April 1971; Sri Lankan State’s original sin

5 April marks the anniversary of the 1971 JVP insurrection—a seminal moment in Sri Lanka’s history, stained by blood. It was the first large-scale eruption of violence involving the Sri Lankan State and a rebellion that shook the nation to its core.

Over 10,000 lives were lost during and after the uprising, a tragedy precipitated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s (JVP) attacks on police stations across the island and the merciless crackdown by Government forces that followed.

While some of those deaths were inevitable casualties of armed conflict, a horrifying number occurred as part of the State’s retaliatory sweep. Abductions, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions became routine. The insurrection laid a grotesque blueprint for the State’s handling of future insurgencies, be it in the South from 1987 to 89 or the North from 1983 to 2009. The architecture of impunity for the State that was constructed in 1971 remains intact to date.

The 1971 insurrection remains Sri Lanka’s original sin, an event that established the template for systemic, unchecked violence by the State against its own citizenry. The precedent set then would resurface with chilling regularity, most notably during the 1987-89 second JVP uprising and the decades-long civil war against the LTTE. Tens of thousands would perish—victims of a machinery that had, since 1971, been given license to eliminate dissent without accountability.

History, however, is a paradoxical beast. After metamorphosing through various political avatars, the JVP, now leading the National People’s Power (NPP), has risen to occupy the highest offices of the land. One would expect that this evolution, from a revolutionary outfit to a political establishment, would entail a reckoning with the violence of the past and a dire call for accountability and justice for its own comrades who had perished in the hands of the State apparatus.

But the tragedy of Sri Lanka is not only rooted in the sins of the past; it is magnified by the silence of the present. Despite the JVP’s ideological rebirth and ascension, the NPP has demonstrated little appetite for pursuing justice for the State-sponsored violence of 1971 or 1987-89. Instead, it has settled into the trappings of incumbency—pandering to the military, repeating the same but failed rhetoric on human rights, and refusing to meaningfully address the crimes of the past.

It seems that the promise of justice has been bartered away for political expediency. Sri Lanka remains haunted by its unresolved ghosts because those in power—whether old or new—are reluctant to confront the truth. Without accountability, impunity thrives. And without justice, peace remains an illusion.

The NPP, born of revolutionary fervour and forged in the crucible of State oppression, now holds the unique moral and political responsibility to redress these historical injustices. It also has the political mandate of the electorate if not the moral obligation of its own cadres who died in the hands of State brutality. The NPP can break this vicious cycle of State violence and impunity. It is time for truth, accountability, and reconciliation—not just as lofty ideals, but as concrete actions, for those victims of the insurgencies in the South as well as those in the North. Anything less is a betrayal of the blood that was spilled, and the countless lives that continue to be scarred by the violence of 1971 and beyond.