Opposition’s strategic dilemmas, Easter massacre matrix

First understand the masterplan, then connect the dots to discern the mastermind

SJB 24 Sept.: spectacular solo achievement, tactical victory

 Sajith at Polduwa: Undeniable success, but could be more inclusive

An opinion poll in the Sunday Times (27 Sep.) on the 2nd anniversary of AKD-NPP rule shows 58% dissatisfaction and only 42% satisfaction. This means that President Dissanayake has retained the vote—below an absolute majority—that brought him into office, but that the JVP-NPP’s high popularity at the Parliamentary election has been reduced to the same level as his, while he hasn’t increased his popularity either.

The 58% negative vote should gladden the Opposition, but it really can’t because the Opposition contains a bipolar split between Sajith/SJB and Namal/SLPP. Namal may have run the gruelling legal gauntlet by Presidential election 2029. 

There are only two scenarios/templates in the playbook which can break the Opposition stalemate in 2029:

I. Sajith emulates his father’s 1988 breakthrough victory beating the formidable Sirimavo Bandaranaike by swinging the poor among SLFP voters and JVP supporters through the inspiring vision of Janasaviya, the radical poverty-reduction program. 

II. Namal combines and emulates CBK’s 1994 repositioning of her party and 1999 defeat of Ranil, and his father’s patriotic-populist 2005 victory over Ranil. 

UNP-SP-SJB

The UNP fails to recognise that its decades-long inability to elect a President to lead the country was because it de-Premadasaised its economic ideology post-1993, and failed to transition over a decade ago to Sajith as leader. 

There is no bigger indictment of the UNP and the pro-Ranil caucus in the SJB than the electorate’s verdict on ‘unmandated’ President Wickremesinghe who was consigned to third place in 2024 having ‘saved the country’. 

Sajith Premadasa probably hasn’t forgotten that Ranil dragged his feet and defeated him in 2019, ran as spoiler and defeated him in 2024, and only succeeded in getting Anura Dissanayake and the JVP-NPP elected as our rulers. 

Namal is rightly allergic – for ideological ‘brand’ reasons – to any alliance with Ranil’s UNP (hence the latter’s Anuradhapura absence). 

The UNP has no successor to Ranil. The party can avoid electoral-political extinction only if it recognises Sajith as leader/candidate  and enters an equation with the SJB as main force. That’s the last move with which Ranil can redeem himself and be assured of respectful recognition and status.

The rest of the Joint Opposition including the SLFP should recognise Namal as leader/candidate, abandoning delusions of a non-Sajith/non-Namal candidate with a mass base, national resonance and double-digit viability. 

SJB post-Polduwa 

Sajith Premadasa and the SJB scored a significant tactical and symbolic victory with their impressive ‘swarm’ demonstration, over 5000-strong, at Polduwa on 24 September, proving the SJB’s dominant status within the Opposition. 

That victory was more limited than it might have been, and had an avoidable downside, because of an arrogant, disruptive streak on the part of some overtly right-wing SJB organisers/MPs—notorious loose cannon—exhibiting sectarianism, isolationism and unilateralism. 

To succeed and prevail, Sajith and the SJB should treat five strategic political realities as fundamentals: 

1. A ‘One-Party State’ project cannot be defeated by a mirroring ‘One-Party Opposition’ project and posture. It can only be defeated by a broad, politically pluralist democratic project with social democracy at the core.   

2. The SJB which since its inception failed twice (2020, 2024) to break out of its parent/predecessor UNP’s 20% electoral bunker, cannot afford to risk going it alone, not least in a three-way race. It must win over the middle-ground, the swing voters and new voters, to constitute a majority. 

3. The interests of the whole must, in general, supersede the interests of the part, and the leading part can succeed only if it incorporates and represents the interests of the whole. 

4. Sajith Premadasa is SJB leader and Opposition Leader, and as such must lead, include and represent the interests of the whole Opposition—not just one (albeit biggest) component, his own party, though axiomatically that would be primary. 

5. The SJB is the main and leading Opposition party and must be recognised as such, but it does not hold a monopoly of the Oppositional space. SJB primacy must not translate into exclusivity or self-quarantine. To lead, the SJB must draw in others who follow; form alliances, blocs, partnerships; act in unison or coordination with diverse parties on common issues against a common authoritarian adversary. 

3 Oct.: Resistance reboots 

The 22nd Amendment battle dispelled the ridiculous though widespread illusion that Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya was an enlightened liberal dissident and potential counterweight within the AKD Cabinet and JVP-NPP Parliamentary group. 

She mounted a wall-to-wall defence of the amendment, and pronounced harshly on her uncle, Prof. G.L. Peiris—though the English language provided for less rude, insolent judgmentalism and more finesse and civility. Prof. G.L. Peiris’ detailed critique of 22A did not come from his Ministerial past which she finds so reprehensible, but from his stellar scholarly side. 

Comrade Minister Bimal Rathnayake’s announcement that the Government will not seek to enter a successor IMF program after the current one expires in 2027,  leaves me suspicious about what he doesn’t say: that the Government will not re-enter the international money markets in 2027. The recourse to the high-interest global money markets as distinct from bilateral and multilateral funding and foreign direct investment is the crux of our crisis. 

The Protection of the State From Terrorism Bill which has just been gazetted, is significantly worse than the Prevention of Terrorism Act it replaces. The new Bill’s ambit is wider than armed actions, their organisation or intent to commit them. There’s no such animal as ‘unarmed terrorism’, but going by the Bill’s expansive language, Anura thinks there is. This is not a Bill to ‘protect the State from Terrorism’ but to pre-emptively protect State Terrorism deployed against unarmed people’s protests and criticism.   

Resistance resumes in the form of the Jana Aragala Vyaparaya mobilisation at Campbell Park on 3 October against unaffordable taxation. Wasantha Mudalige, Aragalaya hero, issued a convincing clarion call: (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19qxeLyCcp/)

Easter massacre masterplan 

Reconstruct the masterplan, and connect the dots to discern the mastermind/s. 

The conviction by the court of those most closely involved in the Easter Sunday massacre is welcome but is only half the story and does not—cannot—complete the search for justice. 

The verdict deals with ‘sins of commission’—those who assisted or played some role in the Easter massacre by their active involvement. But there were also ‘sins of omission’. Evil was committed not only by those who blew up the innocent and those who assisted them along the way, but also by those who had been informed that the evil deed would happen and chose to do nothing about it, or dragged their feet with the result that a preventable atrocity was not prevented. 

In a superb piece of investigative reportage, the Jaffna Monitor reconstructs the story of the 17-day delay.

‘…India’s warning to the State Intelligence Service arrived on April 4, 2019, followed by further information on April 18 and 19; on the evening of the 20th and again at first light on the 21st, the head of the SIS passed his own warnings to the inspector general of police and the defence secretary… 

… On April 4, the warning arrived in Colombo through official channels, as a WhatsApp message to Nilantha Jayawardena, the director of the State Intelligence Service. Zahran Hashim and his associates were preparing a suicide attack on important churches…Six men were named, Zahran and his brother Rilwan among them. The message was confirmed in writing at nine the following morning, and a second Indian source sent the same substance three hours later. 

…On April 7 a top-secret letter reached Sisira Mendis, the Chief of National Intelligence. It set out the same warning and added the methods the group might use: a suicide attack, an armed attack, a knife attack, an attack with a truck. 

On April 8 the defence secretary was told, and advised that the police be informed. 

On April 9 the security chiefs met. That same day Jayawardena sent the inspector general of police a report identifying four of the six men India had named. 

…Then, on April 20, the Indian counterpart messaged Jayawardena again. He wanted feedback on what he had sent at the start of the month. He added that the attack was expected “at any time on or before 21.04.2019,” and that a dry run had already been carried out at Kattankudy. 

That was the same evening a former Sea Tiger in Puthukudiyiruppu took a call from an Indian police officer and relayed the warning to his handler in Vavuniya. 

The last message came at 8.27 the next morning. It said the attackers would probably move within hours. The first bomb went off eighteen minutes later…’ 

(https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/the-long-warning-inside-the-intelligence-trail-that-preceded-easter-bombings/)

As respected author of several books on the LTTE war, MR Narayan Swamy has underscored: 

‘…It is by now public knowledge that an Indian agency passed on highly credible intelligence which, had it been acted upon, could not only have failed the murder conspiracy but also led to the arrests of the bombers. Sadly, the inputs received were not followed up. No amount of planning by the terrorists and no amount of overt or covert help they allegedly received from anyone within Sri Lanka or outside could have succeeded in killing people en masse if the warnings had been heeded…’

(https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/easter-bombings-is-about-inaction-despite-specific-warnings/)

Ian Fleming wrote in Goldfinger, “Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action”. 

It wasn’t just one person who ignored or delayed in acting on the Indian intelligence alerts. It was several. They all worked for the State, in similar or related agencies. They belonged to broadly the same category of occupation. If it was only one officer it could have been coincidental, but the chain or clustering suggests conspiracy. 

Why did several intelligence officers behave in the same way, which overrode their training, experience and instincts? Where could they have  caught the ‘delay disease’ from? 

Their names are all known from previous inquiries. Suresh Sallay isn’t one of them. His name seems only to crop up in Azad Maulana’s clip in the TV program. Is he a scapegoat or red herring? He has the wrong profile--not have enough seniority and personal authority to be the mastermind; too junior, youthful, lightweight. Shouldn’t the mastermind have been a heavyweight; some former covert operations chieftain committed to a certain political outcome, who once had authority over them all; someone who remained and remains in the shadows? 

The Saudi/Gulf funded Wahhabi buildup in Eastern Sri Lanka dates back at least to 2012 (https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/the-easter-bombings-did-not-begin-on-easter-sunday/) but there were no bloody attacks on Sinhala targets for several years after that. Organised Islamophobia arose from 2012, through the Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS) and other similar—more vicious-- organisations, ferociously inciting animosity towards Muslim enterprises and communities which resulted in violence, NOT in the East but in the South where there was no such Wahhabi dominance. 

These unprovoked attacks on Muslim targets outside the East by extremist ethnoreligious majoritarian groups, gave the opening for Zahran Hashim to discuss, train for and plan violent attacks on Sinhala targets in the country at large. 

Perhaps these were two prongs of one plot, or consecutive steps up the escalation ladder: 

(a) Create or encourage the creation of Islamophobic Sinhala-Buddhist extremist organisations and discourse and provoke the Eastern Wahhabi fundamentalists to shift focus from exercising cultural domination over Eastern Muslims, to targeting the Sinhala people. 

(b) Ignore the information about the Zahran network and the terrorist build-up, and divert attention to the non-existent LTTE.

(c) Allow the attacks to happen against Sinhala Christian sites and worshippers.

(d) By-pass and override the Cardinal’s successful attempts to stop an anti-Muslim backlash, and enhance an anti-Muslim backlash outside the areas where Christians were a majority or significant minority, in Sinhala-Buddhist majority areas, though the Sinhala-Buddhists hadn’t been targets—thus rousing a tsunami of Sinhala-Buddhist ultranationalism.

(e) Use that ultranationalism as ramp to enable the Sinhala-Buddhist extremist candidate to catapult to the candidacy and victory. 

The respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz has blown the whistle on Prime Minister Netanyahu in a report that has yet to be refuted or criminally prosecuted, stating that the President of the UAE informed Netanyahu of the coming attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, 10 days before October 7th but that Netanyahu failed to pass on the warning to Israeli intelligence heads including of Shin Bet! Earlier the BBC had reported that the head of Egyptian Intelligence had passed on a similar warning to Netanyahu days before Oct 7th and it too had been ignored.  

Could it because Netanyahu was elected to office the first time around in 1996, when he was running behind in the race with Leah Rabin in the aftermath of the assassination of her husband, peace-making Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, by a Jewish extremist who hated the Oslo Accords—and Netanyahu won only because a Hamas bomb exploded on a bus just before the election? 

Israeli organisations staffed by ex-covert ops specialists have played an insidious role in electoral processes the world over. The Guardian (UK) ran a story with the following headline and ‘strap’: 

‘France accuses Israeli firm of interfering in Scottish elections and targeting SNP.

Cyber agency says BlackCore targeted John Swinney, as well as interfering in New York and French elections.’

(https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/12/france-accuses-israeli-firm-interfering-scottish-elections-john-swinney-snp)

Was the ‘failure/delay’ to act on the Easter warnings the same tactical thinking that a few years later, made Netanyahu (according to Haaretz) refrain from communicating the warnings from the UAE about the Hamas attack of October 7th? 

The upside down

Douglas Devananda was in his early 20s when he was first detained at the CID’s headquarters on the infamous Fourth Floor in the early 1980s. 

Having come into the democratic national mainstream under President Premadasa and Minister Ranjan Wijeratne, survived almost a dozen LTTE attacks (one which required brain surgery, and couldn’t prevent near-blindness in one eye), held the strategically vital islands off Jaffna for and with the Sri Lankan State, become a Cabinet Minister, and delivered a speech advocating implementation of the 13th amendment at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the SLFP led by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, he  was back in jail in 2026 and then summoned for questioning to the Fourth Floor by the CID the other day, 45 years after he had first been there in his teens. (https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/cid-questions-douglas-devananda-over-azad-maulanas-account/)

That’s the tragic cycle of the true anti-fascist hero in ‘the Upside Down’ i.e., present day Sri Lanka after two years of rule by AKD-JVP-NPP. 

Cool new patriotism

I am glad that the response to Maitreyi Ramakrishnan ‘from Tamil Eelam’ whose far more serious transgression is to publicly accuse Sri Lanka of ‘genocide’, has not been limited to the Sinhala ultranationalists whose discordant discourse turns everybody off. 

I draw the readers’ attention to two young voices, representing a post-Aragalaya discourse. 

I don’t know the name of this young lady, but she and her partner post under the tag ChrisnCrys. Hers is the perfect postwar non-racist response to the ‘Tamil Eelam/Genocide’ discourse: “So tired of this discourse. It’s 2026. Let’s move forward.” (https://www.facebook.com/reel/1226928786316887)

The other youngster is Riz Razak. He has a superbly articulate rebuttal of the ‘genocide’ allegation by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. (https://www.facebook.com/reel/2104942370907883)            

                               

(https://dayanjayatilleka.webflow.io/)