-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.June.19, 2.40 PM) Two moral universes collided: one driven by vengeance and impunity, the other anchored in dignity, wellbeing, and the rule of law.
“Acintitampi bhavati, cintitampi vinassati”
There are moments in a nation’s history when the expected collapses and the unimaginable arrives with the force of destiny. Sri Lanka has lived inside that paradox for decades. The ancient line from the Mahājanaka Jātaka — “Acintitampi bhavati, cintitampi vinassati” — is not a gentle spiritual reflection. It is a political verdict. What one expects does not happen; what happens is what no one imagined. It is the operating principle of a country where impunity has been the only stable institution, and where the deep state has survived by mastering the art of the unforeseen.
His untouchable masters wished for torture, death, and the erasure of due process. The victims — the families, the citizens, the ones who have lived through decades of state violence — demanded only health, safety, and a fair trial. These two moral universes did not merely disagree; they collided. And in that collision, the deeper architecture of Sri Lanka’s political violence became visible.
To understand this moment, one must begin with the long shadow of unprosecuted crimes. In 1977, post-election violence left bodies in the streets and ashes where homes once stood. No one was convicted. Parliament laundered the crimes. In 1983, thousands were slaughtered in broad daylight, and the state responded not by prosecuting perpetrators but by banning three leftwing parties. Even the fortytwo inmates murdered inside Welikada Prison — under state protection — were absorbed into the country’s vast archive of unacknowledged atrocities.
The pattern metastasized. Chemmani, where more than two hundred skeletons — including children’s — were unearthed. Matale, where over 150 bodies surfaced from the soil of 1987–89. Mannar Town. The Colombo dockyard. Torture camps like Batalanda. Gunsite, where eleven children vanished. Hundreds of other sites, witnessed by survivors and recorded in commissions that produced reports but never justice.
This is not a catalogue of horrors. It is a blueprint — a doctrine of governance built on the assumption that the state may kill, disappear, torture, and silence without consequence. Journalists like Lasantha Wickrematunge, human rights defenders like Prageeth Ekneligoda, lawyers, priests, and ordinary citizens have all been absorbed into this logic of erasure. The Easter Sunday attacks, with their 273 dead, were not an aberration but a continuation of a political culture where power, corruption, and impunity form a single organism.
Impunity is not a stable condition. It accumulates until it collapses. Decades of unprosecuted crimes created a class of actors who genuinely stopped believing in consequences. But the machine miscalculated. The Aragalaya of 2022 erupted. The NPP rose. And something shifted — not yet fully visible, but unmistakably present. The deep state, accustomed to controlling outcomes, suddenly found itself confronting a public no longer willing to be governed by fear.
The drama surrounding Suresh Sallay was engineered to look like a groundswell — a public uprising in miniature. But when the curtain rose, the stage was empty. His political theatre at Fort Railway Station failed to attract even fifty people. The cameras were ready, the script prepared, the handlers waiting for a crowd that never arrived. What was meant to be a show of strength became a demonstration of isolation.
His appeals to religious authority were equally hollow. Sending his wife to the Mahanayake produced no ripple. The silence was deafening. Unlike figures such as Thileepan, who in 1987 fasted to death before 100,000 people at Nallur Kandaswamy Temple demanding India honour its pledges to the Tamil people, or Murugathasan Varnakulasingham, who in 2009 self-immolated outside the UN headquarters in Geneva to force global attention onto Tamil suffering, Sallay stood alone. Their acts — however controversial their contexts — carried symbolic weight because they emerged from collective anguish and political meaning. Sallay’s spectacle collapsed because it had no such moral gravity.
Even Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongfully convicted in 1894, became a global emblem of injustice because his suffering exposed the rot inside a powerful institution. His case split the French Republic and ultimately reshaped its legal conscience. Sallay’s drama, by contrast, exposed nothing except the exhaustion of a political machine trying to manufacture sympathy without legitimacy.
Even his “untouchable” patrons could not manufacture the illusion of mass support. Their networks have fractured. Their levers no longer move the public. Sallay’s isolation is not personal; it is structural — the isolation of a machine that has lost its audience, its credibility, and its capacity to manipulate the nation.
Shani Abeysekera’s letter to Mrs. Sallay — “It will not happen” — was not a threat. It was a statement of structural reality. The demand to remove Shani will not succeed. The attempt to collapse the NPP government will not succeed. The opposition is too fractured, too compromised, too entangled in the very networks of impunity now being exposed. The deep state’s old playbook is failing because the conditions that sustained it have changed.
The moral centre of this crisis lies in the Mahājanaka Jātaka (No. 539) — the source of the verse that frames this entire essay: “Acintitampi bhavati, cintitampi vinassati.” The unimagined happens; the carefully planned collapses.
In that Jātaka, the Bodhisatta survives a shipwreck and finds himself alone in the open ocean. Everyone else has drowned. Rescue is impossible. And yet he swims — not because he expects survival, but because effort is the only dignified response to uncertainty. When the oceangoddess Maṇimekhalā finally notices him, she asks why he did not surrender. His answer is the same truth Sri Lanka confronts today: even the unimaginable can occur, and even the certain can fail.
This is the ethic embodied by those who refuse to surrender to the machinery of impunity: Sandya Ekneligoda, the families of Lasantha and the Easter victims, Achala Seneviratne, the parents of the eleven disappeared children. They do not swim because victory is guaranteed. They swim because truth demands effort, even when the outcome is unknown.
The Bodhisatta’s lesson is not mystical. It is political. It is legal. It is the antidote to despair: Swim — not because success is certain, but because surrender is immoral.
Justice for the Easter victims and justice for those accused of failing to prevent the attacks are not competing demands. They are the same demand: that the law apply equally, without torture, coercion, or political manipulation. Sallay must be kept alive, healthy, and free from mistreatment — not because he is innocent or guilty, but because justice collapses the moment the state abandons its own principles.
The story of Augusto Pinochet is the closest modern parable for Sri Lanka’s present moment — a reminder that even the most fortified impunity can fracture under the weight of truth. Pinochet believed he had engineered an unbreakable legal fortress: a 1978 selfamnesty law, a constitution designed to shield him, and a senatorforlife position crafted explicitly to place him beyond the reach of any future prosecution. For nearly a decade, this architecture held. Chile’s Rettig Commission documented thousands of killings, disappearances, and torture cases, yet no one could touch him. The law had been weaponised into a sanctuary.
But impunity has a fatal flaw: it assumes permanence. And permanence is the one thing history never grants.
In 1998, the unexpected happened. Lawyers acting for victims filed complaints in Spain. A Spanish court invoked universal jurisdiction — a doctrine that says some crimes are so grave that any court, anywhere, may hear them. British detectives walked into a London clinic and arrested Pinochet as he recovered from back surgery. He never faced trial, but the arrest itself shattered the illusion of invulnerability. Chilean courts, emboldened by the crack in the wall, stopped applying the amnesty law. The shield dissolved.
Pinochet’s downfall teaches a lesson the deep state never wants to hear: Impunity is not a fortress. It is a bubble. And bubbles burst.
Every deep state imagines itself eternal. It believes its secrets are too dark to surface, its networks too entrenched to unravel, its patrons too powerful to fall. But history is merciless to such illusions. The deep state survives only as long as the public remains afraid, the judiciary remains compromised, and the political class remains obedient. When any one of these pillars weakens, the machinery begins to shake. When two weaken, it begins to crack. When all three shift — as they have in Sri Lanka — collapse becomes inevitable.
The deep state’s greatest miscalculation is always the same: it mistakes silence for loyalty, and fear for consent.
But silence eventually breaks. Fear eventually loses its currency. And the truth, once it begins to surface, becomes heavier than the machinery built to suppress it.
Sallay is not the password to the deep state. Asad Mawlana is not the window. The investigators already know more than the public imagines. The political theatre is a distraction — a last, desperate attempt to control a narrative that is slipping out of the machine’s hands. When the limit of the lie is reached, the truth asserts itself with the force of anicca — the impermanence no power can escape.
The deep state is not immortal. It only behaves like it is — until the moment it isn’t.
The path forward is not spectacle. It is legal clarity. Sallay must cooperate. He must face trial. He must be protected from torture and coercion. His family must understand that those who claim to defend him are the ones who benefit most if he dies. A death in custody would be a convenience death — one that stops evidence and protects godfathers.
The only path out of this darkness is the path Alfred Dreyfus walked: humiliation, false accusation, political circus, and finally vindication through law. It is the path of the Bodhisatta: effort without certainty, struggle without surrender, truth without fear.
Sri Lanka stands at the edge of transformation. The deep state is not immortal. Impunity is not permanent. And the unexpected — the acintita — is already happening. The question is not whether the old machinery will collapse. It is whether the country will have the courage to swim when the ocean rises.
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by (2026-06-19 09:52:16)
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