By Vishwamithra –

“Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.” ~ Victor Hugo

There are newspapers that record history. There are others that merely follow it. And then there are those rare publications that become part of history themselves—not because they command imposing buildings, printing presses or great financial resources, but because they possess the courage to publish what others would prefer to leave unsaid.

Colombo Telegraph belongs unmistakably to that final category.

On 12 September 2026, Colombo Telegraph completes fifteen years of publication. Fifteen years may be a comparatively brief period in the life of an established newspaper. In the turbulent history of Sri Lankan journalism, however, these have not been ordinary years. They have encompassed the consolidation of post-war authoritarianism, the defeat and return of the Rajapaksas, the rise and disintegration of the Yahapalanaya experiment, the Easter Sunday tragedy, the ascent of Gotabaya and the extraordinary emergence of the National People’s Power as the dominant political force in the country.

Through all these upheavals, Colombo Telegraph has remained what it set out to be: an independent public-interest platform committed to the idea that democracy becomes meaningless when citizens are denied the truth, dissenting voices are driven into silence and power is protected from scrutiny.

Its story began not in comfort, but in exile.

The website was launched from London in September 2011 by journalist and media-freedom activist Uvindu Kurukulasuriya. He had left Sri Lanka during one of the darkest periods in the history of the country’s media, following the assassination of his friend and fellow journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge and threats directed against Uvindu himself. The circumstances surrounding its birth therefore gave Colombo Telegraph its character: it was created not as a commercial venture in search of an audience, but as an answer to fear.

Its beginnings were remarkably modest. Uvindu reportedly purchased the domain for twenty-five dollars and initially undertook much of the writing, editing and publishing himself. From that slender material foundation emerged a publication that would become an influential forum for Sri Lankan political commentary, investigation and argument.

That is not merely an entrepreneurial achievement. It is an act of faith—the faith that truth can travel without a printing press, that ideas can cross borders even when journalists are driven beyond them, and that a publication does not require a wealthy proprietor if it possesses an editor with courage.

When Colombo Telegraph appeared in 2011, Sri Lanka was living beneath the enormous shadow cast by the Rajapaksa administration. The war had ended two years earlier. The country had been presented with an exceptional opportunity to heal its wounds, rebuild its democratic institutions and construct a lasting accommodation among its Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities. Instead, triumphalism increasingly displaced reconciliation. Presidential authority expanded, independent institutions weakened, criticism became dangerous and much of the established media learned the art of cautious silence.

The most damaging form of censorship is not always an official prohibition. It is the fear that settles inside the mind of the journalist before a sentence is written. It is the paragraph removed in anticipation of a telephone call, the name omitted to protect a career and the truth softened because the consequences of clarity appear too grave.

Colombo Telegraph was established precisely to resist that psychology. Its founding mission recognized that abductions, killings, intimidation and political pressure had created a culture in which the public conversation increasingly centered not upon what journalists wrote, but upon what they were compelled to withhold. It declared that freedom of expression must protect unsettling and unpopular opinion, because a freedom confined to socially or politically acceptable speech is hardly a freedom at all.

This commitment made the publication valuable—and inevitably made it controversial.

Over the years, Colombo Telegraph has carried the work of journalists, academics, lawyers, political activists, former public officials, economists, artists and citizens whose opinions range across the ideological spectrum. Some have written with formidable scholarship; others with indignation, wit, experience or deep personal pain. Its pages have accommodated constitutional argument, economic analysis, ethnic reconciliation, allegations of corruption, human-rights concerns, literary reflection and fierce political disagreement.

Not every article has pleased every reader. Nor should it have done so.

A publication genuinely committed to freedom cannot confine itself to opinions approved by one political party, ethnic community, social class or fashionable intellectual circle. The proper measure of an independent journal is not whether we agree with everything it publishes. It is whether it is prepared to publish arguments that compel us to think, question our certainties and confront realities we may find inconvenient.

In that sense, Colombo Telegraph has functioned not simply as a news and opinion website but as a restless democratic forum. Beneath its articles, the readers themselves have conducted another, sometimes unruly, national conversation. The comments have ranged from the perceptive to the provocative, from the scholarly to the sarcastic and, occasionally, from the illuminating to the absurd. Yet even this cacophony possesses democratic value. It demonstrates that public discourse is alive.

Democracy is not a drawing-room conversation among people who already agree. It is an untidy encounter among competing memories, identities, convictions and interpretations. The answer to objectionable speech is not necessarily silence imposed from above, but more speech, better reasoning and the courage to contest falsehood openly.

This does not mean that freedom carries no obligations. Journalism must remain answerable to truth, fairness and evidence. Allegations can wound reputations, and the power to publish must be exercised with care. Colombo Telegraph itself recognizes these responsibilities through its published commitment to corrections and the right of reply.

Nevertheless, occasional errors or excesses do not diminish the necessity of the space it has created. A nation is endangered far more by an obedient press that never challenges authority than by a contentious press whose claims can be questioned, answered and corrected.

The survival of Colombo Telegraph is especially significant because it has never rested upon the financial foundations of a large media corporation. It has operated through the work of exiled journalists, contributors and volunteers, without the comfort of a powerful proprietor standing between the publication and those angered by it. Its independence has therefore carried an element of vulnerability. That vulnerability makes its endurance all the more admirable.

The publication has been obstructed, blocked and subjected to pressure under more than one administration. Yet attempts to make it inaccessible ultimately confirmed its relevance. Governments do not ordinarily attempt to silence voices they consider inconsequential. Every effort to suppress Colombo Telegraph became an unintended acknowledgment that its reporting and commentary had reached places where authority did not wish them to go.

The technological nature of the publication also altered the geography of Sri Lankan political discussion. It connected Colombo with Jaffna, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Melbourne and countless other locations inhabited by Sri Lankans whose emotional and intellectual engagement with their country had survived migration or exile. It allowed writers outside the island to participate immediately in its national debate, while giving readers within Sri Lanka access to arguments often absent from the mainstream press.

The word “Colombo” in its title therefore became larger than the city. It came to denote a meeting place—a digital public square in which the island and its diaspora could debate one another across distance.

During these fifteen years, governments have risen proclaiming reform and fallen beneath the weight of their own failures. Political heroes have become disappointments; defeated movements have returned to power; promises of good governance have dissolved into scandal; and those who once condemned concentrated authority have sometimes embraced it after entering office.

Throughout these reversals, the responsibility of independent journalism has remained unchanged. Its duty is not to act as the permanent ally of a government or the automatic instrument of an opposition. It must scrutinize yesterday’s rulers, today’s reformers and tomorrow’s claimants to power with the same unwavering eye.

That obligation is particularly important today. The election of a government promising a clean political culture does not make independent journalism less necessary. It makes it more necessary. Governments confident in their integrity should welcome scrutiny rather than fear it. No leader, party or movement—however popular, well-intentioned or historically significant—should be permitted to become the sole author of its own public reputation.

A free press is not an enemy of democratic government. It is one of democracy’s most demanding friends.

At the heart of the Colombo Telegraph story stands Uvindu Kurukulasuriya. To sustain an independent publication for fifteen years from exile requires more than professional skill. It requires endurance, stubbornness and an almost unreasonable belief in the value of the written word. Editors are seldom thanked for the articles they improve, the legal and political pressures they absorb, the disputes they mediate or the lonely decisions they make before pressing the button that sends a contentious piece into the public domain.

For creating and preserving this platform, Uvindu deserves the gratitude not only of its contributors and readers but of everyone who values the democratic right to question authority.

A tribute worthy of Colombo Telegraph, however, should not become an exercise in uncritical praise. The finest way to honor an independent publication is to insist that it remain independent: open to correction, resistant to factional loyalty, hospitable to serious disagreement and forever suspicious of power. It must continue to distinguish courage from recklessness, revelation from rumor and legitimate criticism from personal malice.

Fifteen years ago, Colombo Telegraph began with little more than a domain name, a determined editor and a conviction that silence must not be allowed to triumph.

Today, it possesses something far more substantial: a record.

It is a record written across some of the most consequential years in Sri Lanka’s recent history—a record of arguments conducted, secrets exposed, orthodoxies challenged and voices given a home when other doors remained closed.

On its fifteenth anniversary, we should celebrate not merely the survival of a website, but the endurance of an idea: that no government should be beyond question, no community denied a voice and no truth suppressed merely because its publication is inconvenient.

May Colombo Telegraph continue to disturb complacency, challenge authority and enlarge the democratic conversation.

In a country too often injured by silence, may it continue to speak.