By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
Mawpiya Sevana Home engulfed in flames. Image courtesy of nagalandpost.com
On the evening of June 3, 2026, fire consumed the Mawpiya Sevana care facility in Batagoda, Anguruwatota, near Horana in the Kalutara District. Twelve residents — elderly men and women, people living with mental illness, people with intellectual disabilities — died. Eight more were severely injured. Seventy-one human beings were packed into a building designed for fifteen. The first instinct of the bourgeois press, the political establishment, and the state apparatus is to render this a story about regulatory failure: the home was unregistered, the owner has been arrested, the Defence Secretary visited the ruins. Officials speak of stricter enforcement, mandatory inspections, and compliance frameworks. A proprietor sits in remand custody. The machinery of bourgeois law performs its theatre of accountability.
We reject this framing entirely. The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are not a regulatory scandal. They are a systemic indictment — the concentrated and visible expression of what capitalist society does to human beings who can no longer be profitably exploited.
The Fundamental Logic: Discarded Lives
To understand this tragedy scientifically, one must begin with the logic of capital itself. Under capitalism, the value of a human being — in the brutal calculus of the system — is indexed to their capacity to generate surplus value. The worker sells their labour power; capital extracts from that labour power more value than it returns in wages; the difference constitutes profit, the lifeblood of the system. This is the elementary truth established by Marx in Capital and confirmed by every hour of every working day across the planet.
What, then, of those who can no longer labour? What of the elderly, the severely disabled, those living with serious mental illness? In the language of capital, they are unproductive. They generate no surplus value. They are, from the standpoint of the system, a cost — a drain on resources that could otherwise be directed toward accumulation. Capitalism does not produce sentimentality toward those it cannot exploit. It produces neglect, abandonment, and, at the sharp end of underdevelopment, mass death.
This is the political truth behind the twelve corpses at Mawpiya Sevana. These were human beings whom the system had already written off. They had no social security worth the name. They had no public institutions capable of housing and caring for them with dignity. They were deposited — warehoused — in an overcrowded, unregistered private facility, in a building designed for fifteen, because their families, themselves workers ground down by decades of austerity, had no alternative. The capitalist state knew this was happening. It tolerated it, because the alternative — a publicly funded, adequately staffed, universally available system of elder care and disability support — would require precisely the kind of social expenditure that the ruling class and its international creditors have placed beyond political possibility.
The IMF and the Deliberate Dismantling of Social Provision
This brings us to the immediate political context, which is inseparable from the structural one. Sri Lanka is presently in the grip of one of the most savage austerity programs in its history, administered under the direct supervision of the International Monetary Fund. The 2022 foreign debt default and the social explosion that swept former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power opened the door to an IMF bailout — and with it, the full subordination of Sri Lankan economic and social policy to the demands of international finance capital.
Every government since — from Wickremesinghe to the present JVP/NPP administration of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — has functioned as a transmission belt for IMF dictates. The 2026 budget allocates a staggering 4.5 trillion rupees (450,000 crores Rupees. Approximately US $13 billion) for debt servicing alone — money extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and the rural poor and transferred to international bondholders, banks, and multilateral creditors. To meet this obligation, the government has slashed public expenditure across every social domain: health, education, welfare.
The health system is collapsing under the pressure of these cuts. Public hospitals run out of essential medicines — insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, psychiatric medications. Patients wait over a year for MRI scans and die during the wait. Nurses are so overworked and under-resourced that they have no chairs to sit on. The government’s own health minister, confronted with the medicine shortage, told patients to “buy them from the cheapest places.” This is not negligence. This is deliberate policy, enforced under IMF conditionality and praised by international financial institutions as evidence of “fiscal discipline.”
Into this landscape of deliberate social destruction, the question of elder care and disability support does not even register as a policy priority. The JVP/NPP government moved in late 2025 to slash the Aswesuma welfare program — a meagre cash transfer scheme paying between 5,000 and 17,500 rupees per month (approximately US$16 to $57) to the disabled, the elderly, kidney patients, and the extreme poor. Even this minimal safety net is under attack, with the World Bank pressing for a reduction in the number of beneficiaries and a JVP minister publicly declaring that welfare recipients should “feel ashamed” — calling it “legal begging.” As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has noted, this language carries chilling historical echoes: it frames the destitute not as victims of a system, but as parasites upon it.
It is in this context that Mawpiya Sevana existed. The state did not build, fund, or staff adequate public residential facilities for the elderly and the disabled — not because it lacked the administrative capacity to do so, but because the entire fiscal framework of Sri Lankan capitalism, as restructured by the IMF, prohibits such expenditure. The government allocates debt repayments nearly nine times the health budget. There are simply no resources directed toward the systematic, universal care of those who cannot work. In their place, a black market of unregistered, unregulated, overcrowded private facilities fills the vacuum — precisely because working-class and poor families, themselves crushed by falling real wages, rising prices, and the destruction of social services, cannot provide the full-time care that the state refuses to provide.
The State Knew, and the State Did Not Care
It would be politically dishonest to attribute what happened at Mawpiya Sevana to ignorance or inattention on the part of state authorities. The Director of the National Secretariat for Elders has confirmed that the facility was known to the authorities, that it was unregistered, and that it had previously been warned to comply with regulations. Officials knew. They did not act, not because the machinery of enforcement was insufficiently developed, but because the state had no institutional alternative to offer the residents. To shut down Mawpiya Sevana without providing a publicly funded substitute would have been to condemn seventy-one people to destitution or homelessness. The state permitted the facility’s continued operation because the alternative — genuine social provision — is structurally excluded by the political and economic priorities of the ruling class.
This is the functioning logic of the capitalist state in an underdeveloped country operating under IMF tutelage. It is not an aberration from the normal functioning of the system. It is the system functioning normally. The capitalist state in Sri Lanka — as in every neocolonial country — is not an instrument of social welfare. It is an instrument of capital accumulation, debt repayment, and the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the exploitation of labour. Those who cannot be exploited — the elderly, the severely disabled, those with serious mental illness — fall outside this framework entirely. They are residue. They are waste. The system does not know what to do with them except minimize the cost of their existence and, when they die in preventable fires, process the deaths through the criminal justice system to defuse political pressure.
The Feudal Supplement and Its Limits
In the absence of any meaningful social security system, the burden of care for the elderly and disabled in Sri Lanka — as throughout the countries of the periphery — falls on the feudal-cultural obligations of family and kinship networks. Sons and daughters are expected to provide, to sacrifice their own economic lives, to absorb the cost that the state refuses to bear. This system of informal social reproduction (provision of public goods — healthcare, education, social security — necessary to maintain a productive workforce) does not represent cultural high standards. It is a structural necessity for capital: it permits the ruling class to avoid the costs of social reproduction that workers in more developed capitalist countries extracted through generations of struggle — pension systems, public health systems, residential care facilities, disability support.
But this feudal supplement is itself being eroded by the same forces of capitalist development and austerity that make it necessary. As real wages collapse — down 24 percent in the public sector and 14 percent in the private sector since 2022, according to World Bank data — working-class families have fewer resources to provide informal care. Emigration, driven by economic desperation, separates families across continents. The nuclear family unit, under the pressure of capitalist commodity (property) relations and austerity, cannot substitute for the collective social infrastructure that only a socialist society can build and sustain.
The result is the proliferation of informal, unregistered, unregulated private facilities like Mawpiya Sevana — a catastrophic market response to a catastrophic social failure. People with nowhere to go, and nowhere else to put their relatives, are concentrated in buildings not designed to hold them, run by proprietors operating outside any regulatory framework, because the regulated, publicly funded alternative does not exist. The owner of Mawpiya Sevana now faces criminal charges. He may be guilty of negligence. But the system that created the conditions in which he operated — the IMF, the successive Colombo governments, the entire apparatus of neocolonial austerity — faces no charges at all.
The Question of Political Responsibility
The JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake bears direct political responsibility for the conditions that produced this tragedy. This is a government that came to power presenting itself — fraudulently — as a movement of the working people, invoking the language of “people’s power” and social transformation. Its actual record is one of ruthless implementation of IMF directives, attacks on welfare recipients, the deployment of the military against striking postal workers, the invocation of Essential Services legislation to suppress workers opposing privatization, and the systematic underfunding of health and education.
But responsibility does not end with the current government. Every government that has administered Sri Lankan capitalism since independence — the SLFP, the UNP, the SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP — has presided over the gradual destruction of whatever social provision existed and its replacement with the “free market”: privatization, commercialization, the withdrawal of the state from any domain of social reproduction that cannot generate profit for capital. The entire political establishment is complicit. The opposition parties — the SJB, the SLPP, the UNP — offer only “token criticisms” while accepting the IMF framework in its entirety.
The trade union bureaucracies, which claim to represent the interests of working people, are equally implicated. They have systematically suppressed independent workers’ action, called off strikes on the basis of empty promises, and functioned as transmission belts for the very governments and institutions that are dismantling social provision. Their loyalty is to the capitalist system, not to the workers they nominally represent.
The Only Answer: Socialist Transformation
The twelve people who died at Mawpiya Sevana on June 3, 2026, cannot be brought back. But the conditions that killed them can, and must, be ended — not through regulatory reform, not through stricter enforcement of existing laws, not through the arrest of a single proprietor, but through the socialist transformation of society.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the programme of the International Committee of thenFourth International (ICFI), insist on this with complete clarity: there is no solution to the crisis of elder care, disability support, public health, or any other domain of social reproduction within the framework of capitalism and IMF austerity. The resources required to build a genuine, universal, publicly funded system of care for those who cannot work — the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill — exist. They are being extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and transferred to international creditors in the form of 4.5 trillion rupees in annual debt repayments. They are being accumulated by the corporate elite whose tax rates the JVP/NPP government has left intact. They are being hoarded in the offshore accounts and investment portfolios of those who profit from the exploitation of Sri Lankan labour.
These resources must be expropriated — through the repudiation of the foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under democratic workers’ control, and the reorganization of production to serve human need rather than private profit. Public residential care, universal healthcare, free education, disability support, and social security for the elderly are not luxuries. They are social rights, achievable only through the defeat of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.
This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class — against the JVP/NPP government, against the IMF, against the entire capitalist political establishment, and against the trade union bureaucracies that serve as its labour lieutenants. It requires the building of rank-and-file action committees in workplaces, plantations, and communities, independent of all capitalist parties and institutions, coordinating a unified movement for a workers’ and peasants’ government committed to a socialist program.
The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are a concentrated expression of a social order in terminal crisis. The answer to them is not to manage that crisis more humanely — it is to end it, through the international socialist revolution that the Fourth International was founded to advance.
We, the SLLA demand: full public accountability for the deaths at Mawpiya Sevana; immediate public funding for a universal system of residential care for the elderly and disabled; the cancellation of IMF debt obligations and the reallocation of all debt-servicing funds to social provision; and the expropriation of the major banks, corporations, and private hospital networks under democratic workers’ control.
Tonight marks the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, were present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library today, and asked to address an audience of our Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, we would have delivered the following speech.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, member SLLA.
Jaffna Public Library after Arson. Image courtesy of CPA X.
Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters — Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and all who cherish the meaning of human dignity,
Forty-five years ago today, in the dead of night, flames consumed one of the greatest cultural treasures of South Asia. The Jaffna Public Library — home to over 97,000 volumes, to irreplaceable ola leaf manuscripts, to ancient chronicles and living memory, to the intellectual heritage of the Tamil people accumulated across centuries — was reduced to ashes. Not by accident. Not by nature. But by deliberate human hands: uniformed police and organized thugs, dispatched from the south under the protection and direction of the United National Party government of J.R. Jayawardena. Ministers Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Mathew — who boasted in print that the Sinhalese must rise to “protect Buddhism” — arrived in Jaffna to oversee the operation. Four Tamil men were dragged from their homes and killed. Homes, shops, offices, and the press of Tamil newspaper Ealanadu were burned. Statues of Tamil cultural figures were demolished at road junctions.
This was not a spontaneous eruption. It was a political decision, made in Colombo, carried out in Jaffna, and covered up in silence by an entire political establishment and a compliant media. No official inquiry was ever held into the destruction of the library. No one was prosecuted. No minister faced justice. The fire that burned on the night of May 31, 1981 was lit by the ruling class of this island — and it was fueled by decades of communalist poison that every major political party, UNP and SLFP alike, had been injecting into the bloodstream of Sri Lankan society since independence.
We gather here today not only to grieve. We gather to understand. We gather to draw the lessons that the ruling class — of every party, of every era — has worked hardest to prevent the people of this island from drawing.
What was destroyed that night?
The books that burned were irreplaceable — Yalpanam Vaipavama, the history of Jaffna, existed in only one copy, and it perished in the fire. But the rulers of Sri Lanka were not primarily burning books. They were burning a people’s sense of themselves. They were burning the confidence, the continuity, and the cultural selfhood of the Tamil minority. They were sending a message, written in fire: You do not belong here. Your history does not count. Your culture is disposable. Your lives are contingent on our permission.
This was the language of Sinhala chauvinism — not a fringe ideology, but the official state ideology, entrenched in the very constitution of the republic by the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by the anti-Tamil university admissions schemes, by Buddhism’s enshrinement as the state religion. And it was the language of a ruling class that used communal hatred as a tool of governance, a weapon to distract the Sinhalese poor and working class from the economic policies — the austerity, the open-market “liberalization,” the assault on wages and public services — that were devastating their own lives alongside the lives of Tamil workers.
The burning of the Jaffna Library was not the beginning. And it was not the end. It was a turning point — a signal flare fired two years before the July 1983 pogrom, in which organized Sinhala mobs, with voter registration lists in hand provided by state institutions, went from door to door, burning Tamil families alive in Colombo and across the island. Black July ignited a civil war that would consume nearly three decades, claim tens of thousands of lives, shatter entire communities — Tamil and Sinhalese — and culminate in the final military assault of May 2009 at Mulivaikkal, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred in what the United Nations itself acknowledged as potential war crimes, while the world looked away.
Standing today here facing the once flame-engulfed walls of this magnificent monument, we should say loudly, “Never Again”. Never again must mean: never again a burned library. Never again a Black July. Never again a Mulivaikkal.
But “never again” cannot be a wish. It must be a program.
Seventeen years have passed since the guns fell silent in May 2009. What has changed? The war is over — but the conditions that produced the war are not. The military still occupies the North and East. Tamil lands remain seized under military control. Mulivaikkal commemorations — the most basic act of mourning the dead — are physically disrupted by state-backed mobs and security forces. Tamil protesters are harassed by racist mobs and are arrested. A vicious social media hate campaign, coordinated and deliberate, brands every Tamil who speaks of their history, their grief, or their rights as a terrorist, an LTTE sympathizer, a separatist. Tamil writers find their books blocked by government censors under the cynical banner of “national unity.” And presiding over all of this today is the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — a party that built its political career on enthusiastic support for the anti-Tamil war, that opposed every concession to Tamil democratic rights, and that now poses as a government of “national unity” while allowing Sinhala chauvinist propaganda to circulate freely.
We must say this plainly: the militarization of the North has not ended with the war. It has continued and deepened. Successive governments — from Rajapaksa to Wickremesinghe to Dissanayake — have maintained the military stranglehold on Tamil life because the military is the iron fist of a capitalist state that rules in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and serves as the instrument of communal oppression. The glorification of the military — the victory parades, the war monuments, the cult of the soldier — is not incidental. It is how the ruling class educates the Sinhalese masses into accepting militarism as their national identity, while ensuring that no united struggle of Tamil and Sinhalese workers can challenge the social order.
The moral disorientation you see in Sinhalese society today — the celebration of soldiers over teachers, the tolerance of racist social media, the passive acceptance of Tamil humiliation and even calls for the repeat of the historical violence, massacres and vandalism — is not the natural condition of the Sinhalese people. It is a manufactured condition. It has been manufactured, across decades, by a ruling class that needed Sinhalese workers to see Tamils as their enemy rather than their comrades. It is the deliberate product of a political culture built on militarism, chauvinism, fear, and lies — because a Sinhalese worker who hates Tamil workers is a worker who will never turn to face his actual oppressor.
It is in this context that we should turn to the lessons of seven decades of betrayal
The tragedy of Sri Lanka is inseparable from the history of betrayal by the parties that once claimed to speak for the working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party — which emerged from the Trotskyist tradition — was once the largest workers’ party in South Asia. It had, within its hands, the political means to unite Tamil and Sinhalese workers on the basis of socialist internationalism, to oppose communalism at its roots, and to fight for a government of the working class that guaranteed equal rights for all national minorities. Instead, in 1964, the LSSP leadership capitulated to class collaboration, joined the bourgeois coalition of Sirima Bandaranaike — and sealed Tamil oppression into the very constitution of the republic. Colvin R. de Silva, once a fighter for the Fourth International, presided as a minister over the entrenchment of Sinhala-only language policy. This was not a minor error. It was a world-historical betrayal. It opened the road to every pogrom, every war crime, every burned library that followed.
Capitalism cannot solve the national question in Sri Lanka. The ending of the war did not solve the Tamil national question, and the ruling class has been capitalizing this unresolved problem ever since. Throughout the seventy-eight years of independence it has produced only communal war and economic devastation. The Tamil bourgeois parties — the TULF, the TNA and its successors — have failed Tamil workers and youth just as comprehensively, channeling legitimate grievances into parliamentary deals with Colombo and appeals to foreign imperialist powers that have never served Tamil interests and never will. The LTTE’s separatist program, whatever its origins in the just anger of Tamil youth, could not overcome the fundamental reality that a separate Tamil capitalist state would be a small, economically weak entity, dependent on the same imperialist powers that armed and sustained Colombo’s military, unable to guarantee the rights of Tamils who live within and outside the North and East, and incapable of addressing the root class question.
The path forward is not separation. It is not a communal deal brokered between Tamil and Sinhalese elites. It is the unification of the Sri Lankan working class — Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim — in a common struggle against the capitalist system that has used communalism as its instrument of rule for seven decades.
What does “Never Again” demand of us?
When we say “never again,” we do not make a sentimental appeal. We make a political commitment.
Never again a Jaffna Library arson means: never again will we allow the ruling class to burn the cultural heritage of any people — because we understand that the hand that lit that fire was the hand of class rule, using racial hatred as its instrument.
Never again a Black July means: never again will Sinhalese workers stand aside while their class brothers and sisters are massacred — because we understand that the pogrom was organized against Tamils to prevent the unity that would threaten the ruling class.
Never again a Mulivaikkal means: never again will the working class accept a “military solution” to what is a social and political problem — because we understand that the massacre of Tamil civilians served not the interests of Sinhalese workers but the interests of a military apparatus and a ruling class that then turned its guns on Sinhalese workers in austerity, repression, and the destruction of democratic rights.
The Sinhalese workers and youth who are told today that their national glory consists in military parades and the suppression of Tamil commemorations — they are being robbed. They are being robbed of their class consciousness, of their solidarity with fellow workers, of their capacity to fight for their own emancipation. The same ruling class that burned the Jaffna Library has imposed poverty, casualized labor, and IMF austerity on Sinhalese workers. The same military that massacred Tamils at Mulivaikkal is the instrument of a state that imprisons striking workers and breaks trade unions. The enemy of Tamil workers is the enemy of Sinhalese workers. His name is not Tamil or Sinhalese. Its name is Capital.
What are we fighting for?
We call upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers, youth, teachers, students, and intellectuals to build a united movement — not a movement of ethnic reconciliation brokered by elites who represent no one but themselves, but a movement of the working class, fighting for:
The immediate end to military occupation of the North and East, and the return of all seized Tamil lands to the rightful owners. The right to commemorate the Tamil dead at Mulivaikkal and all sites of atrocity — without harassment, disruption, or criminalization. Full linguistic, cultural, and democratic rights for Tamils and all national minorities, including the Muslim community which has faced its own waves of racist persecution. An end to the militarist culture that has been poisoned into Sinhalese society — a culture that glorifies killing and suppresses solidarity. The prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Black July through to Mulivaikkal. And above all — a socialist political program that places the resources of this island — its land, its labor, its productive capacity — under the democratic control of its working people, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim alike, so that poverty, communal division, and ruling-class manipulation can be swept away at their roots.
The Jaffna Library held the memory of a civilization. It held books that no one can recover. But it also holds, for us, an indelible political lesson: that a ruling class willing to burn a library is a ruling class willing to burn everything — willing to burn villages, willing to massacre civilians, willing to destroy entire peoples — in defense of its power and profit.
We honor the memory of what was destroyed on this night 45 years ago not by grief alone, but by commitment — the commitment to build the political movement that makes such destruction impossible, by ending the system that makes it necessary.
A heritage was rendered ashes. But the struggle lives on!
Never again — through the unity of the working class of the North and the South!
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia condemns the detention of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s books and demands their immediate and unconditional release
By Sanjaya Jayasekera.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and thesocialist.lk unconditionally condemn the detention by Sri Lanka Customs of two books by Kilinochchi-based Tamil author Theepachelvan Piratheepan — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren (“I Wage War Through Writing”), a collection of interviews, and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil (“Now Too Here Are Two Nations”), a collection of essays on the war — and demands their immediate and unconditional release. This act of state censorship, carried out with the direct institutional involvement of the Ministry of Defence and under the rubber-stamp of cultural bureaucracies subordinated to the security apparatus, is not an administrative irregularity. It is a political act, rooted in the class interests of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and its state, and it must be understood and combated as such.
The Facts of the Case Expose the Repressive Machinery under the NPP/JVP government
On 18 March 2026, Sri Lanka Customs seized a consignment of books imported from Chennai, India, by Onereach Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, under CusDec No. 47995. The consignment included four books by Theepachelvan Piratheepan. Customs officers, purportedly suspecting a threat to national security, initiated a review process — with the Director General of Customs, Seevali Arukgoda, subsequently stating that the suspicion arose from one book’s cover, which depicted a map of Tamil Eelam separated from the rest of Sri Lanka, and what he described as a “limited inspection of the contents.”
What followed was a cascade of bureaucratic evasion and institutional complicity that lays bare the functioning of the capitalist state. The Defence Ministry recommended that Customs detain all four books, while the Culture Ministry recommended the release of the two novels. Customs then returned to the Defence Ministry seeking a “no objection” for the novels’ release, which was granted. Based on the recommendations of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, the State Panel of Literature of the Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs, and the Ministry of Defence, two books — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil — were formally withheld, with Customs citing provisions under section 120 of the Penal Code, a colonial law, read with Schedule B of the Customs Ordinance.
The Defence Ministry did not respond to questions as to how it determined that the books incited “disaffection” or posed a threat to national security. Crucially, the two books that were eventually released were not first editions and had already been distributed and made available at Tamil bookshops across Sri Lanka. The logical absurdity of this position — that books freely circulating in Tamil bookshops nonetheless require Defence Ministry clearance to re-enter the country through customs — exposes the purely political, punitive character of the censorship directed against Theepachelvan’s work on the war and its aftermath.
When The Examiner inquired whether Customs had reached out to the Attorney General for his opinion, Director General Arukgoda replied: “Why should we consult the AG’s department?” — asserting that Defence Ministry observations are sufficient and that “this has been the practice for as long as he can remember.” Here, in the unguarded candour of a senior bureaucrat, is the operating logic of the Sri Lankan security state: the military-intelligence apparatus has, through decades of communal war and “anti-terrorism” legislation, assumed permanent, unaccountable authority over political expression.
The detention of Theepachelvan’s books is not an isolated incident but part of a systematic and sustained campaign by the NPP/JVP government to suppress Tamil literary and political expression through the Defence Ministry’s permanent stranglehold over the circulation of ideas in the north and east. Writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan — known by his pseudonym Shobasakthi — has revealed that copies of his book 1990: Leidenthivu – Mandaithivu Massacres and Mass Graves, documenting the massacres and mass graves of the war, sent from Chennai to poet Karunakaran’s address in Kilinochchi in late 2025, were seized by Customs at the Jaffna Post Office in November 2025 and forwarded to the Defence Ministry where they remain suppressed to this day — a complaint to Jaffna District NPP MP Rajeevan having yielded nothing, confirming that the censorship of Tamil historical memory is not a bureaucratic malfunction tolerated by the NPP government but its deliberate and continuing political policy.
The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka has warned that detaining publications without clear evidence of inciting communal disharmony could violate constitutional protections, including freedom of expression and equality before the law, and that such actions may amount to a misuse of power and a potential human rights violation. These expressions of institutional “concern,” however, will remain toothless so long as the fundamental class character of the state — and the NPP government that now administers it — goes unexamined and unchallenged.
The Class Character of the NPP’s Censorship
The detention of Theepachelvan’s books is not an aberration of the National People’s Power government; it is a manifestation of its essential political character. The NPP, led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, rose to power on the wave of mass popular revulsion demonstrated in the 2022 aragalaya uprising — a spontaneous movement of workers, youth and the oppressed masses against decades of IMF-dictated austerity, official corruption and elite plunder. Having exploited that mass anti-establishment sentiment to win the presidency and parliamentary majority, the NPP has proceeded to do precisely what every bourgeois government before it has done: implement IMF austerity with renewed vigour, maintain and expand the security-state apparatus inherited from the Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe eras, and deploy the machinery of repression against those who challenge its authority.
The JVP’s historical trajectory makes this entirely predictable. The JVP, which twice launched armed insurrections in the south — in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989 — and which conducted savage political violence, including the assassination of trade union leaders and left-wing opponents, subsequently transformed itself into a parliamentary party deeply integrated into the structures of the Sri Lankan capitalist state. Its “left” and “progressive” credentials — always petty-bourgeois in their class content, reformist in their political program and nationalist in their ideological framework — have served as a political cover for its absorption into bourgeois politics. Its “anti-corruption” and “good governance” rhetoric during the aragalaya period and the 2024 election campaign was not the language of class struggle but the language of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia appealing to middle-class frustrations within the framework of capitalist rule.
Now in government, the NPP/JVP administers the very security apparatus whose colonial-era legal instruments — including Section 120 of the Penal Code, the draconian Public Security Ordinance and the Prevention of Terrorism Act — were wielded by Sinhala-chauvinist governments against the Tamil people for decades. Tamil writers in Sri Lanka live under constant surveillance of the security state. In 2024, Theepachelvan himself was summoned and interrogated by the Terrorist Investigation Division (CTID), and was subjected to nearly three hours of questioning over a book launch event. This persecution has not ceased under the National People’s Power government. The NPP’s “change” amounts to the continuation of the communal-security state with a new parliamentary facade and a refreshed managerial personnel.
Theepachelvan Piratheepan — born on 24 October 1983 in Kilinochchi — is one of the most significant Tamil literary voices to emerge from the lived experience of the war and its devastating human consequences. His poetry, essays and interviews document the suffering of the Tamil people through the armed conflict, the mass atrocities of the final military offensive, and the grinding social desolation of the post-war north and east. It is precisely because his work constitutes an act of bearing witness — of preserving the collective historical memory of a people subjected to systematic violence and dispossession — that the state seeks to suppress it. The detained books represent documentary historical testimony from below: the kind of testimony that the bourgeois state, regardless of which party administers it, has an enduring material interest in silencing.
The Intelligentsia’s Capitulation: Performing Criticism, Defending the Capitalist State
I. Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri: The Government Supporter as Critic
No examination of this crisis would be complete without addressing the role played by the layers of academic and intellectual figures who occupy the space of “civil society” dissent in Sri Lanka — and who perform, with cultivated theatrical effect, the function of absorbing and neutralising working-class and democratic opposition to the capitalist state. The case of Professor Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri demands particular attention, because in the Theepachelvan affair his political intervention reveals, with unusual transparency, the precise mechanism by which the pseudo-left intelligentsia serves the class interests of the bourgeoisie.
Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri
On 19 April 2026, Dewasiri published a video statement on his YouTube channel — History with Nirmal — titled in Sinhala: “The greatest political defeat the Malima [NPP] government received in the case of Theepachelvan!” The framing is significant before a single word of analysis is delivered: the detention of a Tamil author’s books about the war is characterised not as a state assault on democratic rights and on the historical memory of the Tamil people — but as a political defeat for the government. The suffering of the Tamil author, the democratic principle of freedom of expression, the class content of the censorship — all of this is pushed to the background. What remains is a problem of government optics, of public relations management, of the NPP’s political credibility.
In the body of that statement, Dewasiri makes three things clear, each of which must be examined with precision.
First, having campaigned for the NPP/JVP electoral win, he asserts himself a supporter of the NPP/JVP government. This is an admission of class alignment. Dewasiri — the former secretary of the X-Group, the one-time FUTA president, the 2010 Cultural and National Heritage Ministry advisor, the key civil-society architect of the 2015 Sirisena “good governance” election victory — has now completed the arc of petty-bourgeois left politics in Sri Lanka: from student politics, through post-JVP academic radicalism, through “civil society” coalition-building for bourgeois electoral formations, to open and declared support for the NPP government that is today implementing IMF austerity and maintaining the security-state apparatus of the Rajapaksa era. This trajectory is not an individual aberration; it is the class trajectory of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in the epoch of imperialism.
Second, Dewasiri invokes the argument that in the digital age, banning physical books is an act of political absurdity — that in an era of internet access, detaining a printed consignment at customs only amplifies the work’s reach and drives readers to seek out the censored material. On the surface, one may see it as a critique of the government. In reality, it is something far more insidious: it is the argument of a government supporter advising his preferred government on how to conduct its affairs more effectively. The “digital age” argument does not challenge the ‘right’ of the state to suppress political literature; it argues that this particular act of suppression is tactically counterproductive. It is the counsel of a sympathetic advisor, not the principled opposition of a democrat.
Third, and most revealing, Dewasiri’s video statement conveys that he is worried about the NPP government losing credibility in public perception, and urges it to act quickly to resolve the problem. Here the contradiction at the heart of his entire political trajectory is exposed with unusual clarity — and it is a contradiction that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.
It would be a political error to characterise Dewasiri as someone indifferent to Tamil democratic rights. The record is otherwise. He has written at length on the ideological mechanisms by which Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist hegemony suppresses Tamil historical claims, on the illegitimacy of post-war “reconciliation” frameworks that deny devolution and Tamil political agency, and on the dangers of allowing dominant historical narratives to erase the lived experience of the Tamil people. These are not trivial positions — they represent a formal intellectual recognition of the very injustice that the detention of Theepachelvan’s books embodies. However, this critique is made entirely within the service of “post-war reconciliation” — a framework that accepts the Sri Lankan unitary capitalist state as the boundary within which Tamil political claims must be accommodated. Dewasiri argues for a more pluralist, less chauvinist bourgeois order — not for the right of the Tamil nation to self-determination, and certainly not for a class analysis of the national question that would expose the bourgeois state itself as the structural source of national oppression. His formal intellectual defence of Tamil historical memory therefore operates within the very political framework that generates the suppression he critiques.
This contradiction is precisely what makes his intervention in the Theepachelvan case so revealing — and so politically instructive. A man who has written extensively on how Sinhala-Buddhist historical consciousness suppresses Tamil historical memory, who has argued that post-war reconciliation is impossible without confronting that suppression, and who has documented in analytical detail the JVP’s own degeneration into Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist politics, now urges swift action by the NPP/JVP government that is suppressing Tamil historical testimony — not in order to vindicate the principle he has spent years articulating, but in order to protect the government’s political standing with the electorate. The defence of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s books — of the Tamil people’s right to possess, circulate and build upon their own historical testimony of the war — is subordinated entirely to the political management needs of a bourgeois government Dewasiri has openly declared he supports. What his academic framework identifies as an ideological injustice demanding structural confrontation becomes, in the moment of concrete political decision, a governmental embarrassment requiring swift damage control. The principle survives in the academic publications; it dissolves entirely when the government he supports is the one doing the suppressing.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary personal sense. It is the structural logic of petty-bourgeois left politics in the epoch of imperialism. What must be stated with precision is the distinction between historical acknowledgement and political principle: Dewasiri’s academic credentials as a critic of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism make his political function as a government defender more effective rather than less — allowing him to perform the role of principled critic while the substance of his intervention is the protection of a capitalist government that continues the security-state suppression of the very historical memory he has written about. The writings establish his credentials; his political conduct reveals his class allegiance.
The SLLA does not question the sincerity of Dewasiri’s academic work on Tamil historical oppression. We question its political value in the absence of the class independence that alone could give it practical force. Academic recognition of Tamil historical suffering, combined with political support for the bourgeois government that perpetuates it, does not advance the democratic rights of the Tamil people by a single degree. It provides intellectual legitimacy to the political management of their oppression.
This is not the first time Dewasiri has played this role. His trajectory — from X-Group intellectual and cultural radicalism, through ministerial advisor in 2010, to key civil-society architect of the 2015 Sirisena “good governance” coalition, to declared NPP supporter in 2026 — is the biography of the Sri Lankan pseudo-left intelligentsia’s absorption into the structures of bourgeois political management. At every stage, the rhetorical register changes — radical academic, trade union activist, “civil society” democrat, progressive government supporter — while the underlying political function remains constant: to channel mass discontent into safe institutional waters, to dress bourgeois politics in the language of popular aspiration, and to prevent the emergence of an independent, class-conscious political movement of the working class.
The SLLA’s critique of Dewasiri is not personal. It is the application of historical materialism to the concrete political role of a social layer. The pseudo-left intelligentsia does not invent the positions it holds; those positions are determined by its class position, its institutional dependencies, and its material and ideological integration into the structures of bourgeois society. Understanding this is essential to building the independent working-class political alternative that the Theepachelvan case — like every case of state repression before it — demands.
II. Jayathilaka Kammellaweera: The Literary Establishment as Cultural Gendarme
The response of figures like Dewasiri represents one mode of capitulation to the bourgeois state among those aligned with the NPP/JVP. The intervention of renowned Sinhala author and literary critic Jayathilaka Kammellaweera represents something qualitatively different and more openly reactionary: not the management of political embarrassment dressed in progressive credentials, but the direct rationalisation of censorship in the language of Sinhala cultural nationalism itself — a position that does not merely fail to defend Tamil democratic rights but actively argues for their suppression.
Jayathilaka Kammellaweera
Kammellaweera’s position is unambiguous. He argued that books containing ideas damaging to “national reconciliation” could legitimately be detained on the grounds that they harm “social cohesion.” He knows — from what he “heard” about the books — precisely what they contain: the historical memory of the Tamil oppressed nation, the testimonies of the war, the mass atrocities, the dispossession of a people subjected to decades of Sinhala-chauvinist state violence. It is on this basis that he endorses their suppression. His acknowledgement that he has not read the exact text is therefore entirely marginal to his political position — reading the books would not alter his stance by a single degree, because his position is not formed from the specific arrangement of words on specific pages but from what those pages represent: Tamil historical testimony that the Sinhala cultural establishment, aligned with the NPP government, requires to be silenced.
The terms Kammellaweera deploys — “national reconciliation,” “social cohesion” — require class analysis, not liberal restatement. In the political vocabulary of the Colombo establishment since the military defeat of the LTTE in 2009, “national reconciliation” has functioned consistently as a euphemism for Tamil acquiescence to the terms of the Sinhala-Buddhist state’s military victory. “Social cohesion” refers not to the freely expressed unity of equal peoples but to the managed coexistence of unequal communities within the framework of the unitary Sinhala-Buddhist state — a framework in which Tamil historical memory is treated as a threat to stability precisely because it is true. Kammellaweera’s argument is therefore not a liberal position on the limits of free expression made in good faith. It is a Sinhala chauvinist argument made in the language of social harmony: it subordinates the right of the Tamil people to preserve and circulate their own historical memory of national oppression to the political requirements of a Sinhala-dominated state’s management of post-war ethnic relations.
The SLLA states this directly and without qualification: Kammellaweera’s position is objectively racist in its political content and consequences. It assumes the right of the Sinhala cultural establishment — aligned with a Sinhala-chauvinist government of the South — to determine what Tamil writers may say about the Tamil people’s experience of the war, and legitimises the suppression of Tamil historical testimony as a public service. When the NPP state detains Tamil books through the Defence Ministry and aligned literary intellectuals rationalise that act in the language of social cohesion, we witness the complete operation of bourgeois ideological control: the state provides the coercive instrument and the cultural intelligentsia provides the legitimising discourse. These two functions are inseparable. Kammellaweera’s statement is a cultural expression of the JVP/NPP’s deep roots in Sinhala chauvinism — the WSWS has warned that true to its vile record and the reactionary traditions of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, the JVP/NPP government will whip up anti-Tamil Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism in an attempt to divide and weaken the working class — and it confirms that this tendency finds its reflection not only in the state apparatus but in the literary establishment that serves it.
The SLLA condemns Kammellaweera’s statement in the strongest possible terms. The defence of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s right to write, publish and circulate his testimony of the war is not merely a Tamil democratic demand. It is a demand of the entire working class — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — for the right to know its own history, free from the censorship of any state and any literary establishment that has traded its critical independence for proximity to bourgeois political power.
Equally revealing is the conduct of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, whose chairperson, Keerthi Welisarage declared — with breathtaking cynicism — that “there are no restrictions on freedom of expression in Sri Lanka” even as his institution’s recommendations formed part of the bureaucratic chain that kept Theepachelvan’s books in Customs detention. Cultural institutions subordinated to the state and its security apparatus do not defend artists; they police them — and the liberal intelligentsia that staffs and defends such institutions performs the same function in the domain of “civil society.”
The Continuity of State Repression and the Lessons of the SEP’s Record
The detention of Theepachelvan’s books must be situated within the pattern of sustained state repression against artists, writers and political dissenters in Sri Lanka that has intensified under every successive government. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and its affiliated Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE) (now defunct) have fought consistently against this repression — defending writer Shakthika Sathkumara when he was imprisoned on trumped-up blasphemy charges; campaigning for the release of Tamil poet Ahnaf Jazeem, held for months by the Terrorism Investigations Division under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for the content of a poetry collection; and standing with film director and playwright Malaka Devapriya when he was subjected to intimidatory investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department. These were not isolated or tokenistic acts of solidarity. They expressed a principled, politically grounded understanding that the defence of democratic rights — including freedom of expression and artistic freedom — is inseparable from the struggle of the working class against the capitalist state.
The SLLA, as the Revolutionary Left Faction of the SEP, grounds its response to the current attack on Theepachelvan in the same political foundation. The defence of his books is not a matter of abstract liberal principle. It is a class question. The suppression of Tamil literary testimony about the war is an attack on the democratic rights of the Tamil masses and on the ability of the entire working class — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim alike — to form independent political consciousness, to know its own history, and to build the movement necessary to defend its interests against austerity, communalism and authoritarianism.
1. Immediate and unconditional release of both detained books — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil — by Theepachelvan Piratheepan, with no conditions, no ongoing surveillance and no further harassment of the author. We also demand immediate release of all books of other authors including those of writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan.
2. Abolition of the practice whereby the Ministry of Defence — an institution of military-intelligence power — exercises authority over the import and circulation of literary works. The subordination of cultural institutions and customs procedures to the security apparatus must be ended. The repeal of all colonial-era and post-independence legal provisions — including parts of the Schedule B of the Customs Ordinance and its invocation of Section 120 of the Penal Code — used to suppress political literature and artistic expression is an urgent democratic necessity.
3. Full public accountability: the Defence Ministry must be compelled to explain publicly, on the record, on what specific grounds it determined that these literary works constituted a threat to national security. Secret, unaccountable determinations by the military-intelligence apparatus over the domain of political and artistic expression are fundamentally incompatible with democratic rights.
4. Mobilisation of workers, artists, students and youth: the SLLA calls for the broadest possible mobilisation in defence of Theepachelvan and of freedom of expression. Writers, publishers, academics, teachers, trade unionists and students must come together in independent democratic committees — in workplaces, universities and communities — to coordinate this defence outside and against the institutions of bourgeois civil society, which have proved incapable of providing principled opposition to state censorship.
5. Link the defence of democratic rights to socialist politics: the struggle against censorship, against the suppression of Tamil historical memory, and against the NPP government’s continuation of the security state cannot be separated from the struggle against IMF austerity, against the exploitation of the working class, and against the capitalist system that generates communalism and repression as instruments of class rule. The SLLA calls on workers and youth to break with the NPP, the JVP and all parties of the bourgeoisie, and to build an independent socialist political movement grounded in the program and perspectives of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The SLLA and theSocialist.lk stand in unconditional solidarity with Theepachelvan Piratheepan. His work — bearing witness to the anguish, the loss, the resistance and the aspirations of the Tamil people — belongs to the historical memory not only of the Tamil nation but of the international working class. No security ministry, no colonial-era customs ordinance, and no NPP government that has betrayed the masses who trusted it can legitimately suppress that testimony.
The defence of art and free expression is the defence of the working class. The struggle for democratic rights is the struggle for socialism.
