Features

A JOURNEY THROUGH SRI LANKA’S NIGHT

Published

4 years ago

2022/10/23

Thilina Walpola

by Razeen Sally

Our life is a journey
Through winter and night
We look for our way
In a sky without light

Louis-Ferdinand Céline,Journey to the End of the Night

I had watched Sri Lanka’s latest catastrophe unfold from the safety and comfort of Singapore, not having been to the country for two years due to the pandemic. But I felt this catastrophe personally. I am half Sri Lankan. Colombo is my hometown, where I spent most of my childhood. After an almost three-decade absence, I returned to Sri Lanka in my forties and spent a decade travelling its length and breadth to write a travel memoir. From 2015 to 2018, I was an economic-policy adviser to the government.

I arrived at Katunayake airport in late April. A score of porters stood idle around luggage conveyor belts – one sign of chronic overstaffing in Sri Lanka’s public sector. Once on the Southern Expressway, there were striking differences from pre-pandemic times: roadside billboards were naked, reduced to their iron frames, denuded of advertising; shops and small tourist hotels and eateries were shuttered and boarded up.

Galle was front and centre in the post-2009 tourist boom, heaving with visitors all year round, with a transformative facelift of its crumbling buildings and soaring property prices. But now I saw hardly any foreign tourists, just a Colombo crowd down for the weekend.On May 9, the government imposed a nationwide curfew. In Colombo, there had been violence between Rajapaksa supporters and protestors demanding the resignation of Gotabaya, Mahinda and the rest of the government. Mahinda resigned that afternoon. That night mobs burnt down homes belonging to the Rajapaksa clan and other Rajapaksa-supporting politicians.

Armed with a tourist permit to avoid the continuing curfew, my driver Nihal and I, accompanied by Indian friends visiting from Singapore, drove from Galle to Tissamaharama. The coast road was predictably quiet. Most shops were shut, and the odd police or army checkpoint waved us through. Just out of Tangalle, the scenery changed suddenly from the deep dark green of the wet zone to the dry zone’s wider spaces and bigger skies, more economical vegetation, a paler shade of green and fewer people.

On my previous visits, Tangalle and Hambantota were plastered with posters and billboards of the Rajapaksa brothers and Mahinda’s son Namal. This time none were to be seen. A police and army cordon protected Carlton House, the family’s home in Tangalle. Right opposite, lying by the main road, was the toppled statue of D.A. Rajapaksa, Gota’s and Mahinda’s father and founder of the dynasty, a victim of anti-Rajapaksa retribution on May 9.

Initially we were the only guests at our hotel in Tissamaharama. Priyantha, a boat operator on Tissawewa, complained of hard times: no tourists, no diesel for his boat, his children’s school without new textbooks due to a paper shortage, skyrocketing prices for everything. Nearby Kataragama, normally jam-packed with worshippers from all over the island and lots of tourists, was eerily quiet.

From the south coast, Nihal and I drove to Kandy. The Kandy road seemed to be a never-ending stretch of cars, lorries, motorbikes and three-wheelers queueing for petrol and diesel, often sprouting subsidiary branches snaking down side roads. Many stations had run out of fuel; vehicles were parked in queues overnight, their drivers hoping to get fuel the following morning. This day, May 16, was Vesak. But this was the most subdued Vesak I had seen: just a few lanterns here and there, no pandals, and much less food at threadbare roadside stalls.

The following day I walked around a down-at-heel Kandy. The handful of tourists I saw were young backpackers. The Suisse and Queens, Kandy’s venerable colonial hotels, looked even more faded than they did before the pandemic, in dire need of renovation. I popped into a sepulchral Suisse for tea, seemingly the only guest that afternoon. Opposite Queens, bordering the Tooth Temple, several tourist shops and a hotel had closed down.

Back at my hotel, one of the managers told me his family were now drinking tea without milk and not eating chicken to cut down on expenses – a symptom of hyperinflation immiserating the middle class. He said poorer folk in his village were down to one meal a day. Parents were giving up meals to feed their children. Many – all day labourers in the informal economy – had lost their jobs. On my last day in Kandy I spent a couple of late-afternoon hours with Ruwan, one of the founders of the Aragalaya protests in Kandy. We met close to the small group of protesters settled in by the central roundabout and clock tower.

Ruwan, in his late twenties, with unkempt black hair and a straggly brown goatee, had an earnest sincerity and practical idealism I found immediately attractive. He spoke in intelligible, though sometimes halting, English. He was a village boy who got top A-level grades and went to the University of Peradeniya. After graduation and a Colombo internship, he ran a small advertising business from his village home, where he looked after his widowed father. He remained a villager at heart, rejecting the noise, dirt and money-driven rat race that, he thought, poisoned human relations in Colombo. He took his Buddhist philosophy and meditation seriously: a simple, focused, present-in-the-moment life was his Buddhist ideal.

Ruwan told me of his entrepreneurial plans: marketing organic agricultural products from his village; a bike-sharing scheme in Kandy that had won him a nationwide competition. And of his myriad other pursuits: singing in a Sinhala folk-rock band, for which he composed songs with social and environmental commentary; a few screenplays for teledramas; and a novel he was writing on three generations of a family of Kandyan dancers, drawing on his own family and village experience. A visit to the Aragalaya protests in Colombo convinced him to start something similar with a group of friends in Kandy. He was hopeful the movement would bring about real change – “maybe 40 per cent if not 100 per cent”. And determined, unlike so many of his university contemporaries, not to emigrate but to stay in his homeland and do his bit.

Ruwan’s simple life-philosophy, his idealism and engagement, and his varied talents, reminded me how much potential there was in Sri Lanka’s heartlands. But it had long been quashed by the country’s entrenched elite and its noxious politics. And depleted by decades of emigration to faraway places with more opportunities than obstacles – emigration is accelerating fast in the present crisis.

From Kandy I went to the high tea country for a week. The winding, climbing road to Nuwara Eliya was practically deserted, free of the usual traffic of local and foreign tourists, but, alas, still scarred by the billboards that uglify landscapes along Sri Lanka’s main roads. And from Nuwara Eliya we drove to the Uva hills, where my father was born and grew up, and where I spent childhood holidays on a little tea estate.

The petrol queues were nearly as long as they were on the Colombo-Kandy road. Wherever I went I heard the same complaints about fuel, cooking-gas and milk-powder shortages, and prices of eggs, meat, fish and vegetables going through the roof. But life in these mostly rural areas did not seem quite as desperate as it was in the cities and big towns, at least for those who tilled their own land: Sinhala villagers had their paddy fields, orchards, cows and hens to fall back on; and Tamil estate workers assiduously cultivated large, neat vegetable plots next to often straggly tea bushes, rusting tea factories and the cramped, cheek-by-jowl line-rooms they lived in. Most had ready access to firewood for cooking. But even they were anxious about the fertiliser shortage that endangered the next harvest.

I arrived in Colombo after over a month outstation. How different it looked from my last visit in February 2020: so many shops and offices closed – on a Monday afternoon; half the population seemingly queueing for fuel and kerosene; multi-storey hotels, malls and condos on and just off the Galle Road, now hulking eyesores with construction suspended due to lack of finance and concrete. At one end of Galle Face Green, right next to the Aragalaya protest site, Port City lay idle, as it had done since early 2020 when its Chinese workers were whisked back to their homeland. And I saw beggars in numbers I had not seen since my childhood in the 1970s: often wizened men and women with destitution and hopelessness written in their downcast eyes.

Conversations with old friends and acquaintances were almost uniformly depressing. Corruption was endemic: grand larceny at the top and everyday petty graft at the bottom. Hyperinflation, food and fuel shortages and power cuts made daily life a wasteful, exhausting grind. Burglary was on the rise; the poor were getting desperate. Many bemoaned a galloping brain drain. Local companies were haemorrhaging professional staff who were probably leaving the country for good. But the Colombo rich were still OK, filling their favourite clubs, hotel bars and restaurants and upscale malls most evenings.

On a clear, balmy Sunday night I paid my first visit to the Aragalaya protest site, passing crowds of all ages promenading on Galle Face Green, enjoying the post-sunset Indian Ocean breeze. The Aragalaya cluster of tents, stalls and raised wooden stages started right in front of the Shangri La hotel, mall and condo complex, an in-your-face contrast between an elite in glass-encased airconditioned luxury and a suffering majority outside. A flag-bedecked “Love Stage” obscured a roadside view of the statue of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Big white boards attached to a fence were filled with protest scrawls in Sinhala, English and, very occasionally, Tamil. One board displayed mugshots of all the Rajapaksa clan involved in politics. I passed a small tent with a makeshift “art gallery”, and a much larger one housing a well-frequented lending library.

One raised stage had a twenty-something man pumping his fist and shouting a slogan about Rajapaksa “robbers” repetitively, punctuated by an equally young woman singing the refrain, to the rhythmic beat of drums and cymbals. On another stage a university student, to emphasise communal unity, shouted Sinhala Ape … Damila Ape … Muslim Ape … Lanka Ape. The crowds were overwhelmingly young and Sinhala, but with Muslims and a few Tamils mixed in, even including the odd head-shaven, saffron-robed Buddhist monk and white-cassocked Catholic priest.

As I walked by one tent, my gaze turned towards a young man in a wheelchair, clad in a banian and sarong and with dishevelled hair. He made direct eye contact and beckoned me over, addressing me in Sinhala, his speech a little slurred. He took firm hold of my hand with his good hand – the other arm was skeletal, ending in a stump just below the elbow – placed it on the back of his scalp to one side, and ran it across and down to his forehead. It felt ridge-like and lumpy. These were bullet wounds, he said. He pointed to a bullet wound under one eyebrow. The eye below was clearly disfigured. A scar crossed his Adam’s apple – another bullet wound. Then he raised himself using a long crutch, lifted his sarong and showed me a broad gash running down the side of his lame leg – more bullet wounds. He told me he was hit by an LTTE sniper on Nandikidal lagoon, only two months after he got engaged. He spent over a year in a coma and the next five in hospitals undergoing surgeries and rehabilitation. Now he lived on a war veteran’s disability pension, unable to work. And never married.

As we chatted, other disabled veterans gathered round. Two had leg prosthetics, victims of landmines from battles in the Jaffna peninsula. They had all been here, in their disabled war veterans’ tent, since the first day of the protests. It was now Day 58. I found it difficult to keep up with their fast village Sinhala, but “system change”, oft repeated in English, was easy enough to understand.

My last trip outstation was to Jaffna. The scenery changed dramatically once we passed Vavuniya and entered the Vanni, becoming flat, arid, almost airless scrub jungle under an enormous sky and immensely distant horizons. We passed Kilinochchi. On my first visit, over a decade earlier, it was practically deserted, full of empty spaces where the LTTE’s buildings, parade ground and giant cemetery for its fallen soldiers had been razed to the ground by the victorious Sri Lankan army. Now it looked transformed. The smooth A9, heavily potholed a decade ago, expanded to four lanes through a town centre packed with gleaming white shops and showrooms.

The scenery changed again as we approached the causeway at Pooneryn. Parched brown scrub jungle gave way to a shallow expanse of glistening water and, entering the Jaffna peninsula, groves of black-brown palmyrahs, paddy fields and vegetable plots.

We entered Jaffna town, also busier and noisier than I had seen it before. There were new shops and eating houses, hotels and guest houses, reception halls, Hindu temples which looked like money had recently been lavished on them, and more cars and motorbikes replacing the ubiquitous bicycles I had seen on my first visit just over a decade earlier. Battered Austin Cambridges and Morris Oxfords from the 1950s and ‘60s, kept running during the lean war years, were then a familiar sight. Now I saw just one lonesome Austin Cambridge parked in a garage. In town and around the peninsula, ancestral homes that had been destroyed or lay derelict during the war had been rebuilt or renovated by their owners in Colombo and abroad. A new Indian Cultural Centre, built by the Indian government, was now the tallest building in town. But some sights and smells had not changed: plastic and other rubbish strewn on roadsides; the stench of open drains; roaming packs of stray dogs. And maddeningly dangerous driving: motorbikes, three wheelers and bicycles kept shooting out of side roads and sped across the main road.

On previous visits I had heard much about Jaffna’s post-war problems: grievances against the army and the government in Colombo; caste divisions; and disaffected youth freely spending money sent by relatives in the diaspora, indulging in drink and drugs, or whose only ambition was to emigrate. None of that had gone away. But Jaffna, like Kilinochchi, clearly had a post-war bounce. It was up and doing again, partially reviving its pre-war reputation for industriousness, alongside thrift and a thirst for education.

Selvi, introduced to me by a Colombo friend, embodied what I thought were the best Jaffna qualities. In her mid-twenties, short and bespectacled, she came to see me sprucely turned out in her Sunday best of long blouse and pants, her long raven hair brushed straight back. Her English was good. She had a mind of her own and exuded confidence.

There was tragedy in the family. Selvi’s father, a contractor, had an accident; his operation went wrong and he died after four months in hospital. A few months later, her adored younger brother, just nineteen, whose ambition was to become a pilot, committed suicide. She was left alone to support her traumatised mother.

Selvi wanted to make a career in aviation. She put herself through a training school in Colombo and was doing part-time jobs for aviation companies at Jaffna’s Palaly airport. She ran a vegetable export business on the side that generated a steady income. She did not want to rely on handouts from relatives in the diaspora, let alone emigrate via an arranged marriage with a diaspora Jaffna Tamil. Rather she wanted to stay, look after her mother and make the most of professional possibilities in post-war Sri Lanka. She told me there was a younger, aspirational generation in Jaffna without wartime baggage, who wanted to bridge old divides and mix productively with other Sri Lankans.

Jaffna, like the rest of the country, had its long queues in front of petrol stations, shortages of this and that, and hyperinflation. But it cast a different light on Sri Lanka’s present crisis to what I had seen elsewhere in the country. On our last evening in town, my hosts and I met a livewire doctor at the Northgate hotel bar, nursing a weird multicoloured cocktail and conversing in his fast-and-furious, semi-broken English. He was based at Jaffna hospital just around the corner.

He warned us to steer well clear of stray dogs; the country had run out of the anti-rabies vaccine, not to mention other essential medicines. Then he added: “The rest of the country is miserable because they don’t have petrol and cooking gas and suffer daily power cuts. But, during the war, we went for years without petrol, cooking gas and electricity. We had bombs dropping on us. We were terrorised by the army and the LTTE. This is nothing in comparison. So we cope as best we can and get on with life.”

The crisis got even worse after I left in June. In late July, the swelling Aragalaya protests finally prompted Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and resign as president. But the protestors’ victory was hollow. Parliament voted in Ranil Wickremesinghe as the new president. He owed his election to SLPP MPs and the backing of the Rajapaksas. He appointed a new prime minister and cabinet of Rajapaksa loyalists. The army and police cleared the Aragalaya protest site; some protesters were arrested and prosecuted.

There was no “system change”. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s unopposed return to Colombo in early September, enjoying all the privileges due to a former head of state, was proof enough that the system really had not changed. Sri Lanka’s economic and humanitarian crisis continues, so far without substantial reforms to turn the situation round. Complex negotiations with international organisations (the IMF, World Bank and ADB), sovereign creditors (especially China, India and Japan) and mainly US-based private bondholders are proceeding slowly. For ordinary Sri Lankans, there is no end in sight to their suffering.Razeen Sally is author of Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island. He was a professor at the London School of Economics and the National University of Singapore, chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies, and an adviser to the Sri Lankan government.

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Features

The Great AI Schism: When the Titans of Tech tell us to slow down

Published

20 hours ago

2026/10/7

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya

Something extraordinary happened in September 2026. The very people who have spent the last decade pouring tens of billions of dollars into building artificial intelligence, the visionaries, the investors, the CEOs, suddenly started telling the world to hit the brakes. It’s a bit like the captain of a speeding train leaning out of the window and shouting, “Actually, maybe we should slow down a bit!” The public, understandably, is confused. We’ve been told AI will cure cancer, solve climate change, and give us all free time. Now we’re being told it might kill us all. Welcome to the great AI schism.

To understand what’s happening, you have to listen to the people in the room. These are not wild-eyed doomsayers on the internet. They are the titans of the industry. And they are starting to argue with each other.

Dario Amodei: The Insider Who Wants to Hit Pause

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic (Claude AI), is the man who kicked the hornet’s nest. In a 3,800-word essay, posted on his website in mid-September 2026, he didn’t just suggest caution, he demanded a slowdown. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. His reasoning is simple and terrifying: the technology is moving faster than our ability to control it. He warned that AI could be misused for cyberattacks, bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.

What makes Amodei’s warning so chilling is that it comes from a man whose company, Anthropic, builds one of the most powerful AI models in the world, Claude. He’s not a critic on the sidelines. He’s in the driver’s seat, and he’s telling us the car might not have brakes. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he said he agreed with a departing Anthropic researcher who claimed AI could “kill us all” by the end of the decade. That researcher, 27-year-old Jacob Coxon, resigned in protest, saying the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all”. When the people building the technology start resigning because they’re afraid of it, you should pay attention.

Bill Gates: The Elder Statesman with a Warning

Bill Gates has been around long enough to know a paradigm shift when he sees one. The Microsoft co-founder, who spent decades warning the world about pandemics and climate change, has now turned his attention to AI. And he’s not mincing words. In September 2026, Gates warned that AI is “powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths”.

Gates is not worried about Terminator-style robots. He’s worried about people. “There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he said. His solution is simple: regulation. “No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. He even offered to be the man to convince President Trump to regulate AI. Gates is a pragmatist. He knows the technology is coming. He just wants to make sure it doesn’t get us first.

Sam Altman: The Showman with a Conscience (Maybe)

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (Chat GPT), has always been the industry’s greatest showman. He’s the man who told us AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is “just around the corner” and that AI will soon be a “genie that can grant any wish”. But even Altman is now singing a different tune. In September 2026, he ruled out an OpenAI IPO in 2026, citing safety concerns. He called even a 10% risk of AI causing human extinction “unacceptable”.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman posted on X. This is a remarkable shift. Altman has spent years being criticised for moving too fast, for prioritising profit over safety. Now, facing mounting evidence that AI models can cause real harm, from cyberattacks to mental health crises, he’s suddenly the voice of caution. Is it genuine? Or is it a PR move? The cynics will tell you it’s the latter. But the fact remains: when Sam Altman says we need to slow down, the world listens.

Elon Musk: The Provocateur Who Saw It Coming

Elon Musk has been warning about AI for over a decade. He’s the man who called AI “more dangerous than nuclear weapons” long before it was fashionable. So it’s no surprise that he joined the chorus of slowdown calls in September 2026. But Musk being Musk, he couldn’t resist a bit of dark humour. When asked if we’re all going to die within 10 years, he replied, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but we’re all going to die someday anyway”.

But behind the joke is a serious point. Musk believes AI models could escape their constraints, take control of military systems, and even launch nuclear weapons. His solution is mutual oversight: leading AI companies should test each other’s systems for safety before release, and he even suggested a deal with China to make it happen. Musk is a provocateur, but he’s also a visionary. And his vision is one where AI is a weapon that we might not be able to control.

Satya Nadella: The Quiet Strategist

While the others are shouting about doom, Satya Nadella is quietly building an empire. The Microsoft CEO doesn’t talk about extinction risks. He talks about “agentic AI”, AI that can act autonomously, which he calls “a new paradigm”. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which powers these AI agents, grew 43% in the last quarter, surpassing $100 billion in annual revenue.

Nadella’s view is simple: don’t compete to build the most powerful model; compete to control the “orchestration layer”, the systems that connect different AI models. He wants to build the infrastructure that everyone else relies on. It’s a smart play, and it’s making Microsoft a fortune. But Nadella’s silence on safety is deafening. While Amodei and Altman wrestle with their consciences, Nadella is counting the money. It’s not that he doesn’t care; it’s that his business model depends on AI being adopted, not regulated.

Jacob Coxon: The Whistleblower Who Lit the Fuse

You may not have heard of Jacob Coxon. He’s not a billionaire. He’s not a CEO. He’s a 27-year-old researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic. And in September 2026, he resigned from Anthropic with a warning that shook the industry. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote on X. “They are launching themselves directly toward a superintelligence capable of self-improvement, and gambling with our lives”.

Coxon’s warning was remarkable because it came from inside the machine. He said the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”. He called for a temporary freeze on advanced AI training. His resignation triggered a wave of concern, and even Dario Amodei admitted he agreed with Coxon more than he disagreed. Coxon is the canary in the coal mine. And the canary is not looking well.

Donald Trump: The Wildcard

And then there’s Donald Trump. The US President has consistently downplayed AI fears, calling them a “hoax” and a “sick conspiracy”. But even Trump is starting to change his tune, sort of. In September 2026, he announced plans to create an “AI Force” and appoint an AI “Czar”. He said the government would look for “bad” uses of AI through the existing criminal and civil justice systems.

But Trump’s priority is clear: winning the AI race against China. “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth of this incredible industry,” he said. He wants AI to account for 25% of US GDP. Trump is not a technologist. He’s a businessman and a nationalist. He sees AI as a tool for economic dominance, not an existential threat. Whether he’s right or wrong, his stance puts him at odds with almost every expert in the field.

The Bottom Line: A House Divided

So where does this leave us? We have the CEOs of the world’s leading AI companies, Amodei, Altman, and Musk, all calling for a slowdown. We have Bill Gates, the elder statesman of tech, warning of a billion deaths. We have a whistleblower who says the industry is gambling with our lives. And then we have Satya Nadella, quietly building the infrastructure that powers it all, and Donald Trump, who wants to speed up.

The irony is hard to miss. The people who built the AI train are now telling us to slow down. The people who profit from the AI economy are the ones building the tracks. And the public is caught in the middle, trying to figure out who to believe.

Maybe the most honest thing anyone said came from Jacob Coxon, the 27-year-old researcher who quit. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt”.

If the people building the technology believe it could kill us, perhaps we should listen. Before it’s too late.

(Prof. C. A. Saliya, is a charted accountant, academic, researcher and former banker. He is the author of SAMAJA GAVESHAKAYA and Springer Publication DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH. He can be contacted at saliya.ca@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations with which he is affiliated.)

Features

Preventing grievances from becoming communal

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/6

Sahan Weerasooriya

Police removing the Thileepan statue

by Jehan Perera

The death sentence on Sivarasa Anojan, a Sri Lankan citizen convicted of blasphemy in Saudi Arabia has taken a central place in national consciousness for the past several weeks. It has been in the headline news since it was first reported last month. There have been many initiatives taken locally to get a more lenient sentencing by the Saudi authorities. There is also an undercurrent that is critical of both the culture and religion from which this sentencing emanates. This also sustains the widespread publicity being given nationally to the issue. By way of contrast, the controversy caused by the forcible removal of the Thileepan statue in Jaffna has not significantly impacted upon the national consciousness. There was only passing mention of the incident in the national media which has been overtaken by other events.

However, in the north and east of the country, and in the diaspora, the removal of the Thileepan statue has become a major issue. It has led to protest marches led by university students and widespread condemnation by civil society and political groups. The issues underlying the Thileepan statue have deep undercurrents in the Tamil consciousness particularly in the north and east which time is unlikely to dispel. The real test of harmony in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society like Sri Lanka is not whether communities coexist peacefully when nothing controversial is at stake. Rather, the test is how they respond when an event touches their identities and grievances. The death sentence imposed on Anojan in Saudi Arabia and the removal of the Thileepan statue in Jaffna carry the risk of becoming grievances to entire communities.

In the case of Anojan, a young Tamil migrant worker, he was first sentenced to five years imprisonment and a fine of three million Saudi riyals over a Facebook comment. Both he and the Saudi prosecution appealed, with the appeal court raising the sentence to death. This has led to public sympathy for him in Sri Lanka.

Appeals for clemency have come from the President, government and opposition leaders, clergy of all faiths and Muslim political leaders. At the same time there is a need to reject attempts to turn the case into a source of anti-Muslim sentiment or collective blame. Peacebuilding therefore has to be within Sri Lanka as well as diplomatic. Religious leaders and civil society in the country should be ready to quell rumour, even as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Christian leaders stand together publicly.

Thileepan Statue

The Thileepan controversy has had a different trajectory. Many Tamils admire Thileepan, the LTTE name of Rasaiah Parthipan, who died on 26 September 1987 after a twelve-day fast. His demands were addressed to India but included matters pertaining to the Sri Lankan government including the release of detainees held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The statue put up during this year’s commemoration was removed by police in the early hours of 27 September, a day after the commemoration ended. The government’s legal concern, as articulated by its spokesperson, was the LTTE remains a proscribed organisation and before removing the statue, police had presented facts to the court. But law and memory answer different questions and the depth of Tamil anguish cannot be disregarded.

For many Tamils, remembrance of Thileepan is connected to their sense of loss and historical memory. The memorial has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once, and each destruction has added to the meaning it carries. Many who mourn Thileepan are grieving a young man who died without violence and by his own fast. They also grieve an era of loss of the struggle for Tamil rights and self-determination for which Thileepan has become a symbol. The Office for Reparations Act, No. 34 of 2018, provides for collective reparations and gives the Office for Reparations a role in policies on memorialisation. This does not automatically permit any particular statue, nor does it override laws on public places or proscribed organisations. But it shows that memorialisation is recognised within Sri Lanka’s framework for reparations and reconciliation. There is also a wider question of equality.

The JVP that now leads the NPP government was itself once proscribed when it took up arms against the state in which tens of thousands died, later entered democratic politics, and now for many years has publicly commemorated its own fallen. The opportunity to remember those who died should not belong to one community alone.

A commitment to peacebuilding requires that the same trust that has been given to former militants of one community needs to be given to members of other communities if equal citizenship and equal rights are to have meaning. Further, the Office for Reparations Act provides for reparations through livelihood. It is today a fact that those former LTTE members who went through the government’s rehabilitation process find it difficult to get jobs in the private sector.

Private sector employers are reluctant to come under surveillance for employing former LTTE members. There needs to be equal access to employment and removal of unjustified barriers to reintegration, with targeted public programmes where necessary. Until this situation is realized on the ground, the government needs to consider employing those who went through the government’s rehabilitation process and still unable to find suitable employment.

Continuing Peace

The challenge that post-war Sri Lanka faces, a full 17 years after the end of war, is to strengthen the foundations of trust between communities rather than deepen existing suspicions. Anojan is an individual Sri Lankan citizen facing a severe sentence in another country. His case should not become a reason to blame Sri Lankan Muslims. Thileepan is remembered differently by different communities, but the dispute over his memorial should not become a reason to revive the communal divisions of the past. The cases are also mirror images in an important respect. In the Anojan case, the state is an advocate pleading before another government. In the Thileepan case, the state is the actor whose decision is being judged. The first calls for quiet diplomacy and restraint in public language. The second calls for fairness and explanation, and the burden on the state is heavier.

The common roots of the two cases lie in mistrust that does not belong to one community alone. It has been produced by experiences of discrimination, violence, insecurity and loss that have been interpreted differently by different communities. Grievances turn communal when an individual is seen as a representative of a community, when institutions seem to treat communities unequally, and when people feel their pain goes unacknowledged. Each of these can be addressed. The system change that the Sri Lankan people voted for in 2024 would need to include a government that rejects collective blame, acknowledges grief and explains its decisions openly. It also requires state institutions to act transparently and consistently, so that no citizen feels that the law protects some communities more than others.

This peacebuilding imperative requires enlightened leadership as much as legal authority. It requires leaders who will speak to their own communities against prejudice, even when this is politically inconvenient. It requires religious leaders who will demonstrate solidarity across religious boundaries. And it requires civil society to recognise that peacebuilding is not simply preventing violence after tensions have risen, but is addressing the mistrust and grievances that allow tensions to rise in the first place. Sri Lanka has learned, at great cost, that communal divisions can become much larger than the events that initially give rise to them. The Anojan and Thileepan cases give Sri Lanka an opportunity to demonstrate that it has learned from its past. The test of Sri Lanka’s continuing peace is whether we can address difficult grievances without turning them into communal ones.

Features

Sri Lanka Cricket Bill: Governance reform is not yet a cricket strategy – Part II

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/6

Sahan Weerasooriya

By Sarath S. Kodithuwakku

President, Institute of Management of Sri Lanka; Senior Professor, University of Peradeniya

(Continued from yesterday)

Representation, Independence and Decision-Making

The membership-based electoral structure should provide representation without becoming a substitute for executive management. The seven Elected Directors would bring the perspectives of the SLC membership into the Board, while the seven Independent Directors would provide additional professional expertise and independence. The model’s effectiveness will, therefore, depend on whether the Board can integrate these perspectives into coherent strategic decisions while maintaining a clear boundary between governance and day-to-day management.

The equal division between Elected and Independent Directors also raises a governance-design question. An even-numbered Board can create a tie. The Bill addresses this directly: in the event of equality, the Chairperson has a casting vote; in the Chairperson’s absence, the Deputy Chairperson has a casting vote; and if both are absent, an Independent Director, elected to preside, has the casting vote. The issue is, therefore, not whether a tie can be resolved, but how this mechanism affects the balance between representation, independence and accountability.

The leadership structure reinforces this balance: the Chairperson is elected from among the Independent Directors and the Deputy Chairperson from among the Elected Directors. The casting-vote arrangement makes the Chairperson’s role and perceived independence particularly important, especially when a major strategic decision divides the two components of the Board.

The Bill’s committee provisions could support a disciplined model of delegation, but implementation will depend heavily on the terms of reference adopted by the new Board. The framework could be strengthened by requiring a published cricket-development strategy, a clear division of powers among the Board, executives and selection committees, transparent principles for major development allocations, and periodic reporting on outcomes across men’s, women’s, schools and domestic cricket. These measures would strengthen accountability without legislating the details of team selection or tournament scheduling.

From Measurement to Strategic Accountability

If the Board is to hold management accountable for strategy rather than simply for short-term results, it needs a performance framework that captures both outcomes and the capabilities that produce them.

SLC should consider requiring an explicit multi-year cricket-development strategy, supported by measurable objectives and an annual strategy review. Such a strategy should identify the development pathway from schools and grassroots cricket through domestic competitions to high performance; define major capability priorities such as coaching, sports science, data and analytics; set resource-allocation principles; and establish indicators against which progress can be assessed.

The purpose would not be to turn cricket into a bureaucratic exercise. Strategic accountability simply creates a disciplined basis for asking whether the organisation is doing what it said it would do, whether its assumptions remain valid, and whether resources are producing the intended results.

From Measurement to Organisational Learning

SLC should, therefore, consider adopting a formal Balanced Scorecard. Rather than measuring success solely through international match results or annual financial audits, the framework could track four interdependent perspectives:

Financial Sustainability:

commercial growth, financial discipline and compliance.

Internal Processes:

domestic tournament quality, development pathways and selector-process integrity.

Stakeholder Value:

grassroots development, school cricket and women’s cricket expansion.

Strategic Capability:

coaching quality, sports science, talent development, data and analytics capability, and the organisation’s ability to convert investment into sustainable performance.

The purpose of such a framework would not be to reduce cricket development to a collection of numbers. Rather, it would create a disciplined process for asking four fundamental management questions:

What did we expect to achieve?

What actually happened?

Why was there a difference?

What should we change as a result?

Evaluating these dimensions periodically would help SLC move beyond performance reporting towards genuine organisational learning.

ICC as a Stakeholder in Governance Reform

The ICC is another important stakeholder whose interests should be recognised in the reform process. SLC’s governance arrangements do not operate solely within Sri Lankan law; they also have to be compatible with the governance obligations associated with ICC membership. The ICC’s Articles of Association require each Member to provide for free and democratic elections (or nominees from outside its members) and to manage its affairs autonomously, without government or other public-body interference in the governance, regulation or administration of cricket.

International experience demonstrates that ICC engagement in member governance restructuring is not unusual. In the United States, after the ICC expelled the old national association for chronic governance failures, the ICC directly oversaw a multi-year project to design a new governance model. The ICC Board formally approved the constitution for a replacement body (USA Cricket) before it was adopted. The resulting structure combined elected constituent directors with independent directors, showing that an ICC-backed framework can accommodate both forms of representation.

In Nepal, the ICC established a Nepal Advisory Group comprising stakeholders from across the game to recommend constitutional amendments, with adoption of the revised constitution and subsequent elections forming part of the conditions for reinstatement of ICC membership.[8] The ICC subsequently facilitated an independent panel that included ICC nominees together with representatives of Nepal’s National Sports Council and the existing cricket administration to map the election process, guidelines and timelines.[9] More recently, in 2026, an ICC delegation visited Bangladesh to engage with stakeholders on governance and electoral matters.[10] The ICC has also reported that its Deputy Chair and another ICC Board representative visited Sri Lanka and met relevant stakeholders to assess ongoing developments, while the ICC Board reiterated the need for elections to be held as soon as possible.

These precedents make the ICC a legitimate stakeholder in considering the governance implications of the proposed Bill. This does not mean that the ICC should determine Sri Lanka’s domestic legislation, nor that every feature of the Bill requires prior ICC approval. It does, however, suggest that early and formal engagement with the ICC would be prudent, particularly where the proposed arrangements concern Board independence, elections, government involvement and the transition to the new governance structure.

This is particularly relevant because the Bill creates two institutional arrangements that deserve careful scrutiny from an autonomy perspective. The Transformation Committee is responsible for managing the transition until the First Board is constituted, while the Nomination Committee, although structurally independent of the SLC Board, includes representatives connected with the Sports Ministry and the National Sports Council. Neither arrangement, by itself, establishes government interference. However, taken together, they make it important that the independence of the incoming Board is demonstrable through transparent procedures rather than assumed from the structure alone.

Given the professional calibre and international exposure of the members of the Transformation Committee, it would be reasonable to expect that the importance of ICC engagement would have been recognised. Although any such consultation has not been evident in the public domain, it is therefore reasonable to expect that the ICC has either already been consulted or will be consulted before the Bill is enacted. Such engagement would allow potential incompatibilities to be identified before the new structure is enacted and implemented, rather than after the fact.

The Transition Is Itself a Governance Challenge

The transition provisions introduce a significant organisational-change challenge. Replacing the existing club- and association-based governance structure with a new hybrid Board and governance architecture is not simply a legal exercise; it is an organisational change programme. The Sri Lanka Cricket Transformation Committee is required to manage the transition until the First Board is constituted and, during that period, to establish rules covering matters including tournament structure, domestic governance, selection committee appointments, committee terms of reference, the Nomination Committee process and the election of the Elected Directors.

Structural reform on paper can encounter resistance from established interests, institutional habits and existing routines. The implementation phase will therefore require a clear change-management framework, including stakeholder engagement, transparent onboarding for Independent Directors, clarification of decision rights, alignment of legacy committees, and careful transfer of information and responsibilities.

Without attention to these organisational factors, cultural friction could undermine the intended administrative improvements. The success of the reform will therefore depend not only on the text of the legislation but also on the quality of the rules, appointments, delegation arrangements and organisational behaviours that follow it.

From Governance Reform to a Cricket Strategy

The Bill deserves credit for addressing how SLC is constituted and for creating places for specialist advice. It should not be dismissed simply because it does not prescribe a batting order or a domestic fixture list. Those are not appropriate tasks for legislation.

Its limitation is more precise: the proposed governance arrangements do not, by themselves, assure the strategic capability of the Board or the quality, independence and accountability of the decisions made beneath it. They establish the architecture. The future Board and management must supply the strategy, capabilities, discipline and learning mechanisms that make the architecture work.

A stronger reform would connect four elements: a Board selected for collective strategic capability; professional cricket management with clear delegated authority; transparent but non-mechanical selection and investment processes; and systematic evaluation of development outcomes. Within the first of these, information technology and computer science should be recognised as distinct from the broader capability to understand and govern data science, analytics and emerging AI-enabled decision support.

Ultimately, the governing question is not only who gets a seat at the SLC Board table. It is whether that Board can build, fund, execute and learn from a credible strategy for Sri Lankan cricket.

References

1. Department of Government Printing, Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Cricket Bill, Gazette Supplement, Part II of September 25, 2026, issued on 28 September 2026.

2. International Cricket Council. Media release, 15 July 2026, reporting the ICC Board discussion of Sri Lanka Cricket and the need for elections to be held as soon as possible.

3. Sport New Zealand – Ihi Aotearoa. Nine Steps to Effective Governance, particularly Step 1: Define and Agree the Board’s Role; Step 4: Provide Strategic Leadership; Step 5: Employ and Support a Chief Executive; and Step 8: Get the Right People on Board.

4. Cricket South Africa. Governance and management frameworks, including the delegation-of-authority framework, Board committees, Cricket Committee, Cricket Pipeline Committee and CEO accountability.

5. International Cricket Council. ICC Articles of Association, provisions requiring free and democratic elections and autonomous administration without government or other public-body interference. ICC. https://images.icc-cricket.com/image/upload/prd/f7vm88yw1933dc38cgtg.pdf

6. International Cricket Council. “ICC outlines proposed USACA constitution.” ICC, 2017. https://www.icc-cricket.com/news/icc-outlines-proposed-usaca-constitution

7. International Cricket Council. “Approved constitution marks historic landmark for cricket in USA.” ICC, 2017. https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/approved-constitution-marks-historic-landmark-for-cricket-in-usa

8. International Cricket Council. “ICC welcomes Nepal Special General Meeting to adopt revised constitution.” ICC, 2018. https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/icc-welcomes-nepal-special-general-meeting-to-adopt-revised-constitution

9. International Cricket Council. “Independent Panel meet to progress Nepal elections under revised constitution.” ICC, 2018. https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/independent-panel-meet-to-progress-nepal-elections-under-revised-constitution

10. International Cricket Council. “ICC delegation visits Bangladesh to engage with stakeholders on governance and electoral matters.” ICC, 2026. https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/icc-delegation-visits-bangladesh-to-engage-with-stakeholders-on-governance-and-electoral-matters

11. International Cricket Council. “ICC Board approves governance, membership and member support decisions.” ICC, 2026; see also “ICC Board Meeting,” 2026, reporting ICC representatives’ meetings with stakeholders in Sri Lanka. https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/icc-board-approves-governance-membership-and-member-support-decisions

(Concluded)