Monday 7th September, 2026

The irony of the JVP and the UNP clashing over last week’s arrest and remand of SLPP National Organiser and MP Namal Rajapaksa over an alleged Rs. 100 million bribe linked to an Airbus deal may not have been lost on political observers. One may recall that during the UNP-led Yahapalana government, arrests were made the way volleyball is played, as it were. The JVP, which was honeymooning with the UNP at the time, raised questions in Parliament about allegations against the common enemies of the two parties, enabling the UNP to make damning statements about them and build a case for their impending arrests, much as a setter places the ball for a hitter to make the approach, jump and spike. The JVP and the UNP have since fallen out, with the latter lambasting the former for having Opposition politicians arrested for political reasons.

Sri Lanka has earned notoriety for politically-motivated arrests under successive governments. Ruling party politicians use arrests to vilify their opponents before or after elections and major political events, such as propaganda rallies. President J. R. Jayewardene misused Emergency regulations to have actor-turned-politician Vijaya Kumaratunga arrested and detained following the 1982 presidential election, falsely accusing him of involvement in what was described as a Naxalite conspiracy to overthrow the UNP government. Kumaratunga was never charged. The SLFP-led government under President Chandrika Kumaratunga was also not immune to allegations of political witch-hunts, the arrest and detention of former UNP Minister Sirisena Cooray being a case in point. President Mahinda Rajapaksa had his main contender in the 2010 presidential election, former war-winning Army Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka, arrested. The UNP-led Yahapalana also turned arrests into political theatre, with a series of high-profile arrests accompanied by cameras, dramatic police action and publicity. Former head of State Intelligence Maj. Gen. (retd.) Suresh Sallay has been detained since February 2026 under the PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) in connection with an investigation into the Easter Sunday terror attacks.

Legislators of the party in power usually abuse their parliamentary privileges to vilify suspects in custody and hold social media kangaroo trials with impunity. They apparently presume suspects guilty until proven innocent. When they do so, the police cannot be expected to conduct impartial investigations. It is no surprise that the police have been accused of fabricating evidence against the political enemies of governments over the decades.

Pretrial arrests, remand or detention should be the exception rather than the rule, especially in a country like Sri Lanka, which cannot even ensure the safety of convicts and remand prisoners. Above all, the conviction rate in this country is as low as 4% to 6%, according to researchers. The police make arrests swiftly but thereafter drag their feet on investigations while objecting to bail for suspects.

Most of the prosecutions under the Yahapalana government collapsed mainly due to lapses on the part of the police and the Attorney General’s Department, which had to make haste under political pressure. The incumbent government stands accused of trying to overcome this problem by manipulating the judiciary through various means instead of resolving the structural problems besetting the legal process. It is only natural that the questionable 22nd constitutional amendment Bill has come to be viewed as part of the government’s strategy to control the judiciary.

Many people have languished in remand prisons due to politically motivated arrests and selective enforcement that the police are notorious for. The police ought to conduct thorough investigations and gather credible evidence before moving to arrest suspects who are not hardcore criminals posing a danger to society. It defies comprehension why so many suspects are arrested and kept in remand prisons for months on end even when there is no reason to suspect that they will flee the country, interfere with witnesses, suppress evidence, commit further serious offences, or pose a significant danger to the public.

Holding a person on remand indefinitely until the conclusion of investigations is not consistent with due process and international best practices; in fact, it amounts to punishment in itself in all but name. The rule of law demands that the police or other investigators establish reasonable grounds to suspect an offence, collect and preserve evidence, interview witnesses, question suspects and assess the facts objectively before depriving anyone of personal liberty. They must not act according to their whims and fancies or at the behest of their political masters.

Premature arrests risk wrongful detention, reputational damage, hardships and expensive legal challenges for suspects, as is public knowledge. They could also compromise public confidence in law enforcement and lead to perceptions that investigations are influenced by political pressure or public sentiment rather than facts. When the rule of law is undermined, the justice system becomes weak.

Hardly a day passes in this country without major drug detections and underworld killings. Inspector General of Police Priyantha Weerasooriya, speaking at this year’s Police Day ceremony in Colombo on Thursday (03), said police had seized large amounts of narcotics, including 1,416 kg of Crystal Methamphetamine, 946 kg of heroin, and 1,282 kg of cannabis and taken into custody 1,612 illegal firearms, including T-56 assault rifles and pistols, so far this year.

Sri Lanka is awash with illegal firearms, which have found their way into the underworld during the past several decades. Protracted armed conflicts led to an exponential increase in the number of lethal weapons in the wrong hands.

Immediately after the 2024 regime change, the MPs who had obtained repeater guns from the Defence Ministry were asked to return those weapons, and they readily complied for obvious reasons. But those guns account for only a fraction of the weapons issued to politicians and others over the decades. In January 2019, the then Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando disclosed that about 4,700 pistols and revolvers had been licensed but there was no information about those who had obtained them. Some individuals possessed as many as 15 small firearms each, he said.

One may recall that in 2023, the then State Minister Pramitha Tennakoon informed Parliament that the defence authorities had issued about 700 firearms to 154 politicians in the late 1980s, when the JVP went on a killing spree, but none of them had been returned. That figure cannot be accurate. According to anecdotal evidence, thousands of firearms were issued to politicians under threat during that period, and almost all of them have gone missing.

In the late 1980s, the JVP did not spare anyone who refused to obey its illegal orders. Its death-dealing sparrow units physically eliminated anyone who had the courage to voice dissent. Some political activists threatened by the JVP banded together to protect themselves, and the armed groups they formed, such as the PRRA (People’s Revolutionary Red Army) became as ruthless as the JVP killing squads; they eventually helped beat the JVP at its own game. Some of them switched their allegiance to the UNP, and worked as its shock troops.

The leftist parties and the SLFP, too, had to protect themselves against the JVP hit squads. The UNP set in motion a Caravan of Death, which scoured the country, killing JVP activists and suspects. What happened to the firearms used by pro-UNP vigilantes to carry out those extrajudicial killings?

Chris Smith, an expert on the proliferation of firearms, especially in South Asia has in his report, In the Shadow of a Cease-fire: The Impacts of Small Arms Availability and Misuse in Sri Lanka, has revealed that the weapons given to politicians in the late 1908s numbered more than 11,000. Many of them were not returned. The National Commission against the Proliferation of Illicit Small Arms (NCAPISA), established by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in 2004, once quoted a senior police officer attached to the Police Central Armoury at the time as having said that 80% of those weapons had been returned. Even if so, going by Smith’s figure, more than 2,200 weapons have gone unaccounted for.

The proliferation of illicit firearms in Sri Lanka can be attributed to several key factors, according to researchers; they include gunrunning, illegal operations carried out by rogue elements in the police and the armed forces, local arms manufacturing, and criminals gaining access to arms caches of the LTTE. It may be recalled that the Colombo Crime Division produced 12 suspects before the Colombo Chief Magistrate on March 22, 2019, for having supplied weapons retrieved from buried LTTE arms caches in Kilinochchi to criminal gangs elsewhere. It was revealed in January 2025 that as many as 73 T-56 assault rifles had gone missing from an unnamed army camp. Soon after the decimation of the JVP’s military wing in 1989, a police sergeant sold a large stock of firearms, seized from the JVP and stored in the Kuliyapitiya police station, to underworld gangs at Rs. 15,000 each. The police could recover only some of those weapons.

The police must go all out to find the illegal firearms used by the JVP during its second uprising (1987-89). Most of the JVP’s arms caches have not been traced. SJB MP Dayasiri Jayasekara told Parliament on 27 Feb. 2025 that more than 2,000 illegal firearms looted by the JVP between 1987 and 1989 had gone missing. The JVP attacked several police stations and military camps and grabbed weapons. In April 1987, it seized the entire arsenal at the Pallekele army camp. Now that the JVP-led NPP has formed a government and launched a campaign to eliminate gun violence, the Defence Ministry may be able to ascertain information about those missing firearms, as we argued in a previous editorial comment.

The NCAPISA dealt extensively with the issue of illegal weapons in circulation in Sri Lanka. Its survey report contains valuable information, which, however, needs to be updated. Defence authorities should study this document thoroughly and commission a fresh survey on illicit firearms while carrying out operations to neutralise criminal gangs and seize lethal weapons in their possession.

The need for the police and the defence bigwigs to adopt a broader and more strategic approach to ridding the country of the scourge of illegal firearms, which snuff out lives almost daily, cannot be overstated.

Saturday 5th September, 2026

The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) yesterday arrested National Organiser of the SLPP and MP Namal Rajapaksa in connection with a probe into an alleged Rs.100 million bribe linked to an airbus deal. It also took into custody former Minister Johnston Fernando over an investigation into an allegation that he arbitrarily cancelled a properly awarded contract and procured chairs from a company of his choice for the Polgolla Mahinda Rajapaksa Auditorium thereby causing a loss of Rs. 7.4 million to the state. Rajapaksa was remanded until 18 September.

The Opposition claims that its prominent members who are critical of the JVP-NPP government have become victims of a political witch-hunt, and legal action against them is aimed at silencing them. This claim is not entirely false, but those who are trying to portray themselves as victims failed to be above suspicion while in power.

There is no gainsaying that all those who have caused losses to the state coffers through corrupt deals, etc., must be brought to justice. Several former ministers have been imprisoned for misusing state funds. Opinion may be divided on the severity of the sentences awarded to them; the principle of proportionality in criminal law requires that punishment be commensurate with the seriousness of the offence and the offender’s degree of culpability, and penalties should not be excessively harsh or unduly lenient. However, the general consensus is that politicians and public officials who enrich themselves and/or further the interests of their parties by misusing state funds must be made to face the full force of the law. So, punishment meted out to corrupt politicians and their lackeys gladden the hearts of ordinary people.

Most politicians market their humble beginnings, as it were, during election campaigns to endear themselves to the public while living the life of Riley. Curiously, the SLPP politicians who asked for compensation for their properties torched by violent protesters during Aragalaya, were not required to explain how they had acquired those assets. The SLPP government generously paid colossal amounts of state funds as compensation.

Public sympathy is not with the politicians who are protesting against legal action against them over bribery, corruption and other such transgressions, and what they are facing now is generally considered their comeuppance. However, the government, which claims that everyone is equal before the law at present, will have to explain why the ruling party politicians who have committed the same offences as their Opposition counterparts are treated differently.

One may recall that Kumara Jayakody while serving as a Cabinet Minister in the current government, faced a very serious allegation that in 2016 as the Manager of the Procurement and Import Division of the Ceylon Fertiliser Company, he had caused a loss of over Rs. 8. 8 million to the state by influencing a procurement process related to the refurbishment of a warehouse complex for the benefit of a private company. The offences he and former Minister Fernando are alleged to have committed are similar in many respects. But Jayakody was not arrested. He was allowed to appear before the Colombo High Court, where he was indicted and given bail.

How can the government claim that everyone is equal before the law? Aren’t the ruling party politicians and their associates ‘more equal than others’ like the Pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm?