By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
The upside of an enforced, unplugged existence and involuntary time-out, is that you get to see things more clearly in the stillness.
Much of it is individual: enhanced cherishing of spouse; greater awareness of life’s stages and transitions; magnified appreciation of older cousins and young nephews, political leaders and personal friends, concerned old professors and young former staffers/proteges who offered ready assistance.
But as much of the lucidity is political.
Great Satan
In a long series running through 1979, Lanka Guardian founder-editor, Mervyn de Silva hailed and analysed the Iranian Revolution, featuring Ayatollah Khomeini on the journal’s cover several times.
Imam Khomeini, the historic leader of the Iranian Revolution and founder of the new Islamic Revolutionary state, dubbed US imperialism ‘The Great Satan’. Donald Trump-Marco Rubio- Pete Hegseth have doubtless refreshed that definition.
Trump’s USA and Netanyahu’s Israel commenced an unprovoked war of aggression on Iran. They assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei together with his daughter and grandchild. Though the longest ruler, he was no Mao, Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro figure: he was not the founder-leader of the Islamic Republic. He was a young participant and product of the Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini against the Pahlavi monarchy (“the American Shah”) and the USA. That revolution has created many more militants and leaders than US-Israel can kill off.
A US-Israeli strike killed 175 schoolgirls in Minab, Southern Iran, as we saw on TV. There were no apologies, explanations or excuses.
The decapitation strike on Khamenei will bring to the fore new leaders and leadership collectives, recomposing and renewing the Revolutionary state, hardening resolve and sowing the dragon’s teeth of hatred among a new generation of Muslims globally towards the US empire.
Already six US soldiers have been killed and five seriously wounded in an Iranian counterstrike. However, the stated war aims of Trump as restated by Pete Hegseth are so maximalist that a rapid return to a negotiated cessation of hostilities is improbable.
This may become an all-out, history-making war. The objectives of Trump and Netanyahu are the overthrow of the Iranian state that came into being with the Iranian People’s Revolution of 1979, and the reversal of the 1979 Revolution.
Iran is far too large to be swallowed or occupied by the USA. Israel seeks to ‘Lebanonise’ Iran, or break it up.
The Iranian Islamic Republic is far to organic for the US to be able to do what it did to Saddam Hussein and the Baath party’s Iraq, and that took years of bloody conflict and US losses to stabilise.
For the world at large, i.e., for the ‘world’s majority’, the worst possible outcome would be a victory for the US-Israel and the decisive defeat of Iran.
If Iran falls, the road to Eurasia is open. Despite their powerful nuclear deterrents, Russia and China may someday be victim of a tactical nuclear decapitation strike on their leaderships delivered by the US Air Force. Soviet and Chinese leaderships adequately armed Vietnam, preventing a US victory. Today, in their own interests, Russia and China should ensure Iran is able to protect itself and restore its conventional deterrence.
If one regretfully rules out the best possible outcome of a quick negotiated end to conflict, then that leaves the best possible outcome for the world’s majority, either:
A devastating Iranian strike on a US military target which sends enough coffins back Stateside to halt the war, or A protracted war of steadfastness and resistance in which Iran plays the role of the 21st century Vietnam, inflicting unacceptable casualties over months and years, bleeding the arrogant, aggressive superpower and its genocidal ally Israel, forcing a US withdrawal in defeat and humiliation.
Meanwhile Cuba, the ‘green alligator’ of the Caribbean, showed that it retained its strong jaws and sharp bite when in a gunfight it killed a boatload of terrorists from Miami, captured the rest and released the footage. If the US chooses to wage war on Cuba, Hegseth’s military will encounter an armed island and citizenry that will resist for years. (https://youtu.be/bPG-3b-rMAg?si=Hl5Yz_ca0cokohsP)
Proof of Anura’s failure
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If anything the Anura Dissanayake administration says is true, the current dispensation’s strongest support would come from the university educated; recent and new products of the State universities. If as the Government and the pro-Government corporate oligarchy says, the country is doing well under AKD or is likely to, then no one would more enthusiastically invest and participate in it, and see a future for themselves and their families in it, than would the State university products.
But that’s not what the data shows. The data shows the exact opposite. Deng Xiaoping said, building on Mao, ‘seek truth from facts’. What are the facts, and what is the truth?
There is an outflow of the State-educated graduates that Sri Lanka never saw in the “76 accursed years of elite rule since Independence”—not even during the thirty years of the Northern civil war, the half-decade of the Southern uprising and repression, the recent economic crash of 2022 and the Ranil Wickremesinghe ‘stabilisation package’.
The Daily Mirror story by Huzefar Aliasger tells it starkly in its title: ‘Over 80% state university graduates are migrating’.
Colombo, Feb. 27 (Daily Mirror) – Sri Lanka is undergoing a brain drain crisis where a new study from the University of Peradeniya reveals that over 50 per cent of state university graduates, rising to 80-90 per cent in critical fields like medicine, engineering, and agriculture, are migrating permanently, never to return, according to a recent article by Ceylon Public Affairs.
According to the University of Peradeniya study, the brightest graduates—those with science-based degrees—are leaving in droves, with migration rates exceeding 80 per cent in some departments.” Ceylon Public Affairs says.
The consequences of this brain drain are profound. Sri Lanka’s healthcare and education systems are already under strain, with a shortage of doctors and university lecturers driving up pressure on remaining professionals…’
(https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/Over-80-state-university-graduates-are-migrating/108-334050)
These are 2025 statistics. Obviously the best and brightest of young Sri Lankans fresh out of State universities have no hope in the NPP Government, no belief in its propaganda claims and the country’s prospects under the current dispensation, and are engaged in an unprecedented exodus from which they do not intend to return.
With what more evidence can one confront the humbug of those pusillanimous intellects who say the task is ‘to push the Government to the left’, or to ‘give it more time’ because we are ‘at least better off than when the corrupt old elite and parties were in office’.
The truth is that the economy and the country itself is collapsing from chest down, and is paralysed up to the neck from chest up.
The ‘progress’ registered at the top is generated by something akin to a vast Ponzi scheme; not real economic expansion, growth, dynamism, employment generation.
Talk of ‘system change’! Since 1948, the totality of the system has never been more clogged and dysfunctional, slower in delivering progress for the many, than under this NPP administration.
If the Government tries to block or delay the 2029 election, socioeconomic reality guarantees that it will exit the hard way and be sealed out for decades.
Meanwhile, summoning to the FCID, Prof. Maithree Wickremesinghe, an established and respected academic, wife of a former Prime Minister and a former First Lady whose cancer is mercifully in remission, instead of extending her the basic courtesy of recording her statement at home, is evidence of the mean-spirited, borderline barbaric character of the AKD-JVP-NPP Government.
Pelawatte paradigm
In a homespun Mickey Mouse Machiavellianism, which only Pelawatte is capable of, and is all Pelawatte is capable of, the AKD-JVP-NPP has deliberately begun to create a destabilising national crisis which opens space for ethnic extremism in the North, East and South.
I refer to the mandate for the Parliamentary Select Committee on Provincial Council elections.
There is a political vacuum in the North and East because the existing Provincial Councils are not functioning.
They aren’t functioning because there’s been a snarl-up in the electoral framework and process. There is an all-parties Oppositional support for the existing PCs because they have been stakeholders of those councils for decades. All that’s needed is a multi-party consensus on how best and fastest to unfreeze the PCs, providing them to function by holding an election.
However, here is the text of the Speaker’s announcement:
“I wish to announce to the House that, in terms of the resolution passed by Parliament, I have appointed a Select Committee of Parliament to look into and report to Parliament on the matter of selecting the Electoral System under which the Provincial Council Elections should be held and to submit its proposals and recommendations in that regard.”
If one wishes to know the convoluted thinking and transparent negative intention behind this formula, simply read ‘Loku Aiya’ Tilvin Silva’s latest interview.
‘Q What is your stand on the Provincial Council elections?
Tilvin: The answer lies in our manifesto where we have highlighted that a proper solution should be worked out to address the ethnic issue.
Provincial councils have not served the purpose. We should look for a better solution. Until such time, we should have Provincial Councils. We will not scrap them without finding an alternative solution.
Today, we have been unable to reconstitute the provincial councils because of a law enacted during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s time. We had planned to conduct the elections to them this year. Yet, it is impossible (to do) this because of reasons such as cyclone Ditwah. The elections should be held at the earliest possible opportunity. But the question remains how.
There is no law which provides for the conduct of it. We have to do delimitation. We have to think whether we should go for delimitation or not. A committee has been appointed to look into it.’ (https://www.dailymirror.lk/hard-talk/Indian-expansionism-a-thing-of-the-past-Tilvin-Silva/334-334039)
If you need a repair which gets your car engine functioning again but the owner of the garage insists you need a new engine and adds that it has yet to be designed/redesigned, what would you think? You’d figure the guy just doesn’t want to repair your car and put it back on the road—and you would be right.
Easter massacre-Manchurian Candidate-Catholics sacrificed
The Easter massacre inquiry has returned in public discussion. Mine is ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ hypothesis. What if a settler-colonial terrorist state known for assassination, explosions, massacres and evacuating ISIS/ISIL operatives from the Syrian borders, had cultivated over the war years in a strategically important little island State in South Asia, a far-right outlier of a prominent centre-left clan, who was within sight of — but not certain of — his party’s presidential nomination and then the Presidency?
Wouldn’t that expansionist-terrorist State (recently turned genocidal) do whatever it took to turn him into a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ and make him President? Wouldn’t that include perpetrating or designing a ‘false flag’ massacre, or manipulating a penetrated cell of local ISIS followers, to secure the nomination and the Presidency through an Islamophobic public opinion swing to that ‘Manchurian Candidate’—though (probably) unknown to the beneficiary?
Were the specific Indian warnings about the Easter massacre deliberately ignored as part of this gameplan?
Were the Catholics the sacrificial lambs so the Manchurian Candidate would secure nomination and win?
The propaganda smokescreen about the Easter massacre, diverting the line of inquiry, has consistently been provided by a Sri Lankan professor connected to the genocidal state.
The US letter (secured by Ambassador Mahinda Samarasinghe), which airily pinned the Easter Massacre on ISIS sympathisers, seems typical Washington DC, running interference for its closest ally/partner.
Given the expansion of the genocidal-Zionist footprint in NPP-ruled Sri Lanka, I don’t expect the truth.
SJB: guardrail or battering-ram?
There is nonsensical, ignorant misdirection urging Sajith’s SJB to be a ‘guardrail not a roadblock’ on the AKD administration.
The last time the SJB played ‘guardrail not roadblock’ was when Ranil Wickremesinghe was President and this sentiment was articulated by Dr. Harsha de Silva, waving his Economic Blueprint. The consequence was that mass disaffection at unprecedented economic austerity bypassed the temporising main Opposition, the SJB and Sajith Premadasa, and instead catapulted the JVP-NPP with three seats and 3%, to the Presidency and a two-thirds parliamentary majority.
What is the lesson of actual political history? No Government had a faster economic take-off than the Jayewardene administration of 1977. That take-off was facilitated by its 5/6ths majority in Parliament. How did an Opposition reduced to 17 seats in 1970, facing a Government with the country’s first ever 2/3rds majority, flip that result in one term and sweep to a 5/6ths majority?
It sure wasn’t by functioning as a ‘guardrail’ during an economic crisis, though economic crisis there certainly was: the 1973 OPEC oil price hike. JR Jayewardene had just taken over the UNP and re-inducted Ranasinghe Premadasa who has formed the Puravesi Peramuna, as (de facto) Deputy Leader. Far from being a guardrail, the UNP with its 17 MPs, turned battering-ram. Focusing on the economic pain imposed by the Government during the 1973 oil price hike to launch the most aggressively populist campaign of street agitation (‘satyagraha’) and relentless parliamentary attack that this country’s democratic politics has ever witnessed, generated the UNP’s 1977 landslide.
When left leader Dr. NM Perera was sacked by Madam Bandaranaike and his successor Felix Dias Bandaranaike supported by Seevali Ratwatte, pivoted economic policy — including on foreign investment — to the right, the JR-Premadasa UNP didn’t ‘guardrail’ the ‘moderate’ SLFP. Instead, it moved a No-Confidence Motion together with the LSSP, targeting Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Felix Dias Bandaranaike (‘Satan’).
Sajith’s SJB must return to the 1973-1977 UNP oppositional populist strategy. If not, voters have the dynamic young Namal Rajapaksa to turn to.
FLSP rising
Striking an anti-imperialist, anti-US-Israel, pro-Palestine, and pronouncedly pro-Cuban note, the 4th National Convention of the Front-Line Socialist Party was an unexpectedly impressive success. (https://www.youtube.com/live/mDAHbKoHwrQ?si=RZ-2TCY9CTXD-6qr)
FLSP General Secretary Kumar Gunaratnam observed that the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act dating back to the late 1970s was limited to activity linked to armed violence, but the new draft legislation of the JVP-NPP Government criminalises peaceful dissent.
Keynote speaker Duminda Nagamuwa derided the JVP-NPP, saying that starting with its top leader, it had sought to become and had succeeded in becoming “the employees of the big bourgeoisie”, concerned only with “the temporary nature of their job contract” and “securing permanency of employment”. Earlier, Dr. Kalpa Rajapaksa, product of New York’s New School, defined the JVP-NPP as “the new party of the big bourgeoisie”.
Studiously tracking the economic figures and the forthcoming effect, separate and cumulative, of ongoing policies, Duminda Nagamuwa projected the FLSP as:
Positioned for the disintegration of the NPP sociopolitical bloc in 2028-2029 in the wake of the predictable economic meltdown/death-spiral. Ready to fill the political vacuum opened by the lacklustre ‘liberal SJB’ and ‘ultranationalist SLPP’.
If Sajith and Namal fail to inspire sufficiently, the radical socialist left will be the default option on the ground.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication.
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