Senaka Weeraratna

The lack of production of protest literature in Sri Lanka calling for an apology, reparations, repatriation of stolen artifacts, atonement, catharsis etc., illustrates a stark difference between the content of Law Journals and Newspapers and Television Channels in Africa, Caribbean, and even India vis a vis Sri Lanka.

There is a distinct deficiency in the scholarly landscape of Sri Lanka compared to regions like Africa, the Caribbean, and India. While exceptions exist, the legal literature in Sri Lanka shamefully reflects moral cowardice continually leaning toward traditional doctrinal analysis rather than the critical, transformative “protest” discourse found elsewhere. We find sadly a hurrah boy culture in local legal literature when it comes to reference to the colonial past. For example, the writings of say someone like Radhabinod Pal, a distinguished jurist from Bengal who served as one of the 11 judges on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) from 1946 to 1948, is nowhere to be found in a law journal in Sri Lanka with a commentary by a local legal scholar.

Radhabond Pal  stands out for being the sole judge to write a comprehensive dissenting opinion that recommended the acquittal of all 25 Japanese defendants on all counts. 

• His 1,235-page dissent—the longest in the tribunal’s history—argued that the trial was an exercise in “victor’s justice” and a huge hypocrisy. Weaponizing the law to punish the Japanese who had indulged in a Just War against Western Colonialism that had occupied the whole of Asia bar Siam and Japan up to 1939. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal has been described by an American Jurist as a ‘ high profile lynch mob’.  Radhabond Pal   rejected the Doctrine of ‘Manifest Destiny’. He contended that “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” were new legal categories being applied retroactively (ex post facto), which he deemed illegal under international law.
• Selective Morality: He criticized the tribunal for ignoring Allied atrocities, specifically pointing to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he argued were comparable to the war crimes being prosecuted.
• Impact on Japan: Pal remains a celebrated figure in Japan. There are monuments dedicated to him at the Yasukuni Shrine and the Kyoto Ryozen Gokoku Shrine. In 1966, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure (First Class) by the Emperor of Japan. Unfortunately, in Sri Lanka’s legal education system Radhabond Pal remains a mystery and a relatively unknown quantity, despite championing the struggle for the liberation of Asia by the colonized people.  

Comparative Scholarly Context

• Africa and the Caribbean: These regions have a robust tradition of using legal scholarship to demand apologies and reparations for colonial harms, often framing them as essential for “healing and redress”.
• India: While some scholars describe Indian demands for restitution as occasionally “rhetorical,” Indian legal discourse has long engaged with socio-economic rights and colonial redress more aggressively than its Sri Lankan counterparts.
• Sri Lanka: Critics argue that Sri Lankan legal literature often avoids confronting colonial “plunder” directly, sometimes even “celebrating” colonial history without addressing the “grab land laws” (Waste Lands Ordinance, 1841) that impoverished the Kandyan Sinhalese peasantry and led to their deaths through starvation (Ethnic Cleansing). 
• Colonial Reparations: Some recent scholarship, such as in the SLIIT Journal of Humanities and Sciences, has begun arguing that colonial harms must be acknowledged, apologized for, and atoned for by former colonial governments.
• Artifact Repatriation: Some Legal experts have identified a significant “gap in legal scholarship” regarding the return of stolen artifacts, which undermines Sri Lanka’s ability to advocate for the return of its cultural heritage on the international stage.
• Transitional Justice: While journals like the KDU Law Journal (Dr. Punsara Amarasinghe) discuss reparations, they often focus on the “inconsistent forms of compensation” provided by the state rather than a holistic “protest” for catharsis and dignity
• Traditional Focus: Many Sri Lankan law journals, such as the Sri Lanka Journal of International Law or the RIC Law Journal, primarily focus on disseminating doctrinal knowledge to practitioners rather than serving as platforms for radical legal critique or “protest”. There is no interest in Sri Lanka’s legal education institutions to train law students to demand reparations for colonial injustices.
• Sri Lankan law journals tend to focus on doctrinal law, constitutional law, and, more recently, specific, limited international law aspects, with less emphasis on systemic, historical, or post-colonial restorative justice.
• Conversely, legal journals in the Caribbean and Africa often focus heavily on post-colonial theory, reparative justice, and the repatriation of cultural heritage.
• Similarly, Indian legal discourse often engages with colonial legacies and critical legal studies, reflecting a more robust critique of, and demands for redress regarding, historical injustices compared to the current focus on non-confrontational topics in Sri Lankan legal academic publications.

The lack of scholarly conversation on the legal aspects of restorative colonial justice highlights the absence of true believers and robust leaders in Sri Lanka’s academia and professions. with a fighting spirit as we see in Indian lawyers like J.Sai Deepak who are hardly mentioned in Sri Lanka’s leading media and television channels despite the close proximity and cultural compatibility between India and Sri Lanka. What the local readers are offered (or force fed) instead and repeatedly are the opinions of Indian critics like  Arundhati Roy  the author of ‘ God of Small Things’  which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997. No one objects to the frequent publication of the writings of Arundhati Roy in the Sri Lankan media (she is not representative of large-scale Indian Opinion given her background and origins) so long as other Indian critics like J. Sai Deepak and Dr. Anand Ranganathan are also given space. There must be a balance. The exclusion of the opinions of the latter while professing a preference for  Arundhati Roy , who is an unrepentant critic of the Indian freedom struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose is morally indefensible.   

Senaka Weeraratna