Sri Lanka’s modern history from Black July in 1983 to the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019 is a story of a country that bled lives and wealth while refusing to confront the structures that made violence possible. Between pogrom, war and terror attacks, well over a hundred thousand people were killed and the economy lost an estimated 200 billion US dollars to conflict and militarization, yet the political class still reaches for denial, scapegoats and collective amnesia instead of justice and reform.[1][2][3][4][5]
Black July: the spark that lit the war
In July 1983, following an LTTE ambush that killed 13 soldiers, mobs from the Sinhala majority launched a coordinated pogrom against Tamil civilians in what came to be known as Black July.[6][7][3]
Over roughly a week, Tamil homes, businesses and lives were systematically attacked—hundreds to several thousand Tamils were killed, about 150,000–200,000 people were displaced, and entire neighbourhoods were burned while security forces largely stood by or were complicit.[7][8][9][6]
Black July did not emerge from a vacuum. It crowned decades of discriminatory policies—such as the 1948 Citizenship Act, the 1956 “Sinhala Only” law, and restrictions on Tamil political expression—that had already entrenched Tamil perceptions that the post‑colonial state belonged to the Sinhala-Buddhist majority.[3][10][11]
A generation consumed by civil war
The pogrom helped propel Sri Lanka into a 26‑year civil war between the state and the LTTE that lasted from 1983 until the Tigers were militarily defeated in May 2009.[12][10]
By the war’s end, UN and independent estimates suggested at least 80,000–100,000 people had been killed, with later human-rights analysis indicating that the true toll—especially in the war’s final months—might be significantly higher, pushing well above 100,000 when disappearances and unrecorded civilian deaths are included.[1][2][4]
The war was not only deadly; it was extraordinarily expensive.
India’s former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon estimated that Sri Lanka’s “internal war” cost around US$200 billion in direct and indirect economic losses, roughly five times the country’s 2009 GDP—an estimate widely cited by analysts as a symbol of how racist, militarized politics bankrupted the future.[4][13][14]
The economic road to bankruptcy
The war years diverted vast public resources into the security sector, while opportunity costs mounted as investment, tourism and regional development stagnated in conflict-affected areas.[13][15][16]
Even after 2009, governments doubled down on debt‑funded infrastructure, tax cuts and patronage networks rather than building an inclusive peace economy; by 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt for the first time, with the IMF describing the country’s debt as “unsustainable” and tying the crisis to years of policy missteps and shocks, including the 2019 attacks.[17][18][19]
The Rajapaksa administrations are rightly criticized for reckless tax cuts in 2019, heavy borrowing for prestige projects, and the authoritarian, militarized governance style that intensified corruption and fiscal collapse.[18][19][17]
But to blame bankruptcy solely on one family is too easy: the deeper truth is that every major party participated in building a political economy where war, majoritarian populism and short-term patronage repeatedly trumped sustainable development and pluralist institution-building.[10][13]
Collective amnesia: how a state edits its own history
This is where the concept of collective amnesia becomes vital.
Collective amnesia is not simple forgetfulness; it is a deliberate social process in which a state, political class or majority community suppresses or rewrites traumatic episodes to avoid accountability, protect its self-image, or preserve power.
In Sri Lanka this has taken familiar forms:
- Describing Black July as a spontaneous “riot” rather than a state-enabled pogrom, downplaying evidence of government involvement and organized targeting of Tamil households.[6][3][9]
- Treating the end of the war in 2009 purely as a heroic victory, while refusing independent investigation into mass civilian casualties, disappearances and alleged war crimes in the final months.[1][2][10]
- Using the label “terrorism” to delegitimize any discussion of Tamil political grievances, thereby erasing the structural discrimination that predated and outlasted the LTTE.[3][10]
This edited memory allows successive Sinhala‑majoritarian governments and the military leadership to present themselves as guardians of unity while sidestepping the fact that many Tamils see the state itself as a source of violence and exclusion.
It enables what you aptly call a “curse”: there is “never any real unity,” only managed silence and coerced stability.
Easter Sunday 2019: a different face of tragedy
On Easter Sunday 2019, suicide bombers linked to a local Islamist network attacked churches and luxury hotels, killing around 250 people after authorities revised down an earlier higher death toll.[5][20][21]
The bombings were the worst violence since the end of the civil war and revealed catastrophic failures of intelligence coordination and governance, including ignored warnings from foreign agencies and infighting within the security establishment.[17][21][5]
These attacks traumatized Christian and Muslim communities and revived a climate of suspicion and securitization.
They also exposed how a state focused on triumphal post‑war narratives had neglected the hard work of building inclusive institutions, professional intelligence oversight and deradicalization strategies that protect all communities instead of stigmatizing some.
Systemic discrimination and the test of democracy
The question at the heart of your prompt—“How do we address systemic discrimination by the majority against the minority?”—goes to the core of Sri Lanka’s democratic failure.
The oft‑quoted line that “the best test of a democracy is how the majority treats the minority” captures a widely shared democratic intuition, even if its precise origins are uncertain and commonly misattributed.[22]
In Sri Lanka, systemic discrimination has taken several forms: language and citizenship laws that marginalized Tamils; under‑representation in state institutions; heavy militarization of the North and East; and the persistent use of security laws to criminalize dissent in minority regions.[3][23][24]
International and local human-rights bodies, including Amnesty International and regional NGOs, have repeatedly documented how these patterns violate obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and undermine any claim to equal citizenship.[25][23][26]
Your tweet, responding to a minister who wanted to curb LTTE symbols, captured this clearly: you argued that if the government truly wants to stop separatist symbolism, it must first confront “decades of broken promises, power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and the continued refusal to implement meaningful devolution,” and that “symbols of resistance will continue to surface” as long as people see no viable path to dignity, equality and self‑determination within the existing constitutional framework.
That analysis aligns closely with the findings of scholars and rights groups: without structural change, repression only shifts the forms resistance takes.[27][10][23]
PTA, counter‑terror laws and the architecture of repression
The Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), first introduced in 1979 and later made permanent, has long been criticized as a core pillar of Sri Lanka’s repressive architecture.[25][26]
It allows prolonged detention without charge, makes “confessions” to police admissible in court, and grants sweeping powers that have been used disproportionately against Tamils, Muslims, activists and journalists.[28][24][26]
Successive governments—including those that sought international legitimacy after the war—have promised to repeal or fundamentally reform the PTA, yet none fully have; instead, they have tended to repackage similar powers under new counter‑terror bills such as the proposed Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA).[29][27][23]
Civil-society coalitions and regional organizations like FORUM-ASIA have warned that these bills risk entrenching, not dismantling, the extraordinary powers originally justified by the LTTE conflict.[27][23][25]
In this sense, collective amnesia is legal as well as historical: by constantly moving from “temporary emergency” to “permanent counter‑terrorism,” the state normalizes exceptional powers while forgetting that these were supposed to be short‑term responses to specific threats.
NPP’s rise: a rare opening in a frozen system
Against this backdrop, the emergence of the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition represents a rare rupture in Sri Lanka’s post‑independence party system.
In the 2024 general election, the NPP won about 61.5 percent of the vote and secured 159 out of 225 parliamentary seats—an unprecedented two‑thirds majority under proportional representation—after Anura Kumara Dissanayake had already captured the presidency with a reformist, anti‑corruption message.[30][31][32][33]
Crucially for your argument, the NPP’s support base cut across traditional lines: it drew votes not only from Sinhala urban and rural constituencies, but also made inroads into Tamil and Muslim-majority districts like Jaffna, Vanni, Trincomalee and plantation areas, displacing long‑dominant ethnic parties.[31][32][34][30]
This cross‑ethnic, grassroots‑driven mobilization gives the NPP a different kind of legitimacy—and, as you note, it also makes the party structurally more vulnerable to sustained pressure from below than the old patronage-based duopoly.
The NPP manifesto and campaign rhetoric included explicit promises to abolish repressive laws including the PTA and to build a new, more egalitarian political order.[23][30]
Yet once in office, the government has moved toward “reform and replacement” rather than outright repeal, insisting that the problem was the PTA’s “misuse” and floating new counter‑terror legislation that civil-society groups say preserves or expands many of the same powers.[29][28][27][23]
This is precisely where your entrapment frame becomes powerful: without organized, cross‑ethnic grassroots pressure, even a party that rose on a wave of popular anger can be captured by the same security-state logic it once condemned.
Scapegoating Rajapaksas and the trap of narrow accountability
In the wake of default and mass protests, it is politically convenient for many actors to explain Sri Lanka’s crisis solely as the product of one family’s corruption and misrule.
The IMF’s own staff report, however, portrays a more complex picture: pre‑existing vulnerabilities, long‑standing debt accumulation, and policy mistakes across multiple governments combined with external shocks like the Ukraine war and the Easter attacks to produce collapse.[17][35][19]
The Rajapaksas bear enormous responsibility for deepening debt, weakening institutions and encouraging chauvinist rhetoric during and after the war, but focusing exclusively on them risks reproducing collective amnesia at a higher level.
It allows the wider political class, the security establishment and segments of the majority public to avoid asking: Why did so many of us cheer policies that were unsustainable, discriminatory or violent when they were framed as “protecting the nation”?
True accountability would therefore mean:
- Investigating alleged war crimes and corruption across parties and governments, not only among the Rajapaksas.
- Examining how majoritarian ideology and racism repeatedly pushed governments to prioritize military victory, patronage and symbolic nationalism over pluralist institution-building.
- Recognizing the costs borne by minorities—not only in lives, but in land, liberty and political voice.
Without this broader reckoning, scapegoating becomes another form of entrapment: a way to purge guilt without touching the system that made the abuses possible.
From memory to justice: addressing systemic discrimination
Addressing systemic discrimination by a majority against minorities is not a single reform but an ongoing political project.
For Sri Lanka, several concrete pillars emerge from comparative experience and local demands:
- Truth, memory and acknowledgment
- Establish an independent, victim‑centered truth commission with powers to subpoena, protect witnesses and recommend prosecutions, building on but going beyond prior, limited initiatives.[2][10]
- Recognize Black July and the final months of the war as national days of mourning, with official curricula that incorporate Tamil, Muslim and Christian experiences rather than a single heroic narrative.[3][9]
- Legal and constitutional guarantees
- Fully repeal the PTA and resist cosmetic replacements that preserve its core abuses; draft any new security legislation through transparent, participatory processes with strict human-rights safeguards and judicial review.[27][25][23][26]
- Implement meaningful devolution under the Thirteenth Amendment or beyond, ensuring real control for Tamil-speaking regions over land, policing, education and economic development.[10][3]
- Security‑sector and governance reform
- Demilitarize civilian life in the North and East by reducing military presence, ending military involvement in commercial activities, and returning occupied land to its original owners.[2][10]
- Create independent oversight bodies for police and intelligence services with minority representation and clear complaint mechanisms.
- Economic justice and reconstruction
- Prioritize war‑affected areas for transparent, community-driven reconstruction funding rather than politically connected mega‑projects that reproduce patronage.[13][15]
- Link IMF‑supported reforms to anti‑corruption, social protection and equity benchmarks so that debt restructuring does not deepen regional and class inequalities.[35][19]
- Cross‑ethnic grassroots organizing
- As you argue, the unique opportunity with the NPP lies in its dependence on grassroots support; activists from North and South should coordinate campaigns that tie economic justice demands (jobs, anti‑corruption, relief from IMF austerity) together with constitutional and human‑rights demands (repeal of PTA, devolution, demilitarization).
- This includes sustained lobbying of MPs, street mobilization, litigation strategies and international advocacy that keeps the NPP’s manifesto promises in public view.[25][30][32][27]
In other words, the PTA repeal campaign can be a gateway struggle: a concrete, winnable demand that forces the government to choose between its old security reflexes and its new democratic rhetoric.
The role of narrative and political imagination
Finally, as preceding writing demonstrate, narrative is not secondary.
States practice collective amnesia through schoolbooks, speeches and commemorations; movements can counter it through testimonies, literature, film and journalism that insist on remembering.
Reframing Sri Lanka’s story—from “we defeated terrorism” to “we destroyed our own future by refusing equality”—is itself a political act.
When citizens in both North and South accept that a generation was sacrificed not only by the LTTE’s authoritarianism and cult of martyrdom, but also by chauvinistic state policies and majority complicity, the ground for a different politics is laid.
If the “curse of this country” has been the refusal to build real unity, the task now is to turn memory into pressure: using the very grassroots power that lifted the NPP into office to insist that democracy be judged, at last, by how the majority treats the minority—and by whether Sri Lanka chooses remembrance and justice over yet another cycle of denial and disaster.[27][23][22]
Author’s Note:
This article was co‑authored by Kagusthan Ariaratnam in collaboration with Perplexity, an AI‑powered research assistant used to support and verify the factual content through citation‑backed analysis.
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