Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam is a Sri Lankan journalist and author from Jaffna, known for incisive reporting on conflict, culture, and geopolitics across South and Southeast Asia.

Sri Lanka

We Can No Longer Afford to Hate Each Other

We Can No Longer Afford to Hate Each Other

In one small town, in one month, two Tamil-speaking minority communities, both of which have endured discrimination, insecurity and the pressures of majoritarian politics, managed to hurt each other twice. We can no longer afford this. When nine young Muslim women were prevented from beginning work at Kalmunai North Base Hospital this month because of a dispute over their headscarves, the Ministry of Health responded in what has become an increasingly familiar NPP fashion: it managed the immed


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Sri Lanka’s Envoy to India Remembers Lakshman Kadirgamar, 21 Years After His Assassination
Lakshman Kadirgamar

Sri Lanka’s Envoy to India Remembers Lakshman Kadirgamar, 21 Years After His Assassination

By: Aruliniyan Mahalingam Twenty-one years after Lakshman Kadirgamar was assassinated in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to India has remembered the former foreign minister as the man who helped inspire her to join the diplomatic service and set a standard that continued to shape her career. Mahishini Colonne, herself widely regarded in Sri Lankan diplomatic circles as one of the country’s most accomplished career diplomats, said Wednesday that Kadirgamar was foreign minister when she e


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

How Justice Was Derailed After the Muttur Massacre

How Justice Was Derailed After the Muttur Massacre

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — It was around 4:15 in the afternoon of Aug. 4, 2006. The men who came through the gate asked in Sinhala what the aid workers were doing there when everyone else in the town had fled, according to an account assembled by the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) from police sources in Muttur. The staff answered that their office in Trincomalee had told them to stay and wait to be collected. A home guard interrupted and said they were Tamil Tig


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

One Spoke of Karma. The Other Named a Conspiracy.

One Spoke of Karma. The Other Named a Conspiracy.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Moments before a Colombo court sentenced them to death on Friday for failing to prevent the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, Sri Lanka's former police chief and former defence secretary were each invited, as the law requires, to explain why they should not receive the death penalty. Their answers could hardly have been more different: one was a quiet surrender to fate; the other, a defiant insistence that the men he said truly bore responsibility for the massacre remained shield


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

The Easter Bombings: Anatomy of a State Failure

The Easter Bombings: Anatomy of a State Failure

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam At 8:27 on the morning of April 21, 2019, a foreign intelligence service sent one last message to the head of Sri Lanka’s State Intelligence Service. The bombers would probably move between six and ten that morning, it said, and one of their targets was a Methodist church in Colombo. Surveillance teams were being deployed. The police, it added, had already been warned. The first explosions came shortly before nine, less than twenty minutes later. Over the course of th


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Every Militant a Tiger: How the Meenambakkam Bombing Came to Be Blamed on the LTTE
The aftermath of the Meenambakkam Airport bombing on Aug. 2, 1984, one of the deadliest attacks in India up to that time.

Every Militant a Tiger: How the Meenambakkam Bombing Came to Be Blamed on the LTTE

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam A NAME FOR EVERY GUN In an earlier article, we examined the story of Panagoda Maheswaran and the Tamil Eelam Army (TEA), the militant group responsible for the bombing at Madras's Meenambakkam Airport on Aug. 2, 1984. Although the attack was carried out by the TEA, it has long been attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This article examines how responsibility for the Meenambakkam bombing came to be associated with the LTTE, and why that narrative


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

The Mahavamsa Shashi Tharoor Left Out

The Mahavamsa Shashi Tharoor Left Out

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam Shashi Tharoor gave the sort of speech he is known for at the Colombo Literary Festival last week: fluent, warm, faintly flattering to its hosts. Standing in the Arcade at Independence Square, he called Sri Lanka a land “profoundly steeped in rich, mesmerising oral traditions,” and traced its historical pulse to two ancient chronicles: the Mahavamsa, or Great Chronicle, and its predecessor the Dipavamsa, or Island Chronicle. These, he said, were “a library of cultural m


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

‘Our People Were Failed by Both National and International Justice Systems’: Shankari Chandran
Shankari Chandran

‘Our People Were Failed by Both National and International Justice Systems’: Shankari Chandran

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam Shankari Chandran came to fiction the way some people come to prayer: after everything else had failed. For a decade in London she ran the pro bono programmes of one of the world's largest law firms. The work took her into more than thirty countries, into the question of who would represent the men held at Guantánamo Bay, and at one point into the office of a British prime minister. She believed what lawyers are trained to believe, which is that the law is a slow mac


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam