JM Exclusive

By M.R. Narayan Swamy “O land that yearned for valour O soil where Tamil pride has flourished The land where history was born And gave the nation its national leader (Prabhakaran) A bronze statue of the Tamil national leader Shall stand in the land of his birth.” These lyrics are not from the Tamil Tigers’ liberation songs. They are from a song — believe it or not — popularized by Sri Lanka’s incumbent ruling party, whose government has now sent a young Tamil man to prison for singing

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — The letter ran to a few hundred words, but its message to the President of Sri Lanka was unambiguous: lawyers in Jaffna, the country's Tamil heartland, believed that the executive branch had reached into the judiciary and moved a judge who had displeased it. That document — an appeal from the Jaffna Bar Association to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake over the abrupt transfer of High Court Judge A.G. Alexraja — was precisely the kind of accusation

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam On the morning of Dec. 17, 2024, W.S. Sathyananda, a Special Grade officer of the Sri Lanka Administrative Service with nearly three decades of experience, sent a brief WhatsApp message to his superior. Having just reported for duty as Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Transport, Highways, Ports, and Civil Aviation, he requested an appointment to pay a courtesy call. The response he received that afternoon would lead to a Supreme Court case — W.S. Sathyananda v.

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam For six years, a woman from the Pommaveli area of Jaffna — known to police and lawyers alike as one of the district’s most persistent narcotics dealers — had walked in and out of courtrooms, exploiting successive bail hearings to remain free and, according to legal sources, continue trafficking. She had been arrested in June 2020 for possession of 1.475 grams of heroin. Six years of adjournments, applications, and legal manoeuvring produced no conviction. On May 21, 20