Guest Column

By M.R. Narayan Swamy Why are India and Sri Lanka struggling to embrace a mutually beneficial trade agreement despite plenty of attempts? Why do exports to India account for only about 6 percent of Sri Lanka’s total exports? Colombo and New Delhi have long sought to upgrade the original India-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement (ISFTA) by addressing its shortcomings and expanding its scope to include services and investment provisions. The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) was pr

By Sidhartha Thamby The Dividends to Reap from State Land According to the Land Commissioner General’s Department (eSlims, as at 7 February 2022), 123,141 land use permits have been issued against a total of 401,000 families in the province. The number eligible to receive permits in 2022 stood at 40,782, with 6,040 permits still unused.¹⁰ All permits ultimately flow through the Governor’s office for processing before titles are issued by the Director General of Lands in Colombo — a labour-in

By Vijitha Yapa An Unlikely Recruit Dressed in a well-ironed white shirt — unusual for a journalist — the man standing in front of me to be interviewed was a scribe working for the Tamil newspaper Veerakesari. D.B.S. Jeyaraj was a friend of our Features Editor, Ajith Samaranayake, and had come for an interview to join The Island newspaper in 1981. I was a bit sceptical, as I soon found out that he had never worked for an English-language newspaper. But since Ajith was a good, responsible jour

By Sidhartha Thamby There is a particular cruelty in watching a party that once raged against the abuse of power quietly settle into practicing it. Sri Lanka has seen this before. What is new is that we are watching it happen to Provincial Council elections — a decade overdue — and to the constitutional architecture of devolution itself, piece by piece, coordinator by coordinator, committee by committee. We are watching the slow installation of party-aligned coordinators, the bypassing of elec

By M.R. Narayan Swamy “If we have to vote, who should get our vote?” a middle-aged Tamil man asked a friend at a social event in Jaffna. The innocuous query betrayed a sense of confusion that prevails in the minds of many Tamils in Sri Lanka, nearly two years after they jolted the traditional Tamil parties in parliamentary elections almost everywhere. Tamils admit they have always seen the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the country’s dominant ruling party, as a Sinhala-Buddhist entity. But