by Durga Velayudham
It is often said that governments reveal their true character not in the promises they make, but in the instruments they choose to preserve once power is secured. On that measure, the administration led by Anura Dissanayake is already drifting into a familiar and uncomfortable pattern: rhetorical reform on one side, institutional inertia on the other, with the Prevention of Terrorism Act standing as the clearest symbol of that contradiction.
This is not a law that exists in abstraction. It is a living framework of coercive power that determines who may be detained, for how long, under what suspicion, and with what degree of judicial interruption. Any government that inherits such a statute inherits not just legislation, but responsibility for its consequences. Yet the current administration continues to behave as though responsibility is discharged through commentary rather than action. The PTA remains intact, operational, and politically available. That fact alone undermines the reformist identity it once projected.
There is a growing and increasingly difficult-to-dismiss perception that the Dissanayake government is repeating a well-worn Sri Lankan political habit: opposing authoritarian instruments while in opposition, then discovering their “complex necessity” once in office. This is not merely inconsistency; it is institutional absorption. The machinery of the state does not change because slogans change. And unless confronted directly, it absorbs even those who once promised to dismantle it.
The continued existence of the PTA under this administration cannot be excused by appeals to administrative difficulty or inherited constraints. The government commands a parliamentary majority that, in any practical sense, removes the excuse of legislative paralysis. What remains is political will. And political will is precisely what appears absent when it comes to confronting the security architecture that successive regimes have found convenient to retain. The PTA is not being actively reformed, nor is it being decisively repealed. It is being managed—left in place, quietly operational, politically useful when required, and rhetorically inconvenient when questioned.
This is where the contradiction becomes more than theoretical. A government that positions itself as a corrective to past excesses cannot simultaneously preserve the most criticised legal instrument of those same excesses without inviting charges of bad faith. The PTA has long been associated with arbitrary detention practices, weak evidentiary thresholds, and the stretching of “national security” into a catch-all justification for prolonged deprivation of liberty. To leave such a law untouched is not neutrality; it is endorsement by maintenance.
International scrutiny now compounds this domestic contradiction. The presence of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture in Sri Lanka is not an incidental diplomatic exercise. It is a procedural reminder that the world continues to evaluate Sri Lanka’s detention practices against binding international standards. The Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture is not concerned with political narratives; it is concerned with systems. And systems, in Sri Lanka’s case, still include a legal framework that permits exceptional detention with troubling ease.
Against that backdrop, the government’s posture appears increasingly defensive rather than transformative. Instead of treating international engagement as an opportunity to demonstrate reform, it risks treating it as an inconvenience to be managed. That instinct is politically familiar in Sri Lanka, but it is strategically short-sighted. Governments that underestimate international human rights scrutiny rarely do so without consequence, particularly when domestic credibility on reform is already fragile.
More troubling, however, is the emerging domestic perception that the current administration is beginning to adopt the very logic it once criticised: that rights protections are conditional, that legal safeguards are secondary to administrative necessity, and that security frameworks require preservation even at the cost of prolonged civil liberty constraints. This is how reformist governments slowly lose their moral differentiation from their predecessors—not through dramatic betrayal, but through incremental accommodation.
The PTA sits at the centre of that erosion. Its continued existence under a government that promised systemic change is not a technical oversight. It is a political decision, whether acknowledged or not. And every day that decision remains unaltered, it deepens the sense that change in Sri Lanka is cyclical rather than structural, cosmetic rather than constitutional.
There is also a deeper democratic concern. A government with a strong parliamentary position is not merely empowered; it is exposed. It cannot indefinitely hide behind coalition fragility or legislative arithmetic. It is judged by what it chooses to do with that strength. In this case, the choice to delay or dilute PTA repeal signals a preference for administrative continuity over democratic rupture. That may be politically safer, but it is not reform.
The danger is that this becomes a governing philosophy: incremental adjustment in place of decisive reform, managed critique instead of structural correction, and reliance on time as a substitute for policy. Sri Lanka has seen this pattern before. Governments arrive with clarity, and then dissolve into caution. Institutions remain unchanged, only the language around them becomes more refined.
But language is not reform. And delay is not neutrality. The PTA continues to operate, and with it, the underlying architecture of exceptional detention remains intact. For citizens, particularly those already vulnerable to securitised suspicion, this is not an academic debate. It is the difference between ordinary legal process and extraordinary state power.
The international community, including UN mechanisms now engaging directly with Sri Lanka’s detention landscape, will not measure progress by speeches or assurances. It will measure it by repeal, amendment, and demonstrable structural change. Anything less will be read as continuity disguised as transition.
If the Dissanayake administration wishes to distinguish itself from the governments that preceded it, it must do so in law, not rhetoric. The PTA is the clearest available test of that distinction. So far, the answer it has given is not reform, but retention. And retention, in this context, is simply continuity under a different name.
