-By LeN Political Correspondent
(Lanka-e-News -22.April.2025, 11.15 PM) There’s a particularly bitter irony in the latest accusations hurled at Fomer President Ranil Wickremesinghe — this time by M.A. Sumanthiran, a prominent Tamil former parliamentarian and senior lawyer. His charge is not subtle, nor is it misplaced: that the man who owes his presidency to a public uprising has now turned the machinery of the state, and its most draconian laws, against the very spirit that raised him to office.
A year and a half ago, Wickremesinghe was not even a footnote in Sri Lanka’s power structure. He had lost his own parliamentary seat, reduced to a lone survivor of a once-formidable political dynasty. And yet, when President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted in 2022 amidst the largest mass protest since independence — fuelled by economic collapse, authoritarian arrogance, and deepening public rage — it was Wickremesinghe who rose from the ashes.
Not by popular mandate, but by parliamentary arithmetic.
Not through revolution, but by absorbing the backlash.
And now, according to critics like Sumanthiran, Wickremesinghe has become the very thing the protest stood against: a high-handed ruler who uses the law as a weapon rather than a shield.
Let’s rewind. The Aragalaya movement — a citizens’ protest that occupied Colombo’s seafront Galle Face Green for weeks in mid-2022 — was not an armed insurrection. It was a peaceful, pluralistic demonstration of fury. Students, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, teachers, farmers, unionists, and even housewives marched. They toppled not just a government, but the myth that power in Sri Lanka was untouchable.
The protest didn’t just call for Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation; it called for systemic change. An end to impunity. The dismantling of nepotism. The restoration of economic dignity. And in that surge of discontent, the Parliament picked a veteran from the old establishment — Wickremesinghe — to douse the flames.
Some called it a masterstroke of pragmatism. Others, like Sumanthiran, called it betrayal.
And today, that betrayal is playing out in the form of criminal prosecutions — not against those who looted state coffers or dismantled democratic institutions, but against the people who took to the streets to demand better.
The main instrument of this betrayal is the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), a legacy of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war. Originally introduced as a temporary measure, the PTA has been repeatedly used — and abused — to detain thousands without charge, disproportionately targeting Tamil youth, Muslim clerics, and now, apparently, peaceful demonstrators.
During Wickremesinghe’s visit to Sri Lanka’s North last month, protesters — including the families of the disappeared, land rights activists, and civil society groups — gathered in opposition. These are not anarchists. These are people who have waited decades for answers, whose ancestral lands remain under military occupation, whose trauma from war has never been redressed.
Their protest was entirely peaceful.
And yet, several of them now face criminal proceedings, including charges under the PTA. Their court dates have been fixed for April 30.
The irony is unbearable. Wickremesinghe, the political phoenix risen from protest, now using counter-terrorism laws to prosecute protest.
Sumanthiran’s words — shared during a press briefing in Jaffna — echo through the disillusioned corridors of post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka. “He was the product of protest,” the Tamil legislator said. “He became President only because people marched and risked everything to oust a dictator. What has he done since? He has arrested them.”
Indeed, the cases are not confined to the North. Activists and students who were prominent in the Aragalaya have been surveilled, questioned, and in some cases, detained. Several leading protesters, including young voices from the Inter-University Student Federation, have been held for weeks without proper legal representation.
Others have faced travel bans, house raids, and social media surveillance. And in nearly all these cases, the legal basis is an ambiguous cocktail of colonial-era sedition laws, the PTA, and emergency regulations — all wielded at the discretion of the executive.
This is not accountability. This is control.
Perhaps the most chilling part of this political evolution is how ordinary it has become. There is no theatre to it. No dramatic televised announcements. Just quiet arrests, courtroom silence, and legal notices.
Wickremesinghe, with his polished Oxbridge accent and technocratic demeanour, doesn’t bark like his predecessors. He doesn’t declare war on civil society. He merely manages it — clinically, coolly, with constitutional tools that still reek of authoritarianism.
And therein lies the trap. Because tyranny in a suit and tie is harder to recognise than tyranny in jackboots.
One would think that a man who owes his return to power to public protest might be a little more humble. At the very least, grateful. Instead, Sri Lanka has a President who has refused to even acknowledge the legitimacy of the Aragalaya, let alone address its demands.
The protesters who chased Gotabaya out of his palace have not been thanked. They’ve been investigated.
The people who slept in tents outside the Presidential Secretariat have not been consulted. They’ve been removed.
The movement that resurrected democracy has not been preserved. It’s being criminalised.
Wickremesinghe’s defenders point to the chaos that engulfed Colombo in July 2022. Government buildings were torched. The President’s House was ransacked. Media reports showed protesters swimming in the palace pool, rifling through drawers, and even grilling sausages in the kitchen.
"Law and order must prevail," they say. And yes — arson is a crime. Vandalism is a crime. No one disputes that.
But what is truly damning is the selective silence.
While investigations have zoomed in on student leaders and anti-government voices, not a single high-ranking politician or bureaucrat has been charged for the economic crimes that led to the collapse in the first place. Not one central bank official has been prosecuted for policy failures. Not one Rajapaksa sibling has stood trial for corruption.
Ranil Wickremesinghe promised stability. He delivered silence. Selective justice is not justice. It’s vendetta.
In the Tamil-majority North and East, this betrayal cuts deeper.
For decades, Tamil civilians have protested land grabs, enforced disappearances, and militarisation. Their voices, when raised, have often been dismissed as “separatist” or “LTTE sympathiser.” The current arrests are just a continuation of that pattern.
But the context has changed.
The North watched with cautious hope as Sinhala-majority Colombo finally took to the streets in 2022. For once, the capital seemed to understand what it meant to be ignored, misgoverned, and punished for protest.
That hope has now soured. What the North is seeing is not national reconciliation. It’s a return to form.
A state that punishes dissent. A President who preaches legalism but practises repression. A government that wants applause abroad for democratic reforms while prosecuting the very citizens who dared to demand them.
It is important to remember: Wickremesinghe did not win a national election. He was appointed by Parliament after the resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. At the time, he was the only member of his party with a seat in the legislature. His elevation was less democratic will, more political arithmetic.
That alone should make him cautious.
Instead, we have a leader emboldened by technocratic power, confident in Western approval, and utterly indifferent to the spirit of 2022. The President may claim to be steering Sri Lanka through stormy economic waters, but in his wake, he is dragging civil liberties to the bottom.
The hearings scheduled for April 30 against the Northern protesters are not just legal proceedings. They are political statements. They will demonstrate, in no uncertain terms, what the Wickremesinghe presidency stands for.
Will these peaceful demonstrators be convicted for raising their voice?
Will the courts uphold basic democratic freedoms?
Or will we see another chapter in Sri Lanka’s long history of punishing protest — this time dressed in legal formalism, but no less repressive?
Sumanthiran has fired a warning shot. So have civil society groups. But what matters now is whether the international community, and the Sri Lankan public, are paying attention.
Wickremesinghe may have the Constitution on his side. He may have the IMF at his table. But he has lost the moral mandate he was handed — not by election, but by evolution, by a citizen movement that wanted dignity, not detention.
In the end, Wickremesinghe’s legacy will not be shaped by economic reforms alone. It will be shaped by how he treated the people who made his presidency possible.
Did he honour the movement that brought him to power?
Or did he prosecute it into silence?
On this, history is often unforgiving.
-By LeN Political Correspondent
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by (2025-04-22 17:53:15)
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