By Rohana R. Wasala

Continued from Friday, May 8th 2026

Let me start the final part of my personal commentary on the spectrum of active interventions in national politics in Sri Lanka by external and internal actors from 2009 to date (2026). The range of deliberately planned actions that I am commenting on may be identified as an evolving continuum of forced regime change through a so-called ‘colour revolution’ misleadingly named Aragalaya or Struggle (March to November 2022). I referred to this conspiracy towards the end of Part IV:  ‘Lingering apparitions of those  ancient demonic powers are forming a coalition of destabilizing fifth columnists in the form of racist Tamil separatists and Christian and Islamic religio-political extremists arrayed against the  island state……’. Readers will remember that I stressed that these three kinds of extremists are only a handful within each of the peace loving mainstream minority communities. I hope that they will also agree that the particular conspiracy that ousted the honest, idealistic, and patriotic (nationalist) President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa should be subsumed under that broader ‘internationally sponsored regime change (conspiracy that) made a mockery of democracy in Sri Lanka’.  

The alert reader need not be told that the allusion here is to the subtitle of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s 2024 book THE CONSPIRACY to oust me from the Presidency”. But it must be stated that my negative view of the Aragalaya was formed while it was taking place in Colombo in 2022, based on internet news researched through academic and public digital archives. Talking about the ‘Composition of the aragalaya’ on pages 89 to 92, GR outlines his opinion of why he was perceived as inimical to their interests by the minority communities. According to him, each had a motivating factor to take part in the so-called aragalaya: he was seen as anti-Tamil after the military defeat of the separatists; the Tamil diaspora supported the idea of a united Sri Lanka instead of a unitary state. Problems including the cremation issue during the Covid-19 pandemic (which, as he mentions elsewhere in the book, he tried to resolve mainly by leaving it to the science-based recommendations of a duly appointed competent authority, but also adopting alternative means to accommodate Muslim wishes, still within the parameters set by scientific consultants), caused him to be regarded as anti-Muslim. 

Then I went on to explain that Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority community (though a negligible global minority)  is not totally free from its own type of extremists: for example, agitating monk activists like Bhikkhus Balangoda Kassapa and Galagoda-aththe Gnanasara have criticised or paid left-handed compliments to the recently concluded Walk for Peace (April 21 to 28, 2026) from Anuradhapura to Colombo led by Vietnamese American Bhikkhu Pannakara. The two Sri Lankan monks mentioned seem to  have misunderstood the true purpose behind the Peace Walk (which is promoting non-violence, compassion, and unity among people  in the world including Sri Lanka through mindfulness meditation focused on inducing inner peace, and this has nothing to do with religion or politics). Gnanasara and Kassapa theros’ apparent failure to recognize this is regrettable. Even outside that context, they are doing a great disservice to the genuine national causes that they are themselves trying to champion within Sri Lanka; the noisy brash approach that they habitually adopt contradicts the typical serene image of Buddhist monks. Their kind of extremism, though nonviolent except for the lack of verbal restraint, proves as harmful to the beleaguered Sri Lankan state as the extremism of the antinational forces that have sought its demise especially since the end of the armed conflict in 2009. These monks are among a few dozens of genuine Theravada Buddhist monks out of the estimated 40,000 in Sri Lanka, who are trying to raise public awareness about the very real existential threat that the oldest sovereign Buddhist majority unitary state is currently facing. Unfortunately their cries for help have been reduced to just voices in the wilderness for lack of a unifying and empowering leadership.

Both of these monks are genuine whistleblowers, though. The younger Kassapa thera recently got into trouble with the police while trying to stop the forceful removal of a Buddha statue from a lawfully permitted makeshift shrine room by a politically motivated police officer allegedly acting on the orders of a local politician at Trincomalee adjacent to the sanctified spot on the shore where the Siamese monks arrived bringing the hallowed Higher Ordination tradition to Sri Lanka in 1753. The government of  Ranil Wickremasinghe, the constitutionally appointed 8th president who succeeded the ousted Gotabaya Rajapaksa, quite casually ignored the commemoration of that historic event in 2023 at that same place. The older Gnanasara thera  brought to the notice of the authorities what he perceived as growing extremist Islamist activity as early as 2012 or even earlier, and tried to raise public awareness regarding the danger. But he had to face constant harassment and even litigation instead on various agitation-related charges. In August 2018, he was handed down a sentence of a surprising 19 years of rigorous imprisonment (later commuted to be served within a span of 6 years) by the Court of Appeal of Sri Lanka after being found guilty on four counts of contempt of court. 

As reported in the media before the appeal was heard, these charges had originated at the Magistrate’s Court of Homagama in 2016, where the monk was accused of intimidating a witness and committing hate speech in the court premises itself, which amounted to severe cases of contempt of court. But Gnanasara thera had to serve only a few months of his prison term as he was given a presidential pardon in May 2019 by the then president Maithripala Sirisena. Ironically, the person who had been ‘deafeningly whistleblowing’ (if the phrase be permitted), at the risk of his life, based on independently researched investigable evidence, about the probability of a massive islamist attack that he sincerely wanted to prevent, was in prison when that attack was actually carried out in the form of the April 21, 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings by local IS jihadists led by Zaharan Hashim. Gnanasara thera could only cry when he heard about it while still in prison, as he said on his release on May 23, 2019.

But Gnanasara Thera was accused of having contributed to the radicalisation of Muslim youth including Zaharan Hashim, leader of Jamiyathul Millatu Ibrahimi Fi Seylani (JMI) and his followers through his (Gnanasara’s) anti Islamist activism as mentioned in professor Rohan Gunaratna’s book Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community” (2023, Penguin Books). Gnanasara Thera has been in JMI’s death list for years. Gunaratna says the (Wahhabist) JMI members also planned to assassinate Sri Lankan Shia Muslims, although these threats, apparently, were not carried out (pp. 176-177). 

The JMI members arrested after the bombings were introduced to a rehabilitation programme focused on deradicalising their brutalised mindset filled with resentment, anger and hatred. However further plans to introduce critical thinking, mathematics, philosophy and religious knowledge classes were reportedly disrupted by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith who allegedly opposed rehabilitation over punishment.” Gunaratna also mentions the ambivalent behaviour of the Cardinal. Although he was praised for having prevented possible retaliatory attacks on ordinary Muslims by the enraged members of the victim community (Catholics) after the Easter Sunday attacks, it was said his belief in a conspiracy theory and seeming lack of a far-reaching leadership to implement rehabilitation reportedly disappointed many, including some of his hitherto admirers” (pp. 192-193). 

There was another piece of irony of contextual relevance in this case. After the monk had done  what he later realised was a legal offence, he sincerely apologised to the court, but this was ignored (as he was heard saying several times in his later media briefings as the chief of his well known organisation). The Homagama magistrate at the time was Ranga Dissanayake, the present Director General of the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC). There are a number of Opposition claims against him, though, such as that he served as the legal officer for the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the leading partner of the ruling JVP/NPP coalition, that he used improper means to have his child admitted to a prestigious Colombo school, and that his wife worked under former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran (himself accused of a massive treasury bond scam committed on February 27, 2015, and a fugitive from justice), which could cause a conflict of interest that might affect Dissanayake-led CIABOC’s investigations, according to Opposition politicians. But Ranga Dissanayake has rejected all these allegations. Former Supreme Court judge C.V. Wigneswaran’s post-retirement chauvinist politics subjected the judgements he delivered among litigants in the Sinhalese majority South where he spent almost all his professional life to a tinge of suspected insincerity. Ranga Dissanayake is not retired yet. Retired law professor and Opposition politician G.L. Peiris recently criticised Ranga Dissanayake for trying to override the authority of the three commissioners who head the CIABOC.

Shani Abeysekera, presently the Director of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), appointed to that post on an unprecedented contract basis after retirement by the JVP/NPP government, soon to be promoted to the rank of Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG), and  his current boss Ravi Seneviratne, Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security, who accepted responsibility for his failure to prevent a road accident in 2023 through his lawyers at the Mount Lavinia Magistrate’s Court on May 8, 2026, and is waiting to be sentenced, are in a less defensible position in the face of Opposition allegations against them in this regard. Both of them confessed their political affiliation to the JVP/NPP in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court (according to Opposition claims); more importantly, Ravi Seneviratne and Shani Abeysekera were respectively the Senior Deputy Inspector General (SDIG) of Police in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID),and  the Director of the CID (under the Maithripala Sirisena – Ranil Wickremasinghe yahapalanaya regime) at the time of the Easter Sunday suicide bombings. They both failed to prevent the jihadist atrocity even though they had precise prior information about it. Ironically, Opposition politicians maintain that it was Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith the Catholic prelate himself, apparently not unaware of their past, who insisted on Shani and Ravi being appointed to their current posts in order to probe the Easter Sunday bombings in a transparent way acceptable to him! .

To be concluded