If a boy can be arrested and locked up for months simply for writing a poem, then Sri Lanka has already admitted what kind of country it is: not a democracy, but a machine for punishing words. That is the real scandal. Yet instead of the nation rising in outrage, we are now being asked to accept something far worse: a President who speaks in the same vulgar, divisive language that justifies such arrests. This is not a question of political opinion or heated debate. This is a question of whether Sri Lanka still believes in the basic premise of human rights, or whether it has surrendered them to the altar of ethnic supremacy and state power.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is not a decorative document for diplomats to quote when convenient. It is a legal and moral boundary that every signatory state has pledged not to cross. Article 19 guarantees freedom of expression. Article 9 forbids arbitrary detention. Article 26 insists on equality before the law and protection from discrimination. These rights are not optional. They are not privileges granted by the state. They are the bare minimum of what it means to be a society governed by law rather than by fear. And yet, we are watching those rights being treated as if they were mere inconveniences — something to be ignored whenever the state feels offended.
A boy writes a poem. The state responds with arrest and months in a cell. That alone should have been a national emergency. But it was not an isolated case. There have been many more — activists, students, journalists, and ordinary citizens hauled into custody for expressing opinions, for sharing a post, for questioning the government. The pattern is unmistakable: the state is no longer protecting citizens; it is persecuting them. This is not governance. It is intimidation. It is the practice of a regime that believes power is its own justification.
And then the President, the head of that same state, goes to Jaffna and delivers a speech that is not simply careless but deliberately inflammatory. He frames a complex issue of land, history, and religious heritage as a matter of ethnic purity and territorial ownership. He speaks as if the North belongs to one group alone, as if the Tamil people are an inconvenience in their own land, as if their history can be erased by a sermon. He then has the audacity to claim that his government will not tolerate racism. It is a grotesque lie, a cynical inversion of truth, and a direct insult to the intelligence of every citizen who has eyes to see and ears to hear.
What is most alarming is not that he made a controversial remark. Controversy is a normal part of politics. The problem is that the President’s rhetoric mirrors the very kind of language that is used to justify oppression. When he says Buddhists returning to Jaffna to observe precepts is a natural revival and that objections are “racist,” he is not promoting unity. He is weaponising religion and history to delegitimise Tamil identity. He is saying, without saying it outright, that the North is not a place for Tamils alone, but a place for Sinhalese return and dominance. That is not religious devotion. That is ethnic expansion under a spiritual disguise. It is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: cloak conquest in piety, and call resistance “racism.”
This is the moment when the law stops being a shield and becomes a sword. The state that arrests a boy for poetry is the same state that applauds a President for stirring ethnic tension. The logic is identical. The difference is only the scale. If the law can be used to crush a child’s freedom of expression, it can also be used to crush an entire community’s right to exist without fear. When the President suggests that the North and East should not be limited to one ethnic group, he is not calling for inclusion. He is calling for a rewriting of the post-war reality to fit a Sinhalese nationalist narrative. He is telling the Tamil community, “You are not the owners of your own history. You are not the rightful residents of your own land. You are merely guests in a country that belongs to someone else.”
This is the very definition of racism. And when the state endorses it, it violates the ICCPR’s guarantee of equality and non-discrimination. It does not matter how eloquently the President denies the accusation. What matters is the effect of his words. A leader’s speech is not measured by intention but by impact. And the impact here is clear: it encourages a society to view Tamils as outsiders, to treat them as a problem to be solved rather than a people with equal rights. That is the same ideology that fuelled the war. It is the same ideology that justified atrocities. It is the same ideology that turned a nation into a battlefield of identities.
The government’s hollow rhetoric is now exposed. There is no coherent policy, no strategy, no vision for the future. All it has is a loudspeaker and a hunger for power. The President’s speech is a substitute for governance. It is a distraction from the fact that the country is failing on every front: economy, justice, reconciliation, social cohesion. When a government cannot deliver, it does what all weak regimes do — it stirs ethnic resentment and tries to blame the victims. It uses history as a weapon and religion as a mask. It turns a nation’s wounds into a political advantage. It turns citizens into enemies.
But let us be clear: the problem is not only the President. It is the system that allows such rhetoric to go unpunished. If the law is applied to a boy who writes poetry, it must also be applied to the President who speaks like a provocateur. There cannot be one rule for the powerless and another for the powerful. There cannot be one standard of “acceptable speech” for the ordinary citizen and another for the man who holds the highest office in the land. That is not justice. That is tyranny disguised as democracy.
The ICCPR demands that every citizen, regardless of ethnicity, religion or language, enjoys equal protection under the law. It demands that the state cannot manipulate the past to justify the oppression of the present. It demands that freedom of expression is protected, not punished. And it demands that discrimination is not tolerated, especially not by those who claim to represent the nation.
