By Ananda P. Dasanayake –

I am a researcher, and I have spent my working life studying how bodies defend themselves. So, when I look at Sri Lanka, I do not see a country that suddenly fell ill in 2022. I see a patient whose immune system was disabled years earlier.

A healthy body produces abnormal cells every day. It escapes cancer not because its cells never go wrong, but because its defenses catch the wrong cells early. Repair genes fix the damage or order the cell to die. Natural killer cells patrol for anything unfamiliar. T cells hunt down what remains. Immunologists call this surveillance, and it works almost every time.

Cancer is what happens when a dangerous cell learns to evade it. Let’s call it Rajapaksa Cell. Or Ranil or Sirisena cell. It hides its markers. It switches off the T cells that approach. It recruits neighboring tissue to shield it, and it builds its own blood supply. Immunologists describe three phases: elimination, equilibrium, and escape. In the last phase, the tumor is no longer being watched. It is being fed.

Now look at Sri Lanka. The politician who takes a commission on a public contract is the abnormal cell. That is not the surprising part, because every society produces such people. The surprising part is how thoroughly our defenses stopped working. Auditors report findings that are filed and forgotten. Cases crawl through the courts until witnesses die, get killed, or lose interest. Prosecutors learn which files not to open. Asset declarations are made and then kept from the very public they are meant to protect. Each of these is a checkpoint, and each was taught to look away.

Then comes what tumors do best: recruiting. Corruption never works alone. It needs the contractor, the clerk, the relative on the payroll, the neighbor who shrugs and says this is how things are done. These are the suppressor cells that tell healthy tissue to stand down. A body in that condition can feel normal for a long time. Then, in 2022, the foreign reserves ran out, the fuel queues stretched for miles, and the country saw what the scan looks like after years of silent growth.

What followed gives me hope. Ordinary citizens filled the streets, and the response was immune in every sense of the word. An alarm went through the tissue. People who had never protested went out to do so, and a government that seemed untouchable fell. Parliament has since passed a stronger anti-corruption law.

But every oncologist knows the danger of early remission. A tumor that is shrunk but not cleared comes back, and it comes back smarter. The great medical advance of my lifetime, immunotherapy, does not poison the tumor. It removes the brakes the tumor placed on the body’s own defenders. The political equivalent is not revenge, and it is not a heroic savior. It is restoring the checkpoints: an audit office that answers to the public, prosecutors who cannot be transferred for doing their jobs, courts that finish what they start, and asset declarations that any citizen can read.

The Buddha is often described as a physician. He names the illness, finds its cause, affirms that a cure exists, and prescribes the path. Sri Lanka has made the diagnosis. The question now is whether we will complete the treatment.

The immune system is still there. It is the voter, the whistleblower, the honest civil servant, people in the armed forces, and the reporter who files the story anyway. Our task is to stop disabling it.

Look at the cockroach party in neighboring India. They got it right. Now it is your turn, you young people in in Sri Lanka. 

Let’s wipe all the cancel cells. Including the ones in Viharamahadevi Park.

*Professor Ananda P. Dasanayake is a Public Voices Fellow of The Op-Ed Project in partnership with New York University.