english

Negombo prison riot

The Negombo Prison Massacre: Class Violence and the Capitalist State in Sri Lanka

class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, lead article, Living Conditions, Marxist Theory, Militarism, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Social Murder /

By the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA).

Negombo prison riot
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.

Victims
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.

The Negombo dead demand nothing less.

The Negombo Prison Massacre: Class Violence and the Capitalist State in Sri Lanka Read More »

Nedunkerni

Oppose Communally Driven State-Sponsored Demographic Engineering in the North and East of Sri Lanka: The Way Forward

class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, Fascism, history, lead article, Marxist Theory, Militarism, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Sri Lanka /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)

Nedunkerni Protest
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.

Nedunkerni
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.

Keppapulavu
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.

[1] Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today, David North (1993), (16 May 1998) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/05/dnkb-m16.html> 

[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>

[3] ICG reports detail the militarisation in Sri Lanka’s North, Sampath Perera (24 March 2012) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/sril-m24.html> 

[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> 

Oppose Communally Driven State-Sponsored Demographic Engineering in the North and East of Sri Lanka: The Way Forward Read More »

Defeat CIMP Bill!

The Betrayal of the Pen: Defeat the Reactionary Attitude of Journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill

art & culture, art and culture, class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, lead article, News, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Pseudo-left, Sri Lanka, Trade Unions /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

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.

*Sri Lankan union agrees to government censorship of health employees (07 August 2023) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/,07/rhjc-a07.html> 

External Link to this article: https://www.themorning.lk/articles/vzdfKsQ3lr1xfKClRUf0

The Betrayal of the Pen: Defeat the Reactionary Attitude of Journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill Read More »

AKD

The Dissanayake Government’s “Chartered Institute of Media Professionals”: A Blueprint for the Strangulation of Press Freedom

art and culture, class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, lead article, News, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Sri Lanka /

Statement by the  Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)

AKD
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake meeting with a visiting IMF delegation at the Presidential Secretariat on April 2, 2026. Image courtesy of midpoint.lk.

On June 5, 2026, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)/National People’s Power (NPP) government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake published a special gazette notification for a bill to establish the “Chartered Institute of Media Professionals of Sri Lanka (CIMP).” Tabled by the Ministry of Health and Mass Media, the bill is packaged in the soothing language of “introducing and maintaining professional standards” and “elevating quality.” This is a calculated fraud. A close examination of the bill’s provisions — its definitions, its institutional architecture, its disciplinary mechanisms — reveals an instrument of state censorship designed to discipline, silence, and ultimately eliminate independent journalism, above all the social media content creators and anti-government commentators whom the Dissanayake regime views as a mortal threat to its grip on power.

The working class and all defenders of democratic rights must reject this bill in its entirety. It is not a measure to improve journalism. It is a weapon for the suppression of democratic discourse, conceived in direct continuity with the long and bloody history of media repression in Sri Lanka, and fully consonant with the international offensive against press freedom being waged by capitalist governments across the globe.

The Architecture of State Control

The bill establishes a statutory body corporate — the Chartered Institute — whose design is transparently that of a state-controlled gatekeeper over who may legitimately practice journalism. Five features of the legislation expose its authoritarian character beyond any doubt.

First, the Institute introduces a system of state-created accreditation. Section 3(i) declares that one of the Institute’s objects is “to accredit the media professionals in media professionalism at the evaluation of their efficiency.” Section 4(o) empowers the Institute “to take necessary steps to introduce, develop, maintain and monitor professional standards.” Section 4(t) authorizes it “to maintain and publish a register of members.” Taken together, these provisions convert the fundamental democratic right of freedom of expression into a state-sanctioned privilege. The government positions itself as the ultimate arbiter of who may enroll, register, and be certified as a “qualified” media professional. Freedom of the press is an inherent right, not a license to be granted or revoked by the capitalist state. The very premise of the bill is an assault on this principle.

Second, the definition of “media professional” is deliberately vast and all-encompassing. Section 27 defines the term to include “writers, content developers, content editors, anchors, presenters, broadcasters, journalists, editors, publishers, media owners, media managers, media educators, media researchers, media technicians and camerapersons in the field of media.” The inclusion of “content developers” is particularly revealing. This wide net is cast with a specific purpose: to trap independent bloggers, social media commentators, and alternative left-wing media platforms under the disciplinary apparatus of the state. The Dissanayake administration is acutely threatened by unaligned online media. Mainstream corporate media networks in Sri Lanka are tightly controlled by oligarchs or the state itself. Working-class anger, exposures of government compliance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity, and socialist political analysis find expression through alternative content creators and independent social media channels. By bringing “content developers” under the heel of a chartered state apparatus, the government is building a weapon to silence precisely these voices.

Third, the bill establishes a state-vetted Disciplinary Committee empowered to investigate “professional misconduct.” Section 12(1)(c) provides for the appointment of a Disciplinary Committee. Section 23(1) mandates that this committee “shall hold an inquiry whenever the Council refers any matter to the Disciplinary Committee in respect of a professional misconduct of a member.” Section 23(2) then defines “professional misconduct” as “an act or omission which shall be determined by rules of the Council made under section 26” — a definition so circular and elastic that it amounts to a blank cheque for the political punishment of journalists who refuse to toe the government’s line. Section 24 empowers the Council to “disenroll any member,” or in the alternative to “warn, reprimand or suspend him from membership for such period not exceeding one year.” The power to strip a media worker of professional credentials is the power to destroy a career — and to send a message of intimidation to every other journalist in the country.

Fourth, the bill creates an “Interim Council” appointed entirely by the state. Section 5(4)(a) provides that until the Governing Council is elected, the Minister shall appoint an Interim Council consisting of “the Secretary to the Ministry of the Minister” and “six other persons who have distinguished themselves with proven knowledge, eminence and at least twenty years’ experience in the field of media, nominated by the Secretary to the Ministry of the Minister.” This Interim Council is granted the power under Section 5(4)(b) to make rules “in respect of the number of members to be selected and the criteria to select such members to the Institute” and “to elect and appoint members and the office bearers to the Council.” The Interim Council thus controls who gets into the Institute in the first instance and who may sit on its permanent Governing Council. The entire institutional architecture — the membership criteria, the internal rules, the definition of what constitutes an offense — will be shaped entirely by political appointees of the capitalist state. The Institute will be, from its inception, an instrument of the government.

Fifth, the bill conspicuously lacks any explicit guarantee that membership in the Institute will never be a prerequisite to practice journalism. This omission is not accidental. It signals that the Institute is designed to become a mandatory gatekeeper. Unregistered or deregistered journalists could rapidly find themselves legally blocked from entering press conferences, obtaining state accreditation, accessing public events, or securing employment. The Institute is a mechanism for the de facto licensing of journalism — and therefore for the de facto banning of journalists the state finds inconvenient.

A Continuum of Repression

The CIMP Bill does not emerge from a vacuum. It is the latest in a long continuum of state attacks on press freedom in Sri Lanka, stretching back decades and across every bourgeois government.

The Press Council Act of No. 05 of 1973, introduced by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led coalition government — which included the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Stalinist Communist Party — established a government tribunal (Press Council) with the powers of a district court, empowered to conduct inquiries that could lead to imposition of fines and jail terms against journalists. Its chairman and members are appointed by the president. Among its targets was Kamkaru Mawtha, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League — the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party. Last September, the cabinet spokesperson announced that the cabinet has approved to amend the Press Council Act to expand its regulatory scope to encompass modern digital, electronic, and online media platforms. The historical irony is sharp: the JVP, whose own cadres were slaughtered by the thousands after the abortive 1971 uprising, today deploys the same mechanisms of press control pioneered by the regime that repressed them, now directed against the working class and its political representatives.

The Rajapakse regime (2005–2015) escalated media repression to police-state levels. In 2009, it revived the Press Council Act. In 2012, it moved to gag websites, extending the Press Council’s reach to online media. In 2013, it unveiled a “Code of Media Ethics” whose vaguely phrased clauses — banning publications that “offend against the expectations of the public” or “contain information which could mislead the public” — gave the government unlimited scope to suppress criticism. During this period, 16 journalists and media workers were killed by pro-government death squads, and Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was murdered in broad daylight.

The Online Safety Act brought by the Ranil Wickremasinghe government in January 2024, purporting to counter “fake news”, attacked social media activism decisively. It dealt a major blow to freedom of expression by granting a government-appointed commission sweeping powers to police and censor online speech. Under the guise of preventing online harms, the law criminalizes legitimate dissent, investigative journalism, and social media criticism, threatening activists and content creators with severe prison sentences.

The JVP/NPP government is deepening this authoritarian inheritance, not breaking from it. In November 2024, within weeks of taking office, it announced it would not abolish the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), despite having pledged to do so during the election campaign. Instead, it introduced a new “Protection of the State from Terrorism Act” (PSAT) that broadens the definition of terrorism to encompass strikes, protests, and dissent. In November 2025, following Cyclone Ditwah, Dissanayake declared a state of emergency and issued regulations making it a criminal offense — punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment — to communicate or publish any supposedly “false” statements that could allegedly cause “public alarm.” Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala explicitly instructed police to treat social media critics “not merely as suspects but as offenders.” These powers were deployed to enforce deeper austerity under the guise of “rebuilding.” The state of emergency has now been extended six times,[1] giving Dissanayake sweeping dictatorial powers.

On May 28, 2026 — just one week before the Chartered Institute gazette — President Dissanayake issued a special gazette declaring the Government Press and State Media as essential services, effectively outlawing industrial strike action in those sectors. The Chartered Institute Bill is the ideological twin of this hardline measure. Together they form a pincer: the state attacks media workers’ right to withhold their labour, while simultaneously constructing a disciplinary apparatus to control what those workers may write and who may write at all.

The International Offensive Against Press Freedom

The Dissanayake government’s bill forms part of a global offensive by capitalist states to bring the press — and especially online media — under state and corporate control.

In December 2010, the Hungarian parliament under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán passed a comprehensive media law subordinating all public and private media to the control of a state “media council” composed of Orbán’s partisans. The council was empowered to impose fines of up to €730,000 for reporting deemed “politically unbalanced.” As the WSWS noted at the time [2], Orbán’s authoritarian course was not a “European oddity” but a preparation for “a new round of brutal social attacks” demanded by the international financial markets. The muzzling of the media and the bolstering of the state apparatus were undertaken in direct anticipation of the social conflicts that austerity would unleash.

Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which came into force in 2018, created a legal framework for internet censorship under the pretext of combating “hate speech” and “fake news.” As the WSWS documented, [3] the law was “part of an international offensive to attack free speech online, aimed at suppressing left-wing and socialist views.”

In 2022, Britain’s Ofcom revoked the broadcast licenses of RT, couching the ban in the language of “impartiality” and “freedom.” In 2025, the European Union’s 17th sanctions package against Russia extended to banning pro-Russia and pro-Palestine media, representing what the WSWS called [4] “an open attack on the democratic right to freedom of the press.”

The pattern is unmistakable. Across the world, capitalist governments facing mounting social opposition are constructing legal and institutional mechanisms to police public discourse. The language is always the same: “professional standards,” “ethics,” “combating disinformation.” The purpose is always the same: to suppress working-class opposition and anti-capitalist analysis.

Austerity Requires Repression

The Chartered Institute Bill cannot be understood in isolation from the broader trajectory of the JVP/NPP government. Dissanayake came to power in September 2024 on a wave of popular discontent, posturing as an anti-establishment outsider. Within days of the new parliament convening, the government jettisoned its election pledge [5] to renegotiate the IMF bailout and committed itself to implementing the austerity program in full.

The record since then has been one of relentless attacks on the working class. The government has restructured and privatized state-owned enterprises, sharply increased fuel prices by approximately 40 percent since February 2026, raised electricity tariffs by 32 percent, hiked gas prices by 31 percent, and maintained strict spending limits even as a quarter of the population has fallen below the poverty line. In April 2026, an IMF delegation lavished praise [6] on Dissanayake, commending his “strict adherence to IMF dictates.” The president boasted that “Sri Lanka has met all targets set under the programme.”

The government now faces a deepening crisis [7]: a worsening balance of payments deficit, a sliding rupee, soaring oil import costs driven by the US-Israeli war on Iran, and simmering resistance from workers and the rural poor. It has responded with essential services orders, police violence against protesters, the arrest of student activists, the deployment of the military as strike-breakers, and the repeated extension of emergency rule. The Chartered Institute Bill is the latest escalation in this authoritarian trajectory — a preemptive strike against the dissemination of truth, against the journalism that exposes the real conditions of working people and provides the political analysis necessary for the working class to cohere into a unified revolutionary force.

The JVP: From Death Squads to “Professional Standards”

The JVP’s present role as the enforcer of media censorship must be understood in light of its political history. As the ICFI and WSWS have documented over decades [8], the JVP is not and has never been a socialist or workers’ party. It is a right-wing, nationalist, and communalist movement, steeped in Sinhala populism. In 1988–89, it carried out a campaign of assassinations in which hundreds of left-wing political opponents, trade unionists, and workers — including members of the Revolutionary Communist League — were killed. It was the most trenchant advocate of the racist war against the Tamil minority that culminated in the May 2009 massacre of 40,000 Tamils.

The JVP’s transformation into a party of bourgeois rule — implementing IMF austerity, deploying police-military repression, and now constructing a state apparatus for media censorship — is not a betrayal of its original principles. It is the logical culmination of its class character as a petty-bourgeois nationalist formation. The same party that once physically liquidated its left-wing opponents now seeks to silence them through the bureaucratic mechanisms of a “Chartered Institute.” The methods have been modernized; the objective — the suppression of working-class political independence — remains the same.

The Pseudo-Left and the Trade Unions: Enablers of Repression

The working class cannot look to the pseudo-left organizations or the trade union bureaucracy to defend democratic rights. The Frontline Socialist Party, which falsely postures as a left-wing opponent of the government, collaborates with the union apparatus, whitewashing its betrayals and channeling workers into dead-end negotiations and appeals to parliament. The trade unions affiliated with the JVP/NPP maintain a deathly silence and actively block all anti-government action by their members. Unions tied to opposition parliamentary parties — the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna — call only limited actions aimed at defusing genuine working-class opposition.

None of these forces will mount a principled defense of press freedom, because all of them — government and opposition alike — support the IMF program that is immiserating the working class. All of them fear the independent political mobilization of workers and youth. All of them have an interest in controlling public discourse. The Chartered Institute of Media Professionals Bill is a bipartisan project in its essentials, just as the emergency regulations after Cyclone Ditwah were urged by opposition leader Sajith Premadasa before Dissanayake declared them.

Build the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class

The fight against the CIMP Bill is inseparable from the fight against IMF austerity, against imperialist war, and for the political independence of the working class. Freedom of the press is not a bourgeois luxury to be set aside until “economic demands” are won. It is a vital weapon in the class struggle. The working class needs unfettered access to information, analysis, and political debate — including and especially the revolutionary Marxist perspective advanced by the ICFI, the World Socialist Web Site and thesocialist.lk  — to arm itself for the battles ahead.

The SLLA calls on workers, youth, journalists, online content creators, and all defenders of democratic rights to:

  • Reject the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals Bill in its entirety! This is not a bill to be amended — it is a bill to be defeated!
  • No to state licensing of journalists! Freedom of the press is a right, not a privilege granted by the capitalist state!
  • Defend the right of social media content creators and online commentators to publish without state interference!
  • Abolish the Press Council Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the proposed Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, and all repressive legislation inherited from previous regimes!
  • No to the essential services ban on Government Press and State Media workers! Defend the right to strike!
  • For the building of independent action committees across all workplaces to fight IMF austerity and the assault on democratic rights!
  • For the unity of Sri Lankan workers with their brothers and sisters in South Asia and internationally against the common enemy — global capitalism and its state institutions!
  • For a workers’ government based on workers’ committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages!
  • For the socialist reorganization of society — the only foundation for genuine democracy and press freedom!

The Dissanayake government is constructing the architecture of a police state because it knows that the social crisis it is deepening through IMF austerity will generate mass opposition. The working class must answer by constructing its own independent organizations —  action committees in every workplace and neighborhood, democratically controlled and politically armed with a socialist-internationalist program. The fight against media censorship is a fight for the political independence of the working class. It is a fight that can only be won through the building of a revolutionary party and the mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system in its entirety.

We, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia, wage this fight in solidarity with the international programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International. We urge workers, youth, intellectuals and all defenders of democratic rights to join us in advancing this struggle and building the revolutionary leadership necessary for the fight for socialism.

[1] Sri Lanka NPP government imposes Emergency Laws following Cyclone Ditwah disaster: A warning to the working class, Sanjaya Jayasekera (2 December 2025) <https://www.thesocialist.lk/sri-lanka-npp-government-imposes-emergency-laws-following-cyclone-ditwah-disaster-a-warning-to-the-working-class/> 

Sri Lankan government extends draconian state of emergency, Saman Gunadasa (15 May 2026) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/05/16/fkbi-m16.html>

[2] The demolition of press freedom in Hungary, Markus Salzmann, Peter Schwarz (24 December 2010) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/hung-d24.html>

[3] Germany’s “Network Enforcement Law” goes into effect: A move to censor the Internet, Johannes Stern (4 January 2018) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/04/netz-j04.html>

[4] Ban on Red Media: EU sanctions against Russia attack press freedom, Marianne Arens (28 May 2025) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/29/qopq-m29.html>

[5] Sri Lankan president announces JVP/NPP government will implement savage IMF austerity program in full, Saman Gunadasa, Keith Jones (22 November 2024) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/23/kjdl-n23.html>  

[6] IMF delegation praises Sri Lankan government’s austerity measures, Saman Gunadasa(7 April 2026) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/08/abhi-a08.html>

[7] Sri Lanka’s ruling NPP secures a strong parliamentary majority to enforce IMF dictates: Build the SEP to fight the cuts! Statement of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) (16 November 2024) <https://www.thesocialist.lk/sri-lankas-ruling-npp-secures-a-strong-parliamentary-majority-to-enforce-imf-dictates-build-the-sep-to-fight-the-cuts/>

JVP/NPP government in Sri Lanka preparing further attacks on workers amid growing crisis, Saman Gunadasa (21 May 2026) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/05/22/ingw-m22.html> n

[8] The Sri Lankan elections: JVP assumes responsibility for defending capitalism amid a deepening revolutionary crisis, Keith Jones (23 September 2024) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/24/gpzw-s24.html>

The Dissanayake Government’s “Chartered Institute of Media Professionals”: A Blueprint for the Strangulation of Press Freedom Read More »

Sangeethsan

The LTTE Ban is a Weapon against All of Us: The Arrest of Sangeethsan and the Real Logic of State Repression

art & culture, art and culture, class struggles, english, lead article, Living Conditions, Marxist Theory, Militarism, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Sri Lanka, War, War Crimes /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka. SEP is the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). 

Sangeethsan
Sangeethsan (Sangeethsan Facebook page)

On a day (June 2) that should have passed unremarkably in Kilinochchi, the Jaffna District Crime Detective Bureau, acting through Chavakacheri police, arrested a 24-year-old musician. His name is Ganesh Kumar Sankeethan (Sangeethsan) — known by his stage name “HipHop Sangee” (YouTube Channel name) — and his crime, according to the state, was uploading songs that the police allege indirectly glorify the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He was remanded for two weeks under Section 3(h) of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), his lawyer K. Sayanthan verified.

Sangeethsan, a rapper, has earned widespread recognition within the local Tamil hip-hop community for compositions that combine social commentary with cultural storytelling. Many of his works are available through his social media accounts. Before we go any further, let us consider what one of those songs contains. It is not vague cultural expression or ambiguous artistic metaphor. It invokes அண்ணன் — Elder Brother — the term used in Eelam Tamil political culture to refer to Velupillai Prabhakaran. It speaks of the Tiger flag arriving in triumph. It honors the மாவீரன் — the Great Heroes, the fallen LTTE cadres — by name and by the imagery of their sacrifice. It calls on them to return and build the nation. It invokes கார்த்திகை — November — the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual mourning of the LTTE dead, as its emotional and symbolic landscape: flowers are brought to the fallen, their weeping families cry out to them, and the dead are called back to build the nation.

These are the lyrics of a young man from a war-ravaged district who grew up surrounded by grief, who found in music a way to articulate what his community has been undemocratically forbidden to say openly since May 2009.

We state these facts not to hand ammunition to those who want Sangeethsan kept in a cell. We state them because this article is committed to a principle that the Sri Lankan state and its chauvinist supporters on social media are equally committed to destroying: that honest politics must begin with the truth, not with convenient omissions. The question before us is not whether Sangeethsan’s lyrics express a political program we endorse. They do not — and we will explain why, plainly and without condescension, in the paragraphs that follow. The question before us is a different and more fundamental one: does any democratic society have the right to imprison a 24-year-old for the political content of his songs?

The answer is no. Unequivocally, no.

Freedom of political expression — including the freedom to express a politics that is wrong, mistaken, or even one that others find deeply objectionable — is a right that the working class defends with the greatest vigilance, with one principled and non-negotiable exception: fascist speech and fascist organization. We defend such expressions not because all political ideas are equally correct, but because the repressive legal machinery constructed to silence Tamil grief today is the same machinery that will be turned on striking workers, protesting students, and anyone else who challenges the authority of the capitalist state tomorrow. This is not a theoretical warning. It is the documented history of the PTA, other security laws and essential services laws in Sri Lanka, which have been used against Sinhala rural youth, students, Muslim youth, Tamil journalists, plantation workers, electricity workers and port workers with equal and indiscriminate brutality.

This article is not written primarily for those for whom what we discuss here is their daily experience. It is written for Sinhala youth, for middle-class families in Colombo and Kandy and Galle, for workers on plantations and in factories, who have been told their entire lives that the Tamil question was settled in May 2009, that “terrorism” was  defeated, and that any sympathy for Tamil political expression is a conspiracy against the nation. It is written for those who, upon seeing Sangeethsan’s lyrics circulated on social media, may have felt the trained reflex: Tiger flag, Prabhakaran, Tamil Eelam — this is exactly what the PTA is for.

It is written to ask: who taught you to feel that reflex? Who benefits from it? And what has it cost you — not as a Sinhala person, but as a worker, as a young person, as someone whose living standards are being destroyed by the same state that is filling its remand prisons with Tamil youth and artists?

A Ban Designed Not to Fight Terror, But to Manufacture It

The formal proscription of the LTTE has been maintained continuously since the government of Mahinda Rajapakse banned it by gazette in January 2009, just months before the military’s final offensive ended the civil war. A final gazette in 2011 consolidated and extended this proscription to cover “related activities.” Every government since — Sirisena’s, Wickremesinghe’s, Gotabaya’s, and now Dissanayake’s JVP/NPP government — has maintained this framework intact.

When the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposed the original 2009 ban, it explained with precision what the ban was actually for. The statement issued at the time noted that the ban “has no direct bearing on the LTTE — the government is already waging war against the Tamil separatist organisation.” It warned that the decree’s sweeping powers to proscribe organisations “connected with or representing” the LTTE could “immediately be used against the Tamil National Alliance, a parliamentary political party.” And it predicted, with complete accuracy, that “such broad definitions, however, could be applied to any organisations, including political parties, trade unions or student bodies, that are regarded as opponents of the government.”[1]

Seventeen years later, those warnings have been borne out in case after case. The PTA has been used to imprison Tamil detainees for years without trial, to torture a young Muslim poet named Ahnaf Jazeem for writing verse that condemned ISIS and imperialist war, and to harass Tamil journalists. The JVP/NPP government — elected on a promise to abolish the PTA — has already used the Act against Muslim youth who expressed opposition to the Gaza genocide. In August 2025, the Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID) questioned a Tamil journalist who reported on mass graves in the North. The new Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA) being drafted to replace the PTA reproduces its essential features while expanding the scope of what can be defined as a “terrorist act” to include actions that “intimidate the public” or “compel the government to do or abstain from doing any act” — language that could criminalize strikes, protests, and any form of organized resistance.

The instrument changes. The purpose remains identical: to place in the hands of the capitalist state an infinitely elastic legal weapon that can be pointed at anyone, at any time.

The Criminalization of Memory is Not an Accident

To understand why a 24-year-old rapper from Kilinochchi sits in a remand prison for singing about Tamil Eelam, you have to understand what kind of region Kilinochchi is, and what kind of wound the state is insisting must never be named.

Kilinochchi was the administrative capital of LTTE-controlled territory. It was also the site of some of the most intense fighting and civilian displacement in the final years of the war. The surrounding region of the Vanni was the theater of the last stages of a conflict in which, according to United Nations estimates, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed. The survivors of that catastrophe — the families who lost fathers, mothers, husbands and children, who spent months in detention camps, who rebuilt lives from rubble — now live in a society where any public expression of that experience can be treated as a criminal act.

Sangeethsan is not a terrorist. He is a young man who grew up in the aftermath of that catastrophe, processing it in the only way artists know how: through music. To understand what is really at stake — politically and morally — we must read what he actually sang, and then ask not whether we agree with every word, but whether any democratic society can justify locking a young person in a remand cell for singing them.

This is not incidental to the logic of the PTA. It is the logic of the PTA. The state knows perfectly well that a military revival of the LTTE is structurally impossible and virtually non-existent. There is no evidence of serious LTTE organizational infrastructure, no military command, no armed force in the field. The proscription is maintained not because the LTTE poses a threat, but because the legal apparatus of the proscription remains extraordinarily useful — for precisely this: to convert political grievance into criminality, to transform memory into evidence, and to force the Tamil population into a permanent condition of political silence under pain of imprisonment.

This is what the SEP observed in August 2022, when the Wickremesinghe government, in the very same extraordinary gazette in which it delisted some Tamil diaspora groups for diplomatic purposes, continued to maintain the proscription framework: “The continued proscription of Tamil and Muslim groups is part of ongoing efforts by one government after another to whip up Sinhala chauvinism and discrimination against the country’s oppressed minorities. Facing the mass opposition of workers and the poor, the crisis-ridden Wickremesinghe regime is determined to keep communal tensions alive and deepen the repressive measures.” [2]

The pattern is consistent across every government of the post-independence era. The names change — UNP, SLFP, PA, UPFA, SLPP, JVP/NPP. The policy does not. This is not an accident. This is the function that communalism has always served in Sri Lanka: as the SEP noted in its analysis of 60 years of post-independence history, “Six decades of independence have brought ordinary working people nothing but communal conflict, deepening social misery and increasingly anti-democratic methods of rule.” The beneficiaries of that dynamic have never been ordinary Sinhala working people. They have been the ruling class, which has used ethnic division to rule a fractured country and impose economic policies that serve capital at the expense of all working people, regardless of their ethnicity.[3]

Read the Lyrics — Then Ask the Right Question

Let us be honest about what Sangeethsan sang in the song that we referred to above. His lyrics are not ambiguous cultural nostalgia. They invoke அண்ணன் — Elder Brother — a term that in the context of Eelam Tamil political culture refers unambiguously to Velupillai Prabhakaran. They speak of a Tiger flag arriving in triumph. They use the term மாவீரன் (Maaveeran) — Great Hero — the specific honorific reserved for fallen LTTE cadres. They invoke the month of கார்த்திகை (Karthikai/November), which is the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual commemoration of the LTTE’s dead. They call upon the heroes to “come back” and “build the nation.” They speak of warriors whose “sulfur-scented bodies blended into the wind” — the gunpowder of the battlefield rendered as the smell of sacrifice. This is explicitly a song of mourning for, and celebration of, the LTTE’s slain fighters and their leader. The lyrics read, in part:

The Tiger flag of our Elder Brother is arriving, make way and clear the path!

Tamil Eelam dances in roaring triumph, his name echoes in every direction! 

O great heroes who died protecting the soil, time shall never forget you! 

Come back, come back, please come back again, to display your bravery and to build the nation! [most approximate English Translation]

These sentiments, as expressed, justify no arrest. We understand the content of it because any serious political analysis must begin with reality. But we unequivocally say that the  24-year-old youth from Kilinochchi should not be imprisoned for writing and singing this song.

Sangeethsan’s song is not fascist speech. The working class does not defend fascist speech — it demands the prosecution of fascist outfits and their financial backers. This distinction is not arbitrary. It is rooted in the nature of fascism itself: unlike any other political tendency, however wrong, fascism does not seek to win political argument — it seeks to annihilate the very conditions under which political argument is possible. Sangeethsan’s song is the very expression of a grief-stricken and oppressed people rendered in music. But this legal machinery, constructed to silence Tamil grief and working-class resistance, is never — without a single exception in the entire post-independence history of Sri Lanka — the machinery turned against the Sinhala chauvinist and communalist outfits that the ruling class courts, funds, and shelters precisely when the class struggle sharpens. The Bodu Bala Sena’s incitement of anti-Muslim pogroms, the Sihala Urumaya’s ethnic provocations — none of these drew the ferocity of the PTA. The state does not point its anti-terror machinery at the forces of communalism. It points it at the forces of class struggle. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire point.

To genuinely serve Tamil youth — and to speak honestly to Sinhala workers who need to understand what is happening — we must ask the harder question that state repression is designed to prevent anyone from asking: What does it mean that a generation of Tamil youth in Kilinochchi and Jaffna and Mullaithivu genuinely love Prabhakaran and genuinely mourn the LTTE’s dead?

It means something real and painful. As already said, these young people grew up in the rubble of a bloody war. They grew up in a region under continuous military occupation, where soldiers still control Tamil lands, where surveillance is a fact of daily life, where their elders were disappeared, where mass graves continue to be discovered. They grew up in districts where, even before the 2022 economic collapse, poverty levels in Mullaithivu district reached 40 percent. In this reality, Prabhakaran is not a political program to them. He is a symbol of the idea that someone, once, stood up and fought back.

The grief is real. The anger is legitimate. The desire for dignity is not only human — it is politically necessary. And the passion that Tamil youth pour into songs like Sangeethsan’s is the raw material of a generation searching desperately for something to believe in.

The question that our revolutionary movement poses is therefore not: “How do we suppress this passion?” The question is: “Why is this passion flowing into Tamil nationalism instead of socialist politics?” And the answer to that question leads us directly back to the Colombo ruling class — and to the specific responsibility of the Sinhala working class and its potential for genuine solidarity with Tamil workers and the poor. The state that criminalizes Sangeethsan’s song is not only persecuting Tamil youth. It is actively working to ensure that their passion never finds its correct political destination.

Who is being Deceived, and Why

Here we must speak directly to the Sinhala readers of this article — especially to young people who, when Sangeethsan’s arrest was discussed on social media, may have felt that instinctive reaction: he shouldn’t have been singing about Tamil Eelam, that’s LTTE territory, what did he expect?

That reaction is not yours. It was installed in you.

For decades, the Sri Lankan ruling class and its corporate media have conducted a systematic program of militarization of the society and political conditioning. Sinhala children grew up with a version of national history in which the Tamil struggle for democratic rights was, from its very origins, portrayed as a foreign conspiracy and a terrorist project. The legitimate grievances that produced the Tamil national movement — the systematic language discrimination of 1956, the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, and 1983, the deliberate exclusion of Tamils from state employment and university admissions — were erased from public consciousness. In their place was substituted a permanent security narrative of fear mongering: we are under threat, we must be vigilant, any sympathy for Tamil identity is sympathy for terrorism. War has been rationalized as necessary, and the military has been glorified as “war heroes” (Rana Viru), ready to be deployed against any struggle of the working class united across ethnic divisions.

This communalist project was never a natural outgrowth of Sinhala culture or Buddhism. It was a deliberate political construction, launched by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1956 as an electoral strategy to outbid the conservative UNP, and then reproduced by every faction of the ruling class because it served a vital class function: it prevented the Sinhala and Tamil working class from recognizing their common interests and uniting against the system that exploited them both.

The result can be seen today on TikTok, Facebook, and X. The moment a Tamil artist, journalist, or ordinary citizen uses the vocabulary of their own history — “Tamil Eelam,” “homeland,” “genocide,” “accountability”, “war crimes”, “commemoration” — sections of Sinhala social media erupt in denunciation. These users do not consider themselves tools of the state. Many of them are themselves suffering from the same economic devastation — unemployment, inflation, the IMF’s austerity measures, collapsing public services — that Tamil workers in the North and East are suffering. They have been successfully redirected. The enemy they have been given is not the class that rules them, but the neighbor who speaks a different language and carries a different wound.

Here is the dialectic that the ruling class has maintained for seven decades, and which it is essential for Sinhala workers and youth to understand: Sinhala chauvinism produces Tamil nationalism, and Tamil nationalism, in turn, reinforces Sinhala chauvinism. Each tendency is the mirror image and the fuel of the other. When Colombo discriminated against Tamil language rights in 1956, it created the conditions for Tamil political mobilization. When that mobilization was met not with redress but with pogroms, it created the conditions for Tamil armed separatism. When Tamil separatism launched attacks on Sinhala civilians, it was used by the Sinhala ruling class to justify yet more state terror against Tamils — and to intimidate Sinhala workers who might otherwise have seen through the charade. And when the state now arrests a 24-year-old for singing about Prabhakaran or Tamil Eelam, it ensures that another generation of Tamil youth will conclude — understandably, though incorrectly — that there is no path forward except through Tamil nationalism.

The LTTE’s political program was the program of an aspiring Tamil bourgeoisie, not the Tamil working class. As the ICFI analysis of the LTTE’s defeat made clear, the LTTE was utterly incapable of making a political appeal to Sinhala workers precisely because its perspective was based on ethnic struggle rather than class struggle — and its denunciations of the entire Sinhala population for the crimes of the Colombo government ensured that the very working-class unity that could have changed everything was permanently foreclosed.[4] The LTTE’s violent attacks on ordinary Sinhalese civilians served the same reactionary purpose as the government’s Sinhala supremacism: to divide the working class along ethnic, religious and linguistic lines and thereby strengthen the hand of Sinhala chauvinist forces in Colombo. The LTTE’s military defeat in 2009 resolved nothing. It left the Tamil masses with their democratic rights still denied, their land still occupied, their poor still impoverished — and their youth still searching for a political direction. 

That is the political vacuum into which songs like Sangeethsan’s speak. They should not be criminalized and suppressed. They should be answered — with a socialist program that offers Tamil workers what Prabhakaran could never offer: genuine unity with the Sinhala and Muslim working class in a common fight against the capitalist state that oppresses all of them.

The State that Imprisons Sangeethsan will come for You Next

This is the point that must be grasped most clearly by Sinhala workers and youth who might be tempted to view Sangeethsan’s arrest as a Tamil problem, not their problem.

The PTA was enacted in 1979 to suppress Tamil militant organizations. But, it was never only about Tamils. It was used to bloodily suppress the JVP uprisings of 1988–1990 — killing tens of thousands of oppressed Sinhala rural youth. It has been used against Sinhala journalists, trade unionists, and political opponents. And under the JVP/NPP government that came to power promising to abolish it, the PTA has been invoked against Muslim and Tamil youth and it has used the Essential Public Services Act against electricity workers who protested and postal workers who struck.

The logic is identical in every case: the same state apparatus that defines Tamil cultural expression as “terrorism” will define your strike, your protest, your social media post criticizing the IMF as “terrorism” whenever it becomes convenient. The elastic definitions being written into the new PSTA — acts that “intimidate the public” or “compel the government to abstain from doing any act” — are not aimed at a nonexistent LTTE or any other such outfit. They are aimed at the working class. All of it. Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim.

The infrastructure of surveillance and military occupation maintained in the North and East since 2009, nominally to prevent an LTTE revival, serves a second function that should be legible to any honest observer: it is a standing model and template for the kind of state control that the ruling class intends to extend southward as the social and economic crisis deepens. A state that has kept an entire population under military surveillance for seventeen years after the end of a war, that imprisons a 24-year-old musician for his song lyrics, is a state that has long since abandoned any pretense of democratic governance.

The Way Forward: Unity of the Working Class against the Capitalist State

Sangeethsan must be released immediately and unconditionally. The charges against him must be dropped. The PTA should be abolished, and its successor legislation, the PSTA — which is the same weapon with a new label — should not pass. The military occupation of the North and East must end. All political prisoners held under these laws must be freed.

These are not Tamil demands. They are the demands of the entire working class, because the democratic rights of any section of the working class are the democratic rights of all of it.

The Socialist Equality Party, in which we, the SLLA, represent a revolutionary tendency, has maintained this position without deviation since its founding as the Revolutionary Communist League, through the entire 26 years of the civil war and its aftermath. We opposed the communal war when the JVP was supporting it. We defended Tamil democratic rights when the trade union bureaucracies were silent. We campaigned for the release of Tamil detainees held without trial under the PTA when no other political party would. And we have always done so on the basis of a clear class analysis: not because we gave political support to the LTTE’s separatism — which program represented the interests of a section of the Tamil bourgeoisie, not Tamil workers and farmers — but because the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the unity of the working class, and because Tamil workers and farmers could defend their own interests only by uniting with Sinhala working people in a common struggle against capitalism.

To Tamil youth who love these songs, who light candles in November and weep for the Maaveerar: your grief is not misplaced, and your passion for dignity is a political resource, not a pathology. But Prabhakaran’s program failed — not because he was betrayed by the international community or outgunned by the army, but because a separate Tamil capitalist state could only ever reproduce the poverty and exploitation that Tamil workers already endure, in a new flag’s colors. The answer to discrimination and communal oppression is not to be found in a separate state, but in the unification of the oppressed in a common struggle for socialist revolution. The state that murders Tamil aspirations with the PTA is the same state that destroys Sinhala workers’ living standards with IMF austerity. Your enemy is not the Sinhala worker in a factory in Colombo. Your enemy is the class that rules them both. The revolutionary tradition that actually fought for your rights — that opposed the communal war when the JVP was cheering it on, that campaigned for Tamil political prisoners when no other party would, that demanded the withdrawal of the military from the North and East — is the Trotskyist tradition of the Socialist Equality Party. That is the tradition worthy of your passion and your fight.

The arrest of Sangeethsan is not an isolated incident. It is the latest manifestation of a strategy that has defined Sri Lankan capitalism since independence: divide the oppressed along ethnic lines, criminalize the memory of the oppressed, and use the machinery of anti-terrorism law to suppress any movement that threatens the rule of capital. Every government has played this game. The JVP/NPP, which rode to power on the wave of the 2022 Aragalaya uprising with promises of democratic reform, is playing it now.

The answer to this strategy is not Tamil separatism, which has proven a dead end that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Nor is it Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, which has served as the ideological cover for every act of state terror. [5] The answer is the political unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers, organized independently of all factions of the capitalist class and all its parties, fighting for the common program of socialist internationalism that addresses the interests of all working people against the IMF’s austerity, against militarism, against the entire apparatus of communalist state repression. This unity demands an unconditional and outright refusal to be trapped by the communal divisions that the ruling class has imposed on all of us.

Free Sangeethsan Now! Abolish the PTA—No Replacement! Build the united socialist movement of the working class!

[1] SEP opposes Sri Lankan government’s ban on LTTE, The Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka), 24 January 2009 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/sril-j24.html> 

[2] Sri Lankan government continues proscription of Tamil and Muslim groups and individuals, Saman Gunadasa 17 August 2022 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/17/wfcd-a17.html>

[3] Sri Lankan independence: 60 years of communalism, social decay and war, The Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 4 February 2008 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/02/sril-f04.html> 

[4] Sri Lanka: the defeat of the LTTE and the dead-end of nationalism, Bill Van Auken, 21 May 2009 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/pers-m21.html> 

[5] Tamil separatism, however mistaken its program, arose as a response to systematic national oppression. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism is the ideology of the oppressor nation’s ruling class — it is supremacist in its very foundations, asserting the primacy of Sinhala Buddhist identity over all other communities as a justification for state discrimination, pogroms, and military terror. “Chauvinism” is the Marxist term of art for aggressive, supremacist nationalism deployed in the service of a ruling class — named after Nicolas Chauvin, the symbol of blind, belligerent national superiority. It carries the correct political charge that “nationalism” does not, in relation to Sinhala Buddhist class hegemony.

The LTTE Ban is a Weapon against All of Us: The Arrest of Sangeethsan and the Real Logic of State Repression Read More »

Fire in Horana

The Mawpiya Sevana Fire: Twelve Dead because Capitalism has no use for the Elderly

Democratic Rights, economics, english, Inequality, lead article, Living Conditions, News, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Social Murder, Sri Lanka /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.

Fire in Horana
Mawpiya Sevana Home engulfed in flames. Image courtesy of nagalandpost.com

On the evening of June 3, 2026, fire consumed the Mawpiya Sevana care facility in Batagoda, Anguruwatota, near Horana in the Kalutara District. Twelve residents — elderly men and women, people living with mental illness, people with intellectual disabilities — died. Eight more were severely injured. Seventy-one human beings were packed into a building designed for fifteen. The first instinct of the bourgeois press, the political establishment, and the state apparatus is to render this a story about regulatory failure: the home was unregistered, the owner has been arrested, the Defence Secretary visited the ruins. Officials speak of stricter enforcement, mandatory inspections, and compliance frameworks. A proprietor sits in remand custody. The machinery of bourgeois law performs its theatre of accountability.

We reject this framing entirely. The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are not a regulatory scandal. They are a systemic indictment — the concentrated and visible expression of what capitalist society does to human beings who can no longer be profitably exploited.

The Fundamental Logic: Discarded Lives

To understand this tragedy scientifically, one must begin with the logic of capital itself. Under capitalism, the value of a human being — in the brutal calculus of the system — is indexed to their capacity to generate surplus value. The worker sells their labour power; capital extracts from that labour power more value than it returns in wages; the difference constitutes profit, the lifeblood of the system. This is the elementary truth established by Marx in Capital and confirmed by every hour of every working day across the planet.

What, then, of those who can no longer labour? What of the elderly, the severely disabled, those living with serious mental illness? In the language of capital, they are unproductive. They generate no surplus value. They are, from the standpoint of the system, a cost — a drain on resources that could otherwise be directed toward accumulation. Capitalism does not produce sentimentality toward those it cannot exploit. It produces neglect, abandonment, and, at the sharp end of underdevelopment, mass death.

This is the political truth behind the twelve corpses at Mawpiya Sevana. These were human beings whom the system had already written off. They had no social security worth the name. They had no public institutions capable of housing and caring for them with dignity. They were deposited — warehoused — in an overcrowded, unregistered private facility, in a building designed for fifteen, because their families, themselves workers ground down by decades of austerity, had no alternative. The capitalist state knew this was happening. It tolerated it, because the alternative — a publicly funded, adequately staffed, universally available system of elder care and disability support — would require precisely the kind of social expenditure that the ruling class and its international creditors have placed beyond political possibility.

The IMF and the Deliberate Dismantling of Social Provision

This brings us to the immediate political context, which is inseparable from the structural one. Sri Lanka is presently in the grip of one of the most savage austerity programs in its history, administered under the direct supervision of the International Monetary Fund. The 2022 foreign debt default and the social explosion that swept former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power opened the door to an IMF bailout — and with it, the full subordination of Sri Lankan economic and social policy to the demands of international finance capital.

Every government since — from Wickremesinghe to the present JVP/NPP administration of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — has functioned as a transmission belt for IMF dictates. The 2026 budget allocates a staggering 4.5 trillion rupees (450,000 crores Rupees. Approximately US $13 billion) for debt servicing alone — money extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and the rural poor and transferred to international bondholders, banks, and multilateral creditors. To meet this obligation, the government has slashed public expenditure across every social domain: health, education, welfare.

The health system is collapsing under the pressure of these cuts. Public hospitals run out of essential medicines — insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, psychiatric medications. Patients wait over a year for MRI scans and die during the wait. Nurses are so overworked and under-resourced that they have no chairs to sit on. The government’s own health minister, confronted with the medicine shortage, told patients to “buy them from the cheapest places.” This is not negligence. This is deliberate policy, enforced under IMF conditionality and praised by international financial institutions as evidence of “fiscal discipline.”

Into this landscape of deliberate social destruction, the question of elder care and disability support does not even register as a policy priority. The JVP/NPP government moved in late 2025 to slash the Aswesuma welfare program — a meagre cash transfer scheme paying between 5,000 and 17,500 rupees per month (approximately US$16 to $57) to the disabled, the elderly, kidney patients, and the extreme poor. Even this minimal safety net is under attack, with the World Bank pressing for a reduction in the number of beneficiaries and a JVP minister publicly declaring that welfare recipients should “feel ashamed” — calling it “legal begging.” As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has noted, this language carries chilling historical echoes: it frames the destitute not as victims of a system, but as parasites upon it.

It is in this context that Mawpiya Sevana existed. The state did not build, fund, or staff adequate public residential facilities for the elderly and the disabled — not because it lacked the administrative capacity to do so, but because the entire fiscal framework of Sri Lankan capitalism, as restructured by the IMF, prohibits such expenditure. The government allocates debt repayments nearly nine times the health budget. There are simply no resources directed toward the systematic, universal care of those who cannot work. In their place, a black market of unregistered, unregulated, overcrowded private facilities fills the vacuum — precisely because working-class and poor families, themselves crushed by falling real wages, rising prices, and the destruction of social services, cannot provide the full-time care that the state refuses to provide.

The State Knew, and the State Did Not Care

It would be politically dishonest to attribute what happened at Mawpiya Sevana to ignorance or inattention on the part of state authorities. The Director of the National Secretariat for Elders has confirmed that the facility was known to the authorities, that it was unregistered, and that it had previously been warned to comply with regulations. Officials knew. They did not act, not because the machinery of enforcement was insufficiently developed, but because the state had no institutional alternative to offer the residents. To shut down Mawpiya Sevana without providing a publicly funded substitute would have been to condemn seventy-one people to destitution or homelessness. The state permitted the facility’s continued operation because the alternative — genuine social provision — is structurally excluded by the political and economic priorities of the ruling class.

This is the functioning logic of the capitalist state in an underdeveloped country operating under IMF tutelage. It is not an aberration from the normal functioning of the system. It is the system functioning normally. The capitalist state in Sri Lanka — as in every neocolonial country — is not an instrument of social welfare. It is an instrument of capital accumulation, debt repayment, and the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the exploitation of labour. Those who cannot be exploited — the elderly, the severely disabled, those with serious mental illness — fall outside this framework entirely. They are residue. They are waste. The system does not know what to do with them except minimize the cost of their existence and, when they die in preventable fires, process the deaths through the criminal justice system to defuse political pressure.

The Feudal Supplement and Its Limits

In the absence of any meaningful social security system, the burden of care for the elderly and disabled in Sri Lanka — as throughout the countries of the periphery — falls on the feudal-cultural obligations of family and kinship networks. Sons and daughters are expected to provide, to sacrifice their own economic lives, to absorb the cost that the state refuses to bear. This system of informal social reproduction (provision of public goods — healthcare, education, social security — necessary to maintain a productive workforce) does not represent cultural high standards. It is a structural necessity for capital: it permits the ruling class to avoid the costs of social reproduction that workers in more developed capitalist countries extracted through generations of struggle — pension systems, public health systems, residential care facilities, disability support.

But this feudal supplement is itself being eroded by the same forces of capitalist development and austerity that make it necessary. As real wages collapse — down 24 percent in the public sector and 14 percent in the private sector since 2022, according to World Bank data — working-class families have fewer resources to provide informal care. Emigration, driven by economic desperation, separates families across continents. The nuclear family unit, under the pressure of capitalist commodity (property) relations and austerity, cannot substitute for the collective social infrastructure that only a socialist society can build and sustain.

The result is the proliferation of informal, unregistered, unregulated private facilities like Mawpiya Sevana — a catastrophic market response to a catastrophic social failure. People with nowhere to go, and nowhere else to put their relatives, are concentrated in buildings not designed to hold them, run by proprietors operating outside any regulatory framework, because the regulated, publicly funded alternative does not exist. The owner of Mawpiya Sevana now faces criminal charges. He may be guilty of negligence. But the system that created the conditions in which he operated — the IMF, the successive Colombo governments, the entire apparatus of neocolonial austerity — faces no charges at all.

The Question of Political Responsibility

The JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake bears direct political responsibility for the conditions that produced this tragedy. This is a government that came to power presenting itself — fraudulently — as a movement of the working people, invoking the language of “people’s power” and social transformation. Its actual record is one of ruthless implementation of IMF directives, attacks on welfare recipients, the deployment of the military against striking postal workers, the invocation of Essential Services legislation to suppress workers opposing privatization, and the systematic underfunding of health and education.

But responsibility does not end with the current government. Every government that has administered Sri Lankan capitalism since independence — the SLFP, the UNP, the SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP — has presided over the gradual destruction of whatever social provision existed and its replacement with the “free market”: privatization, commercialization, the withdrawal of the state from any domain of social reproduction that cannot generate profit for capital. The entire political establishment is complicit. The opposition parties — the SJB, the SLPP, the UNP — offer only “token criticisms” while accepting the IMF framework in its entirety.

The trade union bureaucracies, which claim to represent the interests of working people, are equally implicated. They have systematically suppressed independent workers’ action, called off strikes on the basis of empty promises, and functioned as transmission belts for the very governments and institutions that are dismantling social provision. Their loyalty is to the capitalist system, not to the workers they nominally represent.

The Only Answer: Socialist Transformation

The twelve people who died at Mawpiya Sevana on June 3, 2026, cannot be brought back. But the conditions that killed them can, and must, be ended — not through regulatory reform, not through stricter enforcement of existing laws, not through the arrest of a single proprietor, but through the socialist transformation of society.

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the programme of the International Committee of thenFourth International (ICFI), insist on this with complete clarity: there is no solution to the crisis of elder care, disability support, public health, or any other domain of social reproduction within the framework of capitalism and IMF austerity. The resources required to build a genuine, universal, publicly funded system of care for those who cannot work — the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill — exist. They are being extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and transferred to international creditors in the form of 4.5 trillion rupees in annual debt repayments. They are being accumulated by the corporate elite whose tax rates the JVP/NPP government has left intact. They are being hoarded in the offshore accounts and investment portfolios of those who profit from the exploitation of Sri Lankan labour.

These resources must be expropriated — through the repudiation of the foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under democratic workers’ control, and the reorganization of production to serve human need rather than private profit. Public residential care, universal healthcare, free education, disability support, and social security for the elderly are not luxuries. They are social rights, achievable only through the defeat of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.

This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class — against the JVP/NPP government, against the IMF, against the entire capitalist political establishment, and against the trade union bureaucracies that serve as its labour lieutenants. It requires the building of rank-and-file action committees in workplaces, plantations, and communities, independent of all capitalist parties and institutions, coordinating a unified movement for a workers’ and peasants’ government committed to a socialist program.

The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are a concentrated expression of a social order in terminal crisis. The answer to them is not to manage that crisis more humanely — it is to end it, through the international socialist revolution that the Fourth International was founded to advance.

We, the SLLA demand: full public accountability for the deaths at Mawpiya Sevana; immediate public funding for a universal system of residential care for the elderly and disabled; the cancellation of IMF debt obligations and the reallocation of all debt-servicing funds to social provision; and the expropriation of the major banks, corporations, and private hospital networks under democratic workers’ control.

The Mawpiya Sevana Fire: Twelve Dead because Capitalism has no use for the Elderly Read More »

Jaffna speech

“Never Again” — 45th Commemoration of the Jaffna Public Library Arson

class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, Far Right, Fascism, history, lead article, Militarism, News, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Sri Lanka, War, War Crimes /

Tonight marks the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, were present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library today, and asked to address an audience of our Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, we would have delivered the following speech.  


By Sanjaya Jayasekera, member SLLA. 

Jaffna library arson
Jaffna Public Library after Arson. Image courtesy of CPA X.


Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters — Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and all who cherish the meaning of human dignity,

Forty-five years ago today, in the dead of night, flames consumed one of the greatest cultural treasures of South Asia. The Jaffna Public Library — home to over 97,000 volumes, to irreplaceable ola leaf manuscripts, to ancient chronicles and living memory, to the intellectual heritage of the Tamil people accumulated across centuries — was reduced to ashes. Not by accident. Not by nature. But by deliberate human hands: uniformed police and organized thugs, dispatched from the south under the protection and direction of the United National Party government of J.R. Jayawardena. Ministers Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Mathew — who boasted in print that the Sinhalese must rise to “protect Buddhism” — arrived in Jaffna to oversee the operation. Four Tamil men were dragged from their homes and killed. Homes, shops, offices, and the press of Tamil newspaper Ealanadu were burned. Statues of Tamil cultural figures were demolished at road junctions.

This was not a spontaneous eruption. It was a political decision, made in Colombo, carried out in Jaffna, and covered up in silence by an entire political establishment and a compliant media. No official inquiry was ever held into the destruction of the library. No one was prosecuted. No minister faced justice. The fire that burned on the night of May 31, 1981 was lit by the ruling class of this island — and it was fueled by decades of communalist poison that every major political party, UNP and SLFP alike, had been injecting into the bloodstream of Sri Lankan society since independence.

We gather here today not only to grieve. We gather to understand. We gather to draw the lessons that the ruling class — of every party, of every era — has worked hardest to prevent the people of this island from drawing.

What was destroyed that night?

The books that burned were irreplaceable — Yalpanam Vaipavama, the history of Jaffna, existed in only one copy, and it perished in the fire. But the rulers of Sri Lanka were not primarily burning books. They were burning a people’s sense of themselves. They were burning the confidence, the continuity, and the cultural selfhood of the Tamil minority. They were sending a message, written in fire: You do not belong here. Your history does not count. Your culture is disposable. Your lives are contingent on our permission.

This was the language of Sinhala chauvinism — not a fringe ideology, but the official state ideology, entrenched in the very constitution of the republic by the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by the anti-Tamil university admissions schemes, by Buddhism’s enshrinement as the state religion. And it was the language of a ruling class that used communal hatred as a tool of governance, a weapon to distract the Sinhalese poor and working class from the economic policies — the austerity, the open-market “liberalization,” the assault on wages and public services — that were devastating their own lives alongside the lives of Tamil workers.

The burning of the Jaffna Library was not the beginning. And it was not the end. It was a turning point — a signal flare fired two years before the July 1983 pogrom, in which organized Sinhala mobs, with voter registration lists in hand provided by state institutions, went from door to door, burning Tamil families alive in Colombo and across the island. Black July ignited a civil war that would consume nearly three decades, claim tens of thousands of lives, shatter entire communities — Tamil and Sinhalese — and culminate in the final military assault of May 2009 at Mulivaikkal, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred in what the United Nations itself acknowledged as potential war crimes, while the world looked away.

Standing today here facing the once flame-engulfed walls of this magnificent monument, we should say loudly, “Never Again”.  Never again must mean: never again a burned library. Never again a Black July. Never again a Mulivaikkal.

But “never again” cannot be a wish. It must be a program.

Seventeen years have passed since the guns fell silent in May 2009. What has changed? The war is over — but the conditions that produced the war are not. The military still occupies the North and East. Tamil lands remain seized under military control. Mulivaikkal commemorations — the most basic act of mourning the dead — are physically disrupted by state-backed mobs and security forces. Tamil protesters are harassed by racist mobs and are arrested. A vicious social media hate campaign, coordinated and deliberate, brands every Tamil who speaks of their history, their grief, or their rights as a terrorist, an LTTE sympathizer, a separatist. Tamil writers find their books blocked by government censors under the cynical banner of “national unity.” And presiding over all of this today is the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — a party that built its political career on enthusiastic support for the anti-Tamil war, that opposed every concession to Tamil democratic rights, and that now poses as a government of “national unity” while allowing Sinhala chauvinist propaganda to circulate freely.

We must say this plainly: the militarization of the North has not ended with the war. It has continued and deepened. Successive governments — from Rajapaksa to Wickremesinghe to Dissanayake — have maintained the military stranglehold on Tamil life because the military is the iron fist of a capitalist state that rules in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and serves as the instrument of communal oppression. The glorification of the military — the victory parades, the war monuments, the cult of the soldier — is not incidental. It is how the ruling class educates the Sinhalese masses into accepting militarism as their national identity, while ensuring that no united struggle of Tamil and Sinhalese workers can challenge the social order.

The moral disorientation you see in Sinhalese society today — the celebration of soldiers over teachers, the tolerance of racist social media, the passive acceptance of Tamil humiliation and even calls for the repeat of the historical violence, massacres and vandalism — is not the natural condition of the Sinhalese people. It is a manufactured condition. It has been manufactured, across decades, by a ruling class that needed Sinhalese workers to see Tamils as their enemy rather than their comrades. It is the deliberate product of a political culture built on militarism, chauvinism, fear, and lies — because a Sinhalese worker who hates Tamil workers is a worker who will never turn to face his actual oppressor.

It is in this context that we should turn to the lessons of seven decades of betrayal

The tragedy of Sri Lanka is inseparable from the history of betrayal by the parties that once claimed to speak for the working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party — which emerged from the Trotskyist tradition — was once the largest workers’ party in South Asia. It had, within its hands, the political means to unite Tamil and Sinhalese workers on the basis of socialist internationalism, to oppose communalism at its roots, and to fight for a government of the working class that guaranteed equal rights for all national minorities. Instead, in 1964, the LSSP leadership capitulated to class collaboration, joined the bourgeois coalition of Sirima Bandaranaike — and sealed Tamil oppression into the very constitution of the republic. Colvin R. de Silva, once a fighter for the Fourth International, presided as a minister over the entrenchment of Sinhala-only language policy. This was not a minor error. It was a world-historical betrayal. It opened the road to every pogrom, every war crime, every burned library that followed.

Capitalism cannot solve the national question in Sri Lanka. The ending of the war did not solve the Tamil national question, and the ruling class has been capitalizing this unresolved problem ever since. Throughout the seventy-eight years of independence it has produced only communal war and economic devastation. The Tamil bourgeois parties — the TULF, the TNA and its successors — have failed Tamil workers and youth just as comprehensively, channeling legitimate grievances into parliamentary deals with Colombo and appeals to foreign imperialist powers that have never served Tamil interests and never will. The LTTE’s separatist program, whatever its origins in the just anger of Tamil youth, could not overcome the fundamental reality that a separate Tamil capitalist state would be a small, economically weak entity, dependent on the same imperialist powers that armed and sustained Colombo’s military, unable to guarantee the rights of Tamils who live within and outside the North and East, and incapable of addressing the root class question.

The path forward is not separation. It is not a communal deal brokered between Tamil and Sinhalese elites. It is the unification of the Sri Lankan working class — Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim — in a common struggle against the capitalist system that has used communalism as its instrument of rule for seven decades.

What does “Never Again” demand of us?

When we say “never again,” we do not make a sentimental appeal. We make a political commitment.

Never again a Jaffna Library arson means: never again will we allow the ruling class to burn the cultural heritage of any people — because we understand that the hand that lit that fire was the hand of class rule, using racial hatred as its instrument.

Never again a Black July means: never again will Sinhalese workers stand aside while their class brothers and sisters are massacred — because we understand that the pogrom was organized against Tamils to prevent the unity that would threaten the ruling class.

Never again a Mulivaikkal means: never again will the working class accept a “military solution” to what is a social and political problem — because we understand that the massacre of Tamil civilians served not the interests of Sinhalese workers but the interests of a military apparatus and a ruling class that then turned its guns on Sinhalese workers in austerity, repression, and the destruction of democratic rights.

The Sinhalese workers and youth who are told today that their national glory consists in military parades and the suppression of Tamil commemorations — they are being robbed. They are being robbed of their class consciousness, of their solidarity with fellow workers, of their capacity to fight for their own emancipation. The same ruling class that burned the Jaffna Library has imposed poverty, casualized labor, and IMF austerity on Sinhalese workers. The same military that massacred Tamils at Mulivaikkal is the instrument of a state that imprisons striking workers and breaks trade unions. The enemy of Tamil workers is the enemy of Sinhalese workers. His name is not Tamil or Sinhalese. Its name is Capital.

What are we fighting for?

We call upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers, youth, teachers, students, and intellectuals to build a united movement — not a movement of ethnic reconciliation brokered by elites who represent no one but themselves, but a movement of the working class, fighting for:

The immediate end to military occupation of the North and East, and the return of all seized Tamil lands to the rightful owners. The right to commemorate the Tamil dead at Mulivaikkal and all sites of atrocity — without harassment, disruption, or criminalization. Full linguistic, cultural, and democratic rights for Tamils and all national minorities, including the Muslim community which has faced its own waves of racist persecution. An end to the militarist culture that has been poisoned into Sinhalese society — a culture that glorifies killing and suppresses solidarity. The prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Black July through to Mulivaikkal. And above all — a socialist political program that places the resources of this island — its land, its labor, its productive capacity — under the democratic control of its working people, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim alike, so that poverty, communal division, and ruling-class manipulation can be swept away at their roots.

The Jaffna Library held the memory of a civilization. It held books that no one can recover. But it also holds, for us, an indelible political lesson: that a ruling class willing to burn a library is a ruling class willing to burn everything — willing to burn villages, willing to massacre civilians, willing to destroy entire peoples — in defense of its power and profit.

We honor the memory of what was destroyed on this night 45 years ago not by grief alone, but by commitment — the commitment to build the political movement that makes such destruction impossible, by ending the system that makes it necessary.

A heritage was rendered ashes. But the struggle lives on!

Never again — through the unity of the working class of the North and the South!

External Link to the redacted version of this article: https://www.themorning.lk/articles/UtQXTJcSW2Olh5bpgnYN

“Never Again” — 45th Commemoration of the Jaffna Public Library Arson Read More »

Theepachelvan Piratheepan

The NPP/JVP Government’s Assault on Tamil Historical Memory: State Censorship, Class Repression and Intellectual Complicity

art & culture, art and culture, Democratic Rights, english, lead article, News, Perspective, politics, Pseudo-left, Sri Lanka /

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia condemns the detention of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s books and demands their immediate and unconditional release

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and thesocialist.lk  unconditionally condemn the detention by Sri Lanka Customs of two books by Kilinochchi-based Tamil author Theepachelvan Piratheepan — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren (“I Wage War Through Writing”), a collection of interviews, and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil (“Now Too Here Are Two Nations”), a collection of essays on the war — and demands their immediate and unconditional release. This act of state censorship, carried out with the direct institutional involvement of the Ministry of Defence and under the rubber-stamp of cultural bureaucracies subordinated to the security apparatus, is not an administrative irregularity. It is a political act, rooted in the class interests of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and its state, and it must be understood and combated as such.

The Facts of the Case Expose the Repressive Machinery under the NPP/JVP government

On 18 March 2026, Sri Lanka Customs seized a consignment of books imported from Chennai, India, by Onereach Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, under CusDec No. 47995. The consignment included four books by Theepachelvan Piratheepan. Customs officers, purportedly suspecting a threat to national security, initiated a review process — with the Director General of Customs, Seevali Arukgoda, subsequently stating that the suspicion arose from one book’s cover, which depicted a map of Tamil Eelam separated from the rest of Sri Lanka, and what he described as a “limited inspection of the contents.”

Theepachelvan

What followed was a cascade of bureaucratic evasion and institutional complicity that lays bare the functioning of the capitalist state. The Defence Ministry recommended that Customs detain all four books, while the Culture Ministry recommended the release of the two novels. Customs then returned to the Defence Ministry seeking a “no objection” for the novels’ release, which was granted. Based on the recommendations of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, the State Panel of Literature of the Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs, and the Ministry of Defence, two books — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil — were formally withheld, with Customs citing provisions under section 120 of the Penal Code, a colonial law, read with Schedule B of the Customs Ordinance.

The Defence Ministry did not respond to questions as to how it determined that the books incited “disaffection” or posed a threat to national security. Crucially, the two books that were eventually released were not first editions and had already been distributed and made available at Tamil bookshops across Sri Lanka. The logical absurdity of this position — that books freely circulating in Tamil bookshops nonetheless require Defence Ministry clearance to re-enter the country through customs — exposes the purely political, punitive character of the censorship directed against Theepachelvan’s work on the war and its aftermath.

When The Examiner inquired whether Customs had reached out to the Attorney General for his opinion, Director General Arukgoda replied: “Why should we consult the AG’s department?” — asserting that Defence Ministry observations are sufficient and that “this has been the practice for as long as he can remember.” Here, in the unguarded candour of a senior bureaucrat, is the operating logic of the Sri Lankan security state: the military-intelligence apparatus has, through decades of communal war and “anti-terrorism” legislation, assumed permanent, unaccountable authority over political expression.

The detention of Theepachelvan’s books is not an isolated incident but part of a systematic and sustained campaign by the NPP/JVP government to suppress Tamil literary and political expression through the Defence Ministry’s permanent stranglehold over the circulation of ideas in the north and east. Writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan — known by his pseudonym Shobasakthi — has revealed that copies of his book 1990: Leidenthivu – Mandaithivu Massacres and Mass Graves, documenting the massacres and mass graves of the war, sent from Chennai to poet Karunakaran’s address in Kilinochchi in late 2025, were seized by Customs at the Jaffna Post Office in November 2025 and forwarded to the Defence Ministry where they remain suppressed to this day — a complaint to Jaffna District NPP MP Rajeevan having yielded nothing, confirming that the censorship of Tamil historical memory is not a bureaucratic malfunction tolerated by the NPP government but its deliberate and continuing political policy.

The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka has warned that detaining publications without clear evidence of inciting communal disharmony could violate constitutional protections, including freedom of expression and equality before the law, and that such actions may amount to a misuse of power and a potential human rights violation. These expressions of institutional “concern,” however, will remain toothless so long as the fundamental class character of the state — and the NPP government that now administers it — goes unexamined and unchallenged.

The Class Character of the NPP’s Censorship

The detention of Theepachelvan’s books is not an aberration of the National People’s Power government; it is a manifestation of its essential political character. The NPP, led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, rose to power on the wave of mass popular revulsion demonstrated in the 2022 aragalaya uprising — a spontaneous movement of workers, youth and the oppressed masses against decades of IMF-dictated austerity, official corruption and elite plunder. Having exploited that mass anti-establishment sentiment to win the presidency and parliamentary majority, the NPP has proceeded to do precisely what every bourgeois government before it has done: implement IMF austerity with renewed vigour, maintain and expand the security-state apparatus inherited from the Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe eras, and deploy the machinery of repression against those who challenge its authority.

The JVP’s historical trajectory makes this entirely predictable. The JVP, which twice launched armed insurrections in the south — in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989 — and which conducted savage political violence, including the assassination of trade union leaders and left-wing opponents, subsequently transformed itself into a parliamentary party deeply integrated into the structures of the Sri Lankan capitalist state. Its “left” and “progressive” credentials — always petty-bourgeois in their class content, reformist in their political program and nationalist in their ideological framework — have served as a political cover for its absorption into bourgeois politics. Its “anti-corruption” and “good governance” rhetoric during the aragalaya period and the 2024 election campaign was not the language of class struggle but the language of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia appealing to middle-class frustrations within the framework of capitalist rule.

Now in government, the NPP/JVP administers the very security apparatus whose colonial-era legal instruments — including Section 120 of the Penal Code, the draconian Public Security Ordinance and the Prevention of Terrorism Act — were wielded by Sinhala-chauvinist governments against the Tamil people for decades. Tamil writers in Sri Lanka live under constant surveillance of the security state. In 2024, Theepachelvan himself was summoned and interrogated by the Terrorist Investigation Division (CTID), and was subjected to nearly three hours of questioning over a book launch event. This persecution has not ceased under the National People’s Power government. The NPP’s “change” amounts to the continuation of the communal-security state with a new parliamentary facade and a refreshed managerial personnel.

Theepachelvan Piratheepan — born on 24 October 1983 in Kilinochchi — is one of the most significant Tamil literary voices to emerge from the lived experience of the war and its devastating human consequences. His poetry, essays and interviews document the suffering of the Tamil people through the armed conflict, the mass atrocities of the final military offensive, and the grinding social desolation of the post-war north and east. It is precisely because his work constitutes an act of bearing witness — of preserving the collective historical memory of a people subjected to systematic violence and dispossession — that the state seeks to suppress it. The detained books represent documentary historical testimony from below: the kind of testimony that the bourgeois state, regardless of which party administers it, has an enduring material interest in silencing.

The Intelligentsia’s Capitulation: Performing Criticism, Defending the Capitalist State

I. Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri: The Government Supporter as Critic

No examination of this crisis would be complete without addressing the role played by the layers of academic and intellectual figures who occupy the space of “civil society” dissent in Sri Lanka — and who perform, with cultivated theatrical effect, the function of absorbing and neutralising working-class and democratic opposition to the capitalist state. The case of Professor Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri demands particular attention, because in the Theepachelvan affair his political intervention reveals, with unusual transparency, the precise mechanism by which the pseudo-left intelligentsia serves the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

Nirmal Dewasiri
Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

On 19 April 2026, Dewasiri published a video statement on his YouTube channel — History with Nirmal — titled in Sinhala: “The greatest political defeat the Malima [NPP] government received in the case of Theepachelvan!” The framing is significant before a single word of analysis is delivered: the detention of a Tamil author’s books about the war is characterised not as a state assault on democratic rights and on the historical memory of the Tamil people — but as a political defeat for the government. The suffering of the Tamil author, the democratic principle of freedom of expression, the class content of the censorship — all of this is pushed to the background. What remains is a problem of government optics, of public relations management, of the NPP’s political credibility.

In the body of that statement, Dewasiri makes three things clear, each of which must be examined with precision.

First, having campaigned for the NPP/JVP electoral win, he asserts himself a supporter of the NPP/JVP government. This is an admission of class alignment. Dewasiri — the former secretary of the X-Group, the one-time FUTA president, the 2010 Cultural and National Heritage Ministry advisor, the key civil-society architect of the 2015 Sirisena “good governance” election victory — has now completed the arc of petty-bourgeois left politics in Sri Lanka: from student politics, through post-JVP academic radicalism, through “civil society” coalition-building for bourgeois electoral formations, to open and declared support for the NPP government that is today implementing IMF austerity and maintaining the security-state apparatus of the Rajapaksa era. This trajectory is not an individual aberration; it is the class trajectory of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in the epoch of imperialism.

Second, Dewasiri invokes the argument that in the digital age, banning physical books is an act of political absurdity — that in an era of internet access, detaining a printed consignment at customs only amplifies the work’s reach and drives readers to seek out the censored material. On the surface, one may see it as a critique of the government. In reality, it is something far more insidious: it is the argument of a government supporter advising his preferred government on how to conduct its affairs more effectively. The “digital age” argument does not challenge the ‘right’ of the state to suppress political literature; it argues that this particular act of suppression is tactically counterproductive. It is the counsel of a sympathetic advisor, not the principled opposition of a democrat.

Third, and most revealing, Dewasiri’s video statement conveys that he is worried about the NPP government losing credibility in public perception, and urges it to act quickly to resolve the problem. Here the contradiction at the heart of his entire political trajectory is exposed with unusual clarity — and it is a contradiction that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.

It would be a political error to characterise Dewasiri as someone indifferent to Tamil democratic rights. The record is otherwise. He has written at length on the ideological mechanisms by which Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist hegemony suppresses Tamil historical claims, on the illegitimacy of post-war “reconciliation” frameworks that deny devolution and Tamil political agency, and on the dangers of allowing dominant historical narratives to erase the lived experience of the Tamil people. These are not trivial positions — they represent a formal intellectual recognition of the very injustice that the detention of Theepachelvan’s books embodies. However, this critique is made entirely within the service of “post-war reconciliation” — a framework that accepts the Sri Lankan unitary capitalist state as the boundary within which Tamil political claims must be accommodated. Dewasiri argues for a more pluralist, less chauvinist bourgeois order — not for the right of the Tamil nation to self-determination, and certainly not for a class analysis of the national question that would expose the bourgeois state itself as the structural source of national oppression. His formal intellectual defence of Tamil historical memory therefore operates within the very political framework that generates the suppression he critiques.

This contradiction is precisely what makes his intervention in the Theepachelvan case so revealing — and so politically instructive. A man who has written extensively on how Sinhala-Buddhist historical consciousness suppresses Tamil historical memory, who has argued that post-war reconciliation is impossible without confronting that suppression, and who has documented in analytical detail the JVP’s own degeneration into Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist politics, now urges swift action by the NPP/JVP government that is suppressing Tamil historical testimony — not in order to vindicate the principle he has spent years articulating, but in order to protect the government’s political standing with the electorate. The defence of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s books — of the Tamil people’s right to possess, circulate and build upon their own historical testimony of the war — is subordinated entirely to the political management needs of a bourgeois government Dewasiri has openly declared he supports. What his academic framework identifies as an ideological injustice demanding structural confrontation becomes, in the moment of concrete political decision, a governmental embarrassment requiring swift damage control. The principle survives in the academic publications; it dissolves entirely when the government he supports is the one doing the suppressing.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary personal sense. It is the structural logic of petty-bourgeois left politics in the epoch of imperialism. What must be stated with precision is the distinction between historical acknowledgement and political principle: Dewasiri’s academic credentials as a critic of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism make his political function as a government defender more effective rather than less — allowing him to perform the role of principled critic while the substance of his intervention is the protection of a capitalist government that continues the security-state suppression of the very historical memory he has written about. The writings establish his credentials; his political conduct reveals his class allegiance.

The SLLA does not question the sincerity of Dewasiri’s academic work on Tamil historical oppression. We question its political value in the absence of the class independence that alone could give it practical force. Academic recognition of Tamil historical suffering, combined with political support for the bourgeois government that perpetuates it, does not advance the democratic rights of the Tamil people by a single degree. It provides intellectual legitimacy to the political management of their oppression.

This is not the first time Dewasiri has played this role. His trajectory — from X-Group intellectual and cultural radicalism, through ministerial advisor in 2010, to key civil-society architect of the 2015 Sirisena “good governance” coalition, to declared NPP supporter in 2026 — is the biography of the Sri Lankan pseudo-left intelligentsia’s absorption into the structures of bourgeois political management. At every stage, the rhetorical register changes — radical academic, trade union activist, “civil society” democrat, progressive government supporter — while the underlying political function remains constant: to channel mass discontent into safe institutional waters, to dress bourgeois politics in the language of popular aspiration, and to prevent the emergence of an independent, class-conscious political movement of the working class.

The SLLA’s critique of Dewasiri is not personal. It is the application of historical materialism to the concrete political role of a social layer. The pseudo-left intelligentsia does not invent the positions it holds; those positions are determined by its class position, its institutional dependencies, and its material and ideological integration into the structures of bourgeois society. Understanding this is essential to building the independent working-class political alternative that the Theepachelvan case — like every case of state repression before it — demands.

II. Jayathilaka Kammellaweera: The Literary Establishment as Cultural Gendarme

The response of figures like Dewasiri represents one mode of capitulation to the bourgeois state among those aligned with the NPP/JVP. The intervention of renowned Sinhala author and literary critic Jayathilaka Kammellaweera represents something qualitatively different and more openly reactionary: not the management of political embarrassment dressed in progressive credentials, but the direct rationalisation of censorship in the language of Sinhala cultural nationalism itself — a position that does not merely fail to defend Tamil democratic rights but actively argues for their suppression.

Jayathilaka Kammellaweera
Jayathilaka Kammellaweera

Kammellaweera’s position is unambiguous. He argued that books containing ideas damaging to “national reconciliation” could legitimately be detained on the grounds that they harm “social cohesion.” He knows — from what he “heard” about the books — precisely what they contain: the historical memory of the Tamil oppressed nation, the testimonies of the war, the mass atrocities, the dispossession of a people subjected to decades of Sinhala-chauvinist state violence. It is on this basis that he endorses their suppression. His acknowledgement that he has not read the exact text is therefore entirely marginal to his political position — reading the books would not alter his stance by a single degree, because his position is not formed from the specific arrangement of words on specific pages but from what those pages represent: Tamil historical testimony that the Sinhala cultural establishment, aligned with the NPP government, requires to be silenced.

The terms Kammellaweera deploys — “national reconciliation,” “social cohesion” — require class analysis, not liberal restatement. In the political vocabulary of the Colombo establishment since the military defeat of the LTTE in 2009, “national reconciliation” has functioned consistently as a euphemism for Tamil acquiescence to the terms of the Sinhala-Buddhist state’s military victory. “Social cohesion” refers not to the freely expressed unity of equal peoples but to the managed coexistence of unequal communities within the framework of the unitary Sinhala-Buddhist state — a framework in which Tamil historical memory is treated as a threat to stability precisely because it is true. Kammellaweera’s argument is therefore not a liberal position on the limits of free expression made in good faith. It is a Sinhala chauvinist argument made in the language of social harmony: it subordinates the right of the Tamil people to preserve and circulate their own historical memory of national oppression to the political requirements of a Sinhala-dominated state’s management of post-war ethnic relations.

The SLLA states this directly and without qualification: Kammellaweera’s position is objectively racist in its political content and consequences. It assumes the right of the Sinhala cultural establishment — aligned with a Sinhala-chauvinist government of the South — to determine what Tamil writers may say about the Tamil people’s experience of the war, and legitimises the suppression of Tamil historical testimony as a public service. When the NPP state detains Tamil books through the Defence Ministry and aligned literary intellectuals rationalise that act in the language of social cohesion, we witness the complete operation of bourgeois ideological control: the state provides the coercive instrument and the cultural intelligentsia provides the legitimising discourse. These two functions are inseparable. Kammellaweera’s statement is a cultural expression of the JVP/NPP’s deep roots in Sinhala chauvinism — the WSWS has warned that true to its vile record and the reactionary traditions of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, the JVP/NPP government will whip up anti-Tamil Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism in an attempt to divide and weaken the working class — and it confirms that this tendency finds its reflection not only in the state apparatus but in the literary establishment that serves it.

The SLLA condemns Kammellaweera’s statement in the strongest possible terms. The defence of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s right to write, publish and circulate his testimony of the war is not merely a Tamil democratic demand. It is a demand of the entire working class — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — for the right to know its own history, free from the censorship of any state and any literary establishment that has traded its critical independence for proximity to bourgeois political power.

Equally revealing is the conduct of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, whose chairperson, Keerthi Welisarage declared — with breathtaking cynicism — that “there are no restrictions on freedom of expression in Sri Lanka” even as his institution’s recommendations formed part of the bureaucratic chain that kept Theepachelvan’s books in Customs detention. Cultural institutions subordinated to the state and its security apparatus do not defend artists; they police them — and the liberal intelligentsia that staffs and defends such institutions performs the same function in the domain of “civil society.”

The Continuity of State Repression and the Lessons of the SEP’s Record

The detention of Theepachelvan’s books must be situated within the pattern of sustained state repression against artists, writers and political dissenters in Sri Lanka that has intensified under every successive government. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and its affiliated Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE) (now defunct) have fought consistently against this repression — defending writer Shakthika Sathkumara when he was imprisoned on trumped-up blasphemy charges; campaigning for the release of Tamil poet Ahnaf Jazeem, held for months by the Terrorism Investigations Division under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for the content of a poetry collection; and standing with film director and playwright Malaka Devapriya when he was subjected to intimidatory investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department. These were not isolated or tokenistic acts of solidarity. They expressed a principled, politically grounded understanding that the defence of democratic rights — including freedom of expression and artistic freedom — is inseparable from the struggle of the working class against the capitalist state.

The SLLA, as the Revolutionary Left Faction of the SEP, grounds its response to the current attack on Theepachelvan in the same political foundation. The defence of his books is not a matter of abstract liberal principle. It is a class question. The suppression of Tamil literary testimony about the war is an attack on the democratic rights of the Tamil masses and on the ability of the entire working class — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim alike — to form independent political consciousness, to know its own history, and to build the movement necessary to defend its interests against austerity, communalism and authoritarianism.

What Must Be Done

The SLLA and thesocialist.lk demand:

1. Immediate and unconditional release of both detained books —  Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil — by Theepachelvan Piratheepan, with no conditions, no ongoing surveillance and no further harassment of the author. We also demand immediate release of all books of other authors including those of writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan.

2. Abolition of the practice whereby the Ministry of Defence — an institution of military-intelligence power — exercises authority over the import and circulation of literary works. The subordination of cultural institutions and customs procedures to the security apparatus must be ended. The repeal of all colonial-era and post-independence legal provisions — including parts of the Schedule B of the Customs Ordinance and its invocation of Section 120 of the Penal Code — used to suppress political literature and artistic expression is an urgent democratic necessity.

3. Full public accountability: the Defence Ministry must be compelled to explain publicly, on the record, on what specific grounds it determined that these literary works constituted a threat to national security. Secret, unaccountable determinations by the military-intelligence apparatus over the domain of political and artistic expression are fundamentally incompatible with democratic rights.

4. Mobilisation of workers, artists, students and youth: the SLLA calls for the broadest possible mobilisation in defence of Theepachelvan and of freedom of expression. Writers, publishers, academics, teachers, trade unionists and students must come together in independent democratic committees — in workplaces, universities and communities — to coordinate this defence outside and against the institutions of bourgeois civil society, which have proved incapable of providing principled opposition to state censorship.

5. Link the defence of democratic rights to socialist politics: the struggle against censorship, against the suppression of Tamil historical memory, and against the NPP government’s continuation of the security state cannot be separated from the struggle against IMF austerity, against the exploitation of the working class, and against the capitalist system that generates communalism and repression as instruments of class rule. The SLLA calls on workers and youth to break with the NPP, the JVP and all parties of the bourgeoisie, and to build an independent socialist political movement grounded in the program and perspectives of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The SLLA and theSocialist.lk stand in unconditional solidarity with Theepachelvan Piratheepan. His work — bearing witness to the anguish, the loss, the resistance and the aspirations of the Tamil people — belongs to the historical memory not only of the Tamil nation but of the international working class. No security ministry, no colonial-era customs ordinance, and no NPP government that has betrayed the masses who trusted it can legitimately suppress that testimony.

The defence of art and free expression is the defence of the working class. The struggle for democratic rights is the struggle for socialism.

The NPP/JVP Government’s Assault on Tamil Historical Memory: State Censorship, Class Repression and Intellectual Complicity Read More »

Trump

Stop the impending Genocide — Before it is too late: Condemn Trump’s Threat to Annihilate Iranian Civilisation

class struggles, english, Fascism, Imperialism, lead article, Militarism, News, Oligarchy, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, War, War Crimes, World War /

Emergency Statement by the Editorial Board of  theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)  

Trump
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, April 6, 2026, in Washington. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]

Today, 7 April 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

This is not political bluster. This is the public declaration of genocidal intent by the head of state of the most heavily armed military power in history — a power that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and has already been bombing Iran for forty days.

As the World Socialist Web Site stated today in its emergency perspective: “Every word Trump said implicates the government of the United States in a crime of Hitlerian proportions. He says openly what the Nazi leaders discussed behind closed doors.” Trump has already threatened to destroy every power plant, every bridge, every desalination facility — the entire infrastructure of civilised life for 93 million people. He has declared this will be accomplished “over a period of four hours.” He was asked by a reporter whether this constitutes war crimes. His answer: “No, not at all.”

Iran is the heir to one of the oldest and most profound civilisations in human history. Thousands of its civilians — including 168 children killed in a US missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school on the first day of the war — have already been slaughtered. Hospitals, universities, residential districts and schools have been systematically bombed. The logic of escalation, as the WSWS has warned, is inexorable: from intensified bombing to ground invasion, to the occupation of Iranian cities, and ultimately — in the face of mounting US casualties and military failure — to the resort to nuclear weapons.

This is not a hypothetical. This is the trajectory of a war that has been underway for forty days, escalating each week, with no serious force within the capitalist political system placing any brake upon it.

The Democratic Party of the United States — which funded the war with its own vote for the $839 billion defence budget — now calls Trump a “madman” and “unhinged.” But not a single Democrat has proposed concrete action to halt the war. They are complicit. They are terrified that any genuine mass mobilisation against the war would not stop at the war — it would raise the entire question of the distribution of wealth, the power of the financial oligarchy, and the social order both parties exist to defend.

The parliaments of Europe, the governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — all are implicated. Australia has secretly deployed SAS commandos, Wedgetail battle-management aircraft and its Pine Gap intelligence station to the war. Britain hosts the Hormuz summit. Germany rearming. The United Nations Security Council paralysed. International law demolished.

The capitalist state system has proved, beyond any doubt, that it cannot stop this war. Only the international working class can.

theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lank and South Asia (SLLA) aligned with the International Committee of the Fourth International, calls on workers, youth and all those in opposition to this criminal war:

Strike: Workers in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany and across the world must take immediate industrial action — in ports, airports, logistics hubs, defence manufacturing plants and transport networks — to deny the war machine the means to function. The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the TUC and every major trade union federation has maintained criminal silence. Workers must act through their rank-and-file committees, independently of the bureaucracy, to halt the flow of arms, fuel and supplies to this war.

Occupy: Workers and youth must occupy workplaces, campuses and public spaces — not to petition governments that have proven themselves servants of the war, but to assert the independent political power of the working class. The eight million who marched on 28 March in the United States alone must be transformed from a protest movement into an organised political force with a program, a strategy and a leadership.

Organise internationally:  The war on Iran is not a national question. It is a world question. Workers in Sri Lanka, workers in South Korea, workers in Japan — whose governments are cutting separate deals with Iran to secure oil supplies even as the bombs fall — must join this struggle. The IRGC’s warning that it will “deprive the US and its allies of the region’s oil and gas for years” is a measure of how close the world stands to an economic and military catastrophe of civilisational proportions. The only answer is international working-class solidarity, organised through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).

Trump’s threat today must be understood for what it is: a declaration of war not merely against Iran, but against all the accumulated gains of human civilisation — against international law, against the prohibition on targeting civilian infrastructure, against the most fundamental norms of humanity that were codified after the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. As David North stated at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice: this war meets every legal and political criterion established at the Nuremberg Trials for a “crime against peace” — the supreme international crime.

If today, 7 April 2026, becomes the date on which Iranian civilisation is destroyed, it will also be the date that the capitalist world order signs its own death warrant in the eyes of humanity. It must instead become the date on which the international working class rises to say: Not in our name. Not with our labour. Not with our silence.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) sections of the ICFI are organising this resistance. We call on all workers, youth and socialist-minded people in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally to join them.

Demand the immediate, unconditional cessation of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Demand the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from the Middle East.

Build rank-and-file committees. Strike. Organise. Fight for socialism.

Solidarity With the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba — International Working Class Unity!

Hands Off Iran — Stop Imperialist War!

No More Genocide — Stop Trump’s War Machine!

Workers’ Power Against War and Austerity!

Ports Closed to War — Workers Unite!

Not One Penny for War — Fund Hospitals, Schools, Jobs!

Imperialist and Zionist Troops Out from the Middle East!

Stop the War Criminals — Nuremberg for Imperialist Aggression!

Stop the impending Genocide — Before it is too late: Condemn Trump’s Threat to Annihilate Iranian Civilisation Read More »

Banner

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 28 March 2026

class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, Far Right, Imperialism, Living Conditions, Militarism, politics, politics & economics, War, War Crimes, Weekly Political Report, World Economy, World War /

This political report for the week of March 22–28, 2026, is compiled by theSocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).

Banner

I. Imperialism and War: The Iran Catastrophe Deepens

The dominant political development of the week was the further catastrophic escalation of the US-Israeli war against Iran, now entering its fourth week. On Saturday, 22 March, President Trump posted an ultimatum on his social media platform demanding that Iran “fully open, without threat, the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours,” threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power infrastructure, beginning with its largest power plant. The WSWS characterised this as a threat of genocidal violence without precedent in the post-World War II era, comparable only to the Truman administration’s nuclear ultimatum to Japan in 1945.[1]

The scale of the threat was not rhetorical. The Damavand Combined Cycle Power Plant — Iran’s largest, located 35 kilometres from Tehran’s centre — supplies electricity to approximately ten million people. Any strike on the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Iran’s sole operating commercial reactor, risks catastrophic radioactive release. The IAEA Director General has warned that even severing the facility’s power supply lines could trigger a reactor meltdown. Iran responded by declaring all US and Israeli energy infrastructure across the region as legitimate targets, with Gulf states whose populations depend on electricity-powered desalination plants facing a potential humanitarian catastrophe of their own.

By week’s end, the trajectory had moved unambiguously toward ground invasion. Trump, in an interview with the Financial Times, declared openly: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon was preparing for “weeks of ground operations,” and approximately 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were reported to be readying for deployment. The 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force — a 3,000-strong rapid-deployment brigade — was identified by the New York Times as a candidate force for seizing Kharg Island, through which 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth provided the clearest statement of the administration’s actual position: “We negotiate with bombs. You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran.” This cynical formulation — coupling public talk of negotiations with accelerating military preparations — exposes the character of US imperialism: diplomacy as a screen for war, with mass violence as both means and end.

In Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered a further expansion of the “security zone” in the south. More than 1,238 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since the Israeli ground assault began on 2 March. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Three journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a marked press vehicle in Jezzine. Human rights documentation through Day 25 of the Iran war recorded at least 6,530 killed, including 640 confirmed civilians.

The WSWS insists that these are not individual acts of militarist excess but the systematic expression of a capitalist imperialist order in deep crisis, using war to secure control of energy resources, chokepoints and global hegemony. The Newroz 2026 statement of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi (Turkey/SEP) — issued on 22 March — placed the war in this broader framework, linking imperialist aggression against Iran, Lebanon and Gaza to the political interests of regional bourgeoisies and the strategic requirements of US world dominance. The statement called for the building of rank-and-file committees across factories, ports, mines, hospitals and schools, the withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East, the closure of NATO bases including those in Türkiye, and the formation of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.[2]

II. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism

Spain provided the week’s starkest illustration of pseudo-left capitulation to imperialism. The PSOE-Sumar coalition — which weeks earlier had revived the “No to war” slogan associated with the 2003 anti-Iraq War mass movement — announced a €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine following a meeting between Prime Minister Sánchez and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing Spain’s total commitment to approximately €4 billion. The frigate Cristóbal Colón was simultaneously dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean. A token €5 billion social subsidy package — temporary tax cuts and a symbolic rent freeze attempt — was offered as political cover.[3]

The manoeuvre was transparent. The PSOE-Sumar government made this announcement against the backdrop of an unprecedented wave of industrial action across Spain: a nationwide doctors’ strike involving more than 175,000 workers, a three-day national railway strike, airport ground handling stoppages threatening to paralyse Easter travel, regional education strikes — with Catalonia’s culminating in more than 100,000 people on the streets of Barcelona — and general strikes in the Basque Country on 17 March. The working class in struggle was answered with rearmament and tokenism.

The WSWS is unequivocal: PSOE-Sumar’s anti-war posture was never anything other than a political calculation to contain domestic opposition. Its rapid re-integration into NATO war logistics — complementing Spain’s earlier facilitation of US strikes on Iran — exposes the class interests that animate such formations. Sumar, positioned as the “left” partner of the coalition, is identified as a direct instrument of imperialism, channelling dissent into manageable parliamentary terrain while voting through military budgets and suppressing class struggle.

Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) received analogous treatment. Its call for “global people’s power” against the Iran war — superficially radical in rhetoric — was subjected to sharp political critique as pseudo-left opportunism. The FSP’s initiative, the WSWS argued, reflects a nationalist parliamentary logic that accommodates bourgeois parties and dissipates class power through appeals that refuse to break with the capitalist state. The SEP insists that genuine anti-war struggle must be grounded in proletarian internationalism and independent socialist organisation.[4]

III. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights

The Trump administration continued its domestic militarisation offensive during the week. ICE deployments to airports in force — framed publicly as immigration enforcement — were characterised by the WSWS  as a deliberate erosion of democratic norms and a rehearsal for the normalisation of federal paramilitary presence in civilian public life. The SEP connects this directly to the war drive: the same oligarchic project that prosecutes imperialist war abroad constructs the police state apparatus at home.

Australia’s Labor government provided a parallel illustration of bourgeois democracy’s hollowing out. Having lost a High Court ruling on offshore detention, the Albanese government circumvented the decision by transporting former asylum seekers to Nauru. The SEP described this as demonstrating the capitalist state’s readiness to flout its own legal constraints in order to uphold racist border regimes — which serve both capitalist labour market requirements and imperialist geopolitical alliances.

Cuba’s humanitarian crisis deepened further as a nationwide blackout struck the island amid US restrictions blocking incoming Russian fuel shipments. This is imperialist economic warfare targeting working people directly, using energy denial as a weapon of coercion.

The German city of Duisburg maintained its entry ban against Mohamedou Ould Slahi — the Mauritanian — a Guantánamo survivor and author, in a measure that exemplifies the integration of state repression, anti-democratic precedent and the ongoing brutalisation of those processed through imperialist detention machinery.

IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal

Class struggle intensified across multiple fronts, with the trade union bureaucracy consistently functioning as the principal obstacle to the conversion of industrial militancy into political power.

In London, more than 300 Unite members at Stagecoach’s Bow garage struck for four days (19–22 March) against punishing rosters, inadequate rest breaks and dangerous fatigue — conditions forcing drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Stagecoach mounted a systematic strikebreaking operation, importing replacement drivers from other cities and billeting them in hotels. Unite responded by sabotaging the action: officials called off a coordinated strike at Lea Interchange Bus Company — a Stagecoach subsidiary a few miles away — and declared a “win” based on a three-year deal pegging future increases to CPI rather than the previously demanded RPI, while leaving victimisation of union reps unaddressed. The Rail, Maritime and Transport union simultaneously suspended rolling stoppages by 1,800 London Underground drivers for closed-door talks.[5]

The WSWS analysis is direct: the union apparatus acts not as an instrument of working-class power but as a managerial layer whose function is to contain, fragment and ultimately defeat industrial resistance. The strategic response is the formation of rank-and-file committees that link garages and sectors, set non-negotiable safety demands, coordinate unified action, and raise the demand for democratic workers’ control of public transport.

In Australia, Tasmanian teachers conducted rolling statewide strikes over real-wage cuts and deteriorating conditions — the third round of action since September 2025 — while the AEU bureaucracy deliberately staggered the action by region (northwest on Tuesday, north on Wednesday, south on Thursday) to minimise its impact and prevent coordination with the simultaneous Victorian teachers’ strike. The tactic is well-established: token industrial action that creates the appearance of struggle while preserving the bureaucracy’s role as negotiating intermediary and absorber of militancy.[6]

Spain’s strike wave — the full breadth of which crossed healthcare, transport, rail, education and the public sector — demonstrated the objective depth of class anger. The Catalan education strike, supported by 90 percent of educators and culminating in 100,000 on the streets of Barcelona, is among the most significant educational mobilisations in recent Spanish history. That this emerged simultaneously with the PSOE-Sumar government’s announcement of a billion-euro military package for Ukraine underscores the central political contradiction: the same government which presides over real wage cuts and social austerity now channels resources to militarism while deploying union bureaucracies and its pseudo-left partners to contain the resistance.

V. Economic Warfare and Global Instability

The week’s economic developments were inseparable from the war drive. The Iran conflict’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of global oil passes — continued to generate financial turbulence across Asian markets. The imperialist war is simultaneously a political project and an act of structural economic destabilisation that strikes workers internationally through energy price inflation, supply chain disruption and currency volatility.

Cuba’s energy crisis — intensified by US restrictions on Russian fuel shipments — illustrates how imperialist economic coercion operates as a form of warfare targeting entire populations. The IMF, which had previously lauded Sri Lanka as an austerity “success story,” continued to provide ideological cover for the social devastation its programmes produce. These are not disconnected crises but expressions of the same capitalist order in its period of accelerating decay.

VI. The Revolutionary Tasks

The week’s events collectively underscore the axis of ICFI/SEP political analysis: war, dictatorship, austerity and bureaucratic betrayal are not separate phenomena but interlinked expressions of the capitalist system’s terminal crisis. Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum is not an aberration but the language of a ruling class prepared to obliterate the infrastructure of a nation of 90 million people to secure strategic and economic objectives. The pseudo-left formations — PSOE-Sumar, the FSP, the trade union bureaucracies — function consistently to contain and divert the social opposition that these conditions generate.

The correct working-class response — as the WSWS insists — is the building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities, international coordination through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, political independence from all bourgeois parties, and the construction of sections of the Fourth International to provide the revolutionary socialist leadership that the objective situation demands.

[1] Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum: A criminal threat of mass murder — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/23/wzwz-m23.html 

[2] Newroz 2026: Mobilize the working class against imperialist war and for workers’ power in the Middle East! — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/22/hynm-m22.html 

[3] Spain’s Socialist Party-Sumar government unveils €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/22/bkdx-m22.html 

[4] Sri Lanka: FSP “global people’s power” critique — WSWS coverage, week ending 28 March 2026

[5] East London bus drivers opposing fatigue face strike breaking by Stagecoach — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/22/iprj-m22.html 

[6] Australia: Teachers to strike across Tasmania against real wage cuts — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/23/ovkw-m23.html 

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 28 March 2026 Read More »

Scroll to Top