty. The urban poor of Colombo’s slums, the rural farmers crushed by debt and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, the youth who face permanent unemployment — these are the social layers from which the prison population is drawn.
They are the human products of a system that subordinates human need to private profit. And when they resist — when they protest, when they strike, when they explode — the state answers with bullets. When the middle class applauds those bullets, it is not expressing a pathology. It is expressing the logic of a system that requires the dehumanization of its victims in order to sustain itself.
The Warning and the Task
Workers must recognize this danger. The calls to shoot prisoners in the head are not a temporary aberration. They are a political warning. The same forces that today demand the extrajudicial execution of remand prisoners will tomorrow demand the same for striking workers, for protesting students, for anyone who threatens the “stability” that the ruling class requires to continue its exploitation. The social media tendency that mocks the bones of the Chemmani dead, vilifies a remand prisoner’s grieving mother, and calls for bullets in the heads of prisoners is being cultivated as the ideological battering ram of a government preparing for class war.
The revolutionary party must be conscious of these subtle developments in the social consciousness and expose the growing dangers. This means neither exaggerating the tendency into something it is not yet — a mass fascist movement — nor dismissing it as the harmless venting of online cranks. It means identifying it precisely for what it is: an emergent ideological current, rooted in the material crisis of the middle class, cultivated by decades of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism, and tacitly encouraged by a government that will require it when working-class resistance to austerity intensifies. It means exposing the continuity between the dehumanization of Tamils, the mockery of mass graves, and the demand for bullets in prisoners’ heads — because all three are expressions of the same logic, nurtured by the same state, and aimed at the same ultimate target: the working class.
The working class must defeat the ruling class’s militarization program and ideology. This requires an independent political mobilization, organized through action committees in every workplace and neighborhood, that breaks decisively with all capitalist parties — including the JVP/NPP — and their trade union appendages. It requires the building of a revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism, that fights for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers across ethnic divisions and builds an alliance of the working class with all oppressed layers, the peasantry and the youth against the ruling class that foments divisions among them to strengthen capitalist class rule.
The fight against fascistic ideology cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. The middle class that calls for prisoners to be shot is itself a product of a society in crisis — economically threatened, ideologically disoriented, politically manipulated by a ruling class that requires it as a battering ram against the working class. The only force capable of defeating this reactionary mobilization is the organized working class, united across all communal lines, advancing its own socialist program as the alternative to the barbarism of capitalism in decay.
The Negombo dead, the Mahara brutalized prisoners, the tens of thousands slaughtered at Mulliwaikkal, the tens of thousands of rural youth killed in 1988–89, the skeletons still being unearthed at Chemmani and Mannar, the forcibly disappeared, the tortured and the warehoused — The blood of the Sri Lankan working class and oppressed cries out against a system that produces only death and misery. The task of the SLLA is to build the revolutionary party to organize the working class, in alliance with the middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie, the rural poor and the urban impoverished, to put an end to it — through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a workers’ state, in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally, as part of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
[11] “We are currently exhuming bodies in Chemmani. First, we need to determine whether those deaths occurred naturally or due to trauma. The other issue is that within a very short period in that area, the LTTE was in control, the Indian Army was there, and other paramilitaries from that time were also there. The army came much later. Therefore, an investigation is underway to identify the relevant individuals. We will conduct it properly.” Adaderana Facebook on 29 July 2026. [“චෙම්මනි මිනී ගොඩගනිමින් අපි ඉන්නෙ. ඒව සමහරවිට ස්වභාවිකව වෙළා ද, එහෙම නැත්නම් ට්රොමා එකකින් උනාද කියල ඉස්සෙල්ල බේරගන්නට ඕන. අනික් ගැටලුව ඔය ප්රදේශයේ ඉතා කෙටි කාලයක් තුළ LTTE එකත් පාලනයේ ඉඳළ තියෙනව, ඉන්දියන් හමුදාවත් ඉඳළ තියෙනව, ඒකාලෙ හිටපු අනිත් පැරාමිලිටරිස් ඉඳළ තියෙනව. හමුදාව එන්නෙ ඊට ගොඩාක් පස්සෙ. ඒ නිසා අදාළ පුද්ගලයො හොයාගැනීමට විමර්ශන කටයුත්තක් තිබෙනව. ඒක අපි හරියට කරනව.”]
By the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA).
A prison guard shooting indiscriminately at the inmates through a hole of the gate during the Negombo prison riot on 7 July 2026. Image from social media.
The carnage at Negombo Remand Prison on July 5–6, which left at least 28 dead and nearly 100 wounded, is not an aberration. It is the latest and most lethal expression of a penal system that functions, by design, as an instrument of class war against the most impoverished and marginalized layers of Sri Lankan society. The massacre lays bare, with the clarity that only blood can provide, the essential character of the capitalist state: a body of armed men, deployed against the poor, in defense of property relations that produce immiseration as their normal condition.
The postmortem evidence now emerging from Negombo General Hospital and preliminary judicial examinations confirms what the government’s hastily assembled narrative of “underworld drug gang rivalries” was constructed to conceal. The 20 deceased inmates were killed overwhelmingly (14 inmates) by high-velocity gunshot wounds to the head, chest, and upper torso — the signature of a deliberate, lethal shoot-to-kill policy, not crowd control. The seven prison guards and officials who died (a toll that rose to eight when a sergeant succumbed to injuries on July 8) were killed by blunt instruments, shattered bricks, and iron rods — the weapons of the utterly dispossessed, wielded in explosive, visceral rage. Two distinct modes of death, produced by one class system.
The state’s tactical choices confirm that de-escalation was never the objective. No loudspeaker warnings were issued. No tear gas, water cannons, or rubber bullets were deployed. No attempt at dialogue or negotiation was made. Instead, the police, military, and Special Task Force (STF) — the same notorious paramilitary unit responsible for the 2012 Welikada prison massacre — opened fire indiscriminately into crowds of prisoners trapped inside a walled compound. The area around the prison was transformed into what could be witnessed as a war zone, with heavily armed security forces, armored vehicles, military jeeps, and drones deployed to intimidate the hundreds of relatives — mothers, wives, children of prisoners, most of them poor villagers — who gathered outside, weeping and screaming for information as gunfire echoed through the complex.
The killing did not end on July 6. Amnesty International confirmed on July 9 that at least two inmates died after being transferred from Negombo to secondary facilities, amid severe allegations of retaliatory torture and beatings by guards. The Committee for Protecting the Rights of Prisoners warned that five inmates accused of leading the unrest have been placed in secret isolation, creating “a severe threat to their lives.” The massacre continues in the form of organized reprisals.
The Lie Machine
The government’s explanation for the carnage is a lie from start to finish, and it is a lie with a well-documented genealogy. Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara claimed the violence erupted from a dispute over a prison drug-trafficking network. The prisoners, in this telling, were “underworld criminals” and “drug residue” — a dehumanizing lexicon that functions to prepare public opinion for the acceptance of state murder. Acting Commissioner General of Prisons Prasad Hemantha Kumara defended a prison officer filmed firing through a narrow opening in the main gate, claiming the shots were “necessary to prevent a catastrophic prison breach.”
This narrative is a political cover for killings that fold neatly into the JVP/NPP government’s escalating “war on drugs” — itself a well-worn mechanism for criminalizing poverty and justifying the expansion of police-state powers.
The genealogy of official lies is instructive. After 11 inmates were shot dead at Mahara Prison in 2020, the Rajapaksa government blamed psychiatric drugs and drug-dealer conspiracies for the incident — claims the College of Psychiatrists debunked as baseless, and the postmortems confirmed that all victims were shot. The 2012 Welikada prison killings of 27 inmates followed the same script: the government blamed a “hard-core criminal” riot, but a prisoner’s BBC Sinhala account showed STF commandos themselves provoked the confrontation — cuffing, beating, and tear-gassing inmates — before carrying out the massacre.
The pattern is invariant across decades and across regimes: provoke, kill, lie, investigate — where “investigate” means appoint a committee of retired judges to produce a report that suppresses the truth and exonerates the killers. Nanayakkara’s announcement of a three-member committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge is the latest iteration of a ritual so predictable it scarcely merits the name of politics.
Who fills these Prisons?
The Negombo dead were not “underworld criminals.” They were, overwhelmingly, unconvicted remand prisoners — members of a class that constitutes approximately 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s total prison population. They were held in a facility built for 900 that currently warehouses nearly 2,400 human beings. Nationally, Sri Lanka’s prisons — built to accommodate 11,762 inmates — now hold more than 42,000, nearly four times their intended capacity.
Some of the victims who succumbed to injuries during the Negombo prison riot and shooting. Image from social media.
These are not people serving sentences for proven crimes. They are people who have been arrested — overwhelmingly on drug-related charges — and then held in indefinite judicial limbo, often for years, because they cannot afford bail or legal representation. They are punished not for what they have been proven to have done, but for who they are: poor, marginalized, and surplus to the requirements of capital. The remand prisoner is the purest expression of the class logic of bourgeois “justice.”
The conditions in which they are held constitute systematic torture. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka’s 2021 report documented prisoners forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, and survive on food that, as one inmate stated, “even cats and dogs” would reject. Negombo Prison was a pressure cooker of systemic injustice — severe overcrowding, starvation-level nutrition, non-existent sanitation, and daily violence from guards — waiting to explode. And when it exploded, the state responded not with reform but with bullets.
This is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed. The state maintains conditions of deliberate, calculated brutality so that when the inevitable explosion occurs, it can be met with overwhelming lethal force. The explosion provides the pretext for the massacre, and the massacre serves as a demonstration effect for the working class outside the prison walls.
The Guards: Workers in Uniform
The seven prison guards and officials killed at Negombo — beaten to death with bricks and iron rods — were themselves drawn from impoverished rural families and lower-middle-class strata. They took these dangerous, degrading jobs because they had no alternative. But they were not merely passive victims caught in the crossfire of an explosion they did not create. They were the immediate, daily instruments of its production.
The guards were the vehicle through which the hellish torture, the degrading and inhumane treatment, and the systematic mistreatment of the inmates were implemented. It was their hands that administered the beatings. It was their voices that delivered the abuse. It was their bodies that enforced the starvation, the suffocating overcrowding, and the denial of medical care. The explosive, visceral rage that killed them — the shattered bricks and iron rods driven into their bodies — was not an abstract or misdirected fury. It was a rage whose immediate object was precisely those who had, day after day, week after week, month after month, made the prisoners’ existence a living torment.
This is the deepest tragedy of the capitalist penal apparatus: it does not merely place workers in the line of fire. It systematically dehumanizes and militarizes them, psychologically preparing them for violence, conditioning them to torture, brainwashing them to hate their own class brothers. The guard who beats a starving remand prisoner is himself a product of the same rural immiseration that fills the cells. But the state has broken him, stripped him of solidarity, trained him to see the prisoner not as a fellow victim of the same system but as an enemy — “drug residue,” “underworld scum,” a criminal presumed “non-human” (contrary to the sham slogan emblazoned on the perimeter walls of Welikada prison declaring that “prisoners are also human”) — deserving of whatever violence is inflicted upon him. While in uniform, the guard is consciously and fully in the service of the capitalist ruling class and its oppressive apparatus. The ruling class, which never sets foot inside the prison, has successfully constructed a machinery in which one layer of the poor is conscripted to brutalize another, and both are destroyed in the process.
The prisoners’ rage was not misdirected. It struck those who had made themselves the immediate face of the system’s cruelty. The tragedy is that the system is so constructed that the prisoners’ only available targets were other workers — men who, in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, would be their allies against the bourgeoisie that immiserates them both, and who, under a workers’ state, would no longer be set against them as enemies at all. The guards who died at Negombo were perpetrators and victims simultaneously — killers and killed, instruments of class oppression who were themselves oppressed, dehumanized by the same machine they were paid to operate. The ruling class, which orchestrated this fratricide from a safe distance, will mourn neither the prisoners nor the guards. It required both their deaths to sustain the order of private property.
The Historical Trajectory of State Violence
The Negombo massacre must be understood within the unbroken history of penal violence maintained by every successive bourgeois regime in Sri Lanka. The list is staggering: Mahara in 2020 (11 shot dead), Welikada in 2012 (27 killed by STF commandos), Anuradhapura in 2011, Kalutara in 2000, Bindunuwewa in 2000 (27 Tamil detainees hacked to death by a Sinhala extremist mob while the state stood by). At Welikada in 1983, during the Black July anti-Tamil pogrom, 53 Tamil political prisoners were murdered by Sinhala racialist inmates aided by prison authorities.
This trajectory of prison massacres is inseparable from the broader history of state violence against the working class and oppressed. During the JVP insurrection of 1988–89, state forces killed tens of thousands of rural youth in the island’s south — a campaign of mass murder for which no political nor military leadership of the state has ever been held accountable. The JVP itself carried out a fascistic campaign of assassinations during that same period, targeting workers, trade unionists, and political opponents, in the name of defending the motherland. The current JVP/NPP government — whose general secretary Tilvin Silva recently declared that “there will be no other governments after this government” — has never confronted this history within its own ranks, nor has it ever been compelled to do so by the bourgeois media and political establishment that now treat it as a legitimate party of government.
The 26-year civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam concluded in 2009 with the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone, under the direction of then-Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, enacted in 1979 and retained — despite explicit campaign promises to abolish it — by the current JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has been used for decades to detain, torture, and disappear political opponents. Human Rights Watch has documented severe abuses, including rape and other torture methods. Government figures from 2017 indicated that 70 prisoners had been held in pretrial detention under the PTA for more than five years, and 12 for over 10 years.
This is the state that now presents the Negombo killings as a regrettable but necessary response to a “prison drug network.” The state that tortures, disappears, and massacres is the same state that lies about what it has done. The lie is not incidental to the violence; it is an essential component of it. The killing cannot proceed without first preparing public opinion to accept that the victims are not fully human.
The Ideological Offensive: Dehumanization as Class Warfare
The corporate media’s deployment of terms like “underworld criminals” and “drug residue” to describe the Negombo dead performs a precise ideological function. It constructs a subhuman category — people whose deaths are not murders but a form of social sanitation — and mobilizes upper-middle-class public opinion behind the state’s lethal operations. This is the logic of fascistic reaction, and it directly mirrors the xenophobic demonization of immigrants by figures like Donald Trump internationally. The purpose is identical: to criminalize poverty, to justify state terror, and to obscure the class relations that produce both the “crime” and the punishment.
The “war on drugs” in Sri Lanka, as internationally, has never been a public health initiative. It is a mechanism for the criminalization and warehousing of surplus population — young people, overwhelmingly from the poorest layers of society, whose labor is not required by capital and whose existence therefore constitutes a threat to social order. The drug cases that fill the remand prisons are, in the vast majority of instances, frame-ups. They serve the same function that vagrancy laws served in the period of primitive accumulation that Marx analyzed in Capital: the use of penal law to discipline the expropriated poor and enforce the conditions of capitalist exploitation.
The JVP/NPP government has made the “war on drugs” a centerpiece of its political offensive. At the May Day rallies this year, President Dissanayake boasted that “2026 will go down in Sri Lanka’s history as the year when corrupt individuals, fraudsters, and thieves were sent to prison.” This anti-corruption and anti-drug rhetoric serves a dual purpose: it diverts popular anger away from the capitalist system that produces immiseration and toward individual “criminals” who can be blamed for social decay, while simultaneously expanding the repressive apparatus that will be used against the working class when austerity-driven opposition intensifies.
The JVP/NPP: Continuity in Repression
The Negombo massacre took place under the JVP/NPP government elected in 2024 on promises of “systemic change,” a mandate rooted in the 2022 Aragalaya uprising that ousted Gotabhaya Rajapaksa but was politically derailed by trade union bureaucracies and the JVP/NPP itself, which redirected mass struggle into parliamentary channels rather than revolutionary confrontation. That betrayal led to Wickremesinghe’s premiership, the IMF’s austerity loan, and ultimately Dissanayake’s election — with the promised “change” proving to be continuity of the same capitalist class rule. In office, the JVP/NPP has faithfully executed IMF austerity dictates: mass privatizations, casualization of employment and job losses, subsidy cuts, retention of the PTA despite pledges to abolish it, new repressive legislation, emergency powers, and violent suppression of workers’ protests.
The Negombo massacre is the logical expression of a government that represents the same capitalist class as its predecessors and defends the same property relations. The JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva’s declaration at this year’s May Day rally that “there will be no other governments after this government” is not hyperbole. It is a threat — directed not at opposition politicians but at the working class itself. Faced with mounting social opposition as the economic crisis deepens and the US-NATO war on Iran disrupts global energy supplies, driving fuel and food prices still higher, the JVP/NPP is preparing for class war.
The Crisis of Sri Lankan Capitalism
The prison system is a concentrated expression of the broader social catastrophe produced by Sri Lankan capitalism. The country is among the most unequal in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2016, the richest 10 percent earned the equivalent of the total amount earned by 70 percent of all households. The 2022 default on foreign debt — the result of decades of parasitic capitalist development, corruption, and subordination to international finance capital — triggered an economic collapse that pushed the poverty rate sharply upward. The UN reported that at least 70 percent of households were reducing meals, including skipping one meal a day. Officially, food inflation reached 57 percent.
The plantation workers of the central hill country — the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India by British colonialism — continue to live in conditions of abject poverty, earning wages that scarcely permit survival, housed in decrepit “line rooms” unchanged for over a century. The urban poor of Colombo’s slums, the rural farmers crushed by debt and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, the youth who face permanent unemployment — these are the social layers from which the prison population is drawn.
They are the human products of a system that subordinates human need to private profit. And when they resist — when they protest, when they strike, when they explode — the state answers with bullets. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system.
The Marxist Understanding of the State
Lenin, in The State and Revolution, defined the state as “the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” It is not a neutral arbiter, not a mechanism for resolving social conflicts, but an instrument for the organized suppression of one class by another. The state, he stressed, was fundamentally composed of “special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc. at their command.” The prison is the state in its most naked form — stripped of the democratic-parliamentary veneer that normally obscures its class character. When guards and commandos open fire on unarmed prisoners demanding PCR testing during the COVID pandemic, when the state deploys the army, navy, air force, STF, and armed drones to surround a prison and intimidate the families gathered outside, the mask falls away entirely.
The capitalist penal system cannot be reformed. The Human Rights Commission reports, the promises of prison modernization, the committees of inquiry — all of it is a mechanism for absorbing popular outrage and channeling it back into the dead end of bourgeois legality. The conditions that produce these massacres — overcrowding, poverty-driven remand detention, the criminalization of the poor, impunity for security forces — are not dysfunctions of the system. They are the system functioning exactly as it is designed to function.
Successive governments have responded to prison violence with the same empty ritual. Mahinda Rajapaksa promised rehabilitation. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa promised five-year reform plans. Sirisena promised transitional justice. The JVP/NPP promised “systemic change.” Committees are appointed, plans are published, and the conditions that produce violence — overcrowding, remand without trial, starvation, torture — only worsen. They worsen because the capitalist state requires them. The prison exists to discipline the poor, to warehouse surplus labor, to terrorize the working class into submission. It cannot be reformed because its function is irreducibly repressive.
The Revolutionary Answer
The Negombo dead — prisoners and guards alike — were killed by a system that pits the oppressed against each other while the ruling class looks on and calls it justice. The prisoners were killed by a state that views their lives as worthless because their labor is worthless to capital. The guards were killed by the same system, conscripted into a role that placed them in the path of an explosive rage of which they were only the final instruments of creation and which they could not escape.
The only answer to Negombo, to Mahara, to Welikada, to the entire bloody history of the capitalist penal system, is the mobilization of the working class as an independent political force against the capitalist state in its entirety. This means building a revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism, that fights for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers across ethnic divisions and builds an alliance of the working class with all oppressed layers, the peasantry and the youth against the ruling class that foments divisions among them to divide and strengthen capitalist class rule.
Workers across the country — in the factories, offices, plantations, and rural communities — must form their own action committees, independent of all capitalist parties and their affiliated trade union bureaucracies. These committees must be the basis for a democratic and socialist congress of workers and rural masses, advancing a program that begins from human need, not corporate profit: the repudiation of foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under workers’ democratic control, the indexing of wages to the cost of living, guaranteed jobs for all, and the cancellation of debts for poor farmers and small business holders.
The fight against the capitalist penal system is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. The prison can only be abolished through the revolutionary overthrow of the class society that requires it. The task of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) is to build the political leadership capable of organizing the working class for that struggle — in Sri Lanka and across South Asia, as part of the international struggle of the the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of socialist revolution.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
On 2 February 2026, residents and farmers of Nedunkerni, Vavuniya, held a protest against the Sri Lankan government’s revival of proposed Kivul Oya Reservoir Project, alleging that it would facilitate Sinhala colonization and alter the demographic composition of the North-East. Image courtesy of Sri Lanka Breaking News fb page
At a media conference held at the Jaffna Press Club premises on July 3, 2026, a Sinhalese speaker voiced a widely-held Sinhala-Buddhist communal argument: because Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims live together in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, Sinhalese could likewise be peacefully settled in Jaffna and the North and East. This is a misconceived justification for the state-sponsored Sinhalisation of Tamil-majority areas. The argument is a fraud. If accepted as a general principle, it would equally justify the state allocating land to Tamils in Matara, Weeraketiya, Dikwella, Tangalle, Ambalantota, Mirissa, Galle and Deniyaya — predominantly Sinhala areas of the south. The speaker would never accept that, because he exactly knows that state-sponsored settlement is not an invitation to voluntary coexistence, but is an instrument of power. What is being presented as a principle of multi-ethnic coexistence is in reality a justification for state-sponsored ethnic domination of the Sinhalese. The issue is not a matter of ethnicity, not whether Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims can live together voluntarily. The issue is the political character of state-directed demographic engineering and the communal strategy of capitalist rule it serves.
The historical record
Since the sham independence of 1948, successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued demographic engineering in the North and East as a core pillar of communal rule. One of the first acts of the D.S. Senanayake government was to disenfranchise over a million Tamil-speaking plantation workers. The UNP applied from the outset the communal principle that, as Colvin R. de Silva prophetically declared in his 1948 speech opposing the Citizenship Bill, “the state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race.” He warned that this was “an outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy,” adding: “It is precisely under Fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state.”[1]
The pattern intensified after the 1953 hartal, when the general strike shook bourgeois rule to its foundations. Bandaranaike concluded that only the stirring up of anti-Tamil prejudice could counter the influence of the Trotskyists in the working class. But the communal project was not confined to legislation and administrative discrimination. It was pursued with equal vigour through the physical transformation of the country’s demographic map.
From the 1950s onward, successive governments used state-sponsored irrigation and land colonisation schemes to resettle Sinhalese peasants from the wet zone into the dry-zone Northern and Eastern provinces. The Gal Oya project, initiated in 1949 under D.S. Senanayake, settled tens of thousands of Sinhalese colonists on land developed through the diversion of the Gal Oya river. The Sinhalese population of the combined Batticaloa-Amparai district, a mere 4,702 in 1911, had swelled to over 150,000 by 1981 — an increase far exceeding any possible natural growth rate, achieved through the systematic allocation of state land, irrigation infrastructure and cultivation rights to settlers brought from the Sinhalese-majority south. The administrative separation of Ampara from Batticaloa in April 1961 was presented as a measure of bureaucratic decentralisation necessitated by the region’s growth. In reality, it was the political consolidation of more than a decade of engineered demographic transformation. The redrawing of district boundaries carved a new Sinhalese-majority interior out of what had been Tamil- and Muslim-majority territory, severing it administratively from the coastal areas where Tamils and Muslims remained concentrated. By reshaping electoral boundaries to manufacture Sinhala parliamentary representation in what had been a Tamil-majority province, the Ampara partition was not an incidental by-product of development policy but an integral mechanism of the Sinhala bourgeoisie’s nation-building project — confirming that what was presented as technical administration and rural development was, from its inception, bound up with the ruling class’s strategy of fragmenting the working class along communal lines.
A similar dynamic unfolded at Kantale (Kanthalai), where the state settled peasants drawn from outside Trincomalee District in what had been a Tamil-majority village. The same logic was extended north-west into the Tamil-speaking areas of Anuradhapura District through the Padaviya Tank scheme, 65 km from Anuradhapura town. Across these projects, the pattern of land allocation was consistent and unambiguous: the Allai scheme assigned 65 percent of settler plots to Sinhalese colonists, and Kanthalai assigned 77 percent, in each case relegating the existing Tamil and Muslim population to a residual share. The cumulative demographic effect was stark — Trincomalee District’s Sinhalese population rose from roughly 15 percent in 1946 to 33 percent by 1981 — an increase that cannot be attributed to organic demographic growth and that testifies instead to the systematic character of state-directed colonization as an instrument of Sinhala-Buddhist nation-building.
The Mahaweli Development Programme, whose modern phase began under Dudley Senanayake’s government in the late 1960s following a 1969 UNDP/FAO master plan and was dramatically compressed from a planned thirty years into seven after the UNP’s return to power in 1977, took this process of engineered demographic transformation to a qualitatively new level. Settlement in Systems B, C, H and L brought overwhelmingly Sinhalese colonists into the Eastern and Northern provinces: in Systems H and C, 90 percent of settlers were Sinhalese and 10 percent Muslim, with no Tamils allocated land at all, despite the territory lying within the Eastern Province, then a majority-Tamil area. This composition was not incidental; a former senior Mahaweli Authority bureaucrat later acknowledged that the settlement of System L in Weli Oya (Manal Aru) in particular was designed to “destroy the land basis for the very existence of Eelam,” inserting a loyal Sinhala population into the narrow strip separating Tamil areas of the north from Tamil- and Muslim-inhabited areas of the east and driving a permanent geographic wedge into the claimed Tamil homeland.[2] Weli Oya was the most militarized expression of Sinhala colonization, and was settled clandestinely from the mid-1980s under a Buddhist-monk-led mobilization backed by President Jayewardene’s inner circle, with settlers armed and deployed as home guards alongside the army.
A 1985 government-appointed “study group” explicitly recommended — reported in Tamil Times, November 1985 — using Sinhala colonization to sever the territorial link between the Tamil-majority north and east. “The area [Trincomalee District] forms an ethnic bridge and colonization of this region by Sinhalese population can break this inter-district ethnic [Tamil] link”, the report proposed. Eight recommendations reported include transformation of the ethnic composition of the Tamil areas of the north and east in order that Sinhalese would constitute the majority by redrawing Sri Lanka’s map with boundary changes of provinces and by creating new districts. Jayewardene himself announced — reported in Los Angeles News on January 21, 1985 — plans to colonize the Northern Province with enough Sinhalese: “We consider Sri Lanka as one land belonging to all citizens, consisting of 75% Sinhalese and 25% other races. As such, we will settle Sri Lankans in this proportion throughout the island on state land”, he said at a public meeting at Anamaduwa.
This was not a program confined to the war years. It resumed after the LTTE’s military defeat in 2009, when the Mahaweli Authority and the military brought new waves of landless Sinhalese, mainly from Hambantota, into Weli Oya in the same clandestine manner as before. And it continues into the present, with the Sri Lankan cabinet of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake approving the revival of the Mahaweli System L’s Kivul Oya reservoir project in January 2026 — a scheme reported to confiscate over 1,600 acres of Tamil paddy land and settle more than 7,000 people, reportedly all Sinhalese, with no land allocated to the Tamil communities who have farmed the area for decades.
On 2 February 2026, residents and farmers of Nedunkerni, Vavuniya, held a protest against the Sri Lankan government’s revival of proposed Kivul Oya Reservoir Project, alleging that it would facilitate Sinhala colonization and alter the demographic composition of the North-East. Image courtesy of Tamil Guardian
These programs were administered under the banner of national development and land reform. They were nothing of the kind. They shifted the ethnic composition of entire districts, fragmented the geographic contiguity of Tamil-majority territory, and became one of the central grievances underlying Tamil nationalist politics and, later, the armed conflict. The war that erupted in 1983 and the military occupation of the North and East provided cover for accelerated settlement. In the post-war period, as the WSWS reported in 2012, the Rajapakse government pursued a systematic policy of “Sinhalisation” — changing Tamil place names to Sinhala, erecting Buddha statues, and moving Sinhalese settlers northward “to change the population balance in politically and socially significant ways.” [3] The military controlled land allocation and barred displaced Tamils from returning to their villages.
The Sinhalese peasants settled in the Northern and Eastern provinces through these colonisation schemes were themselves victims of the same communal strategy. Granted land and state assistance as initial inducements, many were subsequently left to endure severe hardship. Established in militarily exposed frontier zones, they were repeatedly subjected to deadly attacks by the LTTE and other armed groups, while the state frequently failed to provide either adequate protection or long-term economic security. For many settler families, the promised improvement in living conditions never materialised. Yet these same schemes profoundly and permanently altered the demographic composition of historically Tamil-majority areas — an outcome that was not incidental but, as a substantial body of research has documented, a central political objective of successive governments. The objective record demonstrates that the Sinhala-chauvinist state subordinated the welfare of poor Sinhalese settlers, no less than that of the Tamil population, to its broader strategy of consolidating territorial and political control through communal division. Sinhalese peasants were deployed not as the principal beneficiaries of these schemes but as instruments of a reactionary state policy whose overriding purpose was the preservation of bourgeois rule through ethnic polarisation.
On 5 February 2026, residents of Keppapulavu held a protest for the 12th consecutive day, demanding the return of their “ancestral lands” and community properties that have remained under military occupation since 2009. Image courtesy of Kumanan Kana
Tamil Eelam is Sri Lanka’s Gaza
The continued militarisation of the North and East, the land grabs and settler colonisation sponsored by the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist state, and the atrocities committed against Tamils since the early 1980s draw a sharp parallel between occupied Palestine and the North and East of Sri Lanka. The parallel is not incidental. It is verifiably reported that the Sri Lankan ruling class studied and adapted Zionist settler-colonialism as a precedent, with direct advisory contact between Israeli and Sri Lankan state agencies in the 1980s. The ideological foundations are strikingly similar. Just as Zionist ideology since the Nakba of 1948 has been built on the colonial assertion of a divine and historical claim to land, erasing the presence of the indigenous Palestinian population, Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism rests on the anachronistic and false claim that Tamils were historically invaders of the island — a mythology that denies the centuries-long presence of Tamils in the North and East and provides the ideological cover for their dispossession. The material manifestation of both ideologies has been the same: state-sponsored settler colonisation. In Palestine, Zionist settlements have been systematically implanted to fragment Palestinian territory, seize water and land resources, and make the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. In Sri Lanka, from the Gal Oya project of 1949 through the Mahaweli Programme to the post-war military colonies, the state has resettled Sinhalese peasants in historically Tamil-concentrated areas to alter the demographic map, fragment territorial contiguity, and “destroy the land basis for the very existence of Eelam”. In both cases, the political objective was not merely territorial acquisition but the deliberate strengthening of communal divisions to prevent the unity of the working class. In both cases, the major imperialist powers — above all the United States — provided political cover, military support and diplomatic protection for the project. In both cases, the civilian population was subjected to military onslaught when it resisted: the slaughter of tens of thousands of Tamils at Mullivaikkal in 2009, like the genocidal assault on Gaza, was the bloody culmination of decades of occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing. Tamil Eelam is Sri Lanka’s Gaza — not as a rhetorical flourish, but as the product of the same logic of the capitalist nation-state, which, whether in Palestine or Sri Lanka, resorts to settler colonialism, communal war and permanent military occupation to suppress the democratic rights of oppressed peoples and to divide the working class along ethnic lines.
The class logic of communalism
The policies of demographic engineering have not promoted unity between Tamil and Sinhala workers. They have deepened mistrust and communal division. This serves the interests of the Sinhala ruling class by weakening the independent unity of the working class, while simultaneously providing Tamil nationalist bourgeois leaders with political ammunition to reinforce ethnic divisions and strengthen support for separatism. The Sinhala ruling class and the Tamil bourgeois nationalists are not genuine antagonists. They are symbiotic. Each feeds on the other, and both depend on preventing the unity of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers on a class basis.
The demographic restructuring of the North and East serves a precise class function. It provides land and patronage to Sinhala settlers, creating a social base with a material stake in the communal order. It fragments the working class along ethnic lines, making it far harder for Tamil and Sinhala workers to recognise their common interests. And it provides the Tamil nationalist bourgeoisie with precisely the grievance around which to mobilise ethnic solidarity, reinforcing the very divisions that prevent the emergence of an independent working-class politics.
This was not inevitable. The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), the Trotskyist forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party and the Socialist Lead (SLLA), commanded the allegiance of the most class-conscious workers in the 1940s. On February 4, 1948, it mobilised 50,000 workers — Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim — on Galle Face Green to reject the fake independence arranged in the British Colonial Office. The BLPI warned that disenfranchising Tamil plantation workers would set a chain of discrimination in motion. The disaster came with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party’s political degeneration. Encouraged by the Pabloite revisionists in the Fourth International, the LSSP leaders increasingly adapted to Bandaranaike’s Sinhala populism, entering the SLFP government in 1964. By 1972, the former Trotskyist de Silva was drafting a constitution that enshrined Buddhism as the state religion and a Sinhala as the sole official language — a direct repudiation of everything he had fought for in 1948. The LSSP’s betrayal blocked the development of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class, opening the door to the JVP among Sinhala rural youth and the LTTE among young Tamils.
The way forward
The democratic rights of all communities cannot be secured through state-directed demographic manipulation. They require the conscious political unity of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers against communalism and the capitalist state that has systematically exploited ethnic divisions for its own survival.
Where communities have been relocated through politically motivated settlement schemes, any future solution must uphold democratic rights, be voluntary, provide adequate compensation and livelihood guarantees, and be determined in consultation with the affected people — not imposed by the state in pursuit of communal objectives. But even such democratic measures can only be fully realised through a broader political struggle against the capitalist system that generates communalism as an instrument of rule.
The working class must reject all forms of nationalism and communalism — whether Sinhala supremacism or Tamil separatism. In solidarity with the socialist internationalist programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the SLLA fights for a workers’ and farmers’ government and the convening of a genuine constituent assembly to abolish decades of discrimination and oppression on the basis of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender. Democratic rights can only be assured by ending social inequality through the socialist transformation of society.
The ICFI advances the perspective of a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and [Tamil] Eelam, as part of a United Socialist States of South Asia. The ICFI’s “Tamil Eelam” is not the LTTE’s capitalist Eelam — it is a constituent part of a voluntary socialist federation, a socialist Tamil Eelam, guaranteed by a workers’ state. This is not a diplomatic formula for negotiations between capitalist nation-states. It is a guide to revolutionary action — the unification of Sinhala and Tamil workers in a common struggle against their common class enemy. As the 1987 statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International explained, the working class fights for the democratic rights of oppressed peoples “not as an appendage to the national bourgeoisie, but rather as its implacable enemy.”[4] The right of nations to self-determination cannot be realised through bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements, no matter how courageous or militant. It can only be achieved as a by-product of the socialist revolution led by the proletariat, which, having established its dictatorship, guarantees to all oppressed peoples their legitimate democratic rights within a voluntarily united socialist federation.
What, then, is the way forward for the Sinhalese peasants who have been settled in the North and East under these reactionary programmes? For those already settled and granted title deeds over the years — many of whom have lived there for decades, raised families and know no other home — any resolution must be democratic and voluntary, not punitive. They must be guaranteed security of person and property, full democratic rights, and equal participation in the economic and social life of the region alongside their Tamil and Muslim neighbours. For those who were settled but never granted formal title deeds, the state must either regularise their tenure on terms determined in consultation with all affected communities, or provide adequate compensation and livelihood guarantees should they choose to relocate. For those Sinhalese presently being lured by the state into new settlement schemes — the most active front of the ongoing communal project — the answer is to refuse. Sinhalese workers, youth and peasants must reject the role the Sinhala-chauvinist state has assigned them as demographic pawns. The state that offers them land today will abandon them tomorrow, as it has abandoned generations of settlers before them, once their political utility is exhausted. The genuine interests of Sinhalese peasants lie not in accepting stolen land at the expense of Tamil and Muslim working people, but in joining with those same working people in a common struggle against the capitalist system that exploits and divides them all.
The working class has no interest in drawing borders on exclusive ethnic lines, nor in the demographic manipulation of one community against another. They should reject the idea that different ethnic groups must be separated into different states. The territorial referent of “Tamil Eelam” in our usage is the Northern and Eastern provinces — the areas where the Tamil population has historically lived as a concentrated community, where national oppression has been most acute, and where the demand for a separate Tamil state has been historically raised by the Tamil nationalist movement. But, we do so within the framework of a United Socialist States, on the basis of the democratic right of self-determination and the struggle for socialism — NOT on the basis of ethnic exclusivity of Tamils, nationalist “homeland” claims of a primordial birthright grounded in ethnic identity, or the cartographic pretensions of the Tamil bourgeoisie. The interest of the working class lies in abolishing the entire system of capitalist communal rule through the socialist transformation of society. Sinhalese workers, youth and peasants should recognise the reactionary character of state-sponsored settlement policies and the devastating consequences they have produced over decades. The allies of Tamil workers are not to be found in the separatist leaderships of the Tamil bourgeoisie, but among their Sinhala and Muslim class brothers and sisters. The fight against communally driven demographic engineering is inseparable from the fight for socialism.
Let us be clear
Seventeen years after the war, the democratic right of Tamil people to reclaim their occupied lands must be upheld without qualification. Whether or not individual Tamils possess formal title deeds is irrelevant to the legitimacy of their claim. These are historically Tamil neighbourhoods — areas where Tamils were historically concentrated, where their homes, Tamil villages and cultural places were situated. The absence of state-issued documentation does not extinguish the right of a people to the lands on which their community has lived for generations. On the contrary, the systematic denial or destruction of title deeds by the occupying state is itself an instrument of dispossession, not a legitimate basis for denying restitution.
The democratic right of Tamils to their own neighbourhoods must be recognised and restored. This is not a claim to ethnic exclusivity. No member of any other ethnic community is prevented from residing in these areas of his or her own will, without the intervention of the state. The right being asserted is not the bourgeois-nationalist demand for an ethnically pure territory, but the inviolable democratic right of a historically oppressed people to return to and live in their traditional neighbourhoods, their historical villages and towns — the places from which they were driven by communal war, military occupation and state-sponsored colonisation. There is no exclusive ethnic right to lands that Marxists recognise. But people of the same ethnicity who have shared a culture in traditional neighbourhoods of a community, recognised as their historical villages and towns, have an inviolable right to reside on those lands.
This distinction is fundamental. The Sinhala-chauvinist state has systematically violated this right for decades — through the Gal Oya and Mahaweli colonisation schemes, through the mass expulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, through the military land seizures that followed the 2009 slaughter, and through the ongoing policy of settling Sinhalese colonists on lands from which Tamil families have been barred from returning. The state invokes formal legal title to justify these seizures, but the legal framework itself is the product of the same communal project. To accept the state’s legal title as the arbiter of rights would be to accept the legitimacy of the dispossession.
The restoration of Tamil neighbourhoods, villages and towns is a democratic demand that the working class must champion. It requires the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the military from the North and East, the dismantling of high security zones and army camps established on seized land, and the return of occupied lands to their traditional Tamil inhabitants. It requires that Sinhalese settlers who were implanted through state-sponsored schemes — particularly those who never received formal title — not be used by the state as a human shield to perpetuate occupation. Where settlers have been present for decades and know no other home, solutions must be democratic, voluntary and negotiated with the affected Tamil communities whose rights are primary. But the principle is clear: the democratic right of Tamils to their historical villages and towns is inviolable, and the state that violated it bears the responsibility for redress.
[2] The Lure of Land: Peasant Politics, Frontier Colonization and the Cunning State in Sri Lanka, Thiruni Kelegama and Benedikt Korf (2023) Modern Asian Studies 1, Cambridge University Press <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X22000506>
[4] The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League, Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North, Keerthi Balasuriya (19 November 1987) <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fi-15-1/05.html>
The silence — and in many cases, the open enthusiasm — of institutionalized journalists toward the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals (CIMP) Bill is a political scandal that must be exposed. Rather than recognizing the bill as a direct assault on their own democratic rights, a significant layer of established media professionals has greeted it as an opportunity for personal advancement. They see in the Chartered Institute not a cage, but a club: a state-operated institution that will certify their professional status, distinguish them from the unwashed masses of “content developers” and social media commentators, and — most importantly — open the door to the material privileges that state recognition can confer. Pensions. Insurance schemes. Bank loans at preferential rates. Foreign visa facilitation. Access to government advertising and contracts. A seat at the table with the powerful.
This is the outlook not of defenders of press freedom but of a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum seeking to secure its position through collaboration with the capitalist state. It is the mentality of the courtier, not the journalist.
The Bribe and the Chain
On 17 February 2026, Deputy Minister of Mass Media Kaushalya Ariyarathna of NPP/JVP government told Parliament that the government would establish a chartered institution to promote journalists’ job security, professionalism, health insurance and welfare, and that it would continue the scholarship schemes.
The Dissanayake government is not offering these inducements out of generosity. It is executing a classic strategy of bourgeois statecraft: buy off a strategic layer of the profession, bind their material interests to the survival of the regime, and in doing so, fragment any potential opposition to the throttling of democratic rights. The journalist who today receives a state-certified accreditation, a facilitated bank loan, or a government pension scheme becomes, tomorrow, a hostage. The same state that grants these privileges can revoke them — and under the CIMP Bill, the mechanism for revocation is already built into the architecture. Section 24 empowers the Council to “disenroll any member” for “professional misconduct,” a term left deliberately undefined in Section 23(2), to be filled in later by rules made by the same Council. The journalist who believes they are securing a pension is in fact putting their head in a noose.
This is not hypothetical. We have seen this dynamic play out repeatedly. In 2023, the Government Medical Officers’ Association — the trade union of Sri Lankan doctors — agreed to government censorship* of its own members’ communications, demonstrating how professional associations function as the industrial police for government and corporations. The union bureaucrats who negotiate such arrangements secure their own positions at the expense of the rights of their members. The CIMP Bill extends this model to journalism: create a chartered body, staff it with compliant figures, and use it to discipline the profession from within.
The Class Character of the Betrayal
The journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill are not acting out of ignorance. They are acting out of class interest — the interest of a privileged layer that fears the independent mobilization of the working class and the unregulated democratic discourse of the internet more than it fears state censorship. The mainstream corporate media in Sri Lanka is already tightly controlled by oligarchs and the state. Its senior practitioners have long since made their peace with power. What terrifies them is not the government’s repression but the rise of independent online media — the bloggers, the social media commentators, YouTubers, the citizen journalists, the socialist publications — who operate outside the established hierarchies of the profession and who give voice to working-class anger against IMF austerity, privatization, and imperialist war.
The CIMP Bill, by bringing “content developers” under the disciplinary apparatus of the state, promises to eliminate this competition. For the institutionalized journalist, the bill is not a threat to press freedom — it is a moat around their professional castle. They will be certified. Their rivals will be disenrolled. The democratic right of free expression will be converted into a licensed privilege, and they will be among the license-holders.
This is a reactionary posture of the most dangerous kind. It is the same mentality that led the trade union bureaucracy to suppress strikes by postal workers, electricity workers, and health workers — sacrificing the interests of the broader working class to preserve their own positions within the state apparatus. It is the mentality of the labor aristocracy, the privileged stratum that imperialism cultivates in the colonial and semi-colonial countries to serve as a transmission belt for the dictates of finance capital.
A Trap, Not a Shelter
The journalists who imagine they will benefit from the CIMP Bill are deluding themselves. The state that grants privileges can withdraw them. The Interim Council appointed by the Media Minister — consisting of the Ministry Secretary and six political nominees — will write the rules that define “professional misconduct.” Those rules will not be written to protect the integrity of journalism. They will be written to silence criticism of the government. The journalist who accepts accreditation today may find themselves disenrolled tomorrow for reporting on a strike, exposing a corruption scandal, or publishing an article critical of the IMF program. The pension, the bank loan, the visa facilitation — all will vanish the moment the journalist steps out of line.
The only reliable guarantee of press freedom is not a state-issued certificate of professionalism. It is the organized power of the working class. The journalists who seek to insulate themselves from state repression by collaborating with the state will find that they have merely made themselves more vulnerable to it. They will have traded their independence for a mess of pottage, and they will be devoured in due course.
Journalists Must Ally with the Working Class
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) calls on all honest journalists — including those who may have initially viewed the CIMP Bill as an opportunity for professional advancement — to break decisively from this reactionary orientation. The fight against the CIMP Bill is not a fight for the privileges of a professional elite. It is a fight for the democratic rights of the entire working class, of all the “content creators”. Journalists cannot defend their right to publish by seeking patronage from the capitalist state. They can only defend it by allying themselves with the class that has the power to overthrow that state.
Reject the bribe! The government’s promise of insurance, pensions, loans, and visas is the price of your chains. No material inducement is worth the surrender of press freedom!
Break from the institutionalized journalists who are collaborating with the state! Their “professionalism” is a cover for class betrayal. They do not speak for journalism — they speak for their own careers!
For the unity of journalists with the working class! The fight for press freedom is inseparable from the fight against IMF austerity, against imperialist war, and for the socialist reorganization of society!
Build rank-and-file committees of media workers! Independent of the corporate media owners, the trade union bureaucracy, and the state — to fight for the right to publish without interference!
Defeat the CIMP Bill! No to state licensing of journalists! Freedom of the press is a right, not a privilege!
The pen that serves the state will be broken by the state. The pen that serves the working class will be defended by the working class. Journalists must choose which side they are on.
