"The materialist world outlook not only opens a wide window on the whole universe, but it also strengthens the will. It is also the only thing that makes contemporary man a man"- Leon Trotsky [Attention to Theory].
The immense devastation inflicted upon the oppressed Tamil masses by the war cannot be equated with this or that bomb attack carried out by the LTTE in border villages or in the South. Those attacks were war crimes, and all members of the LTTE leadership — were they alive today — must be held accountable for them. But none of those acts can be placed anywhere near the decades of systematic, organised and massive devastation unleashed upon the Tamil working class, peasantry and oppressed masses as an entire people by the Sinhala-supremacist state in the South.
The Sinhala working class and oppressed masses in the South must honestly reckon with the fact that the gruesome consequences of the war endured by the Tamil people were, both quantitatively and qualitatively, several times greater than the damage suffered by the Sinhala oppressed. You must reject those bloodthirsty elements who seek to bury this truth, whining about alleged injustices against Sinhalese in the North in order to drag chauvinist movements back to the fore.
Separatism, as well as Tamil or Muslim nationalism, can only be defeated — primarily and indispensably — by defeating Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist capitalist politics.
This article was originally published by theSocialist.lk on 6 July 2026.
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
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 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.
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.
