Real winners of Sri Lanka’s election: A people emboldened to force change

Anura Kumara Dissanayake rode a wave of anger to power. But any Sri Lankan leader’s position is precarious today. Because people now know how to call for change and get it.

Colombo, Sri Lanka — Transport a Sri Lankan citizen from the early 1990s to the past week of the island’s politics, and you may just break their brain.

Back then, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the Marxist outfit that the country’s new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, now leads, was reviled in swaths of southern Sri Lanka for having twice attempted violent revolution. Between 1987 and 1989, the JVP unleashed new horrors upon a nation already rent by ethnic war in the north.

In the years that followed that uprising, Sri Lanka’s third president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, allegedly ran death squads that cut down young men that Dissanayake – already part of the JVP cadre – would have considered his sahodarayo, the Sinhala word for brothers. There are stories, often told, of the corpses of JVP comrades floating down rivers, a chilling warning from the state to match the brazenness of the JVP’s own killings.

In the scenic village of Batalanda, meanwhile, a young minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe — the man Dissanayake would replace as president three decades later — was allegedly overseeing a detention camp for JVP activists. Many are believed to have been tortured and killed there.

So soaked in blood is Sri Lanka’s modern history, that though the details of these violent skeins have been blurred in whirls of denial, propaganda and cynical revisionism, these stories, and the dread they evoked, have endured, and shaped the island’s politics for decades.

And yet, in September 2024, many of the southern electorates the JVP of the late 1980s had terrorised