-By Special Columnist
(Lanka-e-News -21.April.2025, 9.45 PM) Today would have been Mangala Samaraweera’s 69th birthday. A date that should have been marked with reflective interviews, smart political analysis, and perhaps a tweet quoting John Stuart Mill or Oscar Wilde. Instead, it comes draped in the quiet discomfort of unresolved questions — not just about his mysterious death during the chaotic fog of Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 response, but about the kind of country that allowed his kind to be politically orphaned in the first place.
A liberal. A straight-talker. A strategist. An aesthete in a world of khaki populists. Mangala was, for lack of better political taxonomy, an outlier in a system allergic to transparency and ideological finesse. He was that rarest breed of Sri Lankan politician — unashamedly cosmopolitan, resolutely secular, and stubbornly modern. Which made him a threat. Not to the people. But to the people in power.
To understand Mangala is to understand the evolution of modern Sri Lankan politics — not its parade of strongmen, but its quieter current of reformists who tried, despite the tide, to keep the country anchored to some notion of dignity.
It was Mangala who engineered Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s 1994 electoral sweep — a campaign that promised (at the time) a humane, federal future. While others handed out rice packets and defaulted to racial slogans, Mangala ran a campaign of ideas. His reward? The Ministry of Media and Telecommunications — a portfolio most treated as a propaganda arm. Mangala, however, wielded it like a scalpel.
He dismantled the state media monopoly, broke the chains on television licensing, liberalised postal services, and invited private radio to play more than just baila and political speeches. Sri Lanka’s media pluralism owes its pulse to him — not the self-proclaimed guardians of press freedom who tweet angrily today, but never touched a policy lever.
More crucially, he was one of the few Sinhalese politicians willing to look Jaffna in the eye and say: “We burned your library. And we must rebuild it.” He did. Not just physically — the Jaffna Public Library did rise under his watch — but symbolically, as a gesture of humility, acknowledgement, and healing.
Mangala was, above all, a man allergic to ethnic chauvinism. While most Sinhala politicians genuflected before the altar of majoritarianism, Mangala insisted on a Sri Lanka that embraced pluralism not as a reluctant compromise, but as a national identity.
He championed the White Lotus campaign — an earnest, if underappreciated, effort to rehumanize Tamil civilians and demilitarize political language. He saw the island’s future not in division, but dialogue. He saw the war not as a moral crusade but a humanitarian failure. That stance cost him. In votes. In popularity. In cabinet support.
But Mangala was never one to auction principle for power. He wasn’t interested in hugging monks for television or attending temple rituals with TV cameras in tow. “I’ll light a lamp,” he once quipped, “but I won’t light it on cue.”
His proximity to Mahinda Rajapaksa was once seen as political loyalty. It soon became political cancer. Mangala, who had helped build the Rajapaksa brand in 2005, found himself suffocating under its weight. By 2007, he had defected — with flair and fury.
Few politicians in Sri Lanka could pivot with credibility. Mangala could. And did. He went from Rajapaksa’s campaign manager to Rajapaksa’s most articulate critic. In Parliament. On television. In diplomatic circles. When others whispered about the growing militarisation of government, Mangala screamed it from the rooftops.
He was labeled a traitor. A CIA agent. A Western stooge. His sexuality was mocked. His liberalism caricatured as decadence. Still, he did not stop. Still, he insisted on a Sri Lanka that could be honest about its crimes and sincere about its future.
He was, in the Rajapaksa era, the conscience that wouldn’t shut up.
When the so-called Yahapalana (Good Governance) revolution of 2015 began to roll forward, Mangala was right in its engine room. As Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, he sought to detoxify Sri Lanka’s pariah status on the world stage.
He restored relations with the UN. Rebuilt dialogue with Western democracies. Pushed for transitional justice mechanisms. Advocated for the Office of Missing Persons. Even got the GSP+ concession back from the EU. He was, by all measures, the face of Sri Lanka’s democratic rebranding — a salesman not of spin, but of substance.
Yet within the government, his candour often irritated the cabal of cronies more interested in cutting deals than cutting debt. Mangala didn’t do “meet me in a hotel room.” He did official meetings. Proper minutes. Transparent procurement. In a government that promised to clean up, he was one of the few with a mop in hand.
He famously refused the official residence — said he didn’t need it. How many ministers can claim that today, when most would happily occupy a government-provided dog kennel if it came with air conditioning?
Mangala’s speeches — from Parliament to global investor forums — weren’t just word salads. They were structured, precise, often laced with literary references. He quoted Camus, not conquerors. Spoke of markets and morality. Talked of GDP and gay rights.
At an event in London’s Standard Chartered Bank in the mid-2010s, Mangala addressed foreign investors with poise, poise, and spreadsheets. Rohan Masakorala stood beside him, making the case for Sri Lanka’s shipping sector. It was not a show. It was policy in action. He didn’t offer investors land for a commission. He offered them a reason to believe.
Yet, back home, he was often viewed as “too polished,” “too elite,” “too foreign.” In truth, Mangala’s biggest flaw was that he was playing chess in a room full of carrom boards.
Then came 2021. COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. The Gotabaya Rajapaksa regime had weaponised pandemic paranoia into a curfew-laced surveillance state. Voices of dissent were silenced under the guise of “national security” and “health protocols.”
And then, suddenly, Mangala fell ill. Diagnosed with COVID. Hospitalised. And then, just like that, gone.
The official line was that the virus claimed him. But questions linger. Rumours abound. That he had been under surveillance. That his calls were being intercepted. That he had tried desperately to reach out to media mogul Dilith Jayaweera in his final hours. That he feared something more than just a fever.
There are whispers of a slow kill — not with poison, but with delayed care. That orders were given to “let him go.” That the man who challenged the militaryfication of governance became its final silent casualty.
There is, of course, no smoking gun. Only a smoking sense of suspicion.
But what is undeniable is this: the regime of Gotabaya Rajapaksa did not mourn him. It did not issue florid tributes. No national day of mourning. No parliamentary resolution. Just a carefully scripted press release — cold, factual, and devoid of emotion.
They were, after all, relieved. The man who had become their intellectual nemesis was no more.
So, what remains of Mangala Samaraweera’s political legacy in 2025?
Very little on the surface. His party — the Samagi Jana Balawegaya — pays occasional homage but lacks his ideological clarity. The liberal, secular, urban middle class — the demographic he championed — remains politically leaderless.
Yet Mangala’s ghost haunts every debate about reconciliation, every call for financial transparency, every movement demanding the decriminalisation of homosexuality, every youth movement that believes democracy is not a slogan but a structure.
And perhaps that’s his greatest legacy: he planted the seed, even if he did not live to see the harvest.
Mangala once said, “I’d rather be called a traitor than betray my conscience.” In a nation where politics is the art of betrayal, that alone made him different.
He wore his shirts untucked. Preferred modern art to ancient curses. Drank his wine red. Loved his country enough to be honest with it. Mangala wasn’t perfect — no one is. But he was principled. And in the cesspool of Lankan politics, that’s enough to qualify him for sainthood.
Today, we remember not just the man, but the mirror he held to our political culture — a mirror that showed us what we could be if we stopped clinging to the ghosts of ethno-nationalism and embraced the future with open arms and open minds.
He was, in many ways, our last liberal. Let us hope he was not the last ever.
-By Special Columnist
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by (2025-04-21 16:13:50)
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