Remythologizing Discourses: State and Insurrectionary Violence in Sri Lanka

Abstract

With India and Burma, Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, a former British colony, inaugurated the great wave of decolonization which would not end until the colonial world was replaced by a world of independent nations. The transition to independence was peaceful and harmonious. Colombo was considered a possible site for the headquarters of the British Commonwealth. It seemed a model for peaceful pluralism. Today it is a country of angry widows. Two of them, daughter and mother, are as a result of recent elections respectively: “President”, Mrs Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, and “Prime Minister”, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. The former’s husband, Vijaya Kumaratunga, an actor and politician, was shot by leftist militants in 1988. The latter’s husband, Solomon Bandaranaike, the president of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party which he founded, was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959 (after which she became the world’s first woman prime minister and Freedom Party leader). The opposition party candidate to Mrs Kumaratunga’s People’s Alliance was Srima Dissanayake, who stood for election for the United National Party in place of her husband who was blown up by a young woman who, positioning herself some ten feet from the rostrum where Mr Dissanayake was speaking, blew him up and herself with a bomb hidden under her shirt. This some eighteen months after a suicide bomber, riding a bicycle, sent by the Tamil Tigers had blown up the then President Ranashinghe Premadasa. A week before this event a political associate of Mr Dissanayake was also killed, on order it was widely rumoured of Mr Premadasa.