A longform feature by Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.June.16, 11.30 PM) “When evil seeks power, it first borrows the language of virtue - and the saints who trust that language become its easiest prey.”
Sri Lanka is a country built on unresolved ghosts. Eleven schoolchildren abducted for ransom, swallowed by the state’s own machinery. Prageeth Ekneligoda, a journalist who vanished into the night as if the earth itself conspired to erase him. Lasantha Wickrematunge was murdered in broad daylight after predicting his own death and the impunity that would follow. Twenty-seven inmates at Welikada Prison were executed inside a state facility as though their lives were administrative inconveniences. And the Easter Sunday bombings, the most devastating attack in modern Sri Lankan history, are still wrapped in political fog and institutional silence.
These are not isolated tragedies. They are the fingerprints of a system that has learned to hide its darkest instincts behind the symbols of holiness. Because in Sri Lanka, evil does not roar. It whispers. It smiles. It bows. It wears robes, uniforms, and titles. It arrives as a saint.
This is the story of how clergy, judges, intelligence chiefs, lawyers, and charismatic politicians became entangled in a machinery that weaponised virtue, manipulated fear, and turned morality into a mask. It is the story of saints who walked into the snare — and saints who were the snare.
The deep state in Sri Lanka is not a conspiracy theory. It is an architecture, a living, breathing organism built over decades of war, counterinsurgency, political paranoia, and institutional decay. It has no single mastermind. It has no headquarters. It survives because it is everywhere and nowhere at once.
Its first pillar is the security intelligence complex: SIS, DMI, CID/TID factions, military intelligence cells, and the shadow networks that grew in the East. These agencies became powerful during the war and never relinquished that power. Figures like SIS Director Suresh Salley appear again and again in public testimony not as lone villains, but as symbols of how intelligence power drifts into political orbit. The Sri Lanka Brief article you opened describes how intelligence failures around Easter were reframed as political opportunity, how the machinery of the state became a tool for “trading blood for political power.”
The second pillar is the political class, presidents, ministers, and strategists who do not control the deep state so much as negotiate with it. Gotabaya Rajapaksa rode the wave of fear into office. Ranil Wickremesinghe governs by balancing the same networks. Every administration inherits the architecture; none dismantles it.
The third pillar is the judicial-legal shield. This is where the deep state launders itself. Judges like A.H.M. Dilip Nawaz, Gotabaya’s first judicial appointee, had their names surface in Easter trial testimony and in BASL-linked campaigns targeting the Chief Justice, elevated under Gotabaya, who appeared at anti-CJ events, caught between judicial duty and political lineage. Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s Department, repeatedly identified by United Nations reports as a major obstacle to justice, became the institutional firewall behind which politically sensitive cases softened, stalled, or died.
The BASL, under figures like Rajeev Amarasuriya, presented itself as the guardian of judicial purity while shielding the AG’s Department and inserting itself into cases like the Kapila Chandrasena investigation. The Bar was no longer a neutral institution. It had become part of the choreography of impunity.
But the most dangerous pillar of all is the ideological layer, the fusion of religion, nationalism, and media that gives the deep state its voice, its camouflage, and its moral authority.
Deepstate terrorism is not the claim that the state “did” the attack. It is the recognition that extremist violence becomes politically useful when warnings are ignored, intelligence is selectively acted upon, investigations are steered, and fear becomes a tool of electoral mobilisation.
The Easter Sunday bombings were not merely a security failure. They were a political earthquake. They reshaped the electoral landscape, revived strongman fantasies, and breathed new life into the intelligence-political nexus. Extremist violence became the accelerant for a new political order.
This is not a conspiracy. It is structural opportunism, the deep state’s oldest instinct.
Some figures entered the post-Easter landscape with genuine moral intent and were promptly absorbed, manipulated, or weaponised by the deep state. They did not seek power. They sought truth, justice, clarity. And in doing so, they stepped directly into the machinery that thrives on their credibility.
The Cardinal believed that Gotabaya Rajapaksa would deliver justice. He walked into the trap with open eyes, trusting the strongman who was himself entangled in the architecture under scrutiny. His moral authority became a bargaining chip in a political game he never intended to play.
Chief Buddhist prelates, swept up in nationalist fervour, chanted anti-Muslim slogans and echoed the narratives that legitimised securitisation. Their robes, symbols of compassion, became instruments of mobilisation. They did not realise that the deep state does not need their wisdom; it needs their aura.
Justice Yasantha Kodagoda, elevated under Gotabaya, found himself pulled into the gravitational field of political lineage. His presence at anti-Chief Justice events created the image of a judge caught between judicial duty and the expectations of the power structure that elevated him.
Justice A.H.M. Dilip Nawaz, Gotabaya’s first judicial appointee, saw his name surface in Easter trial testimony and in BASL-linked campaigns targeting the Chief Justice. He became another figure drawn into the crossfire of institutional politics, not because he sought influence, but because the deep state knows how to weaponise proximity.
And then there is Saroj Pathirana, one of the most respected journalists of his generation. A man who’s reporting once cut through propaganda like a blade, now publicly criticising the Chief Justice in ways that appear to bolster the BASL’s selective crusade. Whether he intended it or not, his voice, trusted, admired, and morally weighty, became another tool in the deep state’s arsenal. This is how the machinery works: it does not silence every journalist; it recruits some of them through the seduction of righteous indignation. It turns critique into choreography.
These are not villains. They are saints who walked into the snare, moral figures whose good faith became a resource for the deep state, whose credibility became a currency, and whose voices, once independent, were pulled into the gravitational field of a system that feeds on virtue.
They remind us of the most painful truth of all:
The deep state does not fear the wicked. It fears the righteous and therefore seeks to own them.
If naïve saints lend legitimacy, false saints manufacture it.
Suresh Salley, repeatedly referenced in public testimony, became the guardian who cannot question the intelligence chief whose power is sanctified by secrecy.
Certain Sangha chiefs acted as intermediaries for political and intelligence interests, requesting favours in investigations and defending state actors. Their robes became political armour.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the charismatic patriarch, became the saint-patriot, a leader whose followers saw him not as a politician but as a saviour. Charisma became a shield against scrutiny.
The BASL leadership, under Rajeev Amarasuriya, wielded selective purity as a political weapon, attacking the Chief Justice while protecting the AG’s Department, even as the UN identified that department as a major obstacle to justice.
The Attorney General appointed by Ranil Wickremesinghe became the technocrat saint, the institutional figure whose authority could sanitise or stall politically sensitive cases.
These are the saints who were the snare, the actors whose public virtue concealed structural power.
The deep state survives because it needs both kinds of saints.
The naïve saint lends legitimacy, trusts the wrong actors, amplifies the wrong narratives, and becomes a moral shield for the system. The false saint weaponises virtue, manipulates public trust, hides behind robes and titles, and turns morality into political armour.
Together, they create a system where evil looks holy, holiness becomes compromised, and truth becomes impossible to locate.
This dual saint mechanism is the deep state’s most sophisticated survival strategy.
Sri Lanka cannot dismantle the deep state until it dismantles the myth of sanctified power, the saint politician, the saint judge, the saint monk, the saint intelligence chief, the saint technocrat, the saint lawyer. The country must learn to see that holiness is not immunity, moral authority is not proof of virtue, and the robe, the cassock, and the constitution are not shields against scrutiny.
The deep state survives because it has mastered the art of moral theatre. It knows how to wrap itself in saffron and silk, how to speak in the cadence of piety, how to turn fear into faith and faith into obedience. It knows that in a religious country, the most effective disguise for power is holiness. And it knows that the easiest people to manipulate are those who believe they are doing God’s work.
But the truth is simpler, harsher, and more ancient than any political slogan:
God does not hide behind power. Power hides behind God.
And so the question that now confronts every Sri Lankan is no longer political. It is spiritual. It is moral. It is the question that divides the living from the lost.
When you look at these unresolved crimes, the eleven abducted children, Prageeth Ekneligoda, Lasantha Wickrematunge, the Welikada killings, and the Easter bombings, when you look at the robes, the uniforms, the titles, the speeches, the sanctimony, the theatre of virtue that has protected the guilty and confused the innocent…
Whose side are you on?
Not left or right. Not government or opposition. Not Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim. Not even a saint or sinner.
The real question is this:
Are you with the saints of the deep state or with God?
Because in the end, there is no middle ground.
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by (2026-06-16 19:01:45)
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