In Sri Lanka, with the longest history of universal suffrage in Asia, every election excites the nation, and that will be the case with the upcoming parliamentary polls.
Less than a fortnight after Sri Lanka’s November 16 presidential elections, the country is faced with two realities. One, a (...)
In the push and pull between authoritarianism and democracy in Sri Lanka, the former has won out more often than not. But the fact that the country is not a full-blown dictatorship today is a testament to a spirit of resistance that can’t be snuffed out.
The terms “bourgeois democracy” and (...)
Thanks to elections, rural debt problem has resurfaced as a prominent issue in the public domain. While some candidates have vowed to cancel the rural debt, others have pledged to find solutions to the problem and the agrarian crisis. Such accentuated attention from the people who seek power to (...)
Amidst hatred, which has risen to a crescendo, Muslims must also combat the emergence of hostile factions.
Farzana Haniffa gave the following talk at the Rajani Thiranagama Memorial Lecture, organised in Jaffna, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the murder of the eponymous human (...)
“Sri Lanka’s Easter Tragedy: When the Deep State Gets Out of Its Depth” sets out to answer the question many Sri Lankans were asking in the wake of the carnage in April 2019: How could this happen, when the state had prior warning of the attacks? The author explains that by the ‘Deep State’ he (...)
Women’s groups and the co-operative movement are leading the way out of the debt trap.
The global hegemony of finance capital is based on burgeoning household debt accompanied by devastating dispossession. This is more evident in peripheral societies, where state investment in the rural economy (...)
Women’s groups and the co-operative movement are leading the way out of the debt trap.
The global hegemony of finance capital is based on burgeoning household debt accompanied by devastating dispossession. This is more evident in peripheral societies, where state investment in the rural economy (...)
On August 18, at a colossal rally held in Colombo, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s firebrand leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake was revealed as the chosen candidate of the National People’s Power (NPP) movement. It had been an obvious choice for the NPP consisting of 28 other groups and organizations in (...)
Following Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s announcement as a presidential candidate, many have compared him with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The analogy is instructive because, like Modi, Gotabaya packages development as a nationalist project.
Modi, for example, recently revoked Jammu and (...)
I marched in the 1963 United Left Front May Day demonstration and was at the Galle Face rally jointly chaired by NM, Dr Wicks and Philip. I was also at the 18 August 2019 Galle Face rally which launched the national People’s Power movement and named its presidential candidate. The latter drew (...)
We have witnessed in the last a few days the presence of so many loopholes and gaps in the existing legislations that have had a negative and adverse impact on human security and the country’s stability. These laws were passed by the Parliament consisting of elected representatives that is (...)
The 6.2 million people voted on January 2015 to oust the existing regime might have had compared two scenarios prior to casting their vote. It went wrong. The outcome is the first generalized crisis in the country since its independence.
In spite of the ambiguities embedded in the constitution (...)
’Water is for All’ by Duleep de Chickera poses some difficult questions about Sri Lanka’s past and the challenges facing its future.
Ethnic and religious polarisation have been spreading in South Asia and afar in recent decades. Sadly, sections of the intelligentsia and the clergy have also been (...)
After 10 years of a fragile peace, the deadly bombings on April 21 have blighted the eastern lagoon landscape of the island nation, pitting religious communities against one another. Meera Srinivasan reports on the simmering tensions in the aftermath of the attacks.
Every few metres in (...)
In Sri Lanka, the challenge is to turn national mourning into a call for coexistence and democracy.
As reports about those behind the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka emerge, many questions remain about the motives of the extremists. The full picture of the formation of this extremist force (...)
After the Easter bombings, I am struggling to understand how violent ideology has taken hold in my Muslim community.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Two days after the Easter Sunday bomb attacks in Sri Lanka, I met my greengrocer at the Colpetty market, a symbol of the cosmopolitan city that I call home. (...)
The news did not initiate a new fear — it ignited an old one, based on myriad experiences from the war.
On the evening of April 20, I was making Easter bread with my children at our home in California when a friend texted me, saying there had been bombings in Sri Lanka. My chest hurt. I (...)
I believe it was 2002. An organisation so far unknown in our village began propaganda declaring that watching TV is Haram. They didn’t just stop with propaganda. They went from house to house and broke TV antennas, they warned shopkeepers who sell DVDs to not do so and they burnt shops.
Some (...)
(CNN)Since multiple blasts killed at least 253 people and injured hundreds more in Sri Lanka last Sunday, the government has declared a state of emergency, bringing back draconian anti-terrorism laws that will curtail civil liberties and increase militarization.
Officials have begun to (...)
State of emergency in wake of Easter Sunday attacks grants security forces sweeping powers, sets new media restrictions.
Shortly after a spate of bombings tore through churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, the country’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe admitted that a top police (...)
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