Guest Column

By Kumulan Sri Lanka is suddenly brave. The state has found courage. It has found investigators, files, witnesses, travel bans, detention orders, and dramatic whispers about former presidents and former spy chiefs. It now speaks of the Easter Sunday bombings as though justice has finally entered Colombo, barefoot and late, carrying a torch. Good. Let every room be opened. Let every liar sweat. Let every priest, widow, parent, orphan, and survivor hear the truth. If senior officials enabled,

By Che Ran There is a particular smell to Colombo politics after rain: diesel, wet dust, sea salt, old files, new lies, and that faint colonial rot of a state that has never really confessed to itself. The ministries dry out. The uniforms return to their posts. The priests keep waiting. The widows keep waiting. The politicians, of course, discover justice exactly when it becomes useful. Into this humidity walks the case of Suresh Sallay — soldier, intelligence man, Rajapaksa insider, spymaste

By: Prof Mahesh Nirmalan MD, FRCA, PhD, FFICM University of Manchester. The dependence on the unimpeded flow of overseas ‘aid’ runs firmly through many countries in the global south. Grants, concessionary loans, and development assistance have been presented as honourable lifelines and viewed as the ‘magic wand for poverty alleviation’. But it is a dogma that deserves closer scrutiny in a world that treats ‘Aid’ as an extension of foreign policy. The Nobel prize winning and centre-left leani

By M.R. Narayan Swamy If the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) government is to be believed, it has uncovered a treacherous Kim Philby, the Cold War's most infamous double agent, in Sri Lanka, who committed a bloody horror against the country and its people. No, Suresh Sallay did not send trained agents behind the now routed Tamil Tiger lines to die; far worse, he colluded with the Islamic State to orchestrate a string of bomb attacks that killed around 260 people on Easter Day in 2019. Some of

By M.R. Narayan Swamy “One month is too short a time to be disappointed!” The comment from a middle-aged Chennai resident, who voted for cinema star-turned-politician Vijay and remains one of his loyal supporters, neatly sums up the mood on the ground as Tamil Nadu’s first coalition government in decades completes its first month in office. As Chief Minister, C Joseph Vijay retains much of his personal popularity that propelled millions in Tamil Nadu to vote for his two-year-old Tamilaga Vett

By M.R. Narayan Swamy The Sri Lankan government wants former intelligence chief Suresh Sallay, whose health has become precarious after launching a hunger strike in custody, to die because it cannot prove that he was in any way involved in the 2019 Easter bombings that killed 269 people, one of his lawyers alleges. This is the reason the retired Major General has been forced to undergo “inhuman treatment” in CID custody so that he breaks psychologically and commits suicide, one of Sally’s lawy

by Kumulan Every time I see Khalistan rallies in Canada, the UK, Australia, or some comfortable Western suburb with clean pavements, I feel like I am watching political cosplay with a blood-soaked backstory. Flags. Slogans. Martyr posters. Angry men with microphones. Boys born in Mississauga, Southall, Surrey, or Melbourne shouting about liberation with the confidence of people who have never had to live through the consequences of the liberation they are selling. It is all very heroic when t

By M.R. Narayan Swamy “Please don’t harm me! Yes, I am a Tiger. I was told to keep a watch on you, so I came here. Please don’t have me killed!” This is how a young spy sent by the Tamil Tigers spoke in visible despair after being identified by Douglas Devananda, a sworn enemy of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The incident took place a few years before the LTTE went down fighting in 2009. A Sri Lankan minister, then, Douglas, was presiding over a camp organized by his Eela