By Vishvanath
A statement made by JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva at an event to commemorate the JVP members killed during the 1971 JVP uprising has caused quite a stir in political circles. Addressing a gathering of party members, on...
By Vishvanath
Hardly anything could be more demeaning for a government that has come to power, promising to eliminate bribery and corruption and usher in good governance, than to be accused of corruption and shielding the corrupt. This has been...
By Vishvanath
There seems to be no end in sight to the JVP-led government’s U-turns. Hardly any sphere remains where it has not made a policy about-turn, the latest being the introduction of the QR-based fuel rationing to manage the...
The old left and the JVP become strange bedfellows
By Vishvanath
The first political marriage between the old left and the new left, represented by the JVP, occurred in 2004, when the then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, turned her SLFP-led People’s...
By Vishvanath
There are arguments for and against the recent arrest and detention of Major General (Retd) Suresh Sally, a former top military intelligence officer, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) in connection with the Easter Sunday terror attacks...
Rise, fall and rise of JVP and plateauing progress of traditional socialists
by Vishvanath
The defeat of the SLFP-led United Front (UF) coalition government in the 1977 general election, where the UNP secured a five-sixths majority, led to the release of...
Mirror wall by Kassapa
Last week, we wrote in these columns about how Sinhala Buddhist nationalism was being used as a tool by the ‘usual suspects’, the Rajapaksa school of politics, to try and capture the imagination of the majority...
Rise of an ultra-radical left movement
By Vishvanath
Political conformism of the traditional left, the resultant dilution of its revolution ideology and the adoption of economic policies they once rejected as capitalist and exploitative, e. g. economic liberalization, inter alia, created conditions for...
By Kassapa
The clamour for Sinhala Buddhist majoritarianism is a slogan, a rallying call, almost as old as Sri Lanka’s post-independence history. The person who used it first with immediate success was S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, seventy years ago in 1956. That...
By Vishvanath
The demise of Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) leader Prof. Tissa Vitharana marks the end of an era. Gone is one of the few remaining Sri Lankan leftist leaders known for their intellectual prowess and dedication to the socialist...
What defines a government are its major achievements or drawbacks, not what is written in its election manifesto. This is what it would be remembered for. They become synonymous with its leaders, be it success or failure.
So, J.R. Jayewardene...
By Vishvanath
The term of the incumbent JVP-led NPP government had a bumpy start with the resignation of Speaker Asoka Ranwala, who had to step down, unable to support his claim that he had obtained a Ph.D. from a Japanese...
