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.
On Friday, August 14, 2026, the Free Media Movement (FMM) is hosting a forum at the Sri Lanka Press Institute titled “Proposed Chartered Institute of Media Professionals, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of the Right to Expression.” The panel features human rights lawyer Lakshan Dias, right-wing political strategist Shiral Lakthilaka, and myself, representing the Trotskyist perspective of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
Our participation in this event may draw questions from journalists, workers, and youth as to why a representative of the revolutionary socialist-internationalist movement is sharing a platform with a right-wing strategist of the capitalist establishment and a liberal NGO-oriented human rights lawyer? Does this not imply a compromise with their politics, or a concession to the reformist framework of the FMM?
The answer is an emphatic no. We are intervening in this forum precisely to wage an uncompromised political battle: to expose the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois traps being laid before media workers, to draw the sharpest line of demarcation between revolutionary Marxism and the bankrupt politics of liberal reformism and bourgeois constitutionalism, and to present the working class with an independent, revolutionary strategy to defeat the National People’s Power (NPP)/JVP government’s Chartered Institute of Media Professionals (CIMP) Bill. We are stepping onto this platform not to seek consensus with Lakthilaka and Dias, but to politically destroy the positions they represent before an audience of journalists, media workers, youth, and intellectuals — and to win that audience to the independent class line of the Fourth International.
The Principle: Why Revolutionaries Intervene in Bourgeois Forums
The objection that revolutionaries should not share a platform with class enemies — that doing so implies political endorsement or compromise — is not new. It is a species of the same “Left” infantilism that Lenin demolished in his 1920 pamphlet, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, which rejected ultra-left abstentionism as sectarian passivity that leaves the working class under the unchallenged ideological influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies.
Abstentionism presents itself as revolutionary purity. “We will not soil ourselves by sharing a platform with class enemies.” “We will not enter reactionary trade unions led by social-chauvinists.” “We will not participate in bourgeois parliaments.” This posture feels radical. It satisfies the subjective need for political cleanliness. But its objective effect is the opposite of revolutionary: it vacates the field. It leaves the trade unions entirely in the hands of the reformist bureaucrats. It leaves the parliament to the bourgeois parties. It leaves the FMM forum to Lakshan Dias and Shiral Lakthilaka — to liberal legalism and bourgeois constitutionalism — without a single countervailing voice. The workers, journalists, and youth who attend that forum will hear only one side: the side that tells them to petition the state, to trust the courts, to seek redress within the framework of the very system that is strangling their rights.
That is not revolutionary purity. It is political desertion. It is abandoning the masses to the ideological hegemony of the class enemy at the very moment they are searching for an alternative.
The German “Left” Communists argued that revolutionaries should refuse to work in reactionary trade unions because those unions were dominated by social-chauvinist and counter-revolutionary leaders. They argued that revolutionaries should refuse to participate in bourgeois parliaments because parliamentarianism was “historically and politically obsolete.” Lenin’s response was devastating:
“If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the ‘leaders’… but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations — even the most reactionary — in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found.”
This is the fundamental principle. The revolutionary party does not choose its terrain of struggle according to its own convenience. It goes to where the masses are — or, in this case, to where the journalists, media workers, content creators, and politically conscious youth who are seeking answers on the question of press freedom will be gathered. The FMM forum, whatever its political limitations, will draw precisely this audience. To refuse to participate, to leave the platform entirely to Lakshan Dias and Shiral Lakthilaka, would be to abandon that audience to the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politics. That would be not revolutionary purity but political cowardice.
Lenin was even more explicit on the question of participating in bourgeois parliaments — institutions far more reactionary in their function than a civil society forum:
“Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers… follow the lead of the Catholic clergy… it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class.”
The same logic applies here. The journalists and media workers who will attend the FMM forum are not yet won to the revolutionary perspective. Many are undoubtedly attracted to the liberal-legalist arguments of Dias or the bourgeois-constitutionalist calculations of Lakthilaka. The task of the Trotskyist is to be present in that forum, to present the Marxist alternative, and through that intervention to educate, expose, and win the most advanced elements to the independent class line.
The Bolsheviks themselves provided the historical model. In 1905, they correctly boycotted the Bulygin Duma — a consultative “parliament” — because the objective situation was rapidly developing toward mass strikes and armed uprising. But in 1906, when the revolutionary tide had receded, the boycott of the Duma was a mistake, and the Bolsheviks rectified it. They participated in the most reactionary of parliaments, used its rostrum for revolutionary agitation, and built the party’s connection with the masses through that work. Lenin summarized the lesson:
“The Bolsheviks’ boycott of ‘parliament’ in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience… It would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other conditions and other situations.”
Today, in Sri Lanka, the situation is not one of mass revolutionary upsurge in which the working class is building soviets and the question of power is immediately posed. It is a period of mounting social crisis, deepening austerity, and the construction of an authoritarian state apparatus — in which broad layers of journalists, content creators, and youth are searching for a political orientation. In such conditions, to boycott a public forum on press freedom because it is organized by a liberal NGO and features bourgeois speakers would be to turn one’s back on the very layers we seek to win. The correct tactic is to intervene, to demarcate, and to fight.
No Compromise: The Sharpest Demarcation
To intervene is not to compromise. The distinction is fundamental, and confusion on this point is fatal.
A compromise, in the Leninist sense, involves a concession on program or principle — an agreement to subordinate the independent interests of the working class to those of the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie. The Popular Front — the subordination of the Communist Party to a bourgeois-led coalition — was such a compromise. The trade union bureaucracy’s no-strike deals with the Dissanayake government are such a compromise. The institutionalized journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill in exchange for pensions and bank loans are making such a compromise.
Our participation in the FMM forum involves no such thing. We have not modified a single position. We have not muted a single criticism. We have not agreed to any common platform, joint statement, or unified demand with Lakthilaka, Dias, or the FMM. On the contrary, we are appearing on their platform for the explicit purpose of exposing the bankruptcy of their politics and presenting the revolutionary alternative. We are not their allies. We are their political antagonists, and we will use the occasion to make that fact unmistakably clear to every person in the room.
This is the method of the united front as elaborated by the Fourth International — not the Popular Front of class collaboration, but the united front of political exposure. Trotsky, in his 1933 letter “The United Front for Defense,” argued that Communists and Social Democrats could undertake common actions against fascism — but only on the basis of complete organizational and political independence, and only for the purpose of exposing the reformist leaders’ refusal to fight and winning their rank-and-file supporters to the revolutionary party. The same principle applies here: we share a platform with Lakthilaka and Dias not to blur the lines between us, but to sharpen them to the breaking point.
The Political Biographies: Who We Are Confronting
To understand why our intervention is necessary, one must understand precisely whom we are confronting on this platform.
The Free Media Movement (FMM)
The FMM was formed in the early 1990s as a liberal civil society and media advocacy organization. While historically positioned as a defender of press freedom against state violence and censorship, its political foundation has always been bounded by the limits of bourgeois democracy and civil society reformism. The FMM operates heavily within an NGO framework, drawing funding and ideological orientation from Western liberal foundations. Rather than mobilizing the independent class power of media workers and the broader working class, its strategy relies on lobbying the capitalist state, petitioning bourgeois courts, issuing press releases, and appealing to “democratic norms” and international human rights bodies.
When faced with the systemic crisis of capitalism, the FMM seeks to negotiate minor procedural safeguards within the existing state structure. It avoids exposing the intrinsic link between the capitalist state’s drive for austerity — the IMF program enforced by the NPP/JVP government — and its necessity to strangle free expression. Its forum, while ostensibly a forum for debate, is structured within this liberal-reformist framework: the assumption that the problem is a bad bill that can be amended or defeated through advocacy, rather than a capitalist state that must be overthrown.
Shiral Lakthilaka
Shiral Lakthilaka is a veteran political strategist, constitutional lawyer, and commentator who represents the establishment of right-wing bourgeois politics in Sri Lanka. Having spent decades operating within the corridors of power, Lakthilaka has been closely aligned with major capitalist parties, including the United National Party (UNP) and the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). He served as a senior advisor to former President Maithripala Sirisena during the UPFA-UNP coalition government, helping to navigate state policy and constitutional manipulations.
Lakthilaka’s political role is that of a class-conscious defender of the capitalist state. His opposition to specific government bills, including the CIMP Bill, is strictly tactical and legalistic. He views press freedom not as an unconditional democratic right of the working class, but as an institutional mechanism necessary for elite political competition and bourgeois governance. His politics aim to preserve the stability of the capitalist order and protect corporate media interests. When his own parties were in power, they fortified their arsenal of oppression with the Press Council Act, parliamentary privileges laws, police violence, and emergency regulations against workers and journalists. His critique of the NPP regime is not a critique of state repression in principle — it is the grievance of one faction of the ruling class against another.
Lakshan Dias
Lakshan Dias is a well-known human rights lawyer, civil society activist, and liberal commentator. He has built a career representing victims of state excesses, religious minorities, and political dissidents in the courts, making him a prominent legal voice in civil society circles.
Despite his opposition to state repression, Dias operates within a liberal-procedural framework. His perspective assumes that the capitalist state and its legal apparatus can be reformed to protect fundamental rights through public interest litigation, constitutional advocacy, and international pressure. He treats democratic rights as abstract legal concepts separated from class relations and the socio-economic crisis. Dias’s framework ignores the fact that the legal apparatus is an instrument of class rule, ultimately encouraging workers and youth to seek redress within the very court system and state structure that enforces capitalist austerity. His is the politics of the supplicant — the belief that the state can be persuaded to restrain itself — and it is politically lethal for the working class.
By creating a state-controlled system of accreditation, a political “Interim Council” appointed directly by the Media Minister, and a Disciplinary Committee empowered to disenroll members for vaguely defined “professional misconduct,” the state is establishing a gatekeeper over public discourse. The definition of “media professional” in Section 27 — extending to “writers, content developers, content editors, anchors, presenters, broadcasters, journalists, editors, publishers, media owners, media managers, media educators, media researchers, media technicians and camerapersons” — is deliberately cast to sweep bloggers, social media commentators, YouTubers, and socialist publications into a state disciplinary net. Facing mounting popular anger against IMF-mandated austerity, privatization, and police-state measures — including the six-times-extended state of emergency and the essential services ban on Government Press workers — the NPP/JVP government views unregulated digital media as a mortal threat to its rule.
The Traps of “Opposition”
The crisis of press freedom in Sri Lanka is compounded by the political bankruptcies of those who claim to speak against the bill or who openly welcome it.
As exposed in our article “The Betrayal of the Pen,” a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum of institutionalized corporate journalists has greeted the CIMP Bill with enthusiasm. Seeking personal advancement — state-certified status, bank loans, pensions, and foreign visas — these courtiers of the capitalist state are willing to trade press freedom for material privileges. They see the CIMP not as a cage, but as an exclusive club that protects their professional status while the state muzzles independent content creators and working-class commentators.
On the other hand, the “opposition” mounted by the FMM, Lakshan Dias, and Shiral Lakthilaka offers no path forward for the working class.
The Liberal/NGO Trap: The FMM and liberal lawyers like Dias reduce the struggle against state repression to appeals, judicial petitions, and lobbying within the framework of bourgeois constitutionalism. They treat press freedom as an abstract legal issue, detached from the capitalist crisis and the IMF program. They foster the dangerous illusion that the capitalist state — or its courts — can be persuaded to protect democratic rights. This is a political dead end. The state that is constructing the repressive apparatus will not be persuaded to dismantle it by a well-argued legal brief. Democratic rights are not granted by the benevolence of judges; they are won and defended through the organized power of the working class.
The Bourgeois Establishment Trap: Figures like Lakthilaka represent factions of the capitalist opposition (UNP/SJB) whose critique of the NPP regime is purely tactical. They do not oppose state repression in principle. As stated before, while in power, their own parties deployed the Press Council Act, police violence, and emergency regulations against workers and journalists. Their goal is to exploit popular discontent to maneuver back into office — where they will execute the same capitalist austerity and the same attacks on democratic rights. The working class has no stake in which faction of the bourgeoisie administers the state. Its task is to overthrow that state entirely.
Our Strategy: The Independent Mobilization of the Working Class
We are intervening in this forum to explicitly break with the politics of the FMM, Lakthilaka, and Dias, and to present a Trotskyist line of demarcation to journalists, youth, and workers.
Press freedom is an unconditional right, not a state license. We reject the premise that the capitalist state has any right to certify, register, or discipline media workers or content creators. The CIMP Bill must be defeated in its entirety — not amended, not moderated, not subjected to “safeguards” negotiated by liberal lawyers, or mandated by bourgeois courts. Democratic rights are won and defended through class struggle, not granted by ministerial decree or judicial review.
Austerity requires repression. The assault on press freedom is directly linked to the crisis of global capitalism. The NPP government cannot enforce IMF-mandated destruction of living standards, health, and education without muzzling the channels through which working-class opposition is organized. The fight against the CIMP Bill is inseparable from the fight against the IMF program, against the state of emergency, against the essential services orders, and against the entire repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.
Break from the bourgeois state and its courtiers. We call on honest journalists and content creators to reject the state’s bribes of pensions and loans, and to break decisively from the institutionalized media elite collaborating with the regime. The pen that serves the capitalist state will ultimately be crushed by that state. The pen that aligns itself with the struggles of the working class against IMF austerity, imperialist war, and capitalist dictatorship will find an unyielding defense.
Build rank-and-file committees of media workers. Freedom of expression cannot be defended by appealing to capitalist courts or parliamentary committees. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class. Media workers, tech workers, and content creators must form independent rank-and-file committees, completely separate from corporate media owners, trade union bureaucracies, and the state apparatus. These committees must link their struggle to the broader fight of the working class — in the hospitals, the power stations, the post offices, the schools, and the plantations — against the common enemy.
For a workers’ government based on rank-and-file committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages. The ultimate guarantee of press freedom is the overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government, based on democratically elected rank-and-file committees, that will place the banks, major corporations, and the media under the democratic control of the working class.
For the socialist reorganization of society — the only foundation for genuine democracy and press freedom.
A Platform for Political War
We use this platform at the Sri Lanka Press Institute not to seek consensus with Lakthilaka and Dias, but to wage political war against everything they represent. We are not their colleagues. We are not their co-panelists in any meaningful sense. We are their irreconcilable political enemies, and we will use every minute of this forum to demonstrate to the journalists, media workers, and youth in attendance why the politics of liberal reformism and bourgeois constitutionalism are a trap, why the capitalist state cannot be reformed, and why the only force capable of defending press freedom is the internationally united working class, organized independently and armed with a socialist program.
The working class does not plead with its enemy. It mobilizes to defeat it. We call on media workers, youth, and the working class to join us in building an independent movement for socialism — the only real guarantee of true freedom of expression.
Sri Lankan singer, Umaria Sinhawansa performing on stage. Photo from Sinhawansa’s Facebook
The ongoing conflict between Sri Lanka’s singers, lyricists, and composers over royalties and copyright is not a personal quarrel or a legislative oversight. It is the music industry colliding with the irreducible logic of capitalist property relations — and the Intellectual Property Act No. 36 of 2003 lays that logic bare with brutal clarity.
The Act defines the “author” of a musical work as the physical person who created it — the composer of the melody and the writer of the lyrics. To the author belong the economic rights: the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform, broadcast, and commercially exploit the work. To the author also belong the moral rights: the right to be named, the right to object to distortion or mutilation prejudicial to honour or reputation.
The singer is not the author. The singer is a “performer,” relegated to a separate chapter on “Related Rights.” Under Section 17, the performer has limited exclusive rights over the broadcasting and fixation of an unfixed performance. But Section 17(2) extinguishes even these: once the singer authorises the incorporation of the performance into a recording, those exclusive rights cease. The singer’s sole remaining entitlement is Section 19 — a right to “a single equitable remuneration” whenever the recording is broadcast or publicly performed, shared with the producer. No moral right. No copyright. No ownership of the finished product.
The voice that gave the song its soul has no claim. The law can grasp what is fixed on paper — notation, words — as property. What is embodied in performance — the timbre, the phrasing, the breath, the interpretative intelligence that transforms marks on a page into music — is not recognised as “creative” in the legal sense. It is labour rendered unto the property of others.
This is the correct logic of bourgeois law. It is not a mistake awaiting correction. The law does what capitalist property law must do: disaggregate a collaborative artistic whole into assignable, tradable units of ownership. The composer and lyricist own the melody and the words. They can sell them — separately. Other singers will perform them. The lyrics can be set to a new melody. The melody can be synchronised with different words. Content creators will feed both into artificial intelligence to generate new works. The singer who first gave the song life has no legal standing to object, because the singer owns nothing.
And here Marxists must be precise. This recombination, this improvisation, this ceaseless transformation of existing cultural material — a song sung by a different voice, lyrics adapted to a new melody, a melody reimagined with new words — is how art has always developed. These are not violations to be legally restrained. They are the processes through which music breathes. Marxists do not oppose this. We do not defend the “moral right” of the original creator to freeze a work in amber. That moral right is itself a bourgeois legal construct. The tragedy is not that songs can be reimagined — it is that under capitalism, reimagination takes the form of dispossession, where one set of artists profits from the labour of another while the law sanctifies the arrangement.
Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), grasped the fundamental contradiction of art under class society. He observed that art under capitalism “flourished in the abundance and in the leisure of the governing classes, and remained in their keeping.” The artist was, in the final analysis, a dependent of the bourgeoisie — and when the axe of revolution cut down the old props, “the element of keeping which was almost intangible when social relations were undisturbed, was bared in all its crudity.” What Trotsky described for the writer and painter applies with equal force to the musician. The seeming independence of the artist is an illusion sustained by the market. When the market turns, the illusion shatters, and what remains is the brute fact of property.
The Sri Lankan Act merely codifies this dependency with juridical precision. The composer and lyricist may feel themselves secure in their ownership — but they too are dependent on the market, on publishers, on streaming platforms, on the very property regime that temporarily advantages them. The singer is one step further down the chain of dispossession. But the chain itself is the problem.
Trotsky insisted that “culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.” “Art needs comfort, even abundance.” Under capitalism, that abundance is channelled into private accumulation. The material security that would free artists to collaborate without fear is denied to them, and in its place they are given property rights to fight over. The lyricist sues the composer. The singer sues both. The record label takes its cut. The streaming platform takes the rest. Everyone fights everyone because the system forces them to. Former collaborators become adversaries. Art becomes an asset to be litigated.
A socialist society abolishes this entire framework. By overthrowing bourgeois property relations in art, it eliminates both the commodification that sets artists against one another and the ownership claims that restrict how culture can be reworked and reimagined. The socialist state guarantees the material security of all cultural workers — composers, lyricists, singers, instrumentalists, sound engineers — through public funding and democratic planning. Freed from the anxiety of survival, no artist needs to sue another over royalties. Freed from property claims over melody and verse, no artist can block another from reinterpreting, adapting, or transforming a work. Technology, including AI, becomes a tool of creative liberation for all, not a weapon to dispossess some for the profit of others. Creative energies, liberated from the tyranny of the market, are directed toward the enrichment of human life.
The crisis of Sri Lanka’s music industry is not a legal problem awaiting a better royalty formula. It is a class question. The working class must take up the fight — not to adjudicate between singers and lyricists under the existing property regime, but to overthrow that regime entirely. Only on the foundation of human need, not private greed, can art truly flourish — freely, collectively, without owners and without fences.
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.”]
Human remains marked no. 429, uncovered on 19 July 2026 at the Chemmani mass grave. Image courtesy of Kumanan Kana.
A skeleton (429th) excavated yesterday (19) — Day 37 of Phase 3 of the excavation at the Chemmani mass grave — was found buried in a sitting position: legs folded, arms resting on the lap, body oriented toward the northeast. This is the second such discovery. An identical posture was found in the 227th skeleton during Phase 2 in 2025. None of these findings became news for any of the established media stations in the South.
Someone buried this person with deliberate, specific orientation. That detail is a wound that refuses to close.
Chemmani-Sittupatti is now Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including 18 children, six of them infants. Excavations began only because construction workers accidentally struck bones while digging a crematorium foundation in February 2025. The dead literally surfaced from beneath the earth.
The graves trace back to 1995–96, when the Sri Lankan army retook Jaffna. An army corporal convicted for the rape and murder of Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy confessed in court in 1998: hundreds of Tamil civilians — “suspects,” abductees, the disappeared — were executed and secretly buried here on the orders of senior military officers. Warrants were eventually issued for seven military personnel. All were released on bail. By 2004, the entire case was quietly interred.
For nearly three decades, successive governments — UNP, PA, SLFP, UNP again, SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP which celebrated the 2009 military “victory” — have guaranteed one thing above all else: impunity for the killers.
Today the JVP Justice Minister visits the site (19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. With 400 dead beneath the soil of a Hindu cremation ground, with six infants among them, with bodies buried in clusters at a depth of barely 1.6 feet, with a convicted army corporal’s sworn court testimony naming senior officers who ordered the killings — to call this a “normal graveyard” is the language of a cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken in plain sight.
And it could not be more fitting that it comes from a minister of the JVP — the very party that spent the entire 26-year war waging a communalist campaign for military victory, that actively strengthened the hand of Rajapaksa whose forces committed the documented atrocities now being disinterred from this earth, and that celebrated the 2009 “triumph” despite the killing of 40,000 Tamil civilians. This is the same government that halted Phase 2 excavations for eight months by refusing to release funds, that maintains over 100,000 troops occupying the North and East, and that rejected the UN Human Rights Council’s call for an international war crimes investigation just last year. The minister’s doubt is not incidental — it is the government’s policy, expressed without shame.
And Chemmani is not alone. Mannar. Thiruketheeswaram. Kokkuthoduvai. Kalavanchikudy. The North and East are a landscape of unmarked graves.
No justice will come from this capitalist state — not under the JVP, not under the UNP, not under the SLFP, not under any formation of the Sinhala bourgeoisie whose entire political order was built on anti-Tamil communalism. Nor will justice come from Tamil nationalist parties that appeal to the same “international community” — Washington, London, Brussels — that armed, trained, funded and politically backed the Sri Lankan military throughout the war, then looked away as 40,000 died in the Vanni in 2009. These same imperialist powers are today backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
And let there be no illusion: justice is equally owed for the crimes of the LTTE and its breakaway factions — the forced recruitment of child soldiers, the assassination of Tamil political opponents, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the north, the bombings of Sinhala civilians. Those crimes too will never be honestly reckoned with under a capitalist order in which the Tamil bourgeoisie has its own interest in suppressing any genuinely independent working-class accounting of the war.
The sitting skeleton, legs folded, arms at rest, facing northeast — buried in haste by soldiers following orders, covered up for thirty years by generals protected by presidents — is a testament to what capitalism produces when it governs a multi-ethnic society divided against itself.
The buried will will not stay buried. But justice will not emerge from within this system.
It will come only when Tamil and Sinhala and Muslim workers unite — not behind any bourgeois party, not behind the imperialist “international community” — but in a common struggle to overthrow the capitalist order that made Chemmani possible, and to build a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
