Sri Lanka’s democratic journey since Independence in 1948 has been a series of triumphs frequently eclipsed by tragedy. While we pride ourselves on being the oldest democracy in Asia, that title feels increasingly like a relic of a bygone era, polished for international consumption but hollowed out by decades of emergency regulations and State overreach. Today, we stand at a crossroads that will define the next half century of our republic. The introduction of the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA) is a profound interrogation of whether the system change promised in 2024 was a genuine ideological shift or a clever rebranding of autocracy.
The primary concern lies in the language of the draft Act itself. In any functioning democracy, the distinction between a criminal act and a political protest must be sacrosanct. However, the PSTA blurs these lines. By including “serious damage to property” or “interference with essential services” under the umbrella of terrorism, the State effectively grants itself a toolkit to dismantle any significant movement of civil disobedience. We must ask ourselves what would take place, if a student protest or a labour strike should ever be met with the full, crushing weight of counter-terrorism machinery. History suggests that when a State is given the power to define its critics as terrorists, it rarely hesitates to do so. This is a direct threat to the right to dissent, the very heartbeat of a free society.
In this context, the tragic fate of Roshen Chanaka in 2011 remains a harrowing testament to the cost of State overreach. A twenty-one-year-old machine operator in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone, Chanaka was gunned down by Police during a strike against a pension bill that workers feared would plunder their savings. His death was not merely a failure of policing but a systemic assault on the right to assembly, compounded by reports that he was denied timely medical care while in custody. The subsequent resignation of the Inspector General of Police and the withdrawal of the bill under the weight of a forty-thousand-strong walkout proved a singular truth: when the State enforces security through the barrel of a gun, it achieves only the radicalisation of the citizenry it seeks to subdue. As we debate the PSTA today, the ghost of Katunayake serves as a reminder that when the law is used to criminalise economic and social dissent, the blood of the innocent becomes the ultimate price of stability.
The Rathupaswala incident, also known as the Weliweriya shooting, was another incident of violent crackdown by the State on unarmed protesters demanding clean drinking water on 1 August 2013.
Furthermore, the fourth estate finds itself in the crosshairs. The clauses regarding the “dissemination of terrorist publications” and the “encouragement of terrorism” are particularly insidious. Even with the thin veneer of good faith protections, the mere threat of a protracted legal battle and State detention is enough to induce a suffocating self-censorship. Investigative journalism, the very lifeblood of a transparent society, cannot survive in an environment where a reporter must wonder if an exposé on State failure will be interpreted as an act of subversion. If the media ceases to be a watchdog, it becomes a lapdog: at that point, democracy has already begun to rot from within.
We must also confront the gradual militarisation of our civil spaces. Granting the armed forces and the coast guard the authority to stop, search, and arrest civilians is a regressive step that threatens to undo years of delicate progress in community policing. For the residents of the North and East, who have lived under the shadow of the uniform for generations, this is a lived reality that fosters friction and distrust between the State and the people it is sworn to protect. A democracy that relies on the military to police its own citizens has already conceded that its civil institutions have failed.
The 2024 elections were a clarion call for a new way of governing. The electorate did not vote for a more efficient version of the old oppression: they voted for the dismantling of the structures that allowed such oppression to flourish. If the PSTA is passed in its current form, it will be seen as a betrayal of that mandate. It will signal to the youth and the working class that the faces may change, but the iron fist remains the same.