The last time I met Aga I had made up my mind to bring him a few things, stationery mostly, to help him along with his writing. His desk was a somewhat chaotic cluster of cardboard folders, containing loose sheets of paper on which had written his manuscripts – sometimes, a page would spill out onto the table and I worried how he could figure out what went where. At the centre of this celestial orbit were the party’s old weeklies and national congress reports, like a compass guiding his research.

Sadly, time got the better of us, and I never did get to refresh his stationary supply.

Aga Jayasena (15 February 1942–28 October 2025), was a communist as old as the Sri Lanka’s communist movement itself, being born less than a year before the founding of the Ceylon Communist Party (2–3 July 1943). He joined the party as a full-timer immediately after graduating from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and cut his teeth organising peasants in Badulla and Monaragala. He recalled that he lacked the confidence to give his own speeches in his early days as an organiser, so would read aloud the articles from the communist daily Aththa. A lifelong learner, communicator, and educator, he soon found a place in the party’s central committee, politburo, education department, and as a national organiser.

I first saw Aga, and heard him speak, at the launch of his book on Frederick Engels. I was impressed but a little intimidated, he seemed to me quite stern and serious that day! It was only earlier this year that I picked up the courage to call him to do a series of interviews on his perspectives on the history of communist movement in Sri Lanka. My initial estimation of him was quite wrong, he was extremely warm and welcoming. Ah, Shiran! No point talking on the phone, come and meet me in person. After a few false starts, mainly due to his health, we met at his home in Pelawatte. Flipping through my notes, and listening to the recordings, I realise how unstructured these conversations were. We spoke for hours about various elements from history. But throughout, he was patient, kind, and analytical.

The following are some elements of what we discussed, including my own reflections and research based on the points he raised.

What stage are we in?

In his last days, Aga had thrown himself into the movement’s history to try and understand how the present came to be. He was busy writing his memoirs, including his reflections on the history of party, some of which were quite critical. In our discussions, he was emphatic about the efforts by founding leaders S. A. Wickramasinghe and M. G. Mendis to build the trade union and cooperative movements. The struggles in the trade union movements – especially the conflicts with A. E. Gunasinghe’s Ceylon Labour Party, which had taken a communal and collaborationist turn, during the strikes at the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills – pre-dated the founding of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). Similarly, when the communists were expelled from the LSSP in 1940, Wickramasinghe and his comrades first spent time building up the mass organisations – the Ceylon Trade Union Federation (CTFU) was established in 1941. The party had to come out of the movement, not the other way around.

For Aga, this was the key. He was critical, though not dismissive, of the penchant for conjuring up programmes on which to base a coalition. Having a programme was all good and well, but a programme needed to be creative and original, it had to identify the social forces that would propel the programme forward – who would be included and excluded in such a programme? In his words, a programme needed a “vehicle” – the mass organisations. He was strongly of the opinion that the communist movement needed to descend once again into the working class to rejuvenate itself and rebuild this vehicle.

Aga was also particular about the key theoretical questions. He asked: “What stage of the revolution are we in?” and “Is there a national question?” The questions were open ended, as if he knew the multiple-choice answers that lay before but was unsure which was correct in the current conjuncture. One thing was certain; more study was needed. But the movement lacked intellectuals of the calibre that once existed. And the tide of day-to-day crises and electoral compulsions pulled the movement ever forward, with scarcely a moment to pause, reflect, and evaluate.

Colombo to Cochin

Aga’s reading of the party’s beginnings in the working-class movement made him think about the role of Malayali workers in Ceylon. The CCP’s first mass base was among the Malayali workers. There were about 40,000 Malayalis in Ceylon by the 1940s, and around 2700 Malayali toddy tappers were organised by the CTFU-affiliated All-Ceylon Toddy Workers. In fact, the CCP itself was the product of a union between its predecessor the United Socialist Party, and the largely Malayali-based Ceylon Socialist Party. The first CCP constitution, adopted in 1944, specified that the flag should have the party’s name inscribed “in the Sinhalese, Tamil, Malayalam or English language as the case may be”. Similarly, the party’s first publications were quadrilingual – Forward (English), Janasakthi (Sinhala and Tamil), and Navasakthi (Malayalam). Columns in right-wing papers like Times of Ceylon used to derisively refer to the CCP as ‘Malayali comrades’.

Ceylonese communist ties to India were not limited to their organising the workers domiciled in Ceylon. The founders themselves had intimate connections with the Indian freedom movement – nurtured during periods of study in London and visits to India itself. In London, Wickramasinghe associated closely with Indian freedom fighter, and independent India’s first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, V. K. Krishna Menon – the two organised a conference on ‘Socialism in India and Ceylon’. Wickramasinghe later travelled to India during the Meerut trial, and for a while lived alongside Sabarmati Ashram Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Then there is Buddhist monk Udakandala Sri Saranankara Thero, who studied in Santiniketan, the residential school established by Rabindranath Tagore. In India, Saranankara Thero, learned Bengali, became involved with the Indian freedom movement, and met Subhas Chandra Bose in prison.

But as independence came, efforts turned inwards towards national construction, and contradictions arose over citizenship, borders, markets, and so on. For the communists, the main international capital became the Soviet Union, which alone had the economic strength to maintain an internationally supportive network. Thus, bilateral relationships with neighbouring fraternal parties were deprioritised compared to the relationship with the Soviet Union, which served as the movement’s Mecca.

Aga wondered why that relationship with the Indian movement, particularly in Kerala, wasn’t nurtured more by both sides. Just across the Palk Straits, and over the Western Ghats, lay Kerala, which had democratically elected communists to power in 1959 (interestingly, the dismissal of this government by Nehru, with CIA-backing, occurred just months before the assassination of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike). There are many parallels between Kerala and Sri Lanka. At the time of independence, both were plantation economies, with an underdeveloped industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat, and a dependency on food imports. Like Sri Lanka, Kerala was one of the last places on the subcontinent for a communist party cell to be formed – E. M. S. Namboodiripad attributed this to the relative underdevelopment of Kerala’s modern industries, a conclusion that may well be applied to Sri Lanka too.

Aga’s point intrigued me. Why were there no greater exchanges between the Sri Lankan and Keralite movements? Could there not have been exchanges of cadres for political education, and mutual translation of literature and poetry? Could Sri Lankan cadres not have been sent on fact-finding missions to Kerala’s vast cooperatives networks, community libraries, and healthcare centres? These questions may seem idealistic but they are very well worth asking given the close historical, cultural, and geographical links between the two polities.

Following Aga’s lead, my research led me to an interesting figure. P. Sankar was a Malayali trade unionist and founding member of the CTFU (where he was the vice president and assistant secretary), editor the CCP’s Malayalam weekly Navasakthi, and a CCP central committee member from 1943 to 1952. Sankar returned to India in 1952 – I am not sure the circumstances but it seems likely that the Ceylonese government’s policies against Indian immigrants must have played a role. Once back in Kerala, Sankar joined the Communist Party of India and was elected to the Kerala Legislative Assembly from Chittur in 1977. He died in 1991. Did he ever stay in touch with comrades in Sri Lanka?

I don’t think Aga was being Indo-centric or an Indophile when he suggested closer relations with the Indian movement. His point was that the conditions in India were far more similar to Sri Lanka than the distant Soviet Union. He argued that Sri Lankan communist youth were eager to go and study in the Soviet Union (an arrangement that evolved into a paternalistic relationship for the party) but what they learnt could not always be easily applied to Sri Lanka. I don’t know if he felt this way about his own time at the Academy of Social Science in Moscow. The Soviet Union certainly helped produce a great many Sri Lankan bureaucrats and public servants (for example, Dr. Anil Jasinghe, the health ministry secretary who helped lead the campaign against the COVID-19 pandemic, is a product of Soviet education) but not enough revolutionaries with original thinking. Aga was making an argument rooted in Sri Lankan reality.

Cream of the Crop

One memento I have from Aga is a copy of the Draft Political Report for the Eight National Congress of the Ceylon Communist Party (20–24 August 1972). The faded copy, its pages yellowed, sits on my desk as I type this. Between 1964 and 1972, a period of eight years, there were no national congresses held. Up to then, this was perhaps the longest period without a party congress. This was especially significant because it was a turbulent and transformative few years for the party, the left movement, and the country as a whole.

In 1964, the party had split along the Sino-Soviet fissure, N. Sanmugathasan took with him much of CTFU, the editors of the Sinhala and Tamil press, the peasant front organiser, and several youth front leaders. Thought its electoral impact may have been small, it was a significant blow to the unity of the mass organisations and the ideologically committed mid-level cadre. Then in 1965, Shan’s own party split, with the young Rohana Wijeweera peeling off the youth-wing and beginning to proselytise among rural educated Sinhala youth (Aga was one of those personally approached by Wijeweera) to establish the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP).

Also in 1964, the United Left Front (ULF), consisting of the LSSP, CCP, and Philip Gunawardena’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, collapsed due to the LSSP breaking ranks to accept a cabinet position in the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) government led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. After decades of factionalism, the ULF had been virtually compelled to form due to unprecedent united trade union action leading to the formation of the Joint Committee of Trade Union Organisations in 1963.

Reflecting on the watershed collapse of the short-lived ULF, Aga said, “people let go of us”.

The centre-right government that took power in 1965 was the first to borrow from the International Monetary Fund. There was a renewed urgency for unity among progressive forces. By 1970, the long mooted LSSP-CCP-SLFP alignment finally came to fruition, and this United Front won the elections by a landslide. But the CCP was blocked from obtaining more than one ministerial position (the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction held by Pieter Keuneman).

Then, in 1971, came the JVP insurrection. Aga recalled the turbulent conjuncture of that time – the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1966 and the independent Tricontinental line of Cuba, the US war on Vietnam and the killing of Buddhist monks, and the proliferation of literature by Kim Il Sung translated into Sinhala. The insurrection shook the Old Left, which was completely taken aback by the violence. The deeply ingrained notion that there were no conditions for armed struggle in Sri Lanka were challenged. “The big question was why we didn’t see this coming”, Aga said.

Aga admitted a “soft corner” for the JVP of 1971. He was of the same generation of Rohana Wijeweera (born in 14 July 1943). He spoke of that generation in an almost bittersweet and rueful tone – they were the “cream”, he said, who could have been a powerful force for social transforma

He had just returned to the country after his political education in the Soviet Union, and communist youth all around the country were in ferment. Aga spoke as if whether he ended up on side or the other was a flip of the coin. After all, like many communists of his age, he had comrades on both sides.

In 1973, the Soviet-wing of the CCP split, a faction led by Wickramasinghe crossed over to the opposition (this group included Sarath Muttetuwegama, Aththa editor H. G. S. Ratnaweera, as well as a young Aga and D. E. W. Gunasekera). A faction led by Keuneman remained with Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government. There were a range of reasons for this split, including the disagreement with the heavy-handed way in which the government had dealt with the JVP insurgents and the use of Criminal Justice Commissions (CJC) Act, No. 14 of 1972, which allowed evidence that would have been inadmissible under the normal procedures. This crucial period intrigued Aga. Some historical accounts claim that the Soviet embassy intervened to patch up ties between the two factions in 1976. Aga intimated that this didn’t happen on equal ground – the Soviets had “closed the tap” of financial support to Wickramasinghe’s faction.

I tend to speculate that Wickramasinghe, without the support of intellectual stalwarts – like P. Kandiah (died in 1960), G. V. S. De Silva (left the party in 1959), and Sanmugathasan and Kumarasiri (who formed the Peking faction in 1964) – perhaps lacked the theoretical confidence to mount a challenge to the Soviet-Keuneman line, and felt isolated. But that is purely my speculation. It is interesting that Sanmugathasan’s Memoirs of an Unrepentant Communist (1989) expresses venom towards Keuneman, but a reverence towards Wickramasinghe. Similarly, Kumarasiri wrote in his later years that Wickramasinghe – not Philip Gunawardena, who later allied with the UNP – was the person who came closest to deserving the title ‘Father of Socialism’ in Sri Lanka. Wickramaisnghe didn’t leave behind any memoirs, so we may never truly know his story.

I think Aga was drawn to the 1972 Draft Political Report because he felt the text contained within it some of the contradictions brewing in the party since the 1960s, and especially after the 1970 coalition and 1971 insurrection. The copy I have is in English and is missing ten pages. Some passages have been marked with a pencil, but I am not sure if this was done by Aga himself, since he would have surely read the Sinhala version instead. Here is one of the marked paragraphs:

“The Party entered the United Front without fully working out the relationship between its own programme and that of the United Front. In the absence of independent campaigns for the party programme, there was a certain ideological confusion in some party ranks and also its development and continuation of diverse ideological trends. This also created confusion among the politically advanced non-party sections, leading to doubts in their minds as to the revolutionary character of the CP. The neglect of the ideological struggle also contributed to the above.”

We Have no Mechanism

My first interview with Aga was about four months into the presidency of Anura Kumar Dissanayake (AKD) and the National People’s Power (NPP) government. Aga had an open mind about the NPP when we met. That said, he maintained it was not clear which way the government would go, and if and how the government would break from the neoliberal framework. He acknowledged that there had been a series of missed opportunities for détente between the JVP and the Communist Party of Sri Lanka over the last decade – most notably, during the joint-struggle to prevent the privatisation of Colombo Port’s East Container Terminal.

Aga understood the NPP’s decision to continue with the IMF programme, and felt it wise for the NPP to not rock the boat too much. Not because he endorsed the IMF programme but because he must have felt that the balance of power was strongly tilted in favour of the bondholders and local merchant capitalists, who could make the economy scream by withholding foreign currency, hoarding commodities, downgrading credit ratings, and so on.

He was also sympathetic to the fact that the NPP was walking into a collapsed state machinery. His choice of words, in Sinhala, still echoes in my mind – “අපිට යාන්ත්‍රණයක් නැහැ”, we have no mechanism. He felt the NPP’s first budget, constrained by the IMF’s conditions, was unable to satisfy any specific sector, but he was appreciative of the allocations towards the estate sector and the north and east. In general, he was appreciative of the NPP’s electoral gains in the north, but was critical of their lack of clarity on solving the national question. He felt that the provision of economic services and infrastructure alone would not be enough to sidestep the political question.

Aga was clearly in a nostalgic mood the times I met him. His mind kept drifting back to the fighters from history, many of whom did not leave behind any memoirs and who are not memorialised by those who remain. He wondered why his generation (the second generation of communists) never thought to sit and interview the first generation at length before they died. Tears came to his eyes as he spoke of A. Vaidialingam, one of the founders of the CCP, who few speak of today. “Vaidialingam was to the north, what Wickramasinghe was to the south”, Aga said. With Aga’s passing, that lineage is almost broken – so much of our movement’s history remains unwritten.

The last message I have from Aga is a voice note in appreciation of a talk I gave on the Bandung Spirit at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies earlier this year. In our interviews, he was often pensive and introspective, so it is nice to have a recording of his voice sounding so animated.

Aga’s passing strikes us just two months ahead of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party – the beginning of the socialist movement in Sri Lanka. I hope that, like Aga, others in the left will take the time to reflect upon the past 90 years of struggle and write these histories. Not just to bask in the glories of the past, but to regain a sense of self, a confidence in our ideas and original aspirations, and a grounding to forge a way ahead.

(Shiran Illanperuma is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought. He is a co-convenor of the Asia Progress Forum).

by Shiran Illanperuma