By Sarath de Alwis –

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty… The state was created to protect us from evil… but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago / The Red Wheel

I voted for AKD. A profound sense of letdown compels this essay. In search of solace, I find myself turning to the old poets for refuge. It is a terrible thing when the dawn you so long-awaited deliver nothing but the same old midnight.

I fervently hope that within the ranks of the 159 NPP parliamentarians, there remain at least a few who have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. It is in that hope that I recall his timeless warnings in this essay.

The titles of the two legislative masterpieces of the NPP government, now awaiting debate and perhaps eventual passage, are eloquent.

The first is called the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, and the second is the Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill.

The term “Terrorism” famously defies definition. What, then, are organized crimes? And what are disorganized crimes?

Those wise words of US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter immediately come to mind: “All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.”

Both bills have already generated furious scrutiny. Distinguished scholars, including those rare individuals who possess the unique privilege of first-hand experience with “State Terror,” have exposed the deep systemic dangers of these two drafts.

I am no lawyer. I am no constitutional pundit either. But I do have a memory. I belong to the generation that witnessed our collective slide into the abyss of unreason following the passage of the original Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).

I remember the legendary lawyer and Marxist politician Dr. Colvin R. de Silva describing his old classmate—the architect of the executive presidency and prophet of the PTA, JR Jayewardene—with the following immortal words: “The problem with Dickie is that often he runs faster than the winds that buffet him.”

As we watch President Anura Kumara Dissanayake navigate his ship of state, one is forced to ask the very same question: Is AKD running faster than the winds that buffet him?

In his frantic hurry to manage a fragile economy still in recovery mode, appease international lenders, and anchor his party’s grip on the state, is he sprinting so fast into the arms of the old national security apparatus that he has outrun his own shadow?

The parallel between JR (Dickie) Jayewardene’s executive velocity and AKD’s contemporary style appears obvious, instructive, and in this instance, quite chilling.

When JRJ assumed absolute power in 1977, he moved with a terrifying, calculated speed. He claimed that his radical restructuring of the state, the creation of the omnipotent Executive Presidency and the enactment of the draconian 1979 PTA—was a historical necessity to pave the way for economic liberalization and to protect the nation from chaotic, destabilizing forces.

JRJ ran faster than the gales of labor unrest and ethnic tension, outrunning democratic norms to build an institutional fortress for the ruling class.

Today, AKD operates with a similarly breathless executive urgency. Faced with the howling winds of IMF restructuring, external debt traps, and the volatile undercurrents of public expectations, the National People’s Power (NPP) government has seemingly abandoned the slow, cumbersome luxury of democratic consultation.

Like JRJ, AKD’s style is one of top-down efficiency; he behaves not as a subverter of the system, but as its ultimate authority—a kind of Supreme Arbiter!

The tragedy of the current moment is that while JRJ strived to build the national security state, AKD is sprinting to preserve it, proving that executive speed invariably leaves human rights far behind in the dust.

Reformer’s Two Scripts

What happens when the subordinate class finally scales the ramparts of the state and occupies the throne room? History offers two scripts.

In the first, the victorious revolutionaries smash the old instruments of tyranny, declaring an unvarnished dawn of liberty. In the second—the more common, painfully predictable script—they look around the palace, realize how remarkably comfortable the executive chairs are, and decide that the old instruments of state control weren’t actually not bad. They were just being operated on by the wrong people!

With these two bills, the promised political renaissance is rapidly transforming from a progressive social-democratic daydream into a wonderfully Orwellian reality.

During the 2024 election cycle, the NPP alliance, spearheaded by the modern Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), marched to power on a platform of immaculate moral renewal.

Their manifesto explicitly promised the total abolition of all “oppressive” laws, a blanket guarantee of civil rights, and the definitive burial of the infamous PTA.

Now, the Ministry of Justice has presented a parallel universe of legal wizardry. To the uninitiated, this looks like a flagrant betrayal. But that is because you do not understand the subtle, Orwellian dialectic of modern governance.

In this new dispensation, “Good Governance” is no longer measured by human rights charters or international legal certainty. “Good” is whatever the JVP Politburo decides is good on any given day!

If the old regime wiretapped you, it was fascism. If the new regime, does it, it is a progressive prophylactic against social disorder.

The “State Terror” Blueprint

Nowhere is this legislative sorcery more sickening than in the actual provisions of the new Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill.

For a nation that has spent nearly half a century suffocating under the old PTA, this new draft is an exercise in profound disillusionment.

Instead of delivering the promised burial of counter-terrorism overreach, this bill replicates the fluid, all-encompassing definitions of “terrorism” that turn ordinary political expression into capital offenses.

Under these provisions, the state reserves the right to classify acts of public protest, labor strikes, or civil disobedience as acts of terrorism if they can be framed as “disrupting essential services” or “coercing the government”.

This is the foundational architecture of the garrison state. By leaving the definition of terror patently ambiguous, the bill systematically strips away the foundational due process guarantees that Sri Lankans have fought to preserve since the birth of our modern nation-state.

I have been told by knowledgeable people that this new law grants law enforcement sweeping powers of executive detention, allowing suspects to be held for prolonged periods completely severed from the vital check of immediate judicial oversight.

Parallel to this is the jurisprudential innovation of the dress code and tattoo clause inside the Prevention of Organised Crimes Bill.

Under this innovation, courts can determine if you belong to an “organised criminal group” based on a highly subjective lifestyle checklist! Your style of dress, your vocabulary, your tattoos, or your physical and virtual associations.

Sri Lankans will easily recall Naomi Coleman, the 37-year-old British mental health nurse who was arbitrarily arrested and deported simply for having a tattoo of the Buddha on her arm—an act the Supreme Court later ruled had absolutely no basis in law.

If you sport a bizarre tattoo, use a pithy Sinhala expression that irritates a sensitive cop, or happen to accidentally join a Zoom meeting where someone holds a dissenting opinion, congratulations! You are now a potential asset of a transnational syndicate.

This law effectively criminalizes identity and association rather than concrete criminal conduct, turning every eccentric citizen into a potential threat to the state.

It was the great Czech dissident Václav Havel who warned us about the unique horror of the post-totalitarian state, where the system demands total, unquestioning conformity to its arbitrary codes.

Havel observed that such a system forces the individual to “live within a lie,” compelling ordinary citizens to act out rituals of obedience just to survive.

A lawyer friend tells me that these two bills effectively “automate compliance”. Our original PTA famously converted the land into a permanent garrison state; these new bills threaten to convert the remaining civilian spaces into an open-air prison where state wardens judge your loyalty by the ink on your skin and the words in your mouth.

Then comes the absolute “gag” on the press. The bill makes it a criminal offense to publish the name or anything that could identify a victim of crime, while imposing heavy restrictions on media reporting of court proceedings without explicit judicial permission.

The two bills constitute a masterpiece of authoritarian irony.

A government that swept to power on the backs of investigative journalism, alternative digital media, and public whistleblowing has now criminalized the very act of describing how the state prosecutes its citizens. The media is effectively told to sit quietly in the corner and print only the officially managed, sterilized truth.

Why the New Vanguard Must Sprint

To understand why the NPP feels absolutely forced to run at this breakneck, JRJ speed, one must look past the legislative text and peep into the vaults of the global finance markets.

The unspoken crisis of the AKD presidency is the crushing, non-negotiable weight of the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility program that ends, and the new one that we are sure to end up with.

When the NPP was in opposition, they vociferously criticized the devastating social costs of fiscal austerity, electricity tariff hikes, regressive taxation, and the fire sale of state assets. They promised a compassionate, people-first alternative. But the reality of state power is a brutal, sobering experience.

Once in the driver’s seat, AKD realized that the state machinery cannot survive without the next IMF tranche. The “Renaissance” must be funded, and the gatekeepers of global capital demand absolute compliance.

This creates a terrifying calculus for a leftist government. Adhering to the IMF structural adjustments means enforcing policies that inevitably compress the living standards of the working class, slash subsidies, and drive up the cost of survival.

The laws of political gravity dictate that such severe economic pain will, sooner or later, trigger massive social unrest, labor strikes, and public protests.

And this is precisely why the government is running so fast into the arms of repressive legislation. They are acutely aware that they are administering a bitter economic pill to the very population that elected them.

To prevent the inevitable blowback from disrupting the IMF’s rigid fiscal targets, the state must preemptively fortify its defenses.

The vanguard must sprint because if the economic storm catches up to them before these security structures are locked in place, the entire edifice of their governance risks collapsing.

Dialectics of State Preservation

There is a piercingly painful historical irony in seeing a movement born in anti-systemic rebellion morph into the supreme custodians of the exact same police stations, intelligence networks, and surveillance cells they once fought.

Navigating painful economic restructuring compels the former outsiders to embrace the principle that the end justifies the means.

To protect its own tenure and ensure economic stability, the state instinctively preserves and modernizes its tools of executive detention, warrantless searches, and parallel criminal laws.

The Minister of Justice is now tasked with writing laws that satisfy both the ideological expectations of a revolutionary vanguard and the demands of a deep-state security apparatus.

He has crafted a legislative regime where the state retains all its old, terrifying, defensive teeth, painting them with a pristine coat of left-leaning “ethical management”.

The two bills have effectively synthesized the institutional paranoia of the old guard with the administrative discipline of the new left.

NPP’s Renaissance, Orwell’s Animal Farm

The tragedy of this NPP “Renaissance” is that it validates George Orwell’s most basic insight from Animal Farm.

The pigs eventually stand on two legs, put on trousers, and the overworked horses outside can no longer tell the difference between the old masters and the new ones.

Like Dr. Colvin R. de Silva’s “Dickie” Jayewardene before him, AKD is running faster than the winds of social and economic crises buffering on his presidency.

But in his rush to outrun the storm, he is outrunning his own promises, leaving democratic safeguards far behind in the dust.

The parallel legal structures being built today are designed to bypass the ordinary safeguards of criminal law, allowing the Ministry of Public Security to bypass magistrates and detain citizens for up to a year on mere “reasonable suspicion”.

The next time you feel the urge to exercise your constitutional right to protest, or perhaps just write a critique of the regime, please remember you are now in a new Orwellian country. The state is always right.