Nothing less than existential: Our choice at the presidential elections
“And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I…
Author: Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
The Tamil Variable In Lankan Politics
Harim Pieris, a former advisor to President Kumaratunga in the days that she had really lost touch with what was what in the country, has written the best piece so far on…
A brief response to a charge of mercenary intellectualism
[Editors note: This is a response by Dayan Jayatilleke to a recently published article by Prof. Peter Schalk of Uppsala University, Sweden, who identified four western educated individuals hired by the Government…
An Allergy To Self-Criticism In Dominant Tamil Discourse
In hard science when an experiment repeatedly fails and finally blows up the lab with it, the very assumptions which form the basis of the experiment are reassessed and often abandoned. The…
Mindless emotionalism and absence of thinking in Tamil politics
With “Sinhala hegemony” in its most dramatic form, the advancing Sri Lankan armed forces, closing in, Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism could not convince the Tamil Nadu voter of its cause and case,…
Tamil politics in Sri Lanka: Time to stop being suicidal
“ It was Prof Robert Pape who put it on the record: the Tamil Tigers fielded many more suicide bombers than any Middle Eastern or “jihadist” group. Suicide within the Tamil nationalist…
Presidential Election 2010: The choice before pluralist democrats
Q: Why did you fall out with Rajapaksa? A: Five days after we won the war, at a meeting of the (president’s) Security Council, he said he’d stop recruiting new people in…
From Here to Hanoi
Vietnam was the first country to be informed by Sri Lanka of its victory over the Tigers. It was from the on the record remarks of a top Vietnamese leader that I…
The Politics of Diaspora Dissidence: A response to Dayapala Thiranagama
– UTHR (J), 18th Sept, 2009 I did not expect the Rajani commemoration to be a posthumous Nuremburg Trial for Velupillai Prabhakaran, as Dayapala Thiranagama seems to suggest ((London). Though Dayapala now…
A response to Basil Fernando: Sri Lanka is not a Gulag Island
I am proud of my country, Sri Lanka, which has just been able to vanquish a formidable, ferocious and fascistic foe, despite its vast global network and in the face of considerable…
Rajani commemoration: An absence of actuality
The evening was good but perhaps Rajani deserved a bit better. She always told it like it was, named things by their name, confronted reality frontally. That quintessential spirit of Rajani, her…
Post-war reconciliation and nation-building in a global context
There have been three civil wars fought against the Sri Lankan state: 1971, 1986-89, 1979-2009. The Sri Lankan state prevailed in all three. These three wars settled three basic questions. The first…
Re-founding Sri Lanka: Reform and Renovation
We have a once –in-generations chance to re-found Sri Lanka, to build Sri Lanka anew. To do so, we must be both hard and soft; and vigilant as hawks and as conciliatory…
The Politics of Post-War Sri Lanka
As Paul Berman once wrote, “somewhere in the world it is always 1941”. There comes a time in the life of every society when it is faced with an existential threat or…
13th Amendment: Why non-implementation is a non-option
The warning about the risk of triumphalism came days before the 65th anniversary celebration of D Day, by the leaders of the US, UK and France. In the USA there are annual…