By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -2026.June.27, 8.00 PM) "I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er." -Shakespeare
"Terrible is the temptation to do good”
"Unhappy the land that needs a hero."
-Bertolt Brecht
Before parliaments. Before constitutions. Before the very idea of a nation — there was Dhaam. The ancient South Indian board game, known also as Dayakattai or Dhayam, is not merely a pastime. It is a philosophy. It is a mirror. It asks one question every society must eventually answer: do you play the game honestly, in full view of everyone, or do you cheat when no one is looking?
Dhaam's rules are simple but devastating. The dice roll — that is fate. The movement of pieces — that is skill. But here is what makes Dhaam different from every game played in the corridors of Sri Lankan power: every move is visible. No hidden pieces. No secret strikes. Legitimacy, in Dhaam, can only be earned by playing openly. This is not a game. This is democracy. And Sri Lanka has been struggling to play it for decades.
Here is what makes Sri Lanka's story so painful and so difficult to explain.
The Dhaam board and the Chess board look almost identical. The Dhaam pieces and the Carrom pieces are both small, both round, both moved by human hands. You can sit at a Dhaam board, pick up Carrom pieces, and play an entirely different game — and for a long time, the people watching will not realise what has happened. You do not have to burn the democratic board to destroy democracy. You simply play the wrong game on the right board, with pieces that look enough like the real ones that the crowd cannot tell the difference — until the pockets are full and the board belongs to no one but the player who hollowed it out.
There is a Sinhala saying that names this perfectly: අපි නොදන්න චෙස් — the chess we do not know. The player speaks the language of Chess. He stands at what looks like a Chess board. But his hands are doing something else entirely. And the people, never taught to tell the difference, watch and trust and wait — while the game is played against them.
The First Decade: The Carrom Years
Mahinda Rajapaksa brought Carrom pieces to the Dhaam board and played openly — charismatically, without apology. He ended a civil war that had bled the country for three decades. He built highways. He made people feel that things were moving. And because he delivered, the people permitted the game. They watched Carrom pieces move across what was supposed to be a Dhaam board and told themselves it was close enough.
But the system Mahinda built was unlike anything before it. Impunity was the striker. The deep state was the board. Accountability was the pocket everything disappeared into. Journalists who asked difficult questions vanished — some literally. Judges who ruled inconveniently found their careers quietly redirected. The Attorney General's office became protection for allies and prosecution for enemies. The 18th Amendment abolished presidential term limits so the Carrom game could never end. The military, fresh from war, was embedded into civilian life, business, and governance. Patronage networks reached every province and every institution, making loyalty to Mahinda worth more than competence, integrity, or law.
This was not corruption in the ordinary sense. This was the architecture of impunity — Carrom pieces occupying every square of a board meant to play an entirely different game.
Shakespeare knew what happens to men who build this way: "I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er." Once impunity is built into the structure of the state, you cannot stop. The Rajapaksa decades did not merely corrupt Sri Lanka. They rewired it. The deep state they built did not disappear when the family fell. It went quiet. It recalibrated. Its pieces are still on the board.
In 2015, the people rose and said: enough. They voted for good governance. They voted for a clean board. They believed, genuinely and desperately, that the Carrom pieces were being removed and the real game was about to begin. What they got was a painted board.
The Yahapalana coalition promised Dhaam. It delivered a Dhaam board with Chess moves running underneath. The 19th Amendment restored some institutional checks. But the deep state was never truly dismantled. The patronage networks were shuffled, not broken. The Bond scandal — a fraud at the heart of the central bank — unfolded under Ranil's watch and was never honestly reckoned with. The people had voted for Dhaam. They received අපි නොදන්න චෙස්.
Then came Gotabaya — impunity returned, concentrated, presidential, absolute. The 20th Amendment dismantled what the 19th had built. And then the board broke. Not metaphorically. Literally. The economy collapsed. The foreign reserves vanished. Queues formed for fuel, for medicine, for cooking gas. The lights went out. What decades of Carrom and Chess had hidden beneath borrowed money and borrowed time finally became impossible to conceal.
The Aragalaya erupted. The people walked onto the board and said: this game is over. We are not pieces. We are players. For a genuinely historic moment, the board belonged to the people. Galle Face Green became the most honest political space Sri Lanka had seen in a generation.
Into the wreckage stepped Ranil Wickremesinghe — through parliamentary arithmetic, not the people's vote. He stabilised the economy. The queues shortened. The lights came back. But stability built on Chess moves on a Dhaam board is not the same as justice. The deep state recalibrated around him. The impunity architecture was not demolished. It was refinanced. Accountability remained distant, procedural, endlessly deferred. Ranil spoke Chess fluently to the end — the expertise deployed not to liberate the board, but to keep it in the hands of those who had always held it.
Then came AKD. And for the first time in three decades, someone sat down at the Dhaam board and played Dhaam.
The election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake was not merely a change of government. It was a change of game. The people — educated by decades of Carrom dressed as governance and Chess dressed as reform — chose a player whose entire political identity was built on the logic of the open board. Visible moves. Public legitimacy. Anti-corruption not as a slogan but as a discipline.
He has not moved to impeach the Chief Justice. He has not interfered in court proceedings however inconvenient the rulings. He has not weaponised the Attorney General's office. He has not telephoned judges. He has not used prosecution as a weapon against critics or withdrawn it as a favour to allies. He has not packed commissions or leaned on the Constitutional Council.
In any other political era these would be unremarkable absences. In the context of the decades that preceded him, they are a declaration. Every previous leader treated the judiciary as a piece to move. AKD has left it on the board — independent, protected, above the game. Brecht understood the difficulty of this ordinary decency: "Terrible is the temptation to do good." To resist picking up Carrom pieces when you have the power — this is the discipline that defines what this moment represents.
Justice is not an abstraction. It lives in the body. When a woman stands in a fuel queue for eight hours and comes home empty-handed, she does not need a scholar to explain economic policy. She knows the board is wrong. She knows the game being played in her name is not the game she was promised.
The Aragalaya was the people walking onto the board and saying: enough. We are not pieces. We are players. We know the difference between Dhaam and what you have been playing on this board. That demand — for rules that apply to everyone equally, for moves made in full view, for a state that serves the people who fund it — was the most honest thing that happened in Sri Lankan public life in a generation. It did not go away when the tents came down. It went into the ballot box. And it changed the game.
There is a move that losing players make in every sport, in every era, in every culture. When they cannot win by playing the game, they attack the umpire. They do not argue about the moves. They argue about the referee's right to stand there at all.
This is precisely what is happening to Chief Justice Surasena. And to understand why it is happening now — with this ferocity, this desperation, this very specific timing — you must understand what is happening inside the courts.
The cases are moving. After decades of delay and procedural fog deliberately thickened by those with connections to thicken it — the cases are actually moving. The people who believed they were untouchable, who built careers and personal fortunes on the certainty that the board would always tilt in their favour, are watching something they have never seen: accountability arriving at their door in the form of a court date.
For decades, impunity was not merely a practice in Sri Lanka. It was a guarantee. Certain families, certain factions, certain architects of the system that broke the country — they were untouchable. They governed with the confidence of men who have never once feared the referee's whistle. That certainty is now cracking. And the crack is coming from the courts.
And here is where the story becomes even more revealing. The deep state — that network of loyalty and protection that kept the untouchables safe for so long — is beginning to betray itself. Saman Ekanayake has already betrayed Ranil Wickremesinghe. The cases against Ranil will be heard. The cases against Mahinda Rajapaksa will be heard. And the question now hangs over the board like a verdict waiting to be read: will Suresh Sallay betray Gotabaya?
When those who built the system of impunity together begin to turn on each other to save themselves — that is not loyalty unravelling. That is the Carrom striker, finally, turning on its own player.
This is what happens when the board becomes fair. The pieces that were kept together by the promise of mutual protection begin to scatter. The deep state does not fall from outside pressure alone. It falls when the people inside it decide that self-preservation matters more than solidarity. And when that moment comes — when former allies become witnesses, when the protectors become accusers — the untouchables discover what ordinary Sri Lankans have always known: that the board was never truly theirs.
Remove the referee at this moment — discredit him, force him out through age-based smears and whisper campaigns — and the cases slow. The momentum breaks. The untouchables find room to breathe again. The board tilts back. The people, just beginning to see justice with their own eyes, are asked once again to wait for a justice that will never arrive. This is not a coincidence of timing. This is the plan.
And so they attack his age. As though age were a weakness. As though the decades a judge has spent reading, deciding, observing, and living through the full arc of Sri Lanka's political and legal history somehow disqualify him from the work of justice. This argument deserves to be named for what it is: an insult dressed as a concern.
Age does not weaken a judge. It sharpens one. Every year on the bench is a year of watching what power does to institutions, what impunity does to people, what happens when the referee is removed and the strongest striker wins. A judge who has lived through what Sri Lanka has lived through — who has seen the Carrom decades, the painted boards, the collapse, the Aragalaya, the slow return of accountability — carries in his judgement something no young appointment can carry: the full, lived, morally weighted knowledge of what is at stake.
The oldest referees know the oldest tricks. They have seen every attempt to tilt the board. They cannot be intimidated by the Carrom player because they have watched the Carrom player operate for decades and they know exactly what the striker looks like when it is aimed at them. Wisdom is not the enemy of justice. Wisdom is justice's strongest guardian. A judge who has grown old in the service of the law has not become less — he has become more. More seasoned. More discerning. More immune to the pressure that breaks younger, less rooted appointments.
The argument that Chief Justice Surasena should be removed because of his age is not a legal argument. It is a Carrom move — dressed, as always, in the language of අපි නොදන්න චෙස්. And when they make that move, the people will recognise it. They will look at the smear campaigns, the whisper networks, the sudden concern for judicial age from the very people who never once cared about judicial independence — and they will say, quietly, with the weary wisdom of a people who have seen every trick on the board: අපි නොදන්න චෙස්.
Brecht: "Unhappy the land that needs a hero." But unhappy or not — the land has one. And the people understand with a clarity born of long suffering exactly what it means when the players who fear the referee most scream the loudest for his removal.
Three decades. From the Carrom years of Mahinda's impunity, through the painted boards of Yahapalana, through the collapse of Gotabaya, through the Chess stabilisation of Ranil, to this moment — the board has been fought over, tilted, hollowed, repainted, and broken. And yet here it stands. The people are still around it. The referee is still at his post. The cases are moving. The deep state is turning on itself.
The sovereignty of this board belongs to the people. That means the rules belong to the people. And the umpire — the one who enforces those rules without fear, without favour, without a telephone call from the powerful — belongs to the people too. You cannot claim to respect the board while destroying the referee. You cannot claim to honour the rules while removing the one person whose job is to uphold them. The board, the rules, and the umpire are one. They stand together or they fall together.
The rules must be fair. The judge must stay.
The people now know the difference between Dhaam and අපි නොදන්න චෙස්. They know what Carrom pieces look like even when given a different name. They know when the umpire is attacked because the player has run out of legitimate moves. And when the smear campaigns come — when the age arguments are deployed, when the whisper networks activate, when the same people who spent decades corrupting the board suddenly discover a passionate concern for judicial propriety — the people will have one answer. Simple. Clear. Earned through suffering.
අපි නොදන්න චෙස්.
The untouchables believed the board was theirs. They governed with the confidence of men who never feared the whistle. That confidence is breaking now — not because of a government or a movement, but because the referee is standing, the cases are moving, the deep state is betraying itself, and the people are watching with eyes that three decades of the wrong game have made very, very sharp.
The board belongs to the people. The rules belong to the people. The umpire serves the people. It always was this way. They simply forgot to tell the players.
The referee is standing. The cases are moving. The untouchables are answering. The deep state is turning on its own. Play Dhaam — or step away from the board. Because the people are watching. And this time, they know exactly what game is being played.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-06-27 14:28:14)
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