H. L. D. Mahindapala Right now Ranil Wickremesinghe, the ex-Prime Minister holding the exceptional record of being sacked twice by the presidency, is in a dilemma: he does not know whether to leave or not to leave Temple Trees,” the official residence of the prime minister. The first time he was sacked by the presidency […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala. The  note below deals with the refusal of Justice C. V. Wigneswaran to debate with Mr. H. L. D. Mahindapala. When Mr. Mahindapala accepted the challenge of Justice Wigneswaran to a debate  Mr. Ranjith Soysa of the Society for Peace, Unity and Human Rights (SPUR) offered to facilitate the debate. In […]

H.L. D. Mahindapala Of all the migrants that stepped into Sri Lanka to make it their home only the Sinhala-Buddhists created, consolidated and sustained, the mainstream culture that shaped and dominated its history.  No other minority has succeeded in displacing them from the commanding position and power they held in the mainstream down the ages. […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala A reply to one of Justice Wigneswaran’s perceptions of historical facts” It is quite apparent that Justice C.V. Wigneswaran’s (JW) perceptions of historical facts”, adumbrated in his letter to  Gallege Punyawardana, President of the Sinhale Secretariat, (See full text in attachment, dated: 8/6/2018), is to claim that history is on the side […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala One of the imperatives that drives the Tamil separatist lobby is the yearning to be on the side of history that makes them look and  sound great. They need this appearance of greatness most of all to sustain their claim for a separate state — their modern political  agenda.  Without this […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala In his role of raising the flag for communalism (not nationalism) Ponnambalam stands out as the Father of Tamil Communalism. His entry into politics in 1931 marks the beginning of communal politics on a scale never seen before. The idealism of the English-educated Tamil youth coming out of anti-caste missionary schools […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala. At first sight, the question of who landed first on Sri Lankan soil, repeated in the headline above, may seem silly, futile and irrelevant. But it should not be dismissed  lightly because the Tamil ideologues engaged in building up a case to acquire disproportionate power and territory, through military offensives, international […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala Dr. Chamindra Weerawardhana, who describes herself as a political analyst in her website, has rushed to the defence of the former State Minister of the UNP who resigned after sounding a clarion call for the revival and return of the LTTE to protect Tamil women and girls. She has justified Ms. […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala The predictable response of the 108 individuals and NGOs objecting to the appointments of Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka as the next ambassador to Russia is not only deplorable but also laughable. It is deplorable because the criteria on which they oppose the appointment consist of a whole heap of garbage surpassing the […]

H, L. D. Mahindapala And the soothsayers, when they saw the seats prepared, foretold: ‘The earth is occupied by these (bhikkus); they will be lords upon the island.’  – Mahavamsa XIV: 53.                                                                                                                     In the opening paragraph Bhikku Mahanama, the Father of Sri Lankan history, makes it clear that he didn’t sit down to write […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala When the Buddha asked the Yakkahas a place to sit (T)he yakkhas thus answered the Blessed One: We all, O Lord, give you even the whole of our island. Give us release from our fear” – Mahavamsa – 1: 27-29. The pioneering Indo-Aryan settlers, who came to be known as Sinhalese […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala With a heavy overload of historical memories, some tragic, some triumphant, some futile, and some memorable and everlasting, we have arrived, on the backs of the long-suffering people, in the 70th year of independence – the Biblical watershed to sit back and consider how far we have advanced or regressed in […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala On the night that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe won the no-confidence motion in Parliament (April 5, 2018) three separate but interconnected incidents occurred, within stone’s throw of each other: 1. he held a thanksgiving pooja to the deities at Gangaramaya Temple for saving his  job which was on the line that […]

By  H.L.D Mahindapala Part 1 When two distinguished authorities on the history of Jaffna — Bishop S. Jebanesan of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India, and Richard Fox Young who holds a Chair in the Princeton Theological Seminary, USA., – collaborated to translate the novel Mirage (Kanal in Tamil), depicting the plight of the despised […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala …… my administration, I believe, has had the most successful year in the history of the Presidency,” Donald Trump, Conservative Political Action Conference, Maryland, February 23rd, 2018 Since it is generally agreed that one week is a long time in politics it is time to ask, at the end of one […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala Universities are expected to perform two primary functions:1. teach and 2. engage in research to generate new knowledge that would light the darkness for the lost contemporaries to find their way into the future. There are 17 universities funded by the tax-payers money to serve these two objectives. But how many […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala In an impassioned speech delivered before the Steering Committee of the Parliament M. A. Sumanthiram, the spokesperson for the TNA, argued the case for federalism which is by far the most plausible presentation I have heard on the subject. And I must add that have heard some of the best and […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala One of the main reasons that exacerbated the North-South relations in the post-independent era has been the total distortion of historical realities by a sizeable segment of our intellectuals who believed that history was a train of events, somewhat like the Yal Devi, that ran up ONLY (emphasis mine) to the […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala In a drama never seen in the Westminster tradition, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had brazenly escorted his closest partner in cut-throat politics, Ravi Karunanayake, to the front benches of the House on the day the latter was forced to announce his resignation because of his involvement in the biggest financial scandal […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala It  is by looking back that one  can detect how coming events had cast their shadows across the political landscape in Sri Lanka on the first Independence Day. In the previous article I showed how the two major events that was staged on the Galle Face end of the city on […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala Three separate political events that gathered momentum and ran in three different directions to dominate the political landscape in the post-independent era took place simultaneously on February 4, 1948 — the first independence day —  in the city of Colombo. Oddly enough, all three events occurred in  between Galle Face Green […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala I am impressed by Prof. Laksiri Fernando’s letter to the Governor of Jaffna highlighting the failure of his administration to issue summons in Tamil to a Tamil journalist of Jaffna. This journalist has a right to receive a communication from the government in  his mother tongue. To issue summons in Sinhalese […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala There are clear indications in Prof. Laksiri Fernando’s  response to my comment that he suffers from the common disease that affects some academics in the professoriate : they can’t hold two thoughts together and balance both in their pinheads to either think straight or arrive at a rational / logical conclusion. […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala Lenin once said that  Bernard Shaw was a good man fallen among  the Fabians – a group of wishy-washy left-wingers whose airy-fairy politics was neither in capitalism nor in any kind of scientific socialism. It was, at best, a shade of state welfarism within the capitalist framework. Prof. Laksiri Fernando (LF) […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala The two critical streams of  thought that flowed down the 20th century and bloodied the political landscape came from the North. These two streams swept aside all other Left-wing currents which were struggling to dominate the mainstream. Both streams of thought were identified and articulated by two Tamil leaders of the […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala Rising communal tensions and clashes in the thirties of the last century, shattering the pre-colonial and colonial communal harmony, debunk the myths of H. L. Seneviratne, (HLS), the  one-eyed theoretician, blaming S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike for the worsening  of inter-ethnic  relations and everything else that happened since he became Prime […]

H.L.D. Mahindapala Regurgitating the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist propaganda, first  injected into the political mainstream by G. G. Ponnambalam, in 1939 at Navalapitiya,  has been the forte of the one-eyed theoretician, H. L. Seneviratne. (HLS). He  has made a career out of his  Sinhala-Buddhist World View”, to use his fanciful lingo, which is nothing  but another derogatory term […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala The flow of migrants to Sri Lanka never ceased throughout its history.  Each  migratory wave came with its own characteristics. Each found its own niche in the over-arching Sinhala-Buddhist society. Historical records do not indicate that the new migrants encountered any difficulties in settling down with the numerically preponderant Sinhala-Buddhists. Take […]

H.L. D. Mahindapala Scholarly narratives tracing the brief history of the Tamils agree that the itinerant migrants from S. India turned into an organic and  distinct entity of their own in Sri Lanka only after they decided to be permanent  settlers in the northern region in the 13th and 14th centuries. The establishment of an […]

H. L. D. Mahindapala The stark contrast in the approach to the long-running North-South crisis, plagued with political and military confrontations, is seen clearly in the S.J.V. Chelvanayakam Memorial lecture” delivered by Dr. Rajitha Senaratne, Minister of Health, on 26th April 2017. In it he lauds Chelva”, the Father of Tamil separatism, to stratospheric heights […]