Features

Paris and some of its habitues and JRJ, Cyril Mathew and their storm troops

Published

4 years ago

2023/04/2

Thilina Walpola

Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama autobiography

(Continued from last week)

As a member of the Sri Lankan delegation I began to attend the meetings of the Communications sector of UNESCO. International meetings of this group were held in Paris while regional meetings were held in Bangkok and New Delhi. As mentioned earlier the Paris meetings were the main driver of the global debate. Special attention was focused on the African countries which were lacking in both manpower and technical resources.

Increasingly what was highlighted was the imbalance in news flows between the developed and developing countries. The answer was to transfer technology and training opportunities to the developing countries through funding from multilateral and bilateral sources, basically coming from the industrialized countries. From this stance came the call for setting up a new institution in UNESCO for the promotion of Communication Development. It was to be called the International Programme for the Development of Communication [IPDC] with its own Governing Council, Director and Secretariat.

Our annual visits to Paris for UNESCO meetings which usually lasted about a week with a weekend in between was a good opportunity to savour the life of that beautiful city which has been called the ‘City of Light’. We were lodged in a hotel close to UNESCO in Place de Fontenot’ in Paris 16, which was the elite district or arondissement. It was close to the Eiffel Tower and Ecole Militaire which is the major military school for the elite officers of the French Army.

A stroll after meetings took us to the most ‘posh’ areas of the city including the Invalides – the Military Museum -mostly devoted to Napoleon. We could also walk in the numerous immaculately maintained parks close to the tower and the Invalides. A longer walk would take us to the famous `Pont de Paris’ or Paris bridges which spanned the river Seine and linked the right Bank with Left Bank [Rive Gauche].

One day while the meeting was going on we received news of the death of Jean Paul Satre and his funeral the following day at the cemetery at Montparnasse which was not too far from Place de Fontenot’. That afternoon I excused myself and with Navaz of our tourist office in Paris joined the thousands of mourners who assembled near the entrance to the cemetery to bid farewell to France’s best known intellectual.

Many who flocked to the cemetery were the young people of the sixties, now close to middle age, who had been inurrectionists against the De Gaulle regime. They came to pay homage to an older man who had taken their side and marched with them in the Quartier Latin. Though Satre was a thorn in his flesh, De Gaulle, in a typical Gallic gesture, had ordered the police not to touch the philosopher-hero. He remembered that Satre had encouraged ‘the resistance’ when France was under Hitler’s jackboot and Frenchmen looked to De Gaulle as their savior.

We had to push through the teeming crowds to follow the black hearse carrying Satre’s remains to his final resting place. At the last minute there was a hush and a famous film star Simone Signoret, came to place a bowl of roses on the coffin which was then slowly lowered into the open grave. Whenever I visit Paris I go to the Montparnasse cemetery to pay my respects and also rekindle my memories of a city I knew so well a long time ago.

At that time the Sri Lanka Embassy in Rue D’Astorg was our home away from home. The Ambassador was Vernon Mendis who was a very senior Foreign Service officer who had managed the administrative side of the Non-Aligned meeting in Colombo. But as soon as he reached retirement age he was hired by UNESCO to be their representative in Cairo. The Director-General of UNESCO M’Bow was well known for his patronage of Ambassadors who were loyal to him.

Mendis was succeeded by Balasubramanium who too was a senior in the service. But Bala too was at the end of his career and was ill with a terminal disease. Most of the relations with the French public was handled by Manu Ginige who was a fluent French speaker and a Francophile. Manu who became my very close friend was a legendary character among the Sri Lankans abroad. A graduate of Peradeniya he followed up on his fascination with international politics by joining Air Ceylon as their representative in Paris.

An ardent Trotskyite in Peradeniya he had a wide circle of leftist friends. Among them was Ratnasiri Wickremanayake who was a law student in London at that time. Ratnasiri had cut short his stay in the UK because he was summoned to contest the Horana seat in the 1960 General Election. His elder brother Munidasa, who had been Philip Gunawardene’s MEP candidate, had been killed a few months before the election. Ratnasiri won the seat, crossed over to the SLFP and later became the Prime Minister.

He never went back to his studies and Europe but maintained his links with his London comrades. These friends formed a trio – Ratnasiri, Willa Wickremasinghe and Manu Ginige. After leaving Air Ceylon Manu joined UTA, the French airline that flew to Colombo, on the invitation of Minister Leslie Goonewardene of the LSSP who was the Cabinet Minister of Transport and Aviation.

Through Air Ceylon and UTA Manu became indispensable to any one with connections to Colombo and Paris because air travel was their lifeline. After the fall of the Bandaranaike regime in 1977 he left UTA and freelanced for a while and even spent some time in Cologne with his German wife and daughter. He came back to Paris as Hameed’s interpreter and confidante.

When our delegation comprising Esmond, Arthur Clarke and myself went to Paris for UNESCO meetings he was our liaison with the secretariat as he was fluent in French. He became indispensable to Esmond and with Hameed’s backing became a crucial member of our Embassy having lived in Paris for over 20 years. Chandrika Bandaranaike and her friends who had moved with him closely in Paris were angry with him for serving the UNP regime but Manu was a professional officer who gave his services to the country by working in the Embassy.

He maintained the friendships of his younger days and remained a close friend of Ratnasiri. Only a few close friends of Ratnasiri hailed him by his pet name ‘Danu’ and Manu was one of them. Very few know that when Dr. N.M. Perera visited Europe for the last time, after he was diagnosed with a cancer, he wished to make a sentimental visit to Paris with Dr. Dora Fonseka who was known to be his girlfriend.

It was Manu who arranged this visit and made his apartment available to them. To the last he retained his radical views. When I stayed in his apartment in Paris I requested him to arrange meetings with the Trotskyite leaders who were our icons in our University days. We met Michel Pablo. It was a secretive meeting which I will describe in the next volume of my autobiography.

Manu and I followed the cortege of Trotskyite ideologue Ernst Mandel in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in North Paris together with a dwindling gathering of old men of the Fourth International who soldiered on. Distancing themselves from these superannuated ideologues a new group of young Trotskyites emerged in the Universities and workplaces and one charismatic young leader even contested the Presidential election though he was only an ‘also ran’.

Violence

JRJ claimed to be a Gandhian who believed in ‘Non-Violence’. But as Clifford Geertz has written in his essay on Gandhi, ‘non-violence’ can only succeed if the Satyagrahi has the potential of unleashing violence as an alternative. Without that fear the opponent does not take the challenger seriously. Thus nonviolence becomes a part of the power game. As Geertz writes, “The argument that a sacred pledge to abstain from the use of force can have moral reality only with respect to people who have a genuine possibility of effectively using force is surely correct”.

JRJ was a Gandhian who always kept his ‘Powder dry’. Once in power he ceased to be a Satyagrahi. One highly disconcerting fact about the JRJ administration was its condoning of violence. When his plans met with organized resistance JRJ had no hesitation in bringing in his thuggish Trade Unionists under Mathew to attack his opponents. Though during the times of previous regimes there were incidents of violence directed at ethnic groups such as the 1958 riots, well described by Tarzie Vittachi, the state did not encourage it.

For instance the Government Agent of Polnnaruwa, Derrick Aluvihare, confronted the rioters, blocked their path with police and Army assistance and prevented a bloodbath. Lakshmi Naganathan, daughter of Federal Party leader E.M.V. Naganathan, told me that when her father and his comrades were bundled up from Galle Face green and incarcerated in Galle Face Hotel, Mrs. Bandaranaike on the PM’s instructions, had sent him food cooked in the Bandaranaike kitchen.

When Mrs. Bandaranaike lost the election only Lakshmi of all the Foreign Service officials went to her home to bid their former Minister and PM goodbye. I had personally seen Left firebrands like Philip and Colvin restraining their supporters from getting into fights. In fact it was the left that was set on by Goonesinha and Kotelawela’s goons. In fairness to the so-called LSSP and CP revolutionaries, not one of them encouraged workers to attack others in the workplace or outside.

NM was the quintessential patient and analytical trade union negotiator. Every year NM would spend a few months in the UK in the company of Dora Fonseka. Even Capitalist negotiators knew that he would skillfully wind up his bargaining just in time to catch his flight to London. Bandaranaike loved to give tongue lashings but except when he praised the ‘Imbulgoda Veeraya’ for obstructing JRJs march, was a peace-loving leader who tolerated the taunt of `Sevala Banda’ which was later adopted even by his murderers. In all his speeches he never accused the Tamil leaders of provoking the Sinhalese.

JRJ on the other hand, for all his lip service to non-violence used violence as a political weapon. As an admirer of Napoleon’s tactics he must have thought that controlled violence was a useful tool for governance. Having I 1977 won a five sixths majority fair and square, be sought to preserve it with unacceptable means. His ‘Major Domo’ was Cyril Mathew who was also the boss of the UNP trade unions.

Mathew proceeded to staff his numerous Boards with his violence prone unionists who in turn packed them with party working class stalwarts. The big state Corporations were seething with tension because of the opposition of leftist workers who had earlier ruled the roost. The Left also made a mistake which they later acknowledged, of forcing a showdown with JRJ early by calling a general strike, with a demand for all-round higher wages. With Thondaman on his side JRJ was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to teach the leftist workers a lesson they will not forget.

JRJ was supported to the hilt by Premadasa who wanted to stuff the Government offices with his own fanatical supporters from Colombo Central. The Marxist theory and practice of the general strike is clear. It should only be a struggle of the last resort because there is no possibility of further escalation. It is a question of win or die for a workers’ party. Indeed the call for a strike by the Left leaders was designed to play themselves back into the game after the disastrous results of the 1977 election where they could not win a single seat.

I was in my office on the day of the general strike. Mathew’s goons led by the UNPs trade Union the JSS launched a murderous attack on the strikers near the Lake House roundabout. They had come armed with clubs, knives and knuckle dusters. One worker was killed and the others ran helter skelter to escape the killers. Alavi Moulana and Sarath Muttetuwegama ran into my room in the ministry on Sir Baron Jayatilaka mawatha as they were being pursued by murderous thugs. I immediately shut the door and got my two friends to sit down and drink a cup of tea while their tormentors on the street rushed past us.

Alavi’s shirt was drenched in blood, and I got my driver Fonseka to bring him a new shirt. Then I smuggled Alavi and Sarath into my official car and had them driven safely home. The Lake House roundabout was like a war zone with placards, shoes, slippers and files strewn all over. I must say that both Alavi and Sarath did not forget this adventure and when much later in the Mahinda Cabinet there were disagreements with Mahinda, Alavi and Dinesh took my side and resolved controversial issues.

Cyril Mathew’s goons did not stop there. They launched an unprovoked attack on distinguished cultural personalities who were critical of the open economy. Popular culture, especially with the coming of TV, that was growing after 1977 was a threat to their sensibility as well as social position. They launched a well-supported opposition to the open economy and its cultural effects. Even their moderate and sensible arguments irritated JRJ and Mathew who knew only too well that the debacle of 1956 started similarly with cultural and religious opposition to the UNP.

There is no doubt that JRJ was behind these attacks. The meeting held at the Buddhist Congress Hall under the leadership of Maduluwawe Sobhita and Sarachchandra was attacked and the two leaders were hospitalized. What was more disconcerting was that ministers, save my minister Anandatissa, were gloating about the discomfiture of the cultural icons. Ananda and I went to see Sarcthchandra who was not seriously hurt. But this jubilation about use of violence which seemed a way of currying favour with JRJ had grave consequences, particularly on the ethnic issue.

There is no doubt that JRJ was behind these attacks. The meeting held at the Buddhist Congress Hall under the leadership of Maduluwawe Sobhita and Sarathchandra was attacked and the two leaders were hospitalized. What was more disconcerting was that ministers, save my minister Anandatissa, were gloating about the discomfiture of the cultural icons. Ananda and I went to see Sarathchandra who was not seriously hurt. But this jubilation about use of violence which seemed a way of currying favour with JRJ had grave consequences, particularly on the ethnic issue.

(To be continued)

All News Advertisement

Features

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

Published

21 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)