-By Gerard Adams
(Lanka-e-News -05.Aug.2026, 03.45 PM) Who Watches the Watchman?
Power in politics is like the tales our ancestors told—where the beast wears the mask of beauty, and the beauty hides the claws of the beast. In the Panchatantra it is said: 'The one who fears losing power will embrace the wolf and call it a friend.' So too in our times, the dance between justice and authority becomes a fairy tale without an ending—where the throne changes hands, but the hunger for control never dies.
Every civilization manufactures the myths it needs to survive its own contradictions. Sri Lanka's newest myth wears the robes of principle: a sudden, theatrical defence of "judicial independence." Strip away the costume and what remains is not conviction — it is fear. Fear wrote the Arthashastra's calculus of statecraft. Fear animated the Mahabharata's fratricidal arithmetic. Fear has carved every kingdom that mistook comfort for permanence — and it now shapes Sri Lanka's judicial crisis.
The performance of "independence" is staged by actors who have long treated judicial institutions as negotiable: the political class, the deep state, and — not least — the peanut boys of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka. They do not chant "independence" to protect justice. They chant it to protect themselves, the way a man accused of arson shouts loudest about fire safety.
At the centre of this fiction stands one interpretive figure — the Batalanda Lord — less a person than a symbol: political fear made flesh, institutional delay made habit, the shadow unresolved accountability casts across four decades of public life. This myth is structure, not decoration: it shapes how institutions metabolise pressure, how legal actors price risk, how political actors calculate survival. "Judicial independence" becomes a flag raised not over the judiciary's dignity, but over the private interests of those who fear what an independent judiciary might do to them.
The fear of a judge is an old story in Sri Lankan politics. But the fear surrounding Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena is of a different order — he is not feared for being political. He is feared for refusing to be.
In the corridors of Hulftsdorp he is spoken of the way old texts speak of Yudhishthira: a man reputed to bend for no one, to sell nothing, to owe no debts he cannot repay in daylight. He delivers judgments on schedule, disciplines the judiciary's own house, and declines the games the powerful assume everyone eventually learns to play.
This explains why the Attorney General has allegedly sought delay after delay in serious indictments, and why "intermediate settlements" were allegedly explored. According to public reporting summarized by journalist Sanath Balasuriya, the AG's office allegedly judged that certain indictments would land with unusual severity under Surasena; legal teams and political actors allegedly agreed; postponements were allegedly sought across January, March, April, and July, with a further extension pursued to September 30 — a timeline that tracks, with suspicious precision, Surasena's own retirement clock.
Balasuriya describes the "Surasena Era" as a season of discomfort for actors accustomed to a more pliable judicial climate, where delay was currency and informal influence was liquidity. What looks like a debate about retirement age is, on this reading, a debate about timing — and the fear of judicial continuity outliving the men who fear it.
Institutions decay unevenly, defending some principles fiercely while abandoning others quietly. The Bar Association of Sri Lanka has, at moments, been genuinely heroic. When the 1978 Constitution centralized executive power, BASL President Eardley Perera, PC, warned early that stripping post-enactment judicial review and granting sweeping presidential immunity would hollow out judicial independence. In 1982 the BASL formally condemned the referendum extending Parliament's term as a subversion of representative democracy.
Through the violent late 1980s, under H. L. de Silva PC and Desmond Fernando PC, the BASL confronted the extrajudicial killing of human rights lawyers head-on — organizing nationwide court boycotts, filing habeas corpus petitions in the Association's own name, partnering with Amnesty International and the ICJ, even arranging exile for threatened lawyers and compensation for the families of the murdered — proof the BASL, when it chooses to, can act as a genuine structural defender of rights.
But the record carries its contradictions. The 2012–2013 impeachment of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake exposed an Association whose early resistance reportedly softened under political weight. Leadership scandals — the undisclosed JICA funding controversy involving Kaushalya Nawaratne PC, the Ramanathan Kannan appointment dispute under Geoffrey Alagaratnam PC — revealed governance gaps that watchdogs such as AHRC, TISL, and the IBA have cited as selective mobilization, ethnic asymmetry in rights advocacy, and persistent protectiveness toward the Attorney General's Department.
That asymmetry cuts deep. The Association mobilized forcefully when Sinhala lawyers were targeted in the late 1980s; its response to the killing of Tamil lawyers, journalists, and activists was markedly quieter. Its 2011 resolution rejecting the UN's Darusman Report drew international criticism for shielding state actors from scrutiny. A guardian can become a gatekeeper without announcing the transformation.
Kaushalya Nawaratne's undisclosed Rs. 21 million JICA project, never brought before the Bar Council, still corrosive to institutional trust though cleared of misappropriation.
Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, whose son's arrest over an alleged Rs. 120 million bribery scheme drew several BASL figures into adjacent legal terrain.
Rajeev Amarasuriya, whose public defence of the Attorney General's Department — framed as institutional stability — critics read as cover for prosecutorial bottlenecks; whose post-meeting address betrayed thin moral confidence: inflated claims of "3000 unanimous vote" against a headquarters capacity nearer 400, failure to secure a venue for 5000 as in 2012, and a digitalisation speech that quietly took aim at the very judge who pioneered the judiciary's digital transformation.
U. R. de Silva, who opposed the structural creation of Special Corruption Courts meant to accelerate the very cases that most need acceleration.
These are not isolated scandals but a pattern: institutional actors privileging seniority, network, and self-interest over the systemic reform that would cost them exactly that. They are not warriors of justice. They are rent-a-robes — legal mercenaries dressed as principle.
Professionalism was born as virtue, not privilege. Ancient healers swore oaths; judges upheld fairness as discipline, not favour; scribes guarded truth as sacred trust. The Panchatantra taught that wisdom is a duty owed outward; the Mahabharata, that justice sometimes demands sacrifice; the Arthashastra, that statecraft is above all responsibility.
Modern professionalism inherits the same demands: conscience, independence, moral courage, service to the public rather than the guild. But when seniority becomes the sole currency of influence, when bottlenecks inflate fees, when delay disproportionately benefits clients who can afford to wait, professionalism mutates into cartel behaviour wearing the language of ethics — a structural diagnosis, not an accusation of individual malice.
The BASL insists that raising the judicial retirement age is personal, ad hoc, and capricious. But institutional behaviour tells a different story.
The Association demands a promotion freeze for judges while enjoying no retirement age itself — gerontocratic dominance quietly maintained over younger judges for decades.
It claims moral authority while having opposed digitalisation for thirty years and Special Corruption Courts, defending both AG delays and elite impunity.
It laments judicial bottlenecks as harmful while those same bottlenecks inflate senior counsel fees, enable judicial laundering, and produce delay-based acquittals favouring the well-resourced.
It accuses judges of conflict of interest while ignoring its own cartel incentives and gerontocratic privilege.
It insists sovereignty requires a referendum, even as the doctrine of necessity is applied globally whenever judges must adjudicate matters touching themselves.
And it demands Supreme Court and Court of Appeal vacancies be filled "as usual" — from the Attorney General's own pipeline, preserving deep-state influence over cases as consequential as the Easter attacks, corruption trials, and human rights prosecutions. Forced retirement at 65, it argues, punishes precisely those judges who worked hardest.
The claim does not survive contact with fact. The reform touches over 400 judges across the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and High Court — a system-wide measure, not a measure aimed at one man.
Yet the BASL's objection narrows, with striking consistency, onto a single figure: Chief Justice Surasena.
A government addressing backlog, efficiency, digitalisation, forensic delay, cadre expansion, and infrastructure finds its critics fixated on one retirement date — not principle, but grievance dressed in institutional language.
The government's package — recruitment of magistrates, cadre expansion, digitalisation, e-filing, virtual hearings, forensic acceleration, ADR expansion, infrastructure investment — is the precise opposite of ad hoc; it is a comprehensive modernization blueprint.
The BASL's resistance, by contrast, serves old-guard legal elites, judicial-laundering networks, AG-pipeline appointments, and delay-based acquittal ecosystems, protecting Easter bombing suspects, drug kingpins, corruption defendants, and political elites who benefit most from a slow clock.
An Association with no retirement age of its own, that profits from bottlenecks and represents high-profile defendants, cannot credibly claim the moral high ground on conflict of interest; its objection is economic and cartel-driven before it is principled.
The government's mandate — to improve efficiency, reduce backlog, modernize courts, and deliver justice — is a sovereign one, and every day of obstruction subtracts from the lives of Easter victims, the families of the disappeared, torture survivors, and the millions trapped in the backlog. By fixing its objection on one man while the reform serves four hundred, the BASL reveals its true motive: protecting elite impunity, not judicial independence.
The record undercuts the "lazy judiciary" narrative outright. At an e-court project meeting, Surasena noted that when he assumed office as the 49th Chief Justice on July 28, 2025, the Supreme Court's pending caseload stood at 5,326 — a figure that, through the sustained commitment of judges and lawyers, had already fallen to 3,763.
Sri Lanka is not the first nation to face this argument.
In Zimbabwe (2021), raising the retirement age from 70 to 75 drew objections that it could not apply to the sitting Chief Justice; the Constitutional Court reversed a lower ruling, holding that changing retirement age alters tenure, not term limits.
In Bangladesh (2004), an age extension from 65 to 67 drew accusations of political motive tied to the caretaker-government system; courts left the amendment intact and instead struck down the unelected caretaker structure itself.
Brazil's 2015 "Emenda da Bengala," raising retirement to 75, was upheld by the Supreme Federal Court on a doctrine of necessity: modernization requires continuity.
Pakistan's 2025 27th Amendment, creating an entirely new Federal Constitutional Court with a higher retirement age, remains the unresolved exception — because it raised genuine concerns about incentivising judges to migrate between courts.
The lesson is consistent: age-extension objections are common, but constitutional systems worldwide resolve them through established doctrine; it is structural court-splitting, not age extension alone, that triggers deeper alarm.
The opposition sought to cast the retirement-age debate as a moral crusade. Public perception did not cooperate. According to Balasuriya's reporting, the meeting convened to oppose the amendment became symbolically self-defeating: senior figures already facing legal scrutiny of their own appeared together, projecting a coalition motivated less by principle than shared legal anxiety. The AG's alleged delay strategy depended on Surasena's retirement, and the opposition's resistance aligned, a little too neatly, with that timing. The optics were described as "a picture so perfect the government couldn't have created it even with AI" — handing the government confidence to press forward and reframing its critics as defenders of self-interest.
History repeats because the same incentives keep producing the same silences.
In the Batalanda case, caretaker Vincent Fernando gave confidential testimony and died suddenly at 36, one day before a scheduled appearance — the Commission investigating him lacking jurisdiction to pursue the death itself. A witness vanished, and accountability vanished with him.
Today the witness is not a man. It is a reform. Judicial reform has become the modern Vincent Fernando — a structural witness whose survival threatens the entrenched interests that depend on its silence.
When digitalisation threatens the bottlenecks that generate income, when forensic modernization threatens the machinery of impunity, reform becomes the witness certain actors would prefer never reach the stand. Structural change threatens entrenched power more profoundly than any individual testimony, because reform is evidence — of what institutions fear, what systems resist, and what political actors would rather the public never examine.
Sri Lanka's political history is a procession of leaders who reached for the judiciary as an instrument: J. R. Jayewardene's appointment of Neville Samarakoon, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga's elevation of Sarath N. de Silva, Mahinda Rajapaksa's removal of Shirani Bandaranayake in favour of Mohan Peiris, Maithripala Sirisena's appointment of Jayantha Jayasuriya, Ranil Wickremesinghe's support for Sanjay Rajaratnam's rise. Each choice subordinated institutional independence to political convenience.
Against that lineage, Anura Kumara Dissanayake's conduct reads as a genuine departure.
* He could have bypassed Murdu Fernando.
* He could have bypassed Surasena.
* He could have installed a loyalist, following forty years of precedent. He did not.
* He appointed the most senior judge available — a judge who would go on to rule against a thirty-year political associate, Minister Ananda Wijepala, and to uphold a death-sentence ruling affecting twelve Aragalaya activists: decisions that carried real political cost.
* AKD did not discipline the Attorney General, did not steer prosecutorial decisions, did not reach for judicial capture. He backed structural reform instead. None of this proves moral purity — but restraint, in a judicial history this saturated with capture, is itself a rare political ethic.
Strip away the rhetoric, and Sri Lanka's choice is stark: 1.1 million pending cases; Easter victims still waiting for justice; families of the disappeared still waiting for truth; drug prosecutions stagnating; corruption cases collapsing; human rights cases delayed for decades by design, not accident.
Should a nation abandon justice for millions to delay one man's indictment? Should judicial modernization be sacrificed to protect the Batalanda Lord? Should victims' suffering be prolonged to preserve a legal cartel that has never submitted itself to the discipline it demands of others? This is not a question for the BASL, or for Ranil, or for the Attorney General. It is a question for the people, because it is the people's suffering being negotiated in every postponement.
Who watches the watchman?
If the watchman is compromised, constrained, or afraid, then the people themselves must become the watch. No institution, however venerable, escapes this obligation — not the judiciary, not the Bar, not the executive.
Power that answers to no one eventually answers only to itself, and a nation that tolerates this indefinitely does not merely lose a court case; it loses the argument for having courts at all.
Sri Lanka now stands at the fork the epigraph foretold — inside a fairy tale where beauty hides claws and the throne changes hands while the hunger for control never dies, or at the threshold of stepping outside that story.
Justice demands the courage to name the fear that built the fiction, dismantle the cartel that profits from delay, and choose accountability over impunity.
The Batalanda Lord has survived every decade by counting on exhaustion and forgetting — on the hope that the next generation simply inherits the silence rather than breaking it.
That inheritance is not fate; it is a choice, renewed with every postponed case and every obstructed reform — and it can be refused.
The question was never whether power fears an honest court.
It always has.
The only question left is whether the people who are watched will finally choose to watch back.
Collection of articles written by Gerard Adams
https://www.lankaenews.com/category/22
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by (2026-08-05 10:38:50)
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