We must briefly clarify our position against false moralists and Sinhala chauvinist voices who falsely accuse us of being lenient toward the LTTE — claiming that we only highlight crimes committed by the military of the southern Sinhala state during the Northern-Eastern war, while failing to report the separate crimes of the LTTE.
We all know that the LTTE committed brutal war crimes. Nowhere have we denied this. We have every reason to reject those crimes, along with the reactionary political program and ideology that motivated them — and we do so unequivocally, completely, and without political qualification. The LTTE’s bombings of Sinhala civilians, the massacre of thirty-three Buddhist monks and novices at Aranthalawa in 1987, the ethnic cleansing of seventy-five thousand Muslims from the Northern Province in 1990, the assassination of political opponents and trade unionists, the abduction of Tamil children as soldiers, and the brutal suppression of every independent socialist and democratic tendency within Tamil society — these were all political crimes against the working class. We condemn them as such without reservation.
A protester lights a ceremonial lamp at a rally organized by the Association of Relatives of the Enforced Disappeared in the North and East, held in Jaffna on 30 August 2026 as part of the “Long Road to Justice” conference marking the International Day of the Disappeared. Image courtesy of Kumara Kana.
However, merely listing those crimes accomplishes nothing politically. We are a political organization — a Trotskyist political leadership being built as the socialist vanguard of the working class of Sri Lanka and South Asia, not an NGO compiling human rights reports. Our task is not to demonstrate moral equivalence between two sets of criminals. Our task is to explain to the working class the class nature of those crimes, who they served, and how the working class must respond to them.
The LTTE’s Terror was Strategy, Not Madness
The LTTE committed all these crimes in pursuit of a specific political program: Tamil ethnic separatism — the establishment of a separate pro-imperialist capitalist state in which the Tamil bourgeoisie and international finance capital could exploit Tamil labor. The primary threat to this program was not the Sri Lankan military. It was the possibility that Tamil workers and poor living in the North, East, and Colombo would unite with the Sinhala working class to find a common solution to the national question on the basis of class struggle. That unity — the unity of Sinhala and Tamil workers against their common class enemy — was the one development the LTTE could not survive politically.
Therefore, the LTTE systematically worked to prevent it. Division was its political oxygen. Instilling deep-seated hatred between Tamil and Sinhala communities was not a byproduct of its strategy — it was central to it. This is why the LTTE never made a class appeal to Sinhala workers. An ethnic nationalist organization that defines the Sinhala nation as the enemy is structurally incapable of making such an appeal. Instead, it pursued the deliberate terrorization of the Sinhala population: bomb attacks in crowded Colombo streets and railway stations, massacres of Sinhala and Muslim farming communities in border villages, the attack on the Temple of the Tooth Relic — the most sacred site of Sinhala Buddhist culture. As a separatist movement, it also carried out these attacks to demographically consolidate its claimed territory through ethnic cleansing.
These were not mad acts or simple reprisals. They were calculated political decisions by a leadership that understood — with cold clarity — that communal terror served its separatist program. Every bomb on a Colombo commuter train pushed Sinhala workers who might otherwise have questioned the war back into the arms of the ruling class. Every border village massacre made it politically impossible for Sinhala farmers to regard their Tamil neighbors as anything but “Tigers” or “terrorists.” This was the deliberate, strategic manufacture of hatred — the substitution of ethnic terror for class politics, the substitution of communal division for working-class unity.
A Political Symbiosis: LTTE and the Southern Ruling Class
On the other hand — and this is the decisive political point that only a Marxist analysis makes visible — escalating Sinhala-Tamil alienation was precisely what the ruling class in the South also required. In fact, the LTTE committing these crimes was exactly what the southern ruling class needed.
Following the so-called independence of 1948, the political program pursued by successive Colombo governments was built upon anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim chauvinism deployed systematically against the unity of working and oppressed people. The Citizenship Act of 1948 stripped a million Tamil plantation workers of their voting rights. The 1956 Sinhala-only language act institutionalized Tamil national oppression. The 1972 constitution entrenched Buddhist supremacism. And when the Sinhala working class demonstrated its revolutionary potential — in the 1953 hartal that brought workers of all communities together and drove the UNP government to its knees — the ruling class built the SLFP on a Sinhala chauvinist platform specifically to prevent that unity from repeating itself. When public sector workers launched the largest general strike in Sri Lankan history in 1980 demanding decent wages, Jayawardene sacked 100,000 of them — and then organized the 1983 pogrom that burned Tamil Colombo and ignited the full-scale civil war.
Sri Lankan capitalists learned the “divide and rule” method from British imperialists — as the catastrophic partition of India demonstrated — and applied it with devastating consistency. The LTTE executed this exact political method in its most barbaric form. Tactically, by terrorizing Sinhala workers and farmers into viewing every Tamil person as a “Tiger,” it trapped Tamil youth within a separatist political dead end, cutting them off from Sinhala class allies and conscripting their anger and sacrifice into its military battalions. Strategically, it handed the southern ruling class precisely the communal polarization it required to suppress working-class unity, justify military budgets, silence anti-war opposition, and brand every critic of the war as a terrorist sympathizer.
The youth and workers who carry this alienation forward today — who fill Sinhala chauvinist social media with hostility toward Tamil Mullivaikkal commemorations, who cheer the “War Heroes” mythology — are victims of this despicable politics jointly produced by both the LTTE and the southern ruling class. The LTTE’s terrorism and the ruling class’s chauvinism were not opposing forces. They were a political symbiosis, each sustaining the other’s grip on their respective populations at the expense of working people on both sides. These dynamics become clearly visible only within a Marxist analysis.
Indeed, part of the LTTE’s separatist politics was to sever the Sinhala people from the Tamil people through terror, and thereby to feed Sinhala chauvinism. Those who continue to advance this Sinhala chauvinism against the Tamil people today are merely carrying forward the political strategy first perfected jointly by the southern capitalist class and the LTTE. In this precise historical sense, the LTTE’s political paternity belongs to the Colombo ruling class — it was the monstrous product of a ruling class that manufactured racist war as its answer to the 1980 general strike and the threat of Sinhala-Tamil working-class unity.
Accountability Exposes the State that Protected the Criminals
Now, we say clearly: if there are LTTE leaders responsible for those crimes, they must be held accountable. And here we must be precise about what the current situation actually is.
The LTTE’s top political and military leadership — Prabhakaran, Soosai, Charles, Balasingham and others — are dead, killed in 2009 or before. But not all responsible figures are dead. Karuna Amman — Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan — commanded LTTE forces in the Eastern Province and bears command responsibility for atrocities committed there, including the Aranthalawa massacre. Pillayan — Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan — operating after 2004 defection as an anti-LTTE paramilitary under the protection of Sri Lankan military intelligence, led pro-government paramilitary forces responsible for child soldier abductions and political assassinations. KP — Kumaran Pathmanathan — managed LTTE arms procurement and international networks. All three are alive today.
And here lies the decisive exposure of the entire system: the southern Sinhala supremacist state that demands we “also” discuss LTTE crimes is the same state that gave Karuna Amman a diplomatic passport, appointed Pillayan as Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, and integrated these figures into its own political apparatus — shielding them from any accountability for their crimes, including Aranthalawa. Any genuine inquiry into LTTE war crimes would therefore expose not only the state’s criminal complicity in protecting Karuna and Pillayan — it would expose the state’s own political responsibility for producing the LTTE through the 1983 pogrom and decades of systematic anti-Tamil oppression, and would drag into the light its own direct war crimes at Mullivaikkal, Chemmani, Mannar, and across thirty years of military occupation. The southern state is not prepared for that. This is precisely why no such inquiry will ever be permitted by the Colombo ruling class — and why they suppress the truth about both sets of crimes simultaneously.
The Political Question, Not the Moral Ledger
The state in the South is a political and repressive institution — not simply a collection of individuals who committed crimes. The massacres, the enforced disappearances, the mass graves at Chemmani — these were not accidental overreaches. They were the structural implementation of state terror, deployed to defend the capitalist order. That state stands ready to commit these crimes again today and tomorrow — not only against Tamil people, but against the Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim working class as a whole, as it implements IMF austerity, criminalizes strikes, and prepares its military apparatus for deployment against workers who resist.
Therefore, what matters to us is not aligning lists of crimes to demonstrate that “both sides are morally wrong.” The most important matter is not the moral question but the political question. Morally speaking, all these crimes are indeed crimes — we condemn them all. But political accountability rests fundamentally with the Sinhala supremacist capitalist state of the South. That is the living institution. That is the armed apparatus. That is the class enemy that remains intact, shielding its own criminals, and threatening the working class today.
No mainstream media outlet in the South goes beyond glorifying “war heroes.” All southern media maintain silence regarding the crimes committed by state forces during the war in the North and East. We are among the very few exposing this truth — at political cost, as the history of our movement’s persecution by both the state and the LTTE demonstrates. Three Revolutionary Communist League members were murdered by the JVP. Five SEP members were kidnapped by the LTTE itself. We have never capitulated to either.
Therefore, to the Sinhala chauvinists who challenge us to write about LTTE crimes as a test of our “independence,” we say: admit that the southern Sinhala government’s military committed war crimes in the North and East. Demand that the southern mainstream media and every government since 2009 expose those crimes one by one. Demand the prosecution of Karuna for Aranthalawa — which your own government prevented. But we tell you: neither you nor the ruling class you serve, consciously or unconsciously, can ever do that. Because doing so would expose the entire system you are defending.
Highlighting the crimes of the southern state does not negate the crimes of the LTTE. In fact, precisely because the southern state attempts to cover up its own crimes and conceal the truth, it has been impossible to establish any genuine accountability mechanism for the crimes committed by the LTTE leadership and its surviving affiliates. To do so would require acknowledging the war crimes of the southern state, as well as the criminal complicity of the state in the post-defection crimes of Karuna and Pillayan. The southern state is not prepared for that — which is why it suppresses the truth about all of it. That is why we must stand for the truth and expose it against every attempt at suppression.
The Only Way Forward: International Socialist Unity
Our primary goal is to organize workers and oppressed people to prevent this country from being pushed into further separatist extremes, communal killings, and new crimes. Seventeen years after the war’s end, with 23 percent of the population in poverty, with Tamil land still under military occupation, with the disappeared still unaccounted for, and with the JVP/NPP government simultaneously hosting “War Heroes Day” ceremonies and implementing IMF austerity that devastates Sinhala and Tamil workers alike — the Tamil national question is not resolved. It has intensified. As long as the southern capitalist state cannot resolve it, Tamil nationalist capitalist leaders will attempt to bring separatism back to the forefront by exploiting the genuine, unaddressed grievances of the Tamil masses.
To prevent this, the working class must be continuously educated about the true nature of this capitalist state and its apparatuses of repression — that this state is established against the oppressed people and workers regardless of ethnicity, religion, or caste, the very divisions the ruling class manufactures, maintains, and capitalizes on; that its military is its repressive machine; that the “War Heroes” it glorifies are the war criminals it protects. The state’s crimes must not be buried by time or repression. They must be brought to the surface and remembered — because new generations cannot understand the true nature of the existing state without that history. Sinhala workers, farmers, and youth must properly understand this political reality to prevent this country from heading toward ethnic massacres once again. And Tamil workers, farmers, and youth must understand that justice for Mullivaikkal, for the disappeared, for the occupied lands — cannot come from Tamil nationalist parties representing the Tamil elite, nor from imperialist tribunals serving geopolitical interests, but only from the unified struggle of the working class of all communities.
The ruling political class, the Buddhist hierarchy aligned with the state, the media ecosystem serving ruling-class interests, and their racist proxy organizations are once again preparing to re-ignite anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim communalism. The JVP/NPP government’s limited and cosmetic gestures toward Tamil grievances — its carefully calibrated electoral manoeuvres designed to attract Tamil votes while maintaining the full apparatus of military occupation and suppression — are being weaponized by these forces as “proof” of capitulation to the Tamil diaspora and betrayal of the Sinhala nation. This propaganda is a deliberate falsification. The Dissanayake government has not resolved a single fundamental Tamil democratic demand: the military occupies Tamil land, the disappeared remain unaccounted for, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act remains intact. What the chauvinists present as “concessions” are the flimsiest of facades behind which the full machinery of Sinhala supremacist state power continues to operate. As the effects of the global economic crisis and imperialist war preparations encroach upon the country — forcing ever more severe austerity and driving an explosive growth of working-class struggles that the Dissanayake government has artificially suppressed with the collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy — the ruling class will inevitably resort to all its tried and tested methods of dividing the working class along ethnic and religious lines. The working class and youth of all nationalities must be alert to the rising fascistic tendencies that the post-war militarization, the “War Heroes” patriotismmythology, and the systematic cultivation of Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist organizations by successive governments have bred within Sri Lankan society — tendencies now finding their most visible expression in the social media campaigns targeting Tamil and Muslim communities, and which the ruling class will not hesitate to mobilize as organized street violence when the deepening economic crisis and the explosion of working-class struggles demand it.
To accomplish these tasks, we are building a revolutionary socialist leadership under the international socialist perspective — the perspective of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, and carried forward by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It is only under such a perspective that youth and workers in the North, South, and East can recognize past crimes and pain, unite against the common class enemy — the capitalist ruling class and the system it defends — and fight together for a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam as part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of South Asia, the perspective advanced by the ICFI in November 1987. Only under this framework, which resolves the Tamil national question through working-class power rather than communal partition or capitalist statehood, will there be no room for renewed separatism, no justification for new massacres, and genuine justice for all victims of this war.
Join us in this struggle. We are the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and we publish theSocialist.lk.
Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
Sent to the Pervomaisk City District Court (inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal (inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), with a copy to the World Socialist Web Site (freebogdan@wsws.org)
Bogdan Syrotiuk, April 2023
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), fighting among the working class and youth to build the revolutionary leadership in South Asia, in solidarity with the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), condemns in the strongest terms the fascistic verdict handed down on August 10, 2026, by a district court in the Nikolaev region sentencing Bogdan Syrotiuk—a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist, opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists—to 15 years in prison on the charge of “high treason under martial law.” We demand the immediate annulment of this verdict and Bogdan’s unconditional release.
Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine on April 25, 2024, on the unsubstantiated allegation that he was an agent of the Russian state. More than two years later, not a shred of evidence has ever been produced for that claim. What was in fact placed before the court was a set of six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site and a 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” These writings called for the international unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war launched by the Putin regime and prosecuted as a US-NATO proxy conflict; they exposed the Zelensky government’s rehabilitation of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division; and they documented the dismantling of elections and opposition politics in Ukraine. None of this constitutes treason under any legal standard that retains a shred of meaning. It is political speech, protected in principle by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Ukraine is a signatory.
The state’s own forensic institutions could not sustain the case. A 65-page report by the veteran Ukrainian criminologist Yuri Irkhin found nothing in Bogdan’s writings amounting to propaganda for Russian aggression. When the court ordered a second, state-directed examination in the hope of a different result, even that body could identify no call for the overthrow of the government, no advocacy of the seizure of power, and no support for the alteration of Ukraine’s borders. The court disregarded its own experts. It disregarded the defense. It disregarded the law. What was handed down on August 10 was not a judicial verdict but a political directive from the Zelensky regime, aimed—as the judgment itself half-admits in citing the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions—not at any act of espionage but at the growth of antiwar sentiment among Ukrainian workers and soldiers. Opinion polling in 2025 found 69 percent of Ukrainians favoring a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal from 2022, while more than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against Ukrainian soldiers for desertion since the invasion began. It is this mounting revolt from below, not any threat from Moscow, that the Zelensky dictatorship is moving to suppress through the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The character of the regime that has produced this verdict must be stated plainly. Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024. He rules today, more than two years later, by decree, under martial law, with elections suspended indefinitely. Communist parties and symbols have been banned since 2015. In 2022 the government suspended eleven opposition parties, subsequently banning outright the largest opposition bloc in parliament. The World Socialist Web Site itself has been blocked inside Ukraine since June 2024. Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, laws that Human Rights Watch has described as dangerously broad and vague, under which people who performed emergency services, construction and garbage removal in occupied territory have been prosecuted as traitors. The United Nations Human Rights Office reported as recently as September 2025 that it continues to document torture and ill-treatment of detainees in Ukrainian custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee has described conditions in Ukrainian pretrial facilities as potentially inhuman and degrading. A fifteen-year sentence inside this system, for a defendant whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest and who has for over two years been denied urgently needed medical care, is nothing less than a sentence of death by degrees.
We in Sri Lanka and South Asia have no difficulty recognizing this method of rule, because we have lived through its variants ourselves. The Sri Lankan state waged a communal civil war for decades under the banner of “national security,” using laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act to criminalize dissent, hold detainees without trial, and, in the war’s final phase, to carry out mass atrocities against the Tamil population that the state and its apologists continue to deny to this day. The Dissanayake-led JVP-NPP government, which came to power promising a break from this history, has instead deepened the IMF-dictated austerity program inherited from its predecessors, maintained the repressive apparatus of the state largely intact, and continued to suppress the democratic and social rights of workers, plantation labor, students, and the Tamil and Muslim minorities. Across South Asia, from the communal-nationalist project of Hindutva in India to military and civilian authoritarianism elsewhere in the region, the ruling classes respond to deepening economic crisis and mass social opposition not with concessions but with the criminalization of left-wing and antiwar politics. The persecution of Bogdan Syrotiuk is a sharp expression of a universal tendency of capitalism in its terminal, imperialist stage: as war and austerity generate irrepressible opposition from below, the ruling classes everywhere reach for dictatorship.
This is why the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk cannot be treated as a matter internal to Ukraine, to be left to the discretion of a court system that has already demonstrated, in the words of the World Socialist Web Site, its fascist contempt for the most basic democratic rights. It is a test for the international working class as a whole, including the working class and youth of Sri Lanka and South Asia. The imperialist powers that have armed and financed the Zelensky regime throughout this war—the United States above all, alongside the NATO powers and their allies—bear direct political responsibility for a war being escalated toward direct confrontation with Russia and, ultimately, toward a wider conflagration that already touches Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon and the flashpoints of the Indo-Pacific. Workers in Sri Lanka and across South Asia have a direct stake in this fight, both because the same imperialist powers that bankroll repression in Kyiv dictate the terms of austerity and militarization pursued by our own governments, and because the defense of Bogdan Syrotiuk is inseparable from the defense of the right of socialists everywhere—including in Colombo, Jaffna, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachchi, and every other city of this region—to organize the working class against war, communalism and capitalist exploitation without fear of imprisonment.
Bogdan Syrotiuk’s only crime was to tell the truth: that this is an imperialist war, that Ukrainian and Russian workers share a common class enemy in their respective ruling classes, and that the celebration of Nazi collaborators as national heroes is a crime against historical memory. For this he faces fifteen years prison sentence. A 15-year sentence in Ukraine’s prison system, where overcrowding, denial of medical care, and deaths in custody are documented by the Council of Europe and the United Nations, is a death sentence. Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over two years. He suffers from diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and the prison administration’s deliberate refusal to provide dental treatment — causing him severe, unrelenting pain — risks chronic infections that, left untreated, can lead to sepsis and death. Every day he remains behind bars is a threat to his life.
We call on the Pervomaisk City District Court and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal to annul this verdict without delay and to order Bogdan Syrotiuk’s immediate and unconditional release. We call on workers, students, trade unionists, lawyers, intellectuals, artists and all defenders of democratic rights in Sri Lanka and throughout South Asia to take up this case as their own: to pass resolutions in their unions, workplaces, universities and organizations demanding Bogdan’s freedom, and to join the international campaign being built by the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Overturn the verdict. Free Bogdan Syrotiuk now!
Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International
The Muslim Health workers who were subjected to racialist vilification and institutional discrimination at the Kalmunai North Base Hospital . Photo obtained from social media.
Since last week, a chauvinist campaign has swept across Sri Lankan social media, targeting newly recruited Muslim female health workers and nursing officers at Kalmunai North Base Hospital and other state institutions. The immediate trigger was their wearing of the headscarf as part of their professional uniform. Hospital management barred them from duty, citing rigid uniform codes. Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist networks on Facebook seized on the issue, with Sinhala youth posting fascistic slogans demanding the exclusion of Muslim women from public-sector healthcare. The matter escalated to Parliament on August 18–20, with Health Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa chairing an emergency meeting alongside Muslim and Tamil MPs, and affected workers filing complaints with the Human Rights Commission.
The position of the working class on this question is clear. Muslim nurses have the democratic right to wear the headscarf as part of their professional attire. The campaign to strip them of this right is not a defence of “uniformity” or “secularism” — it is an expression of the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism [*] constitutionally entrenched in the Sri Lankan capitalist state, which has for decades used ethnic and religious divisions to fracture the working class. It is the same state that has designed worker uniforms with callous disregard to the multi-ethnic interests of the working class of the island and forcibly imposes the same upon them. Defending the Muslim community against state attack and fighting internal reaction are not contradictory — they are two sides of the same class struggle, and both require the revolutionary unity of the working class across ethnic lines.
The defence of this right, however, cannot be separated from the broader fight against all forms of oppression — including the patriarchal structures within all communities — and cannot be entrusted to the Muslim bourgeois parties that have consistently subordinated the interests of Muslim workers to their own deals with the ruling elite.
Below, we publish our response to an opinion piece made against this racist campaign by Muslim content writer Shifana Niyas. Her piece raises issues that go well beyond the immediate uniform controversy — the nature of the Sinhala-Buddhist state, the question of national sovereignty, and the relationship between communal oppression and gender oppression within minority communities. On each of these questions, her analysis leads to conclusions that objectively serve the interests of the Muslim bourgeoisie, not the Muslim working class.
Niyas directs her fire at the chauvinist campaign against Muslim nurses and correctly points to the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state as the framework within which this oppression operates. But she never identifies the class roots of that state. Instead, she substitutes ethnic categories for class analysis: the problem is “Sinhala men and women,” and the solution is Muslim “sovereignty.” From this flows a series of conclusions that objectively serve the interests of the Muslim bourgeoisie, not the Muslim working class.
Her central thesis is that “the enemy of Muslim women is not the Muslim man. The enemy is the Sinhala men and women.” This formulation replaces class analysis with ethnic bloc-thinking. It erases the class divisions that exist within both the Sinhala and Muslim communities. The Sinhala worker who has been systematically poisoned by decades of state-sponsored chauvinism is not the same as the Sinhala capitalist politician who constitutionalised Buddhism as the state religion. The Muslim landlord or businessman who cuts deals with the major bourgeois parties is not the same as the Muslim nurse facing discrimination. When Niyas declares an entire ethnic group — men and women — the enemy, she is doing exactly what Sinhala chauvinists do: treating an ethnic community as a homogeneous bloc. This is not a radical analysis; it is the mirror image of the chauvinism she opposes.
Her assertion that “Muslim men will defend Muslim women regardless of the reasons” and that the struggle against Muslim patriarchy is “not a Sinhala problem” is particularly reactionary. It subordinates the fight against gender oppression to communal solidarity. It tells Muslim women that their struggles within their own community must be silenced in the name of ethnic unity. This is not a defence of Muslim women — it is an attempt to conscript them into a nationalist project that leaves patriarchal structures intact.
But there is a deeper issue here. Niyas treats Muslim patriarchy as an internal communal affair that outsiders have no business addressing. This is the logic of every bourgeois-nationalist tendency: defend the community against external attack and leave internal hierarchies untouched. The working class has a fundamentally different approach. The oppression of women — in all communities — is rooted in the material foundations of class society: the privatised family, women’s exclusion from social production, and the property relations that turn women into dependents. The fight against Muslim patriarchal structures is therefore not a diversion from the fight against Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism — it is the same fight, because both forms of oppression are sustained by the capitalist system. The program of the working class fights for the complete social, legal and economic equality of women: equal pay, the right to work, socialised child care, reproductive freedom, and the full participation of women in political life. These demands apply to Muslim women no less than to Sinhala or Tamil women — and they can only be won through the common struggle of working women and men across all communities. When Muslim women workers fight against patriarchal controls within their own families and communities, they are not weakening the struggle against Sinhala chauvinism — they are strengthening it, by building the independent political consciousness and organisation of the working class as a whole. A movement that tells Muslim women to set aside their own oppression in the name of communal unity is a movement that will never free them from either.
This brings us to the question of national self-determination, properly understood. The working class of every oppressed nationality has the democratic right to determine its own affairs — including the right to wage the struggle against reactionary cultural and patriarchal practices within its own community. But this struggle cannot be carried out in isolation, under the banner of communal identity. It must be waged in conscious solidarity with the working class of all other nationalities, under the leadership of the united revolutionary movement. The Sinhala-Buddhist state has no right whatsoever to intervene in the internal life of the Muslim community — not on the question of dress, not on the question of personal law, not on any question. When the bourgeois state claims to “liberate” Muslim women from Muslim men, as it does with the nursing uniform controversy, it is not advancing women’s rights. It is using women’s oppression as a pretext to assert Sinhala-Buddhist domination. The working class as a whole — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — must oppose such interventions unconditionally. But this defence of the community against the chauvinist state does not mean suspending the class struggle within the community. On the contrary: the most powerful blow that Muslim workers can strike against Sinhala chauvinism is to build their own independent political organisation, break with the Muslim bourgeois leadership, and join with Sinhala and Tamil workers in the common fight against capitalism — the source of all national and gender oppression. Defending the Muslim community against state attack and fighting internal reaction are not contradictory — they are two sides of the same class struggle, and both require the revolutionary unity of the working class across ethnic lines.
Then we come to Niyas’s programmatic conclusion: the problem is that Muslims lack “sovereign status” in Sri Lanka. This is the language of bourgeois nationalism, not of working-class emancipation. The demand for Muslim “sovereignty” inevitably means a separate Muslim state — or at minimum, a territorially based Muslim political authority. This is the same logic that produced the LTTE’s demand for Tamil Eelam: the conviction that the only solution to ethnic oppression is for each ethnic group to have its own state. History has delivered its verdict on this program. Twenty-six years of communal war between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE produced nothing but devastation for ordinary Tamil and Sinhala working people, while the bourgeoisies on both sides entrenched their power.
The real enemy is not “Sinhala men and women.” It is the capitalist ruling class that has, since 1948, systematically used Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism to divide working people along ethnic and religious lines. The Sinhala-only language policy, the constitutional enshrinement of Buddhism, the discriminatory university quotas — all of these were measures consciously adopted by the bourgeoisie to prevent the emergence of a united working-class movement. The 1953 hartal demonstrated the power of workers when they fight on class lines, across ethnic divisions. The ruling class has spent the seven decades since doing everything in its power to ensure that never happens again.
The Muslim bourgeois parties — the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and others — have played their own role in this. They have formed alliances with successive governments, from the UNP to the SLFP to the Rajapaksa regime, trading communal representation for a share of the spoils for the Muslim elite. They have no interest in mobilising ordinary Muslims in a common struggle with Sinhala and Tamil workers, because that would threaten the capitalist system on which their own privileges depend. Niyas’s call for Muslim “sovereignty” — for Muslims to “politically organise and resist” as Muslims — gives legitimacy to precisely these bourgeois forces.
The only way to defeat anti-Muslim chauvinism is to build a united movement of the working class — Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim — on a socialist program. The defence of Muslim health workers’ right to wear the hijab cannot be separated from the defence of all democratic rights for all working people, which in turn cannot be achieved without the overthrow of capitalism itself. The demand is not for Muslim sovereignty, but for the unity of the working class in the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka, as part of the international socialist revolution. That is the perspective we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), advance in solidarity with the perspective the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fights for — the only perspective that offers a way out of the endless cycle of communal violence and oppression.
The root of all injustices against minority nationalities is the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist capitalist state. Any minority-nationalist program against it only strengthens that very state. Workers of all nationalities, unite and fight against the oppressive state and all forms of backwardness!
[*] An explanatory note on terms — Racism, Communalism and Sinhala-Buddhist Chauvinism:
Racism is the ideology that divides humanity into superior and inferior groups on the basis of supposedly biological characteristics, and demands the domination of the former over the latter. It emerged as a distinct doctrine with the rise of capitalism from the sixteenth century onward, elaborated by philosophers, scientists and statesmen to justify the transatlantic slave trade, colonial plunder and the subjugation of entire peoples. Its hallmark is the claim that inequality is inscribed in nature — that the inferiority of the oppressed group is a fact of blood and bone, not of history.
Communalism is the political mobilisation of religious or ethnic identity as the basis for organising political life and defining relations between communities within a single state. In the South Asian context, it treats religious communities — Hindus and Muslims in India; Sinhala-Buddhists, Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka — as monolithic, mutually hostile blocs whose interests are inherently antagonistic. Every member of a community is presumed to share a common political stake that overrides class divisions; a Muslim worker and a Muslim landlord are treated as having the same “Muslim interests.” The political program of communalism is the capture or retention of state power by one community at the expense of others.
The political program of communalism is the capture or retention of state power by one community at the expense of others. This is not a matter of prejudice alone — it is a program for the organisation of the state itself. The communalist conceives of the state as the property and instrument of his own community. Other communities are to be tolerated, at best, as second-class citizens, permanently excluded from the levers of power. The entire constitutional and legal apparatus — language policy, religious establishment, citizenship laws, employment quotas, the regulation of personal law and attire — is systematically designed to codify and enforce the supremacy of one community over all others. When this domination is challenged, the communalist does not appeal to democratic rights or legal remedies; he resorts to the mob and the pogrom, to the burning of homes and businesses, to the physical expulsion or liquidation of the minority — confident that the state he has captured will shield him from consequence. Communalism is therefore not a “cultural” or “religious” phenomenon. It is a political program of the bourgeoisie of the dominant community, which presents its own class rule as the collective interest of the entire community in order to secure itself against both the rival bourgeoisies of other communities and, above all, the united opposition of the working class.
The two ideologies differ in their raw material: racism constructs hierarchy around biology; communalism constructs it around religion, language and ethnicity. But they are identical in their social function. Both construct the minority as an alien, threatening “other”; both attribute inherent inferiority; both demand subordination or exclusion from public life; both produce pogroms, discriminatory laws, economic marginalisation and state violence. And both are weapons of the bourgeoisie, deployed to fracture the working class, prevent the emergence of a unified class movement, and provide a scapegoat for the social misery that capitalism itself creates.
Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is the specific, state-codified form that communalism takes in Sri Lanka. It does not require a doctrine of biological race — Sinhalese and Muslims are not distinguishable by skin colour or physiognomy — but it operates through identical mechanisms. The constitutional enshrinement of Buddhism, the Sinhala-only language policy, the discriminatory treatment of Muslim personal law and attire, and the periodic unleashing of anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil mob violence are the institutional expressions of a chauvinism that functions, in practice, exactly as racism does. The raw material is communal prejudice; the finished product is a chauvinist state. The working class fights both with the same weapon: the revolutionary unity of workers across all communal and racial lines against the capitalist system that breeds them.
The claim that an ethnic minority is violating the rights of the ethnic majority under a Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist constitutional framework and chauvinist political hegemony is false. It is nothing more than fear-mongering designed to racially intimidate minorities. Neither Muslims nor Tamils possess the state power to intimidate or discriminate against Sinhala-Buddhists. Their actions are strictly defensive reactions against an oppressive capitalist state. The chauvinist who howls that his “rights” are under threat is not defending a majority under siege; he is demanding that the state he controls crush a minority that has no state of its own. The majority’s “grievance” is the grievance of the oppressor who resents the very existence of the oppressed.
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Below we reproduce the opinion piece by Shifana Niyas, posted on her Facebook on 21 August, to which the above is a response.
“What we are witnessing today is an epic Sinhala patriarchal meltdown over the issue of the Muslim nursing uniform. One can also see how Sinhala women contribute to this conversation and indirectly strengthen their patriarchy. My position that Sinhala men and women are two sides of the same oppressive face of the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state can be seen in real-time social media conversations.
But beyond that, I want to stress something important. The attack on Muslim culture through AI-generated content is increasing at an alarming rate. The inability of Muslims to counter-generate content or confront this problem politically has put them in a position of real disadvantage.
To start with, what stops Buddhists from seeing content ridiculing their culture/religion is not any inherent superiority (far from it), but rather the fear of retribution and state persecution. Put bluntly, no one except Buddhists believes in the superiority of Buddhism or Buddhist culture—no one has to (the same goes for other religions). But the problem is that one group (Sinhala-Buddhists and Sinhala Christian Zionists) has the freedom, without consequence, to antagonize another group, while the other has to defend itself but cannot antagonize in return. This is the unequal relation of power between the Sinhalese (sovereign) and minorities (non-sovereign). One cannot resolve this by singing the national anthem before ifthar.
Then, Muslim women’s bodies are more regulated by the Sinhala-Buddhist state under the Sinhala male gaze. What does that mean? Most of these conversations about Muslim nursing attire are led by Sinhala men who want to impose their version of what a nursing uniform ought to be, informed by their cultural values, on Muslim women. I have said it before and will say it again: the enemy of Muslim women is not the Muslim man. The enemy is the Sinhala men and women. To scapegoat Muslim patriarchy for Sinhala patriarchal frustration is something that should be resisted. Muslim women’s struggle, or lack thereof, against Muslim patriarchy is not a Sinhala problem either. Muslim men will defend Muslim women regardless of the reasons.
Finally, it does not matter what dress code female nurses in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim countries wear. Florence Nightingale’s attire is irrelevant to this conversation. What is relevant and important is that Muslim female nurses require a certain uniform, and they have the right to it. You do not have to respect it or like it because the rights of Muslims are not dependent on your personal preference. The mandatory cremation policy and dress-code issues are both a result of Muslims not having sovereign status in Sri Lanka. Why Sinhalese can ridicule Islam but Muslims cannot insult Buddhism is a sovereignty issue, not an ethical question. So, instead of explaining to people who act on the power bestowed upon them by the state about the principles and benevolence of Islam, try to politically organize and resist. After all, you can sing the national anthem as loudly as you want, but unless you are a sovereign subject, you are under Sinhala-Buddhist social domination.”
theSocialist.lk republishes the following statement by the WSWS Editorial Board published on WSWS.org on 10 August 2026. We call upon our readers to join the fight to ensure the immediate and unconditional release of Syrotiuk.
Bogdan Syrotiuk
On August 10, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The verdict, handed down by a district court in the Nikolaev region, also orders the confiscation of his property and electronic devices and the destruction of the socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents taken from him.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International denounce this verdict and call on workers, young people and all defenders of democratic rights around the world to demand Bogdan’s immediate release.
The verdict will be immediately appealed. Under Ukrainian law, the appeal must be filed within 30 days. We call on all supporters of democratic rights to back these legal actions and call for the annulment of the sentence.
Bogdan, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason … under martial law.” But the record of the case contains no act of treason—no espionage, no sabotage, no collaboration with any military force. The sole evidence presented against him consisted of his writings, published on the World Socialist Web Site, and his communications with the editors who published them.
The state’s experts examined 14 of Bogdan’s writings and included seven in the indictment. The court was then forced to drop one of the seven—an article on the military commissariats’ violent seizure of draft dodgers—after its own forensic commission could find nothing criminal in it. Bogdan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for six articles.
What was the subversive content? According to the court, the articles contained “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons with fascists and Nazis,” “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” and “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”
In fact, everything written by Bogdan is politically and historically accurate. The “legitimately elected political leadership” is a president whose term of office expired in May 2024. Zelensky remains in power more than two years past his legal mandate, ruling by decree under a state of permanent martial law. Elections have been canceled and basic democratic rights suspended. Bogdan has been convicted of failing to recognize “democratic processes” in a country where no democratic processes exist. His is a verdict handed down by a regime of illegality.
As for the “national heroes” whom Bogdan is accused of “reinterpreting,” they are Stepan Bandera and the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division—Nazi collaborators who supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and were implicated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. The court’s complaint about “comparisons with fascists and Nazis” refers to Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and celebration of these forces.
Among the “proofs” of treason cited by the court are Bogdan’s article “The crimes of the Banderovites against the Ukrainian people: Notes by a Ukrainian Trotskyist” and his 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” In any country where democratic rights retain the slightest meaning, such writings are protected speech. In Ukraine under Zelensky, they carry a 15-year sentence.
When Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on April 25, 2024, the state claimed he was functioning as an agent of the Russian government. In the more than two years since, nothing was produced to substantiate that libelous allegation. In fact, the articles that are cited in the conviction make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to the Russian invasion and the Putin regime.
The verdict refers several times to the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions. This exposes the fact that the prosecution of Bogdan is not about the manufactured pretext of support for Russia. Rather, it is aimed at the growing opposition to war and the Zelensky regime among Ukrainian workers and youth.
The evidence presented in Bogdan’s defense was never answered. A 65-page report by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, found in Bogdan’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” Rather than respond to it, the court ordered a new examination from a state forensic institute—which, even so, found in the articles no calls for the overthrow of the state, the seizure of power, subversive acts or the alteration of Ukraine’s borders.
The defense established that nothing in the record made out the elements of treason, and that Bogdan’s writings were political speech protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court swept all of this aside.
The verdict was not the outcome of a legal proceeding but the execution of a political directive from the Zelensky dictatorship. It states that Bogdan acted “on instructions from a representative of the World Socialist Web Site, under the pseudonym ‘David’”—identified in the judgment itself as David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS. The Ukrainian state is asserting the power to declare international socialist and antiwar publications criminal enterprises, and collaboration with them treason.
The decision to destroy the YGBL’s program, its brochures, leaflets and folders of printed articles exposes the real content of the verdict. The methods are those of fascist regimes: imprison the opposition, confiscate its materials, burn its writings. The court even ordered Bogdan to pay more than 178,000 hryvnia to cover the cost of the forensic “examinations” used to convict him.
The sentencing of Bogdan takes place in a country in which left-wing politics has been outlawed. Communist parties and symbols have been banned in Ukraine since the “decommunization” laws of 2015. In 2022, the Zelensky government suspended 11 opposition parties, including the largest opposition party in parliament, which was subsequently banned outright.
Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office, which reported in September 2025 that it “continues to document cases of torture and ill-treatment” of detainees held by the Ukrainian state. Human Rights Watch describes the collaboration laws as “overly broad and vague”; among those prosecuted are people who carried out “emergency services, construction, humanitarian relief and garbage removal” in occupied territory.
The World Socialist Web Site has been banned in Ukraine since June 6, 2024, six weeks after Bogdan’s arrest.
All of this has been buried and concealed from the public by the government and media outlets that claim the war is being waged in defense of Ukrainian democracy.
The frame-up of Bogdan is the act of a desperate regime. Opposition to the war is mounting within Ukraine itself. More than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against soldiers for desertion or absence without leave since 2022, the majority of them in the past year. In 2025, 69 percent of Ukrainians told Gallup that the country should seek a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal of opinion since 2022. Terrified of the growth of antiwar sentiment among workers and soldiers, the Zelensky government is intensifying repression at home while working to create the framework for the direct entry of the NATO powers into the war.
A sentence of 15 years in a Ukrainian prison is the equivalent of a death sentence. The conditions in Ukraine’s penitentiary system are well documented. At the United Nations Committee Against Torture’s review of Ukraine in April 2025, experts cited overcrowding, inadequate access to food and water, the absence of independent medical examinations and a rising toll of deaths in custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee, reporting on its October 2023 visit to Ukraine, described decaying facilities in which remand prisoners are confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day and found conditions in one pretrial detention center so degraded that it judged them potentially “inhuman and degrading.”
Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year, despite repeated promises from the prison administration. Every day behind bars is a threat to his life.
His fate cannot be left to the courts of a state that has just demonstrated its fascist contempt for democratic rights. Bogdan’s freedom will be won by the mobilization of the international working class, youth and all progressive organizations and individuals dedicated to the defense of democratic rights. We appeal to workers, trade unions, student and youth organizations, civil liberties groups, and socialist and anti-war movements in every country: Take up Bogdan’s case. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions, schools and universities demanding his release. Issue public statements of protest.
Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the World Socialist Web Site at freebogdan@wsws.org.
The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is a fight against imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism. Fill out the form below to get involved.
On Friday, August 14, 2026, the Free Media Movement (FMM) is hosting a forum at the Sri Lanka Press Institute titled “Proposed Chartered Institute of Media Professionals, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of the Right to Expression.” The panel features human rights lawyer Lakshan Dias, right-wing political strategist Shiral Lakthilaka, and myself, representing the Trotskyist perspective of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
Our participation in this event may draw questions from journalists, workers, and youth as to why a representative of the revolutionary socialist-internationalist movement is sharing a platform with a right-wing strategist of the capitalist establishment and a liberal NGO-oriented human rights lawyer? Does this not imply a compromise with their politics, or a concession to the reformist framework of the FMM?
The answer is an emphatic no. We are intervening in this forum precisely to wage an uncompromised political battle: to expose the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois traps being laid before media workers, to draw the sharpest line of demarcation between revolutionary Marxism and the bankrupt politics of liberal reformism and bourgeois constitutionalism, and to present the working class with an independent, revolutionary strategy to defeat the National People’s Power (NPP)/JVP government’s Chartered Institute of Media Professionals (CIMP) Bill. We are stepping onto this platform not to seek consensus with Lakthilaka and Dias, but to politically destroy the positions they represent before an audience of journalists, media workers, youth, and intellectuals — and to win that audience to the independent class line of the Fourth International.
The Principle: Why Revolutionaries Intervene in Bourgeois Forums
The objection that revolutionaries should not share a platform with class enemies — that doing so implies political endorsement or compromise — is not new. It is a species of the same “Left” infantilism that Lenin demolished in his 1920 pamphlet, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, which rejected ultra-left abstentionism as sectarian passivity that leaves the working class under the unchallenged ideological influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies.
Abstentionism presents itself as revolutionary purity. “We will not soil ourselves by sharing a platform with class enemies.” “We will not enter reactionary trade unions led by social-chauvinists.” “We will not participate in bourgeois parliaments.” This posture feels radical. It satisfies the subjective need for political cleanliness. But its objective effect is the opposite of revolutionary: it vacates the field. It leaves the trade unions entirely in the hands of the reformist bureaucrats. It leaves the parliament to the bourgeois parties. It leaves the FMM forum to Lakshan Dias and Shiral Lakthilaka — to liberal legalism and bourgeois constitutionalism — without a single countervailing voice. The workers, journalists, and youth who attend that forum will hear only one side: the side that tells them to petition the state, to trust the courts, to seek redress within the framework of the very system that is strangling their rights.
That is not revolutionary purity. It is political desertion. It is abandoning the masses to the ideological hegemony of the class enemy at the very moment they are searching for an alternative.
The German “Left” Communists argued that revolutionaries should refuse to work in reactionary trade unions because those unions were dominated by social-chauvinist and counter-revolutionary leaders. They argued that revolutionaries should refuse to participate in bourgeois parliaments because parliamentarianism was “historically and politically obsolete.” Lenin’s response was devastating:
“If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the ‘leaders’… but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations — even the most reactionary — in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found.”
This is the fundamental principle. The revolutionary party does not choose its terrain of struggle according to its own convenience. It goes to where the masses are — or, in this case, to where the journalists, media workers, content creators, and politically conscious youth who are seeking answers on the question of press freedom will be gathered. The FMM forum, whatever its political limitations, will draw precisely this audience. To refuse to participate, to leave the platform entirely to Lakshan Dias and Shiral Lakthilaka, would be to abandon that audience to the influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois politics. That would be not revolutionary purity but political cowardice.
Lenin was even more explicit on the question of participating in bourgeois parliaments — institutions far more reactionary in their function than a civil society forum:
“Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers… follow the lead of the Catholic clergy… it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class.”
The same logic applies here. The journalists and media workers who will attend the FMM forum are not yet won to the revolutionary perspective. Many are undoubtedly attracted to the liberal-legalist arguments of Dias or the bourgeois-constitutionalist calculations of Lakthilaka. The task of the Trotskyist is to be present in that forum, to present the Marxist alternative, and through that intervention to educate, expose, and win the most advanced elements to the independent class line.
The Bolsheviks themselves provided the historical model. In 1905, they correctly boycotted the Bulygin Duma — a consultative “parliament” — because the objective situation was rapidly developing toward mass strikes and armed uprising. But in 1906, when the revolutionary tide had receded, the boycott of the Duma was a mistake, and the Bolsheviks rectified it. They participated in the most reactionary of parliaments, used its rostrum for revolutionary agitation, and built the party’s connection with the masses through that work. Lenin summarized the lesson:
“The Bolsheviks’ boycott of ‘parliament’ in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience… It would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other conditions and other situations.”
Today, in Sri Lanka, the situation is not one of mass revolutionary upsurge in which the working class is building soviets and the question of power is immediately posed. It is a period of mounting social crisis, deepening austerity, and the construction of an authoritarian state apparatus — in which broad layers of journalists, content creators, and youth are searching for a political orientation. In such conditions, to boycott a public forum on press freedom because it is organized by a liberal NGO and features bourgeois speakers would be to turn one’s back on the very layers we seek to win. The correct tactic is to intervene, to demarcate, and to fight.
No Compromise: The Sharpest Demarcation
To intervene is not to compromise. The distinction is fundamental, and confusion on this point is fatal.
A compromise, in the Leninist sense, involves a concession on program or principle — an agreement to subordinate the independent interests of the working class to those of the bourgeoisie or the petty bourgeoisie. The Popular Front — the subordination of the Communist Party to a bourgeois-led coalition — was such a compromise. The trade union bureaucracy’s no-strike deals with the Dissanayake government are such a compromise. The institutionalized journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill in exchange for pensions and bank loans are making such a compromise.
Our participation in the FMM forum involves no such thing. We have not modified a single position. We have not muted a single criticism. We have not agreed to any common platform, joint statement, or unified demand with Lakthilaka, Dias, or the FMM. On the contrary, we are appearing on their platform for the explicit purpose of exposing the bankruptcy of their politics and presenting the revolutionary alternative. We are not their allies. We are their political antagonists, and we will use the occasion to make that fact unmistakably clear to every person in the room.
This is the method of the united front as elaborated by the Fourth International — not the Popular Front of class collaboration, but the united front of political exposure. Trotsky, in his 1933 letter “The United Front for Defense,” argued that Communists and Social Democrats could undertake common actions against fascism — but only on the basis of complete organizational and political independence, and only for the purpose of exposing the reformist leaders’ refusal to fight and winning their rank-and-file supporters to the revolutionary party. The same principle applies here: we share a platform with Lakthilaka and Dias not to blur the lines between us, but to sharpen them to the breaking point.
The Political Biographies: Who We Are Confronting
To understand why our intervention is necessary, one must understand precisely whom we are confronting on this platform.
The Free Media Movement (FMM)
The FMM was formed in the early 1990s as a liberal civil society and media advocacy organization. While historically positioned as a defender of press freedom against state violence and censorship, its political foundation has always been bounded by the limits of bourgeois democracy and civil society reformism. The FMM operates heavily within an NGO framework, drawing funding and ideological orientation from Western liberal foundations. Rather than mobilizing the independent class power of media workers and the broader working class, its strategy relies on lobbying the capitalist state, petitioning bourgeois courts, issuing press releases, and appealing to “democratic norms” and international human rights bodies.
When faced with the systemic crisis of capitalism, the FMM seeks to negotiate minor procedural safeguards within the existing state structure. It avoids exposing the intrinsic link between the capitalist state’s drive for austerity — the IMF program enforced by the NPP/JVP government — and its necessity to strangle free expression. Its forum, while ostensibly a forum for debate, is structured within this liberal-reformist framework: the assumption that the problem is a bad bill that can be amended or defeated through advocacy, rather than a capitalist state that must be overthrown.
Shiral Lakthilaka
Shiral Lakthilaka is a veteran political strategist, constitutional lawyer, and commentator who represents the establishment of right-wing bourgeois politics in Sri Lanka. Having spent decades operating within the corridors of power, Lakthilaka has been closely aligned with major capitalist parties, including the United National Party (UNP) and the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). He served as a senior advisor to former President Maithripala Sirisena during the UPFA-UNP coalition government, helping to navigate state policy and constitutional manipulations.
Lakthilaka’s political role is that of a class-conscious defender of the capitalist state. His opposition to specific government bills, including the CIMP Bill, is strictly tactical and legalistic. He views press freedom not as an unconditional democratic right of the working class, but as an institutional mechanism necessary for elite political competition and bourgeois governance. His politics aim to preserve the stability of the capitalist order and protect corporate media interests. When his own parties were in power, they fortified their arsenal of oppression with the Press Council Act, parliamentary privileges laws, police violence, and emergency regulations against workers and journalists. His critique of the NPP regime is not a critique of state repression in principle — it is the grievance of one faction of the ruling class against another.
Lakshan Dias
Lakshan Dias is a well-known human rights lawyer, civil society activist, and liberal commentator. He has built a career representing victims of state excesses, religious minorities, and political dissidents in the courts, making him a prominent legal voice in civil society circles.
Despite his opposition to state repression, Dias operates within a liberal-procedural framework. His perspective assumes that the capitalist state and its legal apparatus can be reformed to protect fundamental rights through public interest litigation, constitutional advocacy, and international pressure. He treats democratic rights as abstract legal concepts separated from class relations and the socio-economic crisis. Dias’s framework ignores the fact that the legal apparatus is an instrument of class rule, ultimately encouraging workers and youth to seek redress within the very court system and state structure that enforces capitalist austerity. His is the politics of the supplicant — the belief that the state can be persuaded to restrain itself — and it is politically lethal for the working class.
By creating a state-controlled system of accreditation, a political “Interim Council” appointed directly by the Media Minister, and a Disciplinary Committee empowered to disenroll members for vaguely defined “professional misconduct,” the state is establishing a gatekeeper over public discourse. The definition of “media professional” in Section 27 — extending to “writers, content developers, content editors, anchors, presenters, broadcasters, journalists, editors, publishers, media owners, media managers, media educators, media researchers, media technicians and camerapersons” — is deliberately cast to sweep bloggers, social media commentators, YouTubers, and socialist publications into a state disciplinary net. Facing mounting popular anger against IMF-mandated austerity, privatization, and police-state measures — including the six-times-extended state of emergency and the essential services ban on Government Press workers — the NPP/JVP government views unregulated digital media as a mortal threat to its rule.
The Traps of “Opposition”
The crisis of press freedom in Sri Lanka is compounded by the political bankruptcies of those who claim to speak against the bill or who openly welcome it.
As exposed in our article “The Betrayal of the Pen,” a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum of institutionalized corporate journalists has greeted the CIMP Bill with enthusiasm. Seeking personal advancement — state-certified status, bank loans, pensions, and foreign visas — these courtiers of the capitalist state are willing to trade press freedom for material privileges. They see the CIMP not as a cage, but as an exclusive club that protects their professional status while the state muzzles independent content creators and working-class commentators.
On the other hand, the “opposition” mounted by the FMM, Lakshan Dias, and Shiral Lakthilaka offers no path forward for the working class.
The Liberal/NGO Trap: The FMM and liberal lawyers like Dias reduce the struggle against state repression to appeals, judicial petitions, and lobbying within the framework of bourgeois constitutionalism. They treat press freedom as an abstract legal issue, detached from the capitalist crisis and the IMF program. They foster the dangerous illusion that the capitalist state — or its courts — can be persuaded to protect democratic rights. This is a political dead end. The state that is constructing the repressive apparatus will not be persuaded to dismantle it by a well-argued legal brief. Democratic rights are not granted by the benevolence of judges; they are won and defended through the organized power of the working class.
The Bourgeois Establishment Trap: Figures like Lakthilaka represent factions of the capitalist opposition (UNP/SJB) whose critique of the NPP regime is purely tactical. They do not oppose state repression in principle. As stated before, while in power, their own parties deployed the Press Council Act, police violence, and emergency regulations against workers and journalists. Their goal is to exploit popular discontent to maneuver back into office — where they will execute the same capitalist austerity and the same attacks on democratic rights. The working class has no stake in which faction of the bourgeoisie administers the state. Its task is to overthrow that state entirely.
Our Strategy: The Independent Mobilization of the Working Class
We are intervening in this forum to explicitly break with the politics of the FMM, Lakthilaka, and Dias, and to present a Trotskyist line of demarcation to journalists, youth, and workers.
Press freedom is an unconditional right, not a state license. We reject the premise that the capitalist state has any right to certify, register, or discipline media workers or content creators. The CIMP Bill must be defeated in its entirety — not amended, not moderated, not subjected to “safeguards” negotiated by liberal lawyers, or mandated by bourgeois courts. Democratic rights are won and defended through class struggle, not granted by ministerial decree or judicial review.
Austerity requires repression. The assault on press freedom is directly linked to the crisis of global capitalism. The NPP government cannot enforce IMF-mandated destruction of living standards, health, and education without muzzling the channels through which working-class opposition is organized. The fight against the CIMP Bill is inseparable from the fight against the IMF program, against the state of emergency, against the essential services orders, and against the entire repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.
Break from the bourgeois state and its courtiers. We call on honest journalists and content creators to reject the state’s bribes of pensions and loans, and to break decisively from the institutionalized media elite collaborating with the regime. The pen that serves the capitalist state will ultimately be crushed by that state. The pen that aligns itself with the struggles of the working class against IMF austerity, imperialist war, and capitalist dictatorship will find an unyielding defense.
Build rank-and-file committees of media workers. Freedom of expression cannot be defended by appealing to capitalist courts or parliamentary committees. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class. Media workers, tech workers, and content creators must form independent rank-and-file committees, completely separate from corporate media owners, trade union bureaucracies, and the state apparatus. These committees must link their struggle to the broader fight of the working class — in the hospitals, the power stations, the post offices, the schools, and the plantations — against the common enemy.
For a workers’ government based on rank-and-file committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages. The ultimate guarantee of press freedom is the overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government, based on democratically elected rank-and-file committees, that will place the banks, major corporations, and the media under the democratic control of the working class.
For the socialist reorganization of society — the only foundation for genuine democracy and press freedom.
A Platform for Political War
We use this platform at the Sri Lanka Press Institute not to seek consensus with Lakthilaka and Dias, but to wage political war against everything they represent. We are not their colleagues. We are not their co-panelists in any meaningful sense. We are their irreconcilable political enemies, and we will use every minute of this forum to demonstrate to the journalists, media workers, and youth in attendance why the politics of liberal reformism and bourgeois constitutionalism are a trap, why the capitalist state cannot be reformed, and why the only force capable of defending press freedom is the internationally united working class, organized independently and armed with a socialist program.
The working class does not plead with its enemy. It mobilizes to defeat it. We call on media workers, youth, and the working class to join us in building an independent movement for socialism — the only real guarantee of true freedom of expression.
Sri Lankan singer, Umaria Sinhawansa performing on stage. Photo from Sinhawansa’s Facebook
The ongoing conflict between Sri Lanka’s singers, lyricists, and composers over royalties and copyright is not a personal quarrel or a legislative oversight. It is the music industry colliding with the irreducible logic of capitalist property relations — and the Intellectual Property Act No. 36 of 2003 lays that logic bare with brutal clarity.
The Act defines the “author” of a musical work as the physical person who created it — the composer of the melody and the writer of the lyrics. To the author belong the economic rights: the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform, broadcast, and commercially exploit the work. To the author also belong the moral rights: the right to be named, the right to object to distortion or mutilation prejudicial to honour or reputation.
The singer is not the author. The singer is a “performer,” relegated to a separate chapter on “Related Rights.” Under Section 17, the performer has limited exclusive rights over the broadcasting and fixation of an unfixed performance. But Section 17(2) extinguishes even these: once the singer authorises the incorporation of the performance into a recording, those exclusive rights cease. The singer’s sole remaining entitlement is Section 19 — a right to “a single equitable remuneration” whenever the recording is broadcast or publicly performed, shared with the producer. No moral right. No copyright. No ownership of the finished product.
The voice that gave the song its soul has no claim. The law can grasp what is fixed on paper — notation, words — as property. What is embodied in performance — the timbre, the phrasing, the breath, the interpretative intelligence that transforms marks on a page into music — is not recognised as “creative” in the legal sense. It is labour rendered unto the property of others.
This is the correct logic of bourgeois law. It is not a mistake awaiting correction. The law does what capitalist property law must do: disaggregate a collaborative artistic whole into assignable, tradable units of ownership. The composer and lyricist own the melody and the words. They can sell them — separately. Other singers will perform them. The lyrics can be set to a new melody. The melody can be synchronised with different words. Content creators will feed both into artificial intelligence to generate new works. The singer who first gave the song life has no legal standing to object, because the singer owns nothing.
And here Marxists must be precise. This recombination, this improvisation, this ceaseless transformation of existing cultural material — a song sung by a different voice, lyrics adapted to a new melody, a melody reimagined with new words — is how art has always developed. These are not violations to be legally restrained. They are the processes through which music breathes. Marxists do not oppose this. We do not defend the “moral right” of the original creator to freeze a work in amber. That moral right is itself a bourgeois legal construct. The tragedy is not that songs can be reimagined — it is that under capitalism, reimagination takes the form of dispossession, where one set of artists profits from the labour of another while the law sanctifies the arrangement.
Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), grasped the fundamental contradiction of art under class society. He observed that art under capitalism “flourished in the abundance and in the leisure of the governing classes, and remained in their keeping.” The artist was, in the final analysis, a dependent of the bourgeoisie — and when the axe of revolution cut down the old props, “the element of keeping which was almost intangible when social relations were undisturbed, was bared in all its crudity.” What Trotsky described for the writer and painter applies with equal force to the musician. The seeming independence of the artist is an illusion sustained by the market. When the market turns, the illusion shatters, and what remains is the brute fact of property.
The Sri Lankan Act merely codifies this dependency with juridical precision. The composer and lyricist may feel themselves secure in their ownership — but they too are dependent on the market, on publishers, on streaming platforms, on the very property regime that temporarily advantages them. The singer is one step further down the chain of dispossession. But the chain itself is the problem.
Trotsky insisted that “culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.” “Art needs comfort, even abundance.” Under capitalism, that abundance is channelled into private accumulation. The material security that would free artists to collaborate without fear is denied to them, and in its place they are given property rights to fight over. The lyricist sues the composer. The singer sues both. The record label takes its cut. The streaming platform takes the rest. Everyone fights everyone because the system forces them to. Former collaborators become adversaries. Art becomes an asset to be litigated.
A socialist society abolishes this entire framework. By overthrowing bourgeois property relations in art, it eliminates both the commodification that sets artists against one another and the ownership claims that restrict how culture can be reworked and reimagined. The socialist state guarantees the material security of all cultural workers — composers, lyricists, singers, instrumentalists, sound engineers — through public funding and democratic planning. Freed from the anxiety of survival, no artist needs to sue another over royalties. Freed from property claims over melody and verse, no artist can block another from reinterpreting, adapting, or transforming a work. Technology, including AI, becomes a tool of creative liberation for all, not a weapon to dispossess some for the profit of others. Creative energies, liberated from the tyranny of the market, are directed toward the enrichment of human life.
The crisis of Sri Lanka’s music industry is not a legal problem awaiting a better royalty formula. It is a class question. The working class must take up the fight — not to adjudicate between singers and lyricists under the existing property regime, but to overthrow that regime entirely. Only on the foundation of human need, not private greed, can art truly flourish — freely, collectively, without owners and without fences.
Relatives of the inmates demand not to shoot the prisoners, outside Mahara Prison on 1 August 2026. Photo credit: Ishara S. Kodikara
On August 1-2, 2026, a riot erupted at Mahara Prison, north of Colombo, causing severe damage to its already unlivable infrastructure and reportedly resulting in the death of one inmate. This is the second prison riot in less than a month and followed the massacre in the Negombo prison early last month.[1] The vast majority of detainees at Mahara — as throughout Sri Lanka’s prison system, where approximately 75 percent of inmates are unconvicted remand prisoners — are held in indefinite judicial limbo, warehoused in facilities built for 11,762 that now hold more than 42,000. The conditions are, by any objective standard, a form of systematic torture: prisoners forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, survive on food that “even cats and dogs” would reject, confined to as little as 1.2 square metres of space.[2] In 2023, 67.8 percent (31,822) of those imprisoned were jailed due to their inability to pay fines — a form of criminalization of poverty. A recent National Audit Office report finds that over 15,000 remain in prolonged remand custody due to delay in government analyst reports. The riot was not an act of criminality. It was an explosion of outrage of human beings subjected to torturous conditions that the capitalist state has deliberately created and deliberately maintains.
But it is not the riot itself that most starkly reveals the political trajectory of Sri Lankan society. It is the response — both of the state and of a significant and vocal section of the public.
In the hours following the Mahara unrest, as was in the aftermath of the Negombo prison incident, a significant segment of society — concentrated in the Sinhala middle class of the south and amplified across social media — began openly proposing measures that belong to the lexicon of fascism. “Break their limbs.” “Shoot them in the head.” “Exterminate the drug residue.” These are not the mutterings of isolated cranks. They are the publicly expressed, socially sanctioned political proposals of a layer of the population that has been systematically prepared over decades to regard certain categories of human beings as unworthy of life. The comments sections of mainstream news outlets and the feeds of social media platforms have become open forums for the advocacy of extrajudicial murder, for the vilification of grieving families, for the glorification of the STF and the military, deployed by the JVP/NPP government, to crush prison riots. The corporate media has done nothing to challenge this — because it cannot, because the media itself has been a primary vehicle for the ideological preparation that has produced it.
Military deployed at the Mahara prison on 1 August 2026. Photo credit: Ishara S Kodikara
Following the Mahara unrest, in a video of an elderly mother of a remand prisoner, published on Dasatha News facebook page, she demanded the release of the names of inmates affected by the riot and subsequent military crackdown — including those killed, transferred to other prisons, or hospitalized. In the video, she holds the ruling class and the police accountable for creating a society dominated by drug lords who prey on the sons of impoverished mothers. She explains that her son was framed through drug planting — a widespread practice by the Sri Lanka Police, a routine mechanism for criminalizing poverty and filling the remand prisons with the sons and daughters of the poor.
Military deployed at Mahara prison to crush the riot and intimidate the relatives and the working class.Image Credit: Ishara S. Kodikara
The video attracted hundreds of scathing, inhumane, and morally bankrupt comments. Commentators vilified her for giving birth to her son, blamed her entirely for his drug addiction, and condemned her for failing to raise him properly. The same hostile barrage was directed at parents, siblings, and other relatives who gathered outside the Mahara and Negombo prisons during the riots and crackdowns to demand the safety of their loved ones — mothers weeping at the gates while gunfire echoed within, wives and children pleading for information, families who had traveled from distant villages only to be met with the deployment of armed drones, armored vehicles, and the Special Task Force.
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This is the face of the fascistic ideology now brewing in sections of the Sri Lankan middle class. It is not merely a political tendency expressed in abstract slogans about “law and order.” It is a social practice of systematic cruelty directed at the most vulnerable — at an elderly mother pleading for her son, at families demanding to know whether their loved ones are alive or dead. The same social media users who demand that prisoners be shot in the head are the ones who mock a mother’s grief, who blame her for the poverty into which her son was born, who insist that the state’s lethal violence is not merely justified but righteous.
This reaction reflects a profound moral decay. It is the ideological harvest of a society that has been taught, systematically and over generations, that lethal violence against the “enemy within” is not merely justified but heroic — and that those who love the enemy, who plead for the enemy, who gave birth to the enemy, are themselves contemptible. The elderly mother who demands to know whether her son is alive is not a grieving parent to be treated with compassion. She is an obstacle to the state’s campaign of terror, and the social media mob has been trained to treat her accordingly.
No public figure has yet gone on record in a formal media statement advocating the extrajudicial execution of prisoners. This tendency has not yet crystallized into an organized movement with a large social base. But it does not need to. The historical lesson of fascism — as demonstrated by the international resurgence of the far right — is that fascist movements are not mass movements from their inception. They begin as ideological currents within sections of the petty bourgeoisie, nurtured by the state and the media, that are activated and expanded when the ruling class requires a battering ram against the working class. The social media comments calling for prisoners to be shot, the mockery of a mother’s anguish, the vilification of families at the prison gates — these are the early ideological indicators of a tendency that the JVP/NPP government, facing mounting social opposition to IMF austerity, will seek to cultivate and mobilize.
The Genealogy of a Fascistic Ideology
The calls to shoot prisoners in the head did not emerge from nowhere. They are the latest expression of an ideological trajectory that can be traced with precision.
The 26-year communal war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), concluded in 2009 with the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone, was not merely a military campaign. It was a project of ideological mobilization on a mass scale. The state, Sinhala-Buddhist saffron forces, and the media jointly constructed a narrative in which the Tamil population — and by extension any population that could be designated as an internal threat — was dehumanized. The war was presented not as a conflict between the Sinhala and Tamil ruling classes, each seeking to exploit “their” workers, but as a civilizational struggle for the “Sinhala motherland” against a barbaric enemy. The Sri Lankan military mercilessly pounded the no-fire zone with artillery shells, deliberately targeting hospitals, aid centres and designated civilian areas. Grisly video evidence later emerged of Sri Lankan soldiers executing naked, bound and blindfolded men in cold blood. [3] When the LTTE defences collapsed, the military murdered surrendering LTTE leaders and herded some 300,000 civilians into army-controlled detention camps.
The Sri Lankan military was glorified as the savior of the nation. War heroes were celebrated in state ceremonies, their images plastered across billboards, their “sacrifices” invoked in political speeches. The military budget was expanded, not contracted, after the war ended. Military “leadership training” was imposed on university students. [4] The armed forces were integrated into the civil administration, including in schools, with retired and serving generals appointed to key government positions. The glorification of the military was inseparable from the cultivation of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism, which presented the Sinhala majority as the authentic nation and all others as threats to its integrity.
This ideological campaign did not end with the war. It was repurposed. As the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned in 2021: “The military and its brutal methods developed during the war are now being prepared for use against the working class, as unrest grows over the worsening social conditions facing working people.” [5] The “war on terror” became the “war on drugs,” which became the “war on the underworld.” The enemy was no longer the Tamil separatist but the drug dealer, the criminal, the “underworld figure” — categories that, in practice, encompass the poorest and most marginalized layers of the working class.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) explained the logic of these campaigns as early as 2009: the “war on the underworld” was launched “to divert growing popular discontent and to justify the further strengthening of the state apparatus in preparation for social unrest.”[6] The same analysis applies with equal force today. The JVP/NPP government’s escalating “war on drugs” is a rehearsal for police-state measures, the main target of which is the working class that come into struggle.
The middle-class social media users who now call for prisoners to be shot in the head are the products of this decades-long ideological conditioning. They have been taught to see the state’s lethal violence as legitimate, to regard due process as an obstacle to “security,” and to view certain categories of the poor as subhuman.
The Same Tendency, the Same Targets
But this tendency is not new. It is the same social layer, animated by the same ideology, that has for the past few years populated the comments sections of mainstream media with the glorification of the military and the dehumanization of its victims. When the daily excavations of skeletal remains at the Chemmani-Siththupaththi mass grave are reported — the bones of Tamil men, women, and children who were “disappeared” by state forces, buried in unusual positions, and dumped together in shallow pits — this same social media mob posts comments calling to “make soup out of their bones and have it.” When Tamil communities in the North and East protest the military’s continued occupation of their lands — a permanent network of army camps established during the war and never dismantled — this same tendency demands the deployment of the army to crush them. When Tamil families who have spent decades searching for their loved ones demand accountability for the tens of thousands slaughtered in the final months of the war, this same social layer mocks their grief and insists the killings were justified. When the skeletal remains of 136 individuals were unearthed in Mannar after 74 days of excavation, the same voices jeered, defending the military.
The calls to shoot prisoners in the head are not a departure from this chauvinist culture. They are its extension. The ideological machinery that was built to dehumanize the Tamil “terrorist” has been repurposed to dehumanize the Sinhala “criminal.” The mechanism is identical: construct a subhuman category, mobilize revulsion against it, and demand that the state kill without process, without mercy, without accountability. The war against the LTTE provided the template. The “war on drugs” provides the new target. The underlying logic — that certain categories of human beings may be killed by the state with impunity, without trial, without process, without mercy and that those who call for their killing are patriots — is the same.
The decades-long campaign of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism has prepared this social layer to serve as the shock troops of reaction. The glorification of war heroes, the celebration of military “victory,” the refusal to acknowledge war crimes, the mockery of mass graves — all of this has cultivated an ideological disposition that regards lethal state violence not as a crime to be prosecuted but as a virtue to be celebrated. The middle-class youth who posts “shoot them in the head” on Facebook is not expressing an idiosyncratic opinion. He is expressing the logical endpoint of an ideology that has been systematically inculcated through the education system, the media, and the political culture of the post-war period. He is the product of a society that has never held its killers to account and has instead elevated them to the status of national heroes.
The same social layer revealed its moral character with unmistakable clarity during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which since October 2023 has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians — men, women, and children slaughtered under the banner of “fighting terrorism.” Across social media, this section of the Sinhala middle class expressed vociferous indifference to the genocide and open support for Zionist Israel’s crimes. The same dehumanization mechanism was at work: Palestinians were “terrorists,” their deaths were “necessary,” their suffering was deserved. That the JVP/NPP government itself has conspicuously failed to condemn Israel’s planned seizure of Gaza, pointedly omitting any mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing from its official statements, is no coincidence. The ideological framework that justifies the slaughter of prisoners at Mahara or Negombo, the mockery of Chemmani’s dead, and the indifference to Gaza’s murdered children is one and the same: the conviction that lethal state violence against a dehumanized enemy is not a crime but a form of justice. This is the moral universe that decades of militarization and chauvinism have built.
The social base that the JVP/NPP government is cultivating is this. The party that opposed UN human rights investigations into war crimes, that integrated retired military officers into its political apparatus, that retains the Prevention of Terrorism Act and expands police-state powers — this party governs with the tacit support of the social media mob that demands bullets for prisoners and mocks the bones of the disappeared. It does not need to issue formal statements endorsing such sentiments. It needs only to continue what it is already doing: glorifying the security forces, refusing accountability for past and present massacres, and framing its “war on drugs” as a civilizational struggle against subhuman enemies. The social media tendency will do the rest, providing the popular ideological cover that the state requires to escalate its violence — against prisoners today, against striking workers and protesting youth tomorrow.
The JVP/NPP: Architects of Militarization
The present leaders of this militarization campaign are the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the National People’s Power (NPP) government. This is a fact of immense political significance that must be stated without equivocation.
The JVP campaigned for the 2024 elections on a platform of “systemic change.” It made promises to workers, peasants, and youth across every corner of society. It presented its program as a vision of social righteousness, of clean government, of a break with the corrupt and violent past. It rode to power on the back of the massive Aragalaya uprising of 2022, in which about a million working people rose up against the Rajapaksa regime and the unbearable social conditions produced by the crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism and the 2022 sovereign default.
Today, that same JVP/NPP holds power while actively driving militarization forward. It has retained the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which it explicitly promised to abolish. It has invoked essential services laws to criminalize strikes across key sectors. It has introduced the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA), vastly expanding state repressive powers. It has announced a plan to recruit 10,000 retired military personnel into the police force — many of whom have combat experience from the 26-year anti-Tamil communal war. It has established over 14,000 Public Safety Committees across all village officer divisions, institutionalized as a force operating under the police — a revival of the intelligence-gathering committees set up by Gotabhaya Rajapaksa during the war, with JVP members reportedly appointed to them in almost all areas.[7]
The JVP’s collaboration with the military apparatus is not new. During the war, the Sinhala chauvinist JVP was a virulent advocate of the military campaign against the LTTE, demanding an all-out military solution and vehemently opposing any concessions to Tamils. [8] [9] [10] In 2010, it formed a sordid electoral alliance with former army commander Sarath Fonseka, the general who oversaw the final military offensives. In 2023, as it prepared for government, the JVP/NPP established formal collectives of retired military and police officers — the Retired Tri-forces Collective and the Retired Police Officers Collective — integrating figures most likely including individuals connected to crimes and human rights abuses during the war into its political apparatus.
The betrayal of the Tamil population of the North and East is among the most damning indictments of the JVP/NPP government. During the 2024 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns, Dissanayake and the JVP/NPP made explicit promises to Tamil voters: the release of all political prisoners, the return of civilian land seized by the military, and the provision of information to families of the tens of thousands of missing persons. On the basis of these pledges — and driven by deep disaffection with the traditional Tamil bourgeois parties that had betrayed them for decades — a significant section of Tamil voters swung behind the JVP/NPP in the November 2024 parliamentary election, handing the party a plurality of votes in all but one district in the North and East. Every one of these promises has been broken. The government now claims that political prisoners were convicted on criminal charges and therefore cannot be released. Some land has been returned, but an estimated 2,600 acres still remain under military control, and tens of thousands of acres seized from ordinary working people during the war remain in the hands of the armed forces. Instead of revealing the fate of the disappeared, the government proposes limited financial reparations to victims’ families while protecting the perpetrators. The JVP/NPP has categorically rejected United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions calling for investigations into war crimes. Its opposition to any human rights investigation flows from its Sinhala chauvinist politics and ardent support for the protracted anti-Tamil civil war and is insisting on the lie that the military committed no war crimes. The Tamil masses who voted based on promises of “systemic change”— in spite of the long record of JVP’s anti-Tamil chauvinism — have instead received the same military occupation, the same denial of justice, the same criminalization of their dead.
Now, the JVP Justice Minister visits the Sittupattu mass grave site (on 19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. In another press statement, the Minister raised doubts as to who the perpetrators were, attempting to discredit strong allegations against the armed forces.[11] This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. This is the language of cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken aloud.
This is the party that now governs Sri Lanka. This is the party that presides over the prison massacres at Negombo and Mahara. This is the party whose media allies portray dead prison guards as “heroes” who “sacrificed their lives” — the right-wing Island newspaper declaring: “The drug mafia has flexed its muscle again. The government has embarked on an ambitious campaign to rid the country of narcotics, and rightly so.” [12] On August 3, its Sinhala language daily, Divina named the military-STF intervention in the Mahara prison as a “humanitarian mission”, which echoed the term used to refer to the military onslaught in the final phase of the civil war. This is the party that is precisely accountable for the massive inhumanity, savagery, and moral decay represented by the calls to shoot prisoners in the head.
The Middle Class and the Fascist Mobilization
The social media posts proposing the extrajudicial execution of prisoners are not evenly distributed across the population. They emanate disproportionately from the Sinhala middle class of the south — the petty bourgeoisie, the lower-level professionals, the small business owners, the university-educated and unemployed youth who have been traditionally taught to see themselves as the guardians of the nation’s moral order. This is the classic social base of fascist movements, and its emergence in Sri Lanka follows a pattern that Marxism has long understood.
The middle class occupies a contradictory position in capitalist society. It is not part of the bourgeoisie — it does not own the means of production on a scale that frees it from the necessity of work. But it is terrified of falling into the proletariat, of losing its precarious status, of being swallowed by the poverty that surrounds it. In periods of capitalist crisis, when its economic position is threatened by inflation, unemployment, and the collapse of small enterprises, the middle class becomes politically volatile. It can be mobilized either in alliance with the working class against the bourgeoisie — or, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, as the shock troops of reaction against the working class.[13]
The decades-long campaign of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism has prepared the Sri Lankan middle class to choose the latter path. The glorification of war heroes, the demonization of internal enemies, the constant invocation of “national security” — all of this has cultivated an ideological disposition that sees violence as the solution to social problems. What is developing among sections of the disgruntled Sinhala middle class is not a diffuse or generalized social conservatism. It is a far-right political current, bearing all the essential characteristics of fascism as the Marxist tradition has understood it: the glorification of lethal state violence as a social good, the systematic dehumanization of designated internal enemies, the contempt for due process and legal norms, and the conviction that extrajudicial killing is a legitimate instrument of “law and order.”
This tendency may not yet have a large social base. It is concentrated among a significant section of social media users — particularly youth and the middle class — who wage this militaristic, demoralized, inhumane campaign as a matter of defending law and order and security. The JVP/NPP government is its political beneficiary and its tacit patron — because it understands that when working-class resistance intensifies, this far-right current will be available for mobilization as the street-level enforcers of state terror.
The government and the ruling class are aware of these developments and are tacitly encouraging them. This is the decisive political point. The social media mob that calls for bullets in prisoners’ heads is not acting against the state. It is acting in harmony with a state that has itself just carried out a shoot-to-kill operation at Negombo, that has deployed the STF and the military against unarmed prisoners, that has subjected transferred inmates to retaliatory torture resulting in at least two post-transfer deaths.[1] The state kills; the social media mob applauds; the government appoints a committee of retired judges to bury the truth. Each element reinforces the others.
SLPP as the direct institutional patron of the far-right
This far-right current is not an amorphous social mood. It is being politically organized. Its most direct institutional patrons are the Rajapaksa family’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which has installed Namal Rajapaksa — the son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa — as its national organizer, and the Buddhist clergy that vociferously backs him.
The SLPP and its clerical allies portray the JVP/NPP government as betraying the Sinhala nation by granting concessions to Tamils in order to secure the support of the Tamil diaspora. This is a calculated distortion, but it contains a kernel of political reality. The JVP/NPP was indeed fully supported by sections of the Tamil diaspora — Tamil capitalist expatriates, the wealthy, and the elite — and continues to seek their backing. These layers in turn expect the government to deliver the full implementation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, including the devolution of police and land powers, as the price of their political loyalty. The JVP/NPP, however, has no intention of fulfilling these expectations. It has released only an insignificant extent of occupied lands, while military occupation of the North and East continues unabated.
The SLPP exploits this contradiction to posture as the savior of Buddhism and the Sinhala nation, directly encouraging far-right fascistic elements who wage Sinhala-Buddhist racist provocations in the North — such as the illegal expansion of the Tissa Viharaya temple on seized Tamil land, the erection of Buddha statues as deliberate communal provocations in Trincomalee, and the ongoing campaign by Buddhist chauvinist groups to assert Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy over Tamil and Muslim communities. The SLPP’s aim is transparent: to outflank the JVP/NPP from the right, to mobilize the most backward and violent sections of the Sinhala middle class, and to position itself as the political leadership of the fascistic tendency now brewing in Sri Lankan society.
The JVP/NPP, for its part, has repeatedly demonstrated that it will not confront this reactionary mobilization but will accommodate and appease it — because it shares its fundamental ideological premises and will require its services when working-class resistance intensifies. The middle-class social media mob that demands bullets for prisoners and mocks the Chemmani dead is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the raw material of a political movement that already has its leaders, its institutions, and its patrons — and that is being prepared for deployment against the working class.
The Trajectory: From Prisoners to Workers
The critical political question is: where does this trajectory lead?
The government will in due course direct these fascistic tendencies against working-class struggles. The middle class that today demands bullets for prisoners will tomorrow demand bullets for strikers. The social media mob that dehumanizes “drug residue” will be mobilized to dehumanize workers who defy essential services orders, youth who protest IMF austerity, peasants who resist land grabs. The ideological machinery that was built to prosecute the war against the LTTE and then repurposed for the “war on drugs” will be repurposed again for the war on the working class.
As the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) warned in November 2024, The JVP/NPP government is already preparing the ground. [14] The 14,000 Public Safety Committees, staffed with JVP members and operating under police supervision, are mechanisms for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and repression against political opponents and workers engaged in struggle. The recruitment of 10,000 retired military personnel into the police force is a direct preparation for the violent suppression of social unrest. The government expects strong resistance from youth and students and has already deployed the police to violently suppress teachers’ protests and student demonstrations. School Development Officers were beaten and detained by police in December 2024 for demanding their rights. Allied health science graduates were violently suppressed and arrested in March and April 2025.
The JVP/NPP is implementing the IMF austerity program to the letter. Dissanayake retains the main portfolios of finance and defence to ensure the government’s foremost task of ruthlessly implementing IMF austerity measures is directly in his hands. For 2026, the allocation of funds to the Ministry of Defence is 530 billion Rupees. On the very first day the majority-JVP/NPP parliament convened, the government jettisoned its election pledge to renegotiate the IMF bailout. The measures include significant tax increases targeting workers, the lowering of the income-tax threshold directly affecting the middle class, the slashing of vital public services and a fire-sale of state-owned enterprises, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs. Parliament unanimously approved these IMF austerity measures in December 2024. Dissanayake’s budgets were fully dictated by the IMF. The working class and the poor suffer heavily due to sky-rocketing prices of consumer items, including essential food items, while the JVP-controlled majority trade unions have artificially suppressed the working class struggles.
The government knows it sits on a social powder-keg. The austerity measures it implements will generate mass opposition. It is haunted by the 2022 Aragalaya. Its response is to build the repressive apparatus in advance, to cultivate the ideological climate in which lethal violence against protesters will be accepted, and to prepare the middle-class shock troops who will condemn and vilify the worker, hail the military-police crack-down and provide the political cover for state terror.
The JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva has declared that “there will be no other governments after this government.” President Dissanayake has said the government “cannot be shaken for decades.” These are not expressions of democratic confidence. They are threats. They announce that the JVP/NPP will not peacefully surrender power, that it is preparing to rule through force, that the fascistic ideology now being cultivated in the middle class is an essential component of its political strategy.
The Crisis of Sri Lankan Capitalism
The prison system — and the fascistic ideology that demands its victims be shot — is a concentrated expression of the broader social catastrophe produced by Sri Lankan capitalism. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the country was among the most unequal in the Asia-Pacific region by 2023. The Super-Rich comprise just 1 percent of the population but command a massive 31 percent of the total personal wealth in the country. The Working Class and the Poor comprise half of the entire population but collectively own less than 4 percent of the overall national wealth.
The plantation workers of the central hill country — the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India by British colonialism — continue to live in conditions of abject poverty. The urban poor of Colombo’s slums, the rural farmers crushed by debt and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, the youth who face permanent unemployment — these are the social layers from which the prison population is drawn.
They are the human products of a system that subordinates human need to private profit. And when they resist — when they protest, when they strike, when they explode — the state answers with bullets. When the middle class applauds those bullets, it is not expressing a pathology. It is expressing the logic of a system that requires the dehumanization of its victims in order to sustain itself.
The Warning and the Task
Workers must recognize this danger. The calls to shoot prisoners in the head are not a temporary aberration. They are a political warning. The same forces that today demand the extrajudicial execution of remand prisoners will tomorrow demand the same for striking workers, for protesting students, for anyone who threatens the “stability” that the ruling class requires to continue its exploitation. The social media tendency that mocks the bones of the Chemmani dead, vilifies a remand prisoner’s grieving mother, and calls for bullets in the heads of prisoners is being cultivated as the ideological battering ram of a government preparing for class war.
The revolutionary party must be conscious of these subtle developments in the social consciousness and expose the growing dangers. This means neither exaggerating the tendency into something it is not yet — a mass fascist movement — nor dismissing it as the harmless venting of online cranks. It means identifying it precisely for what it is: an emergent ideological current, rooted in the material crisis of the middle class, cultivated by decades of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism, and tacitly encouraged by a government that will require it when working-class resistance to austerity intensifies. It means exposing the continuity between the dehumanization of Tamils, the mockery of mass graves, and the demand for bullets in prisoners’ heads — because all three are expressions of the same logic, nurtured by the same state, and aimed at the same ultimate target: the working class.
The working class must defeat the ruling class’s militarization program and ideology. This requires an independent political mobilization, organized through action committees in every workplace and neighborhood, that breaks decisively with all capitalist parties — including the JVP/NPP — and their trade union appendages. It requires the building of a revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism, that fights for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers across ethnic divisions and builds an alliance of the working class with all oppressed layers, the peasantry and the youth against the ruling class that foments divisions among them to strengthen capitalist class rule.
The fight against fascistic ideology cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. The middle class that calls for prisoners to be shot is itself a product of a society in crisis — economically threatened, ideologically disoriented, politically manipulated by a ruling class that requires it as a battering ram against the working class. The only force capable of defeating this reactionary mobilization is the organized working class, united across all communal lines, advancing its own socialist program as the alternative to the barbarism of capitalism in decay.
The Negombo dead, the Mahara brutalized prisoners, the tens of thousands slaughtered at Mulliwaikkal, the tens of thousands of rural youth killed in 1988–89, the skeletons still being unearthed at Chemmani and Mannar, the forcibly disappeared, the tortured and the warehoused — The blood of the Sri Lankan working class and oppressed cries out against a system that produces only death and misery. The task of the SLLA is to build the revolutionary party to organize the working class, in alliance with the middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie, the rural poor and the urban impoverished, to put an end to it — through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a workers’ state, in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally, as part of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
[11] “We are currently exhuming bodies in Chemmani. First, we need to determine whether those deaths occurred naturally or due to trauma. The other issue is that within a very short period in that area, the LTTE was in control, the Indian Army was there, and other paramilitaries from that time were also there. The army came much later. Therefore, an investigation is underway to identify the relevant individuals. We will conduct it properly.” Adaderana Facebook on 29 July 2026. [“චෙම්මනි මිනී ගොඩගනිමින් අපි ඉන්නෙ. ඒව සමහරවිට ස්වභාවිකව වෙළා ද, එහෙම නැත්නම් ට්රොමා එකකින් උනාද කියල ඉස්සෙල්ල බේරගන්නට ඕන. අනික් ගැටලුව ඔය ප්රදේශයේ ඉතා කෙටි කාලයක් තුළ LTTE එකත් පාලනයේ ඉඳළ තියෙනව, ඉන්දියන් හමුදාවත් ඉඳළ තියෙනව, ඒකාලෙ හිටපු අනිත් පැරාමිලිටරිස් ඉඳළ තියෙනව. හමුදාව එන්නෙ ඊට ගොඩාක් පස්සෙ. ඒ නිසා අදාළ පුද්ගලයො හොයාගැනීමට විමර්ශන කටයුත්තක් තිබෙනව. ඒක අපි හරියට කරනව.”]
By the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA).
A prison guard shooting indiscriminately at the inmates through a hole of the gate during the Negombo prison riot on 7 July 2026. Image from social media.
The carnage at Negombo Remand Prison on July 5–6, which left at least 28 dead and nearly 100 wounded, is not an aberration. It is the latest and most lethal expression of a penal system that functions, by design, as an instrument of class war against the most impoverished and marginalized layers of Sri Lankan society. The massacre lays bare, with the clarity that only blood can provide, the essential character of the capitalist state: a body of armed men, deployed against the poor, in defense of property relations that produce immiseration as their normal condition.
The postmortem evidence now emerging from Negombo General Hospital and preliminary judicial examinations confirms what the government’s hastily assembled narrative of “underworld drug gang rivalries” was constructed to conceal. The 20 deceased inmates were killed overwhelmingly (14 inmates) by high-velocity gunshot wounds to the head, chest, and upper torso — the signature of a deliberate, lethal shoot-to-kill policy, not crowd control. The seven prison guards and officials who died (a toll that rose to eight when a sergeant succumbed to injuries on July 8) were killed by blunt instruments, shattered bricks, and iron rods — the weapons of the utterly dispossessed, wielded in explosive, visceral rage. Two distinct modes of death, produced by one class system.
The state’s tactical choices confirm that de-escalation was never the objective. No loudspeaker warnings were issued. No tear gas, water cannons, or rubber bullets were deployed. No attempt at dialogue or negotiation was made. Instead, the police, military, and Special Task Force (STF) — the same notorious paramilitary unit responsible for the 2012 Welikada prison massacre — opened fire indiscriminately into crowds of prisoners trapped inside a walled compound. The area around the prison was transformed into what could be witnessed as a war zone, with heavily armed security forces, armored vehicles, military jeeps, and drones deployed to intimidate the hundreds of relatives — mothers, wives, children of prisoners, most of them poor villagers — who gathered outside, weeping and screaming for information as gunfire echoed through the complex.
The killing did not end on July 6. Amnesty International confirmed on July 9 that at least two inmates died after being transferred from Negombo to secondary facilities, amid severe allegations of retaliatory torture and beatings by guards. The Committee for Protecting the Rights of Prisoners warned that five inmates accused of leading the unrest have been placed in secret isolation, creating “a severe threat to their lives.” The massacre continues in the form of organized reprisals.
The Lie Machine
The government’s explanation for the carnage is a lie from start to finish, and it is a lie with a well-documented genealogy. Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara claimed the violence erupted from a dispute over a prison drug-trafficking network. The prisoners, in this telling, were “underworld criminals” and “drug residue” — a dehumanizing lexicon that functions to prepare public opinion for the acceptance of state murder. Acting Commissioner General of Prisons Prasad Hemantha Kumara defended a prison officer filmed firing through a narrow opening in the main gate, claiming the shots were “necessary to prevent a catastrophic prison breach.”
This narrative is a political cover for killings that fold neatly into the JVP/NPP government’s escalating “war on drugs” — itself a well-worn mechanism for criminalizing poverty and justifying the expansion of police-state powers.
The genealogy of official lies is instructive. After 11 inmates were shot dead at Mahara Prison in 2020, the Rajapaksa government blamed psychiatric drugs and drug-dealer conspiracies for the incident — claims the College of Psychiatrists debunked as baseless, and the postmortems confirmed that all victims were shot. The 2012 Welikada prison killings of 27 inmates followed the same script: the government blamed a “hard-core criminal” riot, but a prisoner’s BBC Sinhala account showed STF commandos themselves provoked the confrontation — cuffing, beating, and tear-gassing inmates — before carrying out the massacre.
The pattern is invariant across decades and across regimes: provoke, kill, lie, investigate — where “investigate” means appoint a committee of retired judges to produce a report that suppresses the truth and exonerates the killers. Nanayakkara’s announcement of a three-member committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge is the latest iteration of a ritual so predictable it scarcely merits the name of politics.
Who fills these Prisons?
The Negombo dead were not “underworld criminals.” They were, overwhelmingly, unconvicted remand prisoners — members of a class that constitutes approximately 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s total prison population. They were held in a facility built for 900 that currently warehouses nearly 2,400 human beings. Nationally, Sri Lanka’s prisons — built to accommodate 11,762 inmates — now hold more than 42,000, nearly four times their intended capacity.
Some of the victims who succumbed to injuries during the Negombo prison riot and shooting. Image from social media.
These are not people serving sentences for proven crimes. They are people who have been arrested — overwhelmingly on drug-related charges — and then held in indefinite judicial limbo, often for years, because they cannot afford bail or legal representation. They are punished not for what they have been proven to have done, but for who they are: poor, marginalized, and surplus to the requirements of capital. The remand prisoner is the purest expression of the class logic of bourgeois “justice.”
The conditions in which they are held constitute systematic torture. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka’s 2021 report documented prisoners forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, and survive on food that, as one inmate stated, “even cats and dogs” would reject. Negombo Prison was a pressure cooker of systemic injustice — severe overcrowding, starvation-level nutrition, non-existent sanitation, and daily violence from guards — waiting to explode. And when it exploded, the state responded not with reform but with bullets.
This is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed. The state maintains conditions of deliberate, calculated brutality so that when the inevitable explosion occurs, it can be met with overwhelming lethal force. The explosion provides the pretext for the massacre, and the massacre serves as a demonstration effect for the working class outside the prison walls.
The Guards: Workers in Uniform
The seven prison guards and officials killed at Negombo — beaten to death with bricks and iron rods — were themselves drawn from impoverished rural families and lower-middle-class strata. They took these dangerous, degrading jobs because they had no alternative. But they were not merely passive victims caught in the crossfire of an explosion they did not create. They were the immediate, daily instruments of its production.
The guards were the vehicle through which the hellish torture, the degrading and inhumane treatment, and the systematic mistreatment of the inmates were implemented. It was their hands that administered the beatings. It was their voices that delivered the abuse. It was their bodies that enforced the starvation, the suffocating overcrowding, and the denial of medical care. The explosive, visceral rage that killed them — the shattered bricks and iron rods driven into their bodies — was not an abstract or misdirected fury. It was a rage whose immediate object was precisely those who had, day after day, week after week, month after month, made the prisoners’ existence a living torment.
This is the deepest tragedy of the capitalist penal apparatus: it does not merely place workers in the line of fire. It systematically dehumanizes and militarizes them, psychologically preparing them for violence, conditioning them to torture, brainwashing them to hate their own class brothers. The guard who beats a starving remand prisoner is himself a product of the same rural immiseration that fills the cells. But the state has broken him, stripped him of solidarity, trained him to see the prisoner not as a fellow victim of the same system but as an enemy — “drug residue,” “underworld scum,” a criminal presumed “non-human” (contrary to the sham slogan emblazoned on the perimeter walls of Welikada prison declaring that “prisoners are also human”) — deserving of whatever violence is inflicted upon him. While in uniform, the guard is consciously and fully in the service of the capitalist ruling class and its oppressive apparatus. The ruling class, which never sets foot inside the prison, has successfully constructed a machinery in which one layer of the poor is conscripted to brutalize another, and both are destroyed in the process.
The prisoners’ rage was not misdirected. It struck those who had made themselves the immediate face of the system’s cruelty. The tragedy is that the system is so constructed that the prisoners’ only available targets were other workers — men who, in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, would be their allies against the bourgeoisie that immiserates them both, and who, under a workers’ state, would no longer be set against them as enemies at all. The guards who died at Negombo were perpetrators and victims simultaneously — killers and killed, instruments of class oppression who were themselves oppressed, dehumanized by the same machine they were paid to operate. The ruling class, which orchestrated this fratricide from a safe distance, will mourn neither the prisoners nor the guards. It required both their deaths to sustain the order of private property.
The Historical Trajectory of State Violence
The Negombo massacre must be understood within the unbroken history of penal violence maintained by every successive bourgeois regime in Sri Lanka. The list is staggering: Mahara in 2020 (11 shot dead), Welikada in 2012 (27 killed by STF commandos), Anuradhapura in 2011, Kalutara in 2000, Bindunuwewa in 2000 (27 Tamil detainees hacked to death by a Sinhala extremist mob while the state stood by). At Welikada in 1983, during the Black July anti-Tamil pogrom, 53 Tamil political prisoners were murdered by Sinhala racialist inmates aided by prison authorities.
This trajectory of prison massacres is inseparable from the broader history of state violence against the working class and oppressed. During the JVP insurrection of 1988–89, state forces killed tens of thousands of rural youth in the island’s south — a campaign of mass murder for which no political nor military leadership of the state has ever been held accountable. The JVP itself carried out a fascistic campaign of assassinations during that same period, targeting workers, trade unionists, and political opponents, in the name of defending the motherland. The current JVP/NPP government — whose general secretary Tilvin Silva recently declared that “there will be no other governments after this government” — has never confronted this history within its own ranks, nor has it ever been compelled to do so by the bourgeois media and political establishment that now treat it as a legitimate party of government.
The 26-year civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam concluded in 2009 with the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone, under the direction of then-Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, enacted in 1979 and retained — despite explicit campaign promises to abolish it — by the current JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has been used for decades to detain, torture, and disappear political opponents. Human Rights Watch has documented severe abuses, including rape and other torture methods. Government figures from 2017 indicated that 70 prisoners had been held in pretrial detention under the PTA for more than five years, and 12 for over 10 years.
This is the state that now presents the Negombo killings as a regrettable but necessary response to a “prison drug network.” The state that tortures, disappears, and massacres is the same state that lies about what it has done. The lie is not incidental to the violence; it is an essential component of it. The killing cannot proceed without first preparing public opinion to accept that the victims are not fully human.
The Ideological Offensive: Dehumanization as Class Warfare
The corporate media’s deployment of terms like “underworld criminals” and “drug residue” to describe the Negombo dead performs a precise ideological function. It constructs a subhuman category — people whose deaths are not murders but a form of social sanitation — and mobilizes upper-middle-class public opinion behind the state’s lethal operations. This is the logic of fascistic reaction, and it directly mirrors the xenophobic demonization of immigrants by figures like Donald Trump internationally. The purpose is identical: to criminalize poverty, to justify state terror, and to obscure the class relations that produce both the “crime” and the punishment.
The “war on drugs” in Sri Lanka, as internationally, has never been a public health initiative. It is a mechanism for the criminalization and warehousing of surplus population — young people, overwhelmingly from the poorest layers of society, whose labor is not required by capital and whose existence therefore constitutes a threat to social order. The drug cases that fill the remand prisons are, in the vast majority of instances, frame-ups. They serve the same function that vagrancy laws served in the period of primitive accumulation that Marx analyzed in Capital: the use of penal law to discipline the expropriated poor and enforce the conditions of capitalist exploitation.
The JVP/NPP government has made the “war on drugs” a centerpiece of its political offensive. At the May Day rallies this year, President Dissanayake boasted that “2026 will go down in Sri Lanka’s history as the year when corrupt individuals, fraudsters, and thieves were sent to prison.” This anti-corruption and anti-drug rhetoric serves a dual purpose: it diverts popular anger away from the capitalist system that produces immiseration and toward individual “criminals” who can be blamed for social decay, while simultaneously expanding the repressive apparatus that will be used against the working class when austerity-driven opposition intensifies.
The JVP/NPP: Continuity in Repression
The Negombo massacre took place under the JVP/NPP government elected in 2024 on promises of “systemic change,” a mandate rooted in the 2022 Aragalaya uprising that ousted Gotabhaya Rajapaksa but was politically derailed by trade union bureaucracies and the JVP/NPP itself, which redirected mass struggle into parliamentary channels rather than revolutionary confrontation. That betrayal led to Wickremesinghe’s premiership, the IMF’s austerity loan, and ultimately Dissanayake’s election — with the promised “change” proving to be continuity of the same capitalist class rule. In office, the JVP/NPP has faithfully executed IMF austerity dictates: mass privatizations, casualization of employment and job losses, subsidy cuts, retention of the PTA despite pledges to abolish it, new repressive legislation, emergency powers, and violent suppression of workers’ protests.
The Negombo massacre is the logical expression of a government that represents the same capitalist class as its predecessors and defends the same property relations. The JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva’s declaration at this year’s May Day rally that “there will be no other governments after this government” is not hyperbole. It is a threat — directed not at opposition politicians but at the working class itself. Faced with mounting social opposition as the economic crisis deepens and the US-NATO war on Iran disrupts global energy supplies, driving fuel and food prices still higher, the JVP/NPP is preparing for class war.
The Crisis of Sri Lankan Capitalism
The prison system is a concentrated expression of the broader social catastrophe produced by Sri Lankan capitalism. The country is among the most unequal in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2016, the richest 10 percent earned the equivalent of the total amount earned by 70 percent of all households. The 2022 default on foreign debt — the result of decades of parasitic capitalist development, corruption, and subordination to international finance capital — triggered an economic collapse that pushed the poverty rate sharply upward. The UN reported that at least 70 percent of households were reducing meals, including skipping one meal a day. Officially, food inflation reached 57 percent.
The plantation workers of the central hill country — the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India by British colonialism — continue to live in conditions of abject poverty, earning wages that scarcely permit survival, housed in decrepit “line rooms” unchanged for over a century. The urban poor of Colombo’s slums, the rural farmers crushed by debt and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, the youth who face permanent unemployment — these are the social layers from which the prison population is drawn.
They are the human products of a system that subordinates human need to private profit. And when they resist — when they protest, when they strike, when they explode — the state answers with bullets. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system.
The Marxist Understanding of the State
Lenin, in The State and Revolution, defined the state as “the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” It is not a neutral arbiter, not a mechanism for resolving social conflicts, but an instrument for the organized suppression of one class by another. The state, he stressed, was fundamentally composed of “special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc. at their command.” The prison is the state in its most naked form — stripped of the democratic-parliamentary veneer that normally obscures its class character. When guards and commandos open fire on unarmed prisoners demanding PCR testing during the COVID pandemic, when the state deploys the army, navy, air force, STF, and armed drones to surround a prison and intimidate the families gathered outside, the mask falls away entirely.
The capitalist penal system cannot be reformed. The Human Rights Commission reports, the promises of prison modernization, the committees of inquiry — all of it is a mechanism for absorbing popular outrage and channeling it back into the dead end of bourgeois legality. The conditions that produce these massacres — overcrowding, poverty-driven remand detention, the criminalization of the poor, impunity for security forces — are not dysfunctions of the system. They are the system functioning exactly as it is designed to function.
Successive governments have responded to prison violence with the same empty ritual. Mahinda Rajapaksa promised rehabilitation. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa promised five-year reform plans. Sirisena promised transitional justice. The JVP/NPP promised “systemic change.” Committees are appointed, plans are published, and the conditions that produce violence — overcrowding, remand without trial, starvation, torture — only worsen. They worsen because the capitalist state requires them. The prison exists to discipline the poor, to warehouse surplus labor, to terrorize the working class into submission. It cannot be reformed because its function is irreducibly repressive.
The Revolutionary Answer
The Negombo dead — prisoners and guards alike — were killed by a system that pits the oppressed against each other while the ruling class looks on and calls it justice. The prisoners were killed by a state that views their lives as worthless because their labor is worthless to capital. The guards were killed by the same system, conscripted into a role that placed them in the path of an explosive rage of which they were only the final instruments of creation and which they could not escape.
The only answer to Negombo, to Mahara, to Welikada, to the entire bloody history of the capitalist penal system, is the mobilization of the working class as an independent political force against the capitalist state in its entirety. This means building a revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism, that fights for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers across ethnic divisions and builds an alliance of the working class with all oppressed layers, the peasantry and the youth against the ruling class that foments divisions among them to divide and strengthen capitalist class rule.
Workers across the country — in the factories, offices, plantations, and rural communities — must form their own action committees, independent of all capitalist parties and their affiliated trade union bureaucracies. These committees must be the basis for a democratic and socialist congress of workers and rural masses, advancing a program that begins from human need, not corporate profit: the repudiation of foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under workers’ democratic control, the indexing of wages to the cost of living, guaranteed jobs for all, and the cancellation of debts for poor farmers and small business holders.
The fight against the capitalist penal system is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. The prison can only be abolished through the revolutionary overthrow of the class society that requires it. The task of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) is to build the political leadership capable of organizing the working class for that struggle — in Sri Lanka and across South Asia, as part of the international struggle of the the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of socialist revolution.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
On 2 February 2026, residents and farmers of Nedunkerni, Vavuniya, held a protest against the Sri Lankan government’s revival of proposed Kivul Oya Reservoir Project, alleging that it would facilitate Sinhala colonization and alter the demographic composition of the North-East. Image courtesy of Sri Lanka Breaking News fb page
At a media conference held at the Jaffna Press Club premises on July 3, 2026, a Sinhalese speaker voiced a widely-held Sinhala-Buddhist communal argument: because Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims live together in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, Sinhalese could likewise be peacefully settled in Jaffna and the North and East. This is a misconceived justification for the state-sponsored Sinhalisation of Tamil-majority areas. The argument is a fraud. If accepted as a general principle, it would equally justify the state allocating land to Tamils in Matara, Weeraketiya, Dikwella, Tangalle, Ambalantota, Mirissa, Galle and Deniyaya — predominantly Sinhala areas of the south. The speaker would never accept that, because he exactly knows that state-sponsored settlement is not an invitation to voluntary coexistence, but is an instrument of power. What is being presented as a principle of multi-ethnic coexistence is in reality a justification for state-sponsored ethnic domination of the Sinhalese. The issue is not a matter of ethnicity, not whether Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims can live together voluntarily. The issue is the political character of state-directed demographic engineering and the communal strategy of capitalist rule it serves.
The historical record
Since the sham independence of 1948, successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued demographic engineering in the North and East as a core pillar of communal rule. One of the first acts of the D.S. Senanayake government was to disenfranchise over a million Tamil-speaking plantation workers. The UNP applied from the outset the communal principle that, as Colvin R. de Silva prophetically declared in his 1948 speech opposing the Citizenship Bill, “the state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race.” He warned that this was “an outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy,” adding: “It is precisely under Fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state.”[1]
The pattern intensified after the 1953 hartal, when the general strike shook bourgeois rule to its foundations. Bandaranaike concluded that only the stirring up of anti-Tamil prejudice could counter the influence of the Trotskyists in the working class. But the communal project was not confined to legislation and administrative discrimination. It was pursued with equal vigour through the physical transformation of the country’s demographic map.
From the 1950s onward, successive governments used state-sponsored irrigation and land colonisation schemes to resettle Sinhalese peasants from the wet zone into the dry-zone Northern and Eastern provinces. The Gal Oya project, initiated in 1949 under D.S. Senanayake, settled tens of thousands of Sinhalese colonists on land developed through the diversion of the Gal Oya river. The Sinhalese population of the combined Batticaloa-Amparai district, a mere 4,702 in 1911, had swelled to over 150,000 by 1981 — an increase far exceeding any possible natural growth rate, achieved through the systematic allocation of state land, irrigation infrastructure and cultivation rights to settlers brought from the Sinhalese-majority south. The administrative separation of Ampara from Batticaloa in April 1961 was presented as a measure of bureaucratic decentralisation necessitated by the region’s growth. In reality, it was the political consolidation of more than a decade of engineered demographic transformation. The redrawing of district boundaries carved a new Sinhalese-majority interior out of what had been Tamil- and Muslim-majority territory, severing it administratively from the coastal areas where Tamils and Muslims remained concentrated. By reshaping electoral boundaries to manufacture Sinhala parliamentary representation in what had been a Tamil-majority province, the Ampara partition was not an incidental by-product of development policy but an integral mechanism of the Sinhala bourgeoisie’s nation-building project — confirming that what was presented as technical administration and rural development was, from its inception, bound up with the ruling class’s strategy of fragmenting the working class along communal lines.
A similar dynamic unfolded at Kantale (Kanthalai), where the state settled peasants drawn from outside Trincomalee District in what had been a Tamil-majority village. The same logic was extended north-west into the Tamil-speaking areas of Anuradhapura District through the Padaviya Tank scheme, 65 km from Anuradhapura town. Across these projects, the pattern of land allocation was consistent and unambiguous: the Allai scheme assigned 65 percent of settler plots to Sinhalese colonists, and Kanthalai assigned 77 percent, in each case relegating the existing Tamil and Muslim population to a residual share. The cumulative demographic effect was stark — Trincomalee District’s Sinhalese population rose from roughly 15 percent in 1946 to 33 percent by 1981 — an increase that cannot be attributed to organic demographic growth and that testifies instead to the systematic character of state-directed colonization as an instrument of Sinhala-Buddhist nation-building.
The Mahaweli Development Programme, whose modern phase began under Dudley Senanayake’s government in the late 1960s following a 1969 UNDP/FAO master plan and was dramatically compressed from a planned thirty years into seven after the UNP’s return to power in 1977, took this process of engineered demographic transformation to a qualitatively new level. Settlement in Systems B, C, H and L brought overwhelmingly Sinhalese colonists into the Eastern and Northern provinces: in Systems H and C, 90 percent of settlers were Sinhalese and 10 percent Muslim, with no Tamils allocated land at all, despite the territory lying within the Eastern Province, then a majority-Tamil area. This composition was not incidental; a former senior Mahaweli Authority bureaucrat later acknowledged that the settlement of System L in Weli Oya (Manal Aru) in particular was designed to “destroy the land basis for the very existence of Eelam,” inserting a loyal Sinhala population into the narrow strip separating Tamil areas of the north from Tamil- and Muslim-inhabited areas of the east and driving a permanent geographic wedge into the claimed Tamil homeland.[2] Weli Oya was the most militarized expression of Sinhala colonization, and was settled clandestinely from the mid-1980s under a Buddhist-monk-led mobilization backed by President Jayewardene’s inner circle, with settlers armed and deployed as home guards alongside the army.
A 1985 government-appointed “study group” explicitly recommended — reported in Tamil Times, November 1985 — using Sinhala colonization to sever the territorial link between the Tamil-majority north and east. “The area [Trincomalee District] forms an ethnic bridge and colonization of this region by Sinhalese population can break this inter-district ethnic [Tamil] link”, the report proposed. Eight recommendations reported include transformation of the ethnic composition of the Tamil areas of the north and east in order that Sinhalese would constitute the majority by redrawing Sri Lanka’s map with boundary changes of provinces and by creating new districts. Jayewardene himself announced — reported in Los Angeles News on January 21, 1985 — plans to colonize the Northern Province with enough Sinhalese: “We consider Sri Lanka as one land belonging to all citizens, consisting of 75% Sinhalese and 25% other races. As such, we will settle Sri Lankans in this proportion throughout the island on state land”, he said at a public meeting at Anamaduwa.
This was not a program confined to the war years. It resumed after the LTTE’s military defeat in 2009, when the Mahaweli Authority and the military brought new waves of landless Sinhalese, mainly from Hambantota, into Weli Oya in the same clandestine manner as before. And it continues into the present, with the Sri Lankan cabinet of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake approving the revival of the Mahaweli System L’s Kivul Oya reservoir project in January 2026 — a scheme reported to confiscate over 1,600 acres of Tamil paddy land and settle more than 7,000 people, reportedly all Sinhalese, with no land allocated to the Tamil communities who have farmed the area for decades.
On 2 February 2026, residents and farmers of Nedunkerni, Vavuniya, held a protest against the Sri Lankan government’s revival of proposed Kivul Oya Reservoir Project, alleging that it would facilitate Sinhala colonization and alter the demographic composition of the North-East. Image courtesy of Tamil Guardian
These programs were administered under the banner of national development and land reform. They were nothing of the kind. They shifted the ethnic composition of entire districts, fragmented the geographic contiguity of Tamil-majority territory, and became one of the central grievances underlying Tamil nationalist politics and, later, the armed conflict. The war that erupted in 1983 and the military occupation of the North and East provided cover for accelerated settlement. In the post-war period, as the WSWS reported in 2012, the Rajapakse government pursued a systematic policy of “Sinhalisation” — changing Tamil place names to Sinhala, erecting Buddha statues, and moving Sinhalese settlers northward “to change the population balance in politically and socially significant ways.” [3] The military controlled land allocation and barred displaced Tamils from returning to their villages.
The Sinhalese peasants settled in the Northern and Eastern provinces through these colonisation schemes were themselves victims of the same communal strategy. Granted land and state assistance as initial inducements, many were subsequently left to endure severe hardship. Established in militarily exposed frontier zones, they were repeatedly subjected to deadly attacks by the LTTE and other armed groups, while the state frequently failed to provide either adequate protection or long-term economic security. For many settler families, the promised improvement in living conditions never materialised. Yet these same schemes profoundly and permanently altered the demographic composition of historically Tamil-majority areas — an outcome that was not incidental but, as a substantial body of research has documented, a central political objective of successive governments. The objective record demonstrates that the Sinhala-chauvinist state subordinated the welfare of poor Sinhalese settlers, no less than that of the Tamil population, to its broader strategy of consolidating territorial and political control through communal division. Sinhalese peasants were deployed not as the principal beneficiaries of these schemes but as instruments of a reactionary state policy whose overriding purpose was the preservation of bourgeois rule through ethnic polarisation.
On 5 February 2026, residents of Keppapulavu held a protest for the 12th consecutive day, demanding the return of their “ancestral lands” and community properties that have remained under military occupation since 2009. Image courtesy of Kumanan Kana
Tamil Eelam is Sri Lanka’s Gaza
The continued militarisation of the North and East, the land grabs and settler colonisation sponsored by the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist state, and the atrocities committed against Tamils since the early 1980s draw a sharp parallel between occupied Palestine and the North and East of Sri Lanka. The parallel is not incidental. It is verifiably reported that the Sri Lankan ruling class studied and adapted Zionist settler-colonialism as a precedent, with direct advisory contact between Israeli and Sri Lankan state agencies in the 1980s. The ideological foundations are strikingly similar. Just as Zionist ideology since the Nakba of 1948 has been built on the colonial assertion of a divine and historical claim to land, erasing the presence of the indigenous Palestinian population, Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism rests on the anachronistic and false claim that Tamils were historically invaders of the island — a mythology that denies the centuries-long presence of Tamils in the North and East and provides the ideological cover for their dispossession. The material manifestation of both ideologies has been the same: state-sponsored settler colonisation. In Palestine, Zionist settlements have been systematically implanted to fragment Palestinian territory, seize water and land resources, and make the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. In Sri Lanka, from the Gal Oya project of 1949 through the Mahaweli Programme to the post-war military colonies, the state has resettled Sinhalese peasants in historically Tamil-concentrated areas to alter the demographic map, fragment territorial contiguity, and “destroy the land basis for the very existence of Eelam”. In both cases, the political objective was not merely territorial acquisition but the deliberate strengthening of communal divisions to prevent the unity of the working class. In both cases, the major imperialist powers — above all the United States — provided political cover, military support and diplomatic protection for the project. In both cases, the civilian population was subjected to military onslaught when it resisted: the slaughter of tens of thousands of Tamils at Mullivaikkal in 2009, like the genocidal assault on Gaza, was the bloody culmination of decades of occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing. Tamil Eelam is Sri Lanka’s Gaza — not as a rhetorical flourish, but as the product of the same logic of the capitalist nation-state, which, whether in Palestine or Sri Lanka, resorts to settler colonialism, communal war and permanent military occupation to suppress the democratic rights of oppressed peoples and to divide the working class along ethnic lines.
The class logic of communalism
The policies of demographic engineering have not promoted unity between Tamil and Sinhala workers. They have deepened mistrust and communal division. This serves the interests of the Sinhala ruling class by weakening the independent unity of the working class, while simultaneously providing Tamil nationalist bourgeois leaders with political ammunition to reinforce ethnic divisions and strengthen support for separatism. The Sinhala ruling class and the Tamil bourgeois nationalists are not genuine antagonists. They are symbiotic. Each feeds on the other, and both depend on preventing the unity of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers on a class basis.
The demographic restructuring of the North and East serves a precise class function. It provides land and patronage to Sinhala settlers, creating a social base with a material stake in the communal order. It fragments the working class along ethnic lines, making it far harder for Tamil and Sinhala workers to recognise their common interests. And it provides the Tamil nationalist bourgeoisie with precisely the grievance around which to mobilise ethnic solidarity, reinforcing the very divisions that prevent the emergence of an independent working-class politics.
This was not inevitable. The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), the Trotskyist forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party and the Socialist Lead (SLLA), commanded the allegiance of the most class-conscious workers in the 1940s. On February 4, 1948, it mobilised 50,000 workers — Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim — on Galle Face Green to reject the fake independence arranged in the British Colonial Office. The BLPI warned that disenfranchising Tamil plantation workers would set a chain of discrimination in motion. The disaster came with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party’s political degeneration. Encouraged by the Pabloite revisionists in the Fourth International, the LSSP leaders increasingly adapted to Bandaranaike’s Sinhala populism, entering the SLFP government in 1964. By 1972, the former Trotskyist de Silva was drafting a constitution that enshrined Buddhism as the state religion and a Sinhala as the sole official language — a direct repudiation of everything he had fought for in 1948. The LSSP’s betrayal blocked the development of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class, opening the door to the JVP among Sinhala rural youth and the LTTE among young Tamils.
The way forward
The democratic rights of all communities cannot be secured through state-directed demographic manipulation. They require the conscious political unity of Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim workers against communalism and the capitalist state that has systematically exploited ethnic divisions for its own survival.
Where communities have been relocated through politically motivated settlement schemes, any future solution must uphold democratic rights, be voluntary, provide adequate compensation and livelihood guarantees, and be determined in consultation with the affected people — not imposed by the state in pursuit of communal objectives. But even such democratic measures can only be fully realised through a broader political struggle against the capitalist system that generates communalism as an instrument of rule.
The working class must reject all forms of nationalism and communalism — whether Sinhala supremacism or Tamil separatism. In solidarity with the socialist internationalist programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the SLLA fights for a workers’ and farmers’ government and the convening of a genuine constituent assembly to abolish decades of discrimination and oppression on the basis of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender. Democratic rights can only be assured by ending social inequality through the socialist transformation of society.
The ICFI advances the perspective of a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and [Tamil] Eelam, as part of a United Socialist States of South Asia. The ICFI’s “Tamil Eelam” is not the LTTE’s capitalist Eelam — it is a constituent part of a voluntary socialist federation, a socialist Tamil Eelam, guaranteed by a workers’ state. This is not a diplomatic formula for negotiations between capitalist nation-states. It is a guide to revolutionary action — the unification of Sinhala and Tamil workers in a common struggle against their common class enemy. As the 1987 statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International explained, the working class fights for the democratic rights of oppressed peoples “not as an appendage to the national bourgeoisie, but rather as its implacable enemy.”[4] The right of nations to self-determination cannot be realised through bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements, no matter how courageous or militant. It can only be achieved as a by-product of the socialist revolution led by the proletariat, which, having established its dictatorship, guarantees to all oppressed peoples their legitimate democratic rights within a voluntarily united socialist federation.
What, then, is the way forward for the Sinhalese peasants who have been settled in the North and East under these reactionary programmes? For those already settled and granted title deeds over the years — many of whom have lived there for decades, raised families and know no other home — any resolution must be democratic and voluntary, not punitive. They must be guaranteed security of person and property, full democratic rights, and equal participation in the economic and social life of the region alongside their Tamil and Muslim neighbours. For those who were settled but never granted formal title deeds, the state must either regularise their tenure on terms determined in consultation with all affected communities, or provide adequate compensation and livelihood guarantees should they choose to relocate. For those Sinhalese presently being lured by the state into new settlement schemes — the most active front of the ongoing communal project — the answer is to refuse. Sinhalese workers, youth and peasants must reject the role the Sinhala-chauvinist state has assigned them as demographic pawns. The state that offers them land today will abandon them tomorrow, as it has abandoned generations of settlers before them, once their political utility is exhausted. The genuine interests of Sinhalese peasants lie not in accepting stolen land at the expense of Tamil and Muslim working people, but in joining with those same working people in a common struggle against the capitalist system that exploits and divides them all.
The working class has no interest in drawing borders on exclusive ethnic lines, nor in the demographic manipulation of one community against another. They should reject the idea that different ethnic groups must be separated into different states. The territorial referent of “Tamil Eelam” in our usage is the Northern and Eastern provinces — the areas where the Tamil population has historically lived as a concentrated community, where national oppression has been most acute, and where the demand for a separate Tamil state has been historically raised by the Tamil nationalist movement. But, we do so within the framework of a United Socialist States, on the basis of the democratic right of self-determination and the struggle for socialism — NOT on the basis of ethnic exclusivity of Tamils, nationalist “homeland” claims of a primordial birthright grounded in ethnic identity, or the cartographic pretensions of the Tamil bourgeoisie. The interest of the working class lies in abolishing the entire system of capitalist communal rule through the socialist transformation of society. Sinhalese workers, youth and peasants should recognise the reactionary character of state-sponsored settlement policies and the devastating consequences they have produced over decades. The allies of Tamil workers are not to be found in the separatist leaderships of the Tamil bourgeoisie, but among their Sinhala and Muslim class brothers and sisters. The fight against communally driven demographic engineering is inseparable from the fight for socialism.
Let us be clear
Seventeen years after the war, the democratic right of Tamil people to reclaim their occupied lands must be upheld without qualification. Whether or not individual Tamils possess formal title deeds is irrelevant to the legitimacy of their claim. These are historically Tamil neighbourhoods — areas where Tamils were historically concentrated, where their homes, Tamil villages and cultural places were situated. The absence of state-issued documentation does not extinguish the right of a people to the lands on which their community has lived for generations. On the contrary, the systematic denial or destruction of title deeds by the occupying state is itself an instrument of dispossession, not a legitimate basis for denying restitution.
The democratic right of Tamils to their own neighbourhoods must be recognised and restored. This is not a claim to ethnic exclusivity. No member of any other ethnic community is prevented from residing in these areas of his or her own will, without the intervention of the state. The right being asserted is not the bourgeois-nationalist demand for an ethnically pure territory, but the inviolable democratic right of a historically oppressed people to return to and live in their traditional neighbourhoods, their historical villages and towns — the places from which they were driven by communal war, military occupation and state-sponsored colonisation. There is no exclusive ethnic right to lands that Marxists recognise. But people of the same ethnicity who have shared a culture in traditional neighbourhoods of a community, recognised as their historical villages and towns, have an inviolable right to reside on those lands.
This distinction is fundamental. The Sinhala-chauvinist state has systematically violated this right for decades — through the Gal Oya and Mahaweli colonisation schemes, through the mass expulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, through the military land seizures that followed the 2009 slaughter, and through the ongoing policy of settling Sinhalese colonists on lands from which Tamil families have been barred from returning. The state invokes formal legal title to justify these seizures, but the legal framework itself is the product of the same communal project. To accept the state’s legal title as the arbiter of rights would be to accept the legitimacy of the dispossession.
The restoration of Tamil neighbourhoods, villages and towns is a democratic demand that the working class must champion. It requires the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the military from the North and East, the dismantling of high security zones and army camps established on seized land, and the return of occupied lands to their traditional Tamil inhabitants. It requires that Sinhalese settlers who were implanted through state-sponsored schemes — particularly those who never received formal title — not be used by the state as a human shield to perpetuate occupation. Where settlers have been present for decades and know no other home, solutions must be democratic, voluntary and negotiated with the affected Tamil communities whose rights are primary. But the principle is clear: the democratic right of Tamils to their historical villages and towns is inviolable, and the state that violated it bears the responsibility for redress.
[2] The Lure of Land: Peasant Politics, Frontier Colonization and the Cunning State in Sri Lanka, Thiruni Kelegama and Benedikt Korf (2023) Modern Asian Studies 1, Cambridge University Press <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X22000506>
[4] The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League, Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North, Keerthi Balasuriya (19 November 1987) <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fi-15-1/05.html>
The silence — and in many cases, the open enthusiasm — of institutionalized journalists toward the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals (CIMP) Bill is a political scandal that must be exposed. Rather than recognizing the bill as a direct assault on their own democratic rights, a significant layer of established media professionals has greeted it as an opportunity for personal advancement. They see in the Chartered Institute not a cage, but a club: a state-operated institution that will certify their professional status, distinguish them from the unwashed masses of “content developers” and social media commentators, and — most importantly — open the door to the material privileges that state recognition can confer. Pensions. Insurance schemes. Bank loans at preferential rates. Foreign visa facilitation. Access to government advertising and contracts. A seat at the table with the powerful.
This is the outlook not of defenders of press freedom but of a privileged petty-bourgeois stratum seeking to secure its position through collaboration with the capitalist state. It is the mentality of the courtier, not the journalist.
The Bribe and the Chain
On 17 February 2026, Deputy Minister of Mass Media Kaushalya Ariyarathna of NPP/JVP government told Parliament that the government would establish a chartered institution to promote journalists’ job security, professionalism, health insurance and welfare, and that it would continue the scholarship schemes.
The Dissanayake government is not offering these inducements out of generosity. It is executing a classic strategy of bourgeois statecraft: buy off a strategic layer of the profession, bind their material interests to the survival of the regime, and in doing so, fragment any potential opposition to the throttling of democratic rights. The journalist who today receives a state-certified accreditation, a facilitated bank loan, or a government pension scheme becomes, tomorrow, a hostage. The same state that grants these privileges can revoke them — and under the CIMP Bill, the mechanism for revocation is already built into the architecture. Section 24 empowers the Council to “disenroll any member” for “professional misconduct,” a term left deliberately undefined in Section 23(2), to be filled in later by rules made by the same Council. The journalist who believes they are securing a pension is in fact putting their head in a noose.
This is not hypothetical. We have seen this dynamic play out repeatedly. In 2023, the Government Medical Officers’ Association — the trade union of Sri Lankan doctors — agreed to government censorship* of its own members’ communications, demonstrating how professional associations function as the industrial police for government and corporations. The union bureaucrats who negotiate such arrangements secure their own positions at the expense of the rights of their members. The CIMP Bill extends this model to journalism: create a chartered body, staff it with compliant figures, and use it to discipline the profession from within.
The Class Character of the Betrayal
The journalists who welcome the CIMP Bill are not acting out of ignorance. They are acting out of class interest — the interest of a privileged layer that fears the independent mobilization of the working class and the unregulated democratic discourse of the internet more than it fears state censorship. The mainstream corporate media in Sri Lanka is already tightly controlled by oligarchs and the state. Its senior practitioners have long since made their peace with power. What terrifies them is not the government’s repression but the rise of independent online media — the bloggers, the social media commentators, YouTubers, the citizen journalists, the socialist publications — who operate outside the established hierarchies of the profession and who give voice to working-class anger against IMF austerity, privatization, and imperialist war.
The CIMP Bill, by bringing “content developers” under the disciplinary apparatus of the state, promises to eliminate this competition. For the institutionalized journalist, the bill is not a threat to press freedom — it is a moat around their professional castle. They will be certified. Their rivals will be disenrolled. The democratic right of free expression will be converted into a licensed privilege, and they will be among the license-holders.
This is a reactionary posture of the most dangerous kind. It is the same mentality that led the trade union bureaucracy to suppress strikes by postal workers, electricity workers, and health workers — sacrificing the interests of the broader working class to preserve their own positions within the state apparatus. It is the mentality of the labor aristocracy, the privileged stratum that imperialism cultivates in the colonial and semi-colonial countries to serve as a transmission belt for the dictates of finance capital.
A Trap, Not a Shelter
The journalists who imagine they will benefit from the CIMP Bill are deluding themselves. The state that grants privileges can withdraw them. The Interim Council appointed by the Media Minister — consisting of the Ministry Secretary and six political nominees — will write the rules that define “professional misconduct.” Those rules will not be written to protect the integrity of journalism. They will be written to silence criticism of the government. The journalist who accepts accreditation today may find themselves disenrolled tomorrow for reporting on a strike, exposing a corruption scandal, or publishing an article critical of the IMF program. The pension, the bank loan, the visa facilitation — all will vanish the moment the journalist steps out of line.
The only reliable guarantee of press freedom is not a state-issued certificate of professionalism. It is the organized power of the working class. The journalists who seek to insulate themselves from state repression by collaborating with the state will find that they have merely made themselves more vulnerable to it. They will have traded their independence for a mess of pottage, and they will be devoured in due course.
Journalists Must Ally with the Working Class
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) calls on all honest journalists — including those who may have initially viewed the CIMP Bill as an opportunity for professional advancement — to break decisively from this reactionary orientation. The fight against the CIMP Bill is not a fight for the privileges of a professional elite. It is a fight for the democratic rights of the entire working class, of all the “content creators”. Journalists cannot defend their right to publish by seeking patronage from the capitalist state. They can only defend it by allying themselves with the class that has the power to overthrow that state.
Reject the bribe! The government’s promise of insurance, pensions, loans, and visas is the price of your chains. No material inducement is worth the surrender of press freedom!
Break from the institutionalized journalists who are collaborating with the state! Their “professionalism” is a cover for class betrayal. They do not speak for journalism — they speak for their own careers!
For the unity of journalists with the working class! The fight for press freedom is inseparable from the fight against IMF austerity, against imperialist war, and for the socialist reorganization of society!
Build rank-and-file committees of media workers! Independent of the corporate media owners, the trade union bureaucracy, and the state — to fight for the right to publish without interference!
Defeat the CIMP Bill! No to state licensing of journalists! Freedom of the press is a right, not a privilege!
The pen that serves the state will be broken by the state. The pen that serves the working class will be defended by the working class. Journalists must choose which side they are on.
