BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka: Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, the former Eastern Province chief minister who is being held on remand in several criminal investigations, has accused unnamed “fake nationalists” in Batticaloa of sabotaging an administrative settlement of the dispute over the Mayilathamadu and Madhavanai grazing lands.
Subramaniyam Jeevanraj, a functionary of the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal, the party Mr. Chandrakanthan leads, made his remarks public. In a Facebook post written in Tamil, Mr. Jeevanraj said he had visited Mr. Chandrakanthan, widely known as Pillayan, in prison, and he attributed several direct quotations to him. Jaffna Monitor has not independently verified the account. Mr. Chandrakanthan has made no public statement of his own on the matter.
According to the post, Mr. Chandrakanthan said that when he was a state minister he had tried to resolve the dispute through administrative channels, and that a solution was within reach when “fake nationalists staged protests for their own political gain.”
“They turned a problem that could have been solved into a huge, unsolvable problem between two communities,” he was quoted as saying.
The remarks followed a demonstration on Nov. 2 outside the Batticaloa District Secretariat. Hundreds of farmers, civil society activists and politicians attended. Organizers demanded that settlers be removed from the pasturelands. A court order was issued against 11 organizers, among them G. Srinesan and I. Srinath, Batticaloa members of Parliament from the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, and the protest ended after the order was issued. The district secretary, J.S. Arulraj, met seven farmers. The meeting produced interim steps, including inspections of grazing sites and more police deployment ahead of a court hearing on Dec. 9. Farmers said the steps fell short of a permanent solution.
Tamil livestock farmers have protested continuously since Sept. 15, 2023. They are demanding the return of about 3,025 hectares of traditional grazing land, which they say has been occupied by settlers, many of them Sinhalese corn cultivators from neighboring districts. The farmers accuse the settlers of killing and maiming their cattle. In September, the government said the land would be gazetted as designated grazing land, but it set no date and gave no acreage. A presidential instruction issued in May to allocate 1,570 acres has not been fully carried out.
In the post, Mr. Chandrakanthan described the steps he said he took on the issue. He said he had raised the matter with the Inspector General of police at the time and arranged for a police sub-station to be set up in the area, after which attacks on cattle fell sharply. He said he held several rounds of talks with the minister responsible for the subject. He also said that a permanent settlement of the dispute was his party’s first condition for backing Ranil Wickremesinghe in the 2024 presidential election.
Mr. Chandrakanthan pledged his party’s support to Mr. Wickremesinghe at a meeting at the party’s Batticaloa headquarters on June 22, 2024. The President’s Media Division’s account of that meeting did not mention any conditions.
Mr. Chandrakanthan also said that the people who blocked roads to stop Mr. Wickremesinghe when he came to Batticaloa to examine the problem are the same people now protesting for it to be solved. That appears to refer to Oct. 8, 2023, when police broke up a protest by farmers and their supporters near Chenkalady ahead of Mr. Wickremesinghe's visit. Front Line Defenders, an international rights group, said the president had come to attend a school event.
Mr. Chandrakanthan did not name the politicians he accused. The protesting farmers have made accusations of their own against people around him. In May 2024, they alleged that a group affiliated with Mr. Chandrakanthan had threatened them at their protest site.
He also said that although “our people” had strongly supported the current government, it had not resolved the farmers’ grievances.
The Criminal Investigation Department arrested Mr. Chandrakanthan in Batticaloa on April 8, 2025, and held him under detention orders issued under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. He was in custody for 359 days before he was produced in court. On April 2, 2026, the Mount Lavinia Magistrate’s Court remanded him in connection with the 2006 disappearance of Sivasubramaniam Raveendranath, then vice chancellor of Eastern University. He has since been remanded by the Batticaloa Magistrate’s Court in connection with killings in the Eastern Province. He has challenged his detention in the Supreme Court, which has fixed his fundamental rights petition for hearing on Jan. 19, 2027.
