Features

40th Death Anniversary of Justin Wijayawardhana: Reminiscences of a bygone socio-political milieu

Published

5 years ago

2022/01/14

By Dr Upul Wijayawardhana

It was 14th January 1982. I, together with my family, was making slow progress from Colombo to Matara in the pre-expressway era, when we heard on the car radio, the noon news bulletin of SLBC announcing the death of my father. There were no mobile phones then for me to receive the sad news from the family. My sister Mali, the only other medic in the family, very kindly undertook the onerous task of looking after our father in the intimate environs of our traditional family home ‘Wijaya Giri”‘ in Godagama rather than allowing him to wither away on a hospital bed. Having visited my father a few days earlier and persuaded Mali against active treatment in an inevitable situation, I was not surprised to learn the end of his multifaceted life but was sad that I could not be there, holding his hand that penned millions of words, when he left this world after decades of selfless service.

Standing at the foot of the bed and looking at his majestic face darkened by death, I thought to myself, “What have I done, compared to what you achieved in so many spheres?” I am still reading about his unmatchable achievements and learning more and more about him from others who write about him. has taken 40 long years for me to pen this tribute although my admiration of him has grown exponentially over the years. In fact, I wondered whether I could be tarnishing his image posthumously by referring to him as a politician because he had so many other significant achievements. I am doing so purposefully to emphasis that our country was once blessed with politicians whose mission was to serve.

First to represent the UNP from Matara District

Communism took root in the Matara district because the leader of the Communist Party Dr S A Wickramasinghe was from there and also a very caring general practitioner. In fact, my father started social service in the early 1930s with Dr Wickramasinghe, forming the Matara Youth Society with him as secretary and Dr Wickramasinghe as the president. Although they parted ways due to ideological differences, they remained friends, and Dr W was gracious enough to offer him the nomination from the Communist Party on more than one occasion. In spite of certainty of success, my father refused and stood by the UNP. The Matara branch of the UNP proposed him as the candidate for the 1952 and 1956 general elections, but the hierarchy of the UNP parachuted outsiders encouraging caste-based politics.

In 1960, the UNP high-command was forced to relent and my father successfully contested Matara seat becoming the first UNP MP for Matara and the first to do so from the whole district. He was chosen to propose the vote of thanks to the throne speech of the Dudley Senanayake government enabling him to demonstrate his much-recognised oratory in the parliament too. His old friend, Dr W retorted cynically from the Opposition benches, “My good friend has made an excellent speech, as usual, but it may well be the funeral oration of this government”, which was prophetic! Unfortunately, my father lost in July, the seat he gained in March. One reason for the loss was malicious stories spread by his opponents alleging he had said, that he needed to wash the seat in the parliament before sitting on it. I know well this was more hurtful to him than losing the election as he was one of the pioneers in the South to stand against caste divisions. In fact, in early 1940s, when caste discrimination was rampant in the South, he organised, as the Secretary of the Matara branch, a Sinhala New Year Celebration which commenced with many from different castes eating Kiri Bath, sitting on mats with the leader of the Sinhala Maha Sabha, S W R D Bandaranaike.

S W R D’s offer

The SLFP government people elected in 1956 with high hopes also started faltering. Sensing the imminent danger, SWRD started planning a revamp. He wanted to go to the UN to display his masterful oratory and reconstitute the Cabinet on his return. He sent an emissary to my father with the offer of appointment to the Senate as the Junior Minister of Education straightaway to be made the Minister with the planned reshuffle. According to my mother, who overheard the conversation, he did not take even a second to refuse the offer.

Betrayal by UNP

Undaunted by the loss, my father continued to teach and do social work. The crossover of C P De Silva caused Mahanama Samaraweera to be nominated the UNP candidate for Matara. J R Jayewardene persuaded my father to contest the Kamburupitiya seat saying, “Justin, don’t worry. Even if you lose, we will look after you. After all, there is the Senate”. My father lost, the UNP forgot the promises, but he enabled my cousin, Chandrakaumara and my brother, Ranjan to represent that constituency subsequently.

George Rajapaksa once told me, “The UNP does not know how to treat the faithful, the best example being your father. If he had done for us what he did for the UNP, we would place him on a high pedestal”.

Even during his era, my father perhaps was too soft and remained with the UNP till his death. Would any other person have refused such offers?

Maybe, to overcome their guilt, the UNP government issued a stamp in the memory of my father in 1990.

Teacher, par excellence

Born on 18 November 1904, Kotawila Withanage Don Charlis Justin Wijayawardhana attended the missionary school in the village before joining to St. Thomas College in Matara. Don Juvanis Wijayawardhana, a notary’s clerk, decided to send his son to Mahinda College, Galle in view of the brilliant performance of his son, Justin at the Junior School Certificate Examination. More than the easy success in the Cambridge Senior examination, what Mahinda College gave my father was the inspiration to fight for independence and the preservation of Buddhism. Though he could have got a more rewarding government position with his qualifications, he opted to be a teacher and joined Rahula College in Matara.

He contributed immensely to the upliftment of Rahula College by the renowned principal Mr D J Kumarage, to be one of the best schools in the country. Rahula was an assisted school, which meant only teachers’ salaries were paid by the government. To meet the increasing demand for admissions, my father went round with Mr Kumarage and persuaded philanthropists in the area to build four buildings which were ceremoniously opened by Prime Ministers DS, Dudley, Sir John and Sir Oliver, the Governor General.

In addition, he was in charge of Sinhala and English debating teams, Arts and Drama society. He wrote many plays for students to stage of which one stands out; Matara Batha, a comedy which was so hilarious, it is said that even Mr Kumarage, who seldom smiled, burst into laughter.

My father taught Buddhism, Sinhala and art. He taught me too and I managed to fail in art, the only subject that I have ever failed! After teaching and inspiring many generations of students, he retired in 1964 having devoted his entire teaching career to Rahula.

Social service

He was a live-wire of the co-operative movement and headed the village co-operative till a few years before his death. He masterminded village development projects like roads and culverts through the Village Development programme.

When Buddhism was threatened by a fanatic sect, Thapasa Nikaya and , defended Bhikkhus threatened by misguided villagers. With the support of Chandraratna Manawasinghe, who was on the editorial staff of Lankadeepa, my father was able to dispel the falsehoods, helping save Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

He reserved his best for Community Centres Praja Mandala, which were established in Matara and surrounding areas. They were the meeting places where villagers could listen to the radio for the very first time. He obtained radios from the government for these centres. Those huge primitive devices needed a massive aerial across the tallest of coconut trees to get a rattly short-wave reception and were powered by car batteries, needing a fortnightly replacement by the post office. When they got late, the radio fell silent and the whole village missed the ‘Radio bana’.

The crowning glory was the annual congress of Community Centres, which lasted a couple of days with many competitions; that was the only opportunity for people to display their talents, unlike today, when we have too many talent shows. One of the highlights was the Kavi Maduwa, the poet’s corner where reputed guest poets gave lectures, in addition to recitals. That was the biggest event in the cultural calendar of the South.

Pioneer translator and writer

A visit to India in the late 1930s changed my father’s life forever as he was able to meet the leaders of the Indian Independence Movement but the most important was his meeting Rabindranath Tagore, whose works he had already translated to Sinhala. He recalled with great fondness the unexpectedly long meeting wherein Tagore granted him permission to translate any of his works.

Sivumal Motagedara, who studied the life and literary works of my father for his research project for the M A degree from Colombo University, has published his dissertation “Justin Wijayawardhana: Jeewithya ha Sastriya Sevaya (Godage, ISBN 978-955-30-9644-9). He argues, very convincingly that it is a great injustice that Justin Wijayawardhana has not been accorded a much more prominent place in Sinhala literature and takes to task the academia for not doing so. He rates Justin Wijayawardhana as the pioneer translator who introduced the works not only of Eastern writers like Tagore but also Western writers like Leo Tolstoy, Hall Caine, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and H G Wells to Sinhala readers. He also mentions Wijayawardhana’s ability to change the style of writing to fit the original for translation and contends that it is rare.

Perhaps, the main reason why my father’s writings have not received the attention it deserves is they were published in newspapers and magazines––not as books due to lack of facilities like agents for writers and the monopoly held by only a few publishers.

I know the great difficulties he had in getting his first book, “Nasthikara Puthraya”, the translation of Sir Hall Caine’s ‘The Prodigal Son’ published in 1964. He had to give up royalty for a tiny sum and the publisher did not even notify how many copies were sold!

Although he had many manuscripts ready, unfortunately, only two more books were published during his lifetime.

One was a translation of a book on the invasion of Tibet “Tibbethaye Bauddha Manava Sanharaya”, which was extensively used by the UNP during the 1965 election campaign. The other was “Tom Mamage Kutiya”, a translation Of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s masterpiece ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, which was published by Marga in 1976.

The Ministry of Cultural Affairs, acceding to our request, published “Seeliyage Lokaya” in January 1983 to coincide with the first death anniversary and “Samawa Deema” in January 1984 to coincide with the second death anniversary. The latter, a collection of translations of ten short stories by Russian writers Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov and Hungarian writers Geza Gardonyi, Kalman Mikszath, Karoly Kisfaludy, was completed in September 1975 and dedicated to JRJ, the then leader of the Opposition. The dedication in my father’s handwriting, in his trademark violet ink, written with his beloved ‘Swan’ pen is reprinted in this book.

“Seeliyage Lokaya”

is an original work written in a novel genre. It is an exploration of village life, a synthesis of events and people in their respective villages of birth as seen by my parents. However, he has titled it ‘Seeliya’s world’, as he called my mother, Jinaseeli Jayawardana ‘Seeliya’ affectionately. The cover was drawn by my youngest brother Kamal. During one of my visits to President JRJ, when I presented a copy, he went through the chapter titles carefully and said “Upul, you must translate this to English as it is a mirror, showing the world what our village life is. It will be the opposite of ‘Grass for My Feet’ by J Vijayatunga”. I tried but, unfortunately, I do not seem to have inherited the translator gene!

The youngest of our six sisters, Champa is doing a tremendous job in keeping our father’s literary heritage going. She had been able to get “Nasthikara Putrya” and “Seeliyage Lokaya” republished. “Samawa Deema” has also been republished with a new title “Idama ha Thanhawa”. In addition, she has got the following in print: “Punarjeewanaya”, a translation of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection, “Lo Pathala Keti Katha”, a collection of short stories by world famous authors including Tagore, Mulkraj Anand, Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wild” and “Minis Angaharu Yuddaya”, a translation of H G Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’.

‘Sai Baba: Man of Miracles’ by Howard Murphet was translated at the request of the Sai Baba Society, which was made in late 1974. Although my father finished the translation in a matter of two months, a unique achievement for a book running to 400 pages, it did not come out in print till a year after his death, in spite of Sai Baba’s blessings!

Matara C Justin Wijayawardhana started writing to Sinhala newspapers and magazines from his late teens and continued for six decades. In addition to articles on Buddhism and current affairs, there are many more translations that have been serialised. Champa is engaged in this monumental task of gathering them so that more books may be published.

Marriage

My father, who initially put service over marriage, changed his mind the moment he saw a new lady teacher who joined Rahula staff. The marriage of Justin Wijayawardhana and Jinaseeli Jayawardana from Ransegoda took place on 17 May 1940, during the biggest flood ever recorded in the Southern Province. We were under the impression that the bridegroom encountered the flooding on his way to the bride’s but two books by Hewamadduma brothers give a different story. The Hewamadduma family from Lenaduwa was one of the closest families to ours. Till his untimely death in 2013, Amare, the well-known administrator, historian and writer used to write regularly about my father. After that his younger brother Dharme has taken over. In Amare’s book “Amara Samara-1”, as well as his elder brother Upatissa’s book “Ma Dutu Maha Purushaya: Justin Wijayawardhana” give detailed accounts, as recounted by their father. Every time a flood occurred, their father Sinnno Appuhamy used to say, “This is nothing compared to the flooding when Wijayawardhana mahattaya got married” and had gone on to relate how my father directed the preparation of boats the previous evening and how they paddled the 15 miles in floodwaters and brought back the couple, disregarding all warnings, safely to Godagama at 3 am, the following day! Apparently, my father having settled the new bride in bed had gone immediately to help flood victims. That shows his character and that my mother was solidly behind him. By the way, Thilakasena Sahabandu, who was married to Hewamadduma sister Karuna, wrote a beautiful anthology of poems titled ‘Sevaye Suwanda (Fragrance of service) which helped a great deal in my father’s election victory.

Funeral

Unfortunately, what should have been Justin Wijayawardhana’s greatest legacy was not to be. Seeing how the poor got into difficulty with lavish funerals, he campaigned for simple funerals but his pleas fell on deaf ears. However, he ensured his funeral was simple and my mother did even better, ensuring that we handed over her body to the Galle Medical Faculty when she died on 24 February 1986.

Detailed written instructions were left about the funeral but true to his considered manner, he stated we could make changes if circumstances demanded. He also stated that if we felt bad for not spending on the funeral, to build a house for a poor family, which we did. The day after death, he was cremated in a coffin made from cheap wood and painted white, on a simple pyre made from locally collected wood. Though his voice was heard at almost every local funeral, he did not want funeral orations and as stipulated there was one anusasana. Although we did not inform any VIPs, Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel turned up and as he was representing the government, we allowed him to speak. The only thing beyond our control was the massive crowd.

As we watched, a great man who had rendered selfless service for almost eight decades, gradually turned into ashes. As requested, his ashes were thrown in Nilawala Ganga.

May he attain the supreme bliss of Nibbana!

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Features

The gambling that wears a suit: Forex, commodities and CFD Trap – III

Published

16 hours ago

2026/09/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya

(The third instalment in a five-part series on the business of gambling, legal and illegal.)

Somewhere in the fine print of every trading app you’ve ever seen advertised on social media, there’s a sentence that almost nobody reads all the way through. It usually says something like this: “77% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.”

Read that again. Not “some people lose money.” Not “trading carries risk.” Seventy-seven out of every hundred ordinary customers who sign up and put their own money in, lose it. And that number isn’t a scandal uncovered by an investigative journalist. It’s a legally required disclosure, printed by the company itself, sitting quietly at the bottom of the same advertisement promising you financial freedom.

Now imagine a casino was legally required to put a sign on its front door reading: “77 out of every 100 people who walk through this door will lose money.” Would anyone still walk in? Probably far fewer than they do today. And yet millions of people, a good number of them here in Sri Lanka, drawn in through Telegram groups, YouTube “gurus,” and slickly produced Instagram ads, open trading accounts every year, often with no idea that the product they’ve just signed up for behaves, mathematically, almost exactly like a casino game.

What a CFD actually is in plain language

CFD stands for “contract for difference.” Strip away the jargon and it means this: you’re not actually buying gold, or oil, or US dollars, or shares in a company. You’re placing a bet with a broker on whether the price of that thing will go up or down over some period of time, usually 24 hours. If you’re right, the broker pays you the difference. If you’re wrong, you pay them.

That alone isn’t necessarily gambling, plenty of legitimate financial hedging works this way. What tips it firmly into gambling territory is leverage. Most CFD and forex platforms let ordinary customers control a position many, many times larger than the money they’ve actually put in, sometimes 50 or 100 times larger. That sounds thrilling, because it means a small price move in your favour turns into a big profit. It also means a small price move against you wipes out your entire deposit in minutes, sometimes seconds. Currency and commodity prices wobble up and down constantly, for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual trader’s skill or analysis. Leverage simply turns that normal, everyday wobble into a coin flip with your rent money.

And underneath all of it sits something called the spread, the small gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at. Every single trade you make, win or lose, hands the broker a slice through that spread. It costs the broker nothing to run more of them through the system. It is, in every meaningful sense, the exact same mechanism as a casino’s house edge on a roulette wheel, a guaranteed cut for the house, built into the game before a single card is dealt or a single trade is placed.

The numbers behind the disclosure

That 77 percent figure isn’t an outlier. Britain’s financial regulator found, in a review of the industry, that 82 percent of CFD customers lost money. Regulators across Europe studied 10 different countries and found the average retail customer lost somewhere between roughly €1,600 and €29,000 trading these products. Academic researchers, who have studied trading apps directly, including their “practice mode” demo accounts, found something else troubling: many of these apps are deliberately designed using the same psychological tricks as gambling apps. Near-miss messaging that makes a losing trade feel like it was almost a win. Streak counters. Push notifications nudging you back in right when you’ve stepped away. The researchers’ own conclusion was blunt: this “supports comparisons with gambling, where an overwhelming majority loses money.”

To be fair to the trading industry, it has a real counter-argument, and it deserves to be heard rather than dismissed. Genuine investing and trading, done properly, does involve skill, understanding a market, managing risk, not betting more than you can afford to lose, using regulated brokers who are supervised by real financial authorities. Nobody sensible would say buying shares in a well-run company is “gambling” in the same sense as a slot machine. The industry’s argument is that CFDs, used responsibly by informed traders, sit closer to that end of the spectrum than to a casino floor.

The trouble is that “used responsibly by informed traders” describes almost none of the customers these apps are actually advertising to. Nobody runs a slick Instagram campaign targeting sophisticated hedge fund managers. They target 19-year-olds with a bit of spare cash and a phone.

The Sri Lankan blind spot

Here is where this story becomes genuinely local, and genuinely urgent. Sri Lanka’s new gambling law, the one creating a single Gambling Regulatory Authority to oversee casinos, card games, and betting, has nothing to do with any of this. Forex and CFD trading falls under an entirely different part of the government’s rulebook, treated as a financial services matter for the Central Bank and securities regulators, not as gambling at all. On paper, that makes sense: trading involves real financial markets, real currencies, real commodities.

But in practice, it creates a gap you could drive a truck through. A card game at a funeral house, played for a few hundred rupees, falls under strict 19th-century anti-gambling law. A trading app that can empty a young person’s entire savings account in an afternoon, using exactly the same psychological hooks as a slot machine, falls under none of it, no age verification standard built for gambling harm, no loss limits, no cooling-off periods, no self-exclusion registers.

Meanwhile, unlicensed offshore forex “signal groups” and trading channels, plenty of them explicitly targeting Sri Lankan youth through Telegram and WhatsApp, operate almost entirely outside any meaningful oversight at all, local or foreign.

There’s a newer wrinkle worth a mention too: cryptocurrency trading and crypto-based gambling products increasingly blur into the exact same category as CFDs, some analysts value the global crypto gambling market in the tens of billions of dollars, though even the experts disagree wildly on the real number, which tells you how little anyone is actually tracking this corner of the industry closely.

The question this instalment leaves open

So here’s the question worth putting to Sri Lanka’s policymakers, and to readers thinking about their own accounts: if a product produces the same loss rates as a casino, uses the same psychological design as a betting app, and overwhelmingly targets the same young, inexperienced customers as illegal gambling operators, does it matter, for the purposes of protecting people, whether we call it “trading” or “gambling”? Right now, in Sri Lanka and in most of the world, the label is doing an enormous amount of legal work that the underlying product doesn’t actually earn.

We’ll return to this exact tension in our final instalment, when we ask what genuinely joined-up gambling regulation would look like, one that judges a product by what it does to the people using it, rather than by what its marketing department decided to call it.

Next week,

Part 4 heads to the racecourse, the one form of gambling that has stayed legal almost everywhere on Earth for centuries, to explain, in plain English, exactly how a bookmaker guarantees itself a profit no matter which horse crosses the line first.

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

Addressing human rights needs multi-pronged approach

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

Volker Türk

by Jehan Perera

The ongoing 63rd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which runs from September 7 to October 7, 2026, in Geneva is important to Sri Lanka. Its outcome will send a signal to other international actors, including the European Union, as to whether Sri Lanka’s reform policy is on track. The written update on Sri Lanka, prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights under High Commissioner Volker Türk and presented by Deputy High Commissioner Nada Al-Nashif, has taken a more holistic approach to the government’s performance over the past year. It acknowledged the progress Sri Lanka has made under the NPP government in relation to accountability for financial fraud and other economic crimes. At the same time, the High Commissioner’s update made clear that progress in relation to economic crime cannot be equated with progress in relation to accountability for grave human rights violations committed during the armed conflict and in other periods of political violence.

The government may have felt sufficiently confident that its response to the High Commissioner’s update could be handled by its representative in Geneva and did not require the attendance of Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath. Sri Lanka’s representative Sumith Dassanayake called for a fundamental review of country-specific mandates within the UN Human Rights Council. Sri Lanka has been facing repeated scrutiny in the form of successive UNHRC resolutions from 2012 onwards. Ambassador Dassanayake argued that such mandates should not continue indefinitely and must be regularly assessed against measurable objectives and tangible outcomes. This may reflect confidence that its record of reform is beginning to receive recognition internationally. The reports and statements at the Human Rights Council acknowledged progress in the government’s efforts to address corruption and economic crime.

The government’s anti-corruption drive has included investigations into allegations involving individuals who held the highest political offices in the country. The arrest of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe in connection with alleged misuse of public funds, and the investigation into the controversial SriLankan Airlines Airbus transaction involving former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s son, are examples of the reach of these investigations. The arrest of SLPP National Organiser and Member of Parliament Namal Rajapaksa in connection with allegations relating to the Airbus purchase scandal has also demonstrated that the government is willing to pursue cases involving politically powerful figures.

Wide Range

The ongoing investigations appear to encompass a wide range of parliamentarians and government members, both past and present. They suggest that accountability for corruption is not being confined to lower-level officials or to individuals who lack political influence. This is precisely the kind of accountability that the public has long demanded and that previous governments have too often failed to deliver. The government is also reaching into the upper levels of the military hierarchies of the past. The case in which 11 young men, most of them Tamil, disappeared after being abducted in Colombo between 2008 and 2009 involved allegations that some families were asked to pay ransoms. The investigation into this case has reached senior military figures. The willingness to pursue such cases is important because it challenges the assumption that those who exercised power during the war are beyond the reach of the law. Such cases would provide a practical test of whether the government’s commitment to accountability for economic crimes is part of a broader commitment to the rule of law.

Success in prosecuting corruption cannot substitute for justice for those who were unlawfully killed, disappeared, tortured or otherwise victimised. The UN report noted that there had been no recognition or accountability for crimes under international law, gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by all parties during the war. The government has yet to establish a credible and effective process to address the many cases of enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing, torture and other serious violations. The government needs to take the international commitments it has inherited on human rights issues seriously. It needs to adopt a multi-pronged approach and go beyond focusing primarily on financial and corruption-related accountability.

Need Action

As a member of the international community, Sri Lanka has a responsibility to abide by the commitments it has made. It cannot selectively uphold international obligations postponing those that are politically difficult. Also, as a small country, Sri Lanka has a self-interest in ensuring the survival of international law, which is all that it has to protect it from the depredations of the bigger international actors. The erosion of international law by powerful states makes it all the more important that smaller states uphold the principles on which the international system is based. Sri Lanka cannot credibly appeal to international law when it is threatened from outside while disregarding its own obligations within. Sri Lanka also needs to win the confidence of its own population that it is committed to justice and equality for all. Public opinion polls and community-level research have disclosed that ethnic and religious minorities are appreciative of the sense of greater security they enjoy under the present government from ethnic or religious extremists.

But a sense of security is not the same as the fulfilment of rights. As far as the Tamil people are concerned, the government has yet to deliver on several of its specific promises. These include the long-standing problems of missing persons, the release of political prisoners who have been members of Tamil militant organisations, and the return of land taken over for military purposes during the war. The issue of Buddhist statues and archaeological sites found on their properties which are then taken from their control continue to trouble them especially as they see no signs of resolution of those disputes. The issue of pastureland in the east of the country in Mylathamadu is particularly concerning to them as they see orders by successive presidents, both President Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, being disregarded on the ground. The Mylathamadu pastureland dispute is where traditional Tamil dairy farmers have engaged in multi-year protests against the ongoing encroachment of their ancestral grazing lands by Sinhalese crop cultivators relocated under government development schemes.

The government’s failure to hold Provincial Council elections is particularly troubling. The provincial council system is the only one that can provide the Tamil people and other ethnic minorities the opportunity to wield political power and exercise a measure of self-determination in the areas in which they are the numerical majority. The continued postponement of Provincial Council elections therefore has consequences that go beyond an ordinary electoral delay. It deprives communities of an important constitutional avenue for democratic participation and power-sharing. The ethnic and religious minorities appreciate what the government is doing in the larger national interest, but they must not be made to feel that their special concerns are being ignored. The government cannot resolve Sri Lanka’s entire legacy of rights violations overnight. But it does need to demonstrate that it is willing to move forward on multiple fronts, not only on a few.

Features

The emptying university: why are academics leaving?

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Hasini Lecamwasam

Brain drain in Sri Lanka is at an all-time high. The latest Human Flight and Brain Drain Index for 2024 shows that we are 16^th of 175 countries on this count, and first in South Asia. That this is a crisis goes without saying. Brain drain affects all sectors, and is a huge strain on the resources of a developing country. Particularly in Sri Lanka, where considerable public investment is made in the moulding of professionals through the system of free education, this amounts to transferring the resources of poorer countries to richer ones with top migration destinations. It is, therefore, important to consider the push and pull factors behind skilled outmigration, specifically from the public university system of Sri Lanka, a key focus of the Kuppi column.

From frustration to exit

Several bitter realities in our crumbling public university system act as push factors in the migration decisions of academics. Many essays on this column have, over several years, attempted to highlight numerous aspects of this erosion. Perhaps, primary among them is the lack of adequate funding, which has debilitating ramifications for the system: very little investment is made in the up-keep of infrastructure (and even less in its expansion), resulting in serious constraints in accommodating growing batches of students and the wellbeing of the staff (particularly in regional universities); research funding is negligible, severely curtailing academics’ ability to effectively discharge their primary duty of teaching which should ideally be informed by their research (and the research of others, access to which is also, unfortunately, mediated by funding); a funding crunch also means a slash in (or greater constraints on) recruitments, increasing the workloads of academics, currently in service, and eating into the quality of their teaching and research.

What recruitments are done frustrate those with any faith in merit. As many of our interventions in this column have shown, recruitment processes are characterised by archaic selection criteria that place very little weight on a candidate’s postgraduate growth and the advantages of interdisciplinary training. Added to this is the general preference for ‘culturally compliant’ candidates who would not rock the boat too much. The combined effect is that those with the capacity and spirit to try out innovations in education are discouraged from joining or staying on in the public university system. Some, or many, of them may instead seek appointments abroad.

A thread that binds all of these problems together is pervasive hierarchy which, again, many interventions on this column have sought to highlight. It is the interest in preserving hierarchy that leads to the preference for alumni in recruitment processes. Hierarchy within universities can be particularly frustrating for younger faculty and women, who typically have to bear the brunt of the workload of their senior, often male, colleagues. In a context of funding, and, therefore, recruitment, restrictions, this translates into a disproportionate burden being placed on junior (usually female) faculty, seriously hindering their prospects of growing into successful academics due to the time constraints within which they have to operate. Junior academics, therefore, are more likely to look to educational institutions abroad for what they hope would be a different work culture that respects them more.

Ideological ruses

On top of these structural frustrations are also the workings of neoliberal ideology. For one, the nature of relations between the global metropole and peripheral countries like Sri Lanka largely dictates what is desirable and what is not. The apparent lifestyles of Western countries – from food to clothing, housing, appliances, and so on – have continued to lure people from the periphery with the promise of a ‘better’ life, alongside better career advancement opportunities. This, of course, masks much of the struggle that goes on behind the scenes to survive in Western societies. For instance, in most cases highly attractive public infrastructure such as roads, public transport, clean air, quality control of food, and so on belie the astronomical privatised costs of healthcare and education. Health insurance is usually mandatory and steep in most high-income settings, while even subsidised education (for which eligibility criteria are strict) creates a serious dent in household earnings. Of course, the happy images of glossy trams and gleeful international travellers don’t convey this.

A second ideological ruse is the myth of greater opportunities and recognition abroad. While there is no denying that local skilled sectors – be it higher education, health, civil service, or private white-collar positions – are replete with issues that inhibit merit-based professional advancement, the notion that things are fundamentally different in Western countries stems from an uninformed optimism. As is now increasingly known and discussed, Western labour markets are notoriously racialised, and equivalent skills are rarely treated as such. Instead, it is usually demanded that skilled migrants clear certain formal examinations in their host countries. In fields like medicine, this is followed by an interview that may also be racially prejudiced. Once these initial steps are cleared, remuneration reverts to square one irrespective of experience accumulated abroad, not to mention the many subtle aggressions, rejections, and trials one has to go through in the negotiation of everyday life. In the many cases where professional qualifications are used as leverage for a move abroad, sights are set on a better future for one’s children, which again is informed by the misplaced faith in greater opportunities and a lack of awareness of the factors outlined above. Needless to say, in the global swing to the Right, things have become even more challenging. In such a context, considering the few rare cases where skilled migrants live extremely comfortable lives as the norm becomes a dangerous misconception.

The two ideological pull factors mentioned above are complemented by a push factor, which has to do with a highly classed understanding of what a white-collar professional is due in their society. Many of these aspirations are clearly articulated in academic trade union action demanding separate quotas for school entry, increased fuel allowances, winning back the presently stalled vehicle permit scheme, salary hikes, and so on. While working people have every right to agitate for better material conditions, insofar as it remains unconnected to a broader movement for improving the conditions of the lot of the working class, it remains self-serving and very much within the class logic of capitalist society. Since these demands are articulated as a means of maintaining distinction, it is clear that they are not envisaged as part of a class movement. The frustration of not having these needs for distinction satisfied may push some to seek greener pastures abroad, at least financially, (perhaps as a means of social mobility based on it), only to be disappointed on most occasions.

What is to be done?

Addressing the systemic push factors listed above requires, first and foremost, greater allocations for free public higher education. This would immediately translate into more recruitments and less work per academic, and better research and teaching in the long haul. An increase in funding would also ideally lead to greater infrastructural investments, especially including improving the living conditions of those who work in regional universities amid untold hardships. Next, fairer, more creative, and, therefore, more effective recruitment policies are badly needed to attract talented individuals to university positions. Rather than carving out a ‘special category’ for academics to achieve this purpose, which is informed by a classed logic, this needs to be done through fundamental reforms in recruitment processes. Third, a persistent attack on the entrenched hierarchy within universities through internal reform is much called for. Reforming recruitment practices will go a long way towards addressing this. Measures should also be taken to introduce more stringent policies against SGBV (not to mention ragging, even though it is not directly connected to brain drain). Such measures would create a safer, fairer, and more attractive workplace, which would give more reasons for people to stay.

On top of greater allocations, we also need a transformation of our aspirations themselves if this situation is to change. That necessitates a kind of education capable of questioning the ‘paradise’ conception of Western societies, and lays bare their colonial material and ideological dimensions, in both their historical and contemporary manifestations. These colonial understandings of the ‘good life’, moreover, have devastating ecological implications for the planet, not to mention social justice. An education with the ability to transform this mindset would hopefully prove to be more than a mere path to social mobility, rather being a tool of social emancipation that renders mobility moot.

(Hasini Lecamwasam is with the Department of Political Science, University of Peradeniya)

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.