democratic state which must act as a bulwark against this – sometimes quixotic, sometimes despotic -- conviction, and the excesses it may provoke. Alternately, threats to social order are also seen to issue from ‘anti-State’ groupings operating outside the norms of the democratic framework.

In these discourses then, violence is seen to stem from either the ‘excesses’ of the political regime, or the ‘excesses’ of disadvantaged groups who take to arms never really from the internal dynamics of the democratic system itself. Still in today’s post-bi-polar world, this easy separation of the democratic state and the extra-parliamentary roots of political violence is breaking down across much of South Asia. In particular, Sri Lankan electoral politics – once seen as so exemplary – have grown increasingly vicious over the past 20 years.

The question this paper seeks to address therefore is, do such acts of violence stem from a simple failure on the part of regimes/disadvantaged groups to contain themselves, or from a more complex failure which has to do with the problematic way in which the rule of law unfolds across the Sri Lankan south?

Study Focus and Methodology

This paper will address this question through an ethnographic study of an extraordinary event which occurred towards the end of nominations week of the local elections of March 1997. It involves the public, daylight assassination of a 29-year-old Member of Parliament and a police security guard, by an electoral opponent and his supporters, acted out before a watching crowd of over a hundred people, in the Ratnapura district of Sri Lanka.

This paper will approach violence as performance rather than transgression.¹ It identifies notions of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ (i.e. symbolic) violence which pervade discourses on democracy; and presents alternate political idioms -- which hold powerful symbolic dimensions -- such as the village feud. It will describe the event, and go on to explore the political and social relationships between the main protagonists in this event -- who are members of powerful political families in the Ratnapura district -- and construct this relationship in terms of a classic ‘village feud.’

This paper bases itself on narratives collected from party activists and ordinary supporters, polling agents and returning officers of many political parties, school teachers, lawyers and human rights activists, during nine months of fieldwork conducted in 1997 in the Ratnapura district and three months between May-August 2004. Because of the terrorising nature of the event and its political repercussions for witnesses, I have changed the names of all informants, regardless of their political affiliations or position in the state hierarchy.²

Narrative draws on memory. Still, memory is never a simple, factual recitation of past event. Rather, it is an account of psychic experiences of specific events, filtered through metaphor, myth, and idiom. Such ideological tools allow both listener and speaker to decipher the event reminisced, to decide who was the victim, who the perpetrator and who the spectator. Thus the act of remembering is never entirely an individual or idiosyncratic exercise, but one that holds larger collective and cultural dimensions.³ Memory allows the speaker to construct a personal narrative which is at the same time a social commentary on his/her life and times.

But if narratives are not factual accounts, are they ‘true’? Clearly, there are many kinds of ‘truths’: empirically-valid truths, legally-admissible truths, forensically-verified truths.⁴

I offer these narratives as a different kind of truth: as ‘truth in fable’, as a way of grasping a particular idiom of political performance in Sinhala culture within its own moral universe.

Rational and Symbolic Violence: Some Conceptual Thoughts

As elsewhere in South Asia, democracy arrived in Sri Lanka in the late-British period. It was built on the notion of a rule of law. The rule of law sought to negotiate social disorder through a state monopoly of coercive violence. Here the state is seen to visit sanctions, impartially, on all those who violate the law. Thus it did bring a radical discourse of social egalitarianism into a South Asian milieu where inequities of caste, class and creed blossomed everywhere.⁵

The rule of law was of course not aimed at making the colonial power answerable to the colonized. It merely aimed at preserving social order among native groups. But over the decades, the harsher effects of a state monopoly of coercive violence were mediated through the principle of a separation of powers executive, legislative and judicial. In its 20 century Anglo-Saxon version then, state coercion is enacted away from the public gaze, behind fortified prison walls. Coercive violence is now ‘rationalised’ and rendered invisible.⁶ This in turn fostered the myth of an enlightened disbursement of power through consensus politics at the local-level. In this discourse, the relationship of power between candidate and voter remains under-theorized, but is tacitly seen to be equal/reciprocal.

Still, there were other faces of the rule of law. In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that in 19 century France, the rule of law did allow for acts of spectacular violence in the affirmation of state power. Thus the barbaric violence of the public execution, he says, was not aimed at re-establishing justice. On the contrary, it re-activated state power. It was a policy of terror which aimed – through the torn and broken body of the criminal – at effecting docility in the watching crowds⁷. Here Foucault attempts to theorize the workings of power as a performative gesture, a theatrical device which inspires terror in the minds of its audience.⁸ Foucault’s analysis contests any easy assumption of the ‘equality’ of the subject/voter vis-à-vis their representatives.

Alternately, the Rule of Law was not enacted upon an empty tabula rasa, but upon terrain already strewn with the debris of previous socio-juridical forms. Such forms or idioms also negotiated social disorder and re-activated power, though in different ways. One such key institution - as many activists encountered on the field have pointed out to me - was the village feud (aravula). The feud structured violence at the local-level and imbued it with social significance.⁹

Social discord at the local-level was negotiated by the village Headman (aratchi) and the irrigation Headman (vel vidane), who were typically hereditary landlords of the dominant govi (agrarian) caste. The village Headman resolved issues ranging from boundary conflicts and land-sharing disputes to cattle-grazing rights - all of which held the potential for violence in an agrarian context. The irrigation Headman mediated access to water resources.¹⁰ Successful conflict-resolution though, involved winning the allegiance of key players in the actual policing of intractable disputes such as the village chandiya (‘hardman’).¹¹

Still, these titles themselves were not hereditary, but at times re-assigned on the holder’s death by regional feudal lords (radala)¹² on behalf of the King.¹³ They appeared to be offered to aspirants seen to be the most powerful and best equipped to effect social order at the local-level. Consequently, the claims of a holder’s heirs could not be openly challenged by large-landowning rivals. Such ‘challenges’ therefore, were necessarily oblique and revolved around two pivotal idioms which mark Sinhala discourse: lajja (‘shame’) and tatvaya (‘status’).¹⁴ Lajja occurs when one is subjected to public ridicule, which in turn undermines one’s status (tatvaya). Tatvaya is contingent upon receiving the deference of the community. But a withdrawal of deference (by perceived inferiors) becomes ‘insolence.’ It provokes a sense of outrage, which - in some situations - is culturally sanctioned.¹⁵

This creates a space for the physical acting out of such angers, often performed by proxies such as the chandiya.

Such performances unfold as sequences in the feud.

At a more analytical level, it could be argued that the feud differed from the sanctified Anglo-Saxon idiom in important ways. It was unlike it in that the feud involved the playing out of spectacular acts of violence, aimed – in Foucault’s words – at the reactivation of power. Thus it did not separate judicial and punitive functions, but melded them together in a single performative act. Though - as many a native at the wrong end of a colonial boot perhaps discovered - the rule of law often failed to live-up to its own theoretical assumptions of a separation of powers, the feud was actually premised on the converging of these two functions.

But more critically, the feud was unlike the Anglo-Saxon idiom in that it was premised on a notion of social inequality. This implies two things. Firstly, it supposed the ascendancy of the village Headman and his hardmen/entourage vis-à-vis local rivals and their factions, construed as ‘subordinate.’ On the other, the relationship between leaders themselves and their retainers remained marked by deep deference – expressed performatively, through the body and its demeanour – and the identity of followers tended to be tied to the – unquestioned - precedence of their leaders. Thus, much as democratic politics, the feud did exemplify consensus politics and reciprocal relations. But it also reinforced hierarchy.

In such a context of unequal empowerment, acts of overt violence acquire strong symbolic dimensions. They serve to – at once – restore the prestige of the leader, untenably diminished by the challenge of a rival, and to induce fear and consternation within the ranks of the opponent’s camp. The act of violence – which often reduces its victim/object to spectacle – now re-affirms the supremacy of the perpetrator, his supporters and their (collective) contempt for rival groups. Most importantly, such acts transcend the personal realm and become public/political acts.

The rule of law attempted to ‘tame’ the feud by criminalizing its overt violence. But in the post-independence years, democratic politics seemed to have once again re-channelled the traditional enmities of the village feud into inter-party rivalries. Such acts of overt violence pose a dilemma for the new democratic system, precariously grafted onto the native political landscape. The system responds by attempting to ‘naturalize’ the act of violence and make it ‘invisible’: it points out that where there are no ready ‘witnesses’ who will come forward, victims who will freely attest or forensic ‘evidence’ to be found, the act of violence cannot be said to have transpired at all! At the same time, the very spectacular/symbolic nature of the violence in itself militates against the witness’ ability to ‘speak out’, and no evidence will be left lying around for long. By thus imputing a sense of social egalitarianism - based on a high degree of personal empowerment – that often does not persist at the local-level, the new democratic system makes demands of an evidential and legal kind that the terrorized and silenced victim cannot effect.

Particularly in its Anglo-Saxon version then, the democratic system constructs all forms of violence as either ‘rational’ (i.e. to do with State coercion) or ‘irrational’ (i.e. stemming from any other source) and criminalizes the latter. In the process, the symbolic realm which holds powerful expressive and communicative properties in the Sinhala context is marginalized. Political dissent as well as the workings of power becomes unintelligible and therefore criminalized.

Thus despite harsh personal experiences of violence, many local activists who engage in party politics today still seem to hold profound ambiguities about the moral validity of the feud idiom. They contend that it was more about power than violence per se. While it did involve performative enactments, unlike Foucault’s public execution, this did not always imply outright violence, though as argued above, violence often transpired. Rather, the feud idiom is thought to have focused on the symbolic, the spectacular and the theatrical, all of which aimed at the reactivation of power by generating awe and apprehension in the watching crowds.

Consequently, many activists across party lines affirm that the feud idiom also became a vehicle for the deployment of symbolic activity in the expression of popular dissent and civic disaffection, as local opponents attempted to contest the transgressions of traditional leaderships. For the candidate-supporter transaction is never static but is always subject to shifts with changes in the social environment. In today’s more egalitarian climate then, spectacular enactments may attempt to create a sense of fascination and enthrallment, which aims to captivate the imagination of spectators rather than to terrorize. At its’ best, such an idiom has the potential to become an exciting and magically persuasive political strategy, able to inspire the masses to new heights of political participation. Always performative, violence is still only one manifestation of the feud.

Still, as the following event displays, at specific moments the feud did give rise to acts of excessive violence.

The Event

The event occurred during Nominations week of the March 1997 local elections. Held throughout the island, these elections were contested by a range of political parties, including the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-led People’s Alliance (PA) which controlled the government, and the United National Party (UNP) which comprised the largest bloc in the Opposition.

By noon, 11 February 1997, the UNP had handed in their nomination papers to the Ratnapura District Administration (katcheri).¹⁶ This induced a boisterous mood. The nominations were safely in, explains a UNP activist, so our boys were celebrating, this is normal. If the SLFP had given in their nominations on that day, they would have done the same. SLFP supporters, on the other hand, were not amused. There were convoys of UNP vehicles everywhere, complains a pro-SLFP bystander, racing down the Ratnapura-Colombo highway and shouting jayawewa (‘hurrah!’). A lot of liquor was being consumed. This created terrific traffic problems, he says.

Meanwhile, Nalanda Ellawala, SLFP Member for the Ratnapura district, had left early that morning for Colombo with the Nominations papers of the PA’s local election candidates, to be endorsed by the Party Secretary. He was accompanied by Dilan Perera, Member for the neighbouring Badulla District, who was on a similar errand. The rest of the group comprised of Sgt Sirisoma, Ellawala’s bodyguard, PC Jayasena, Perera’s bodyguard, and 2 long-time Party associates. None of the group except the police officers were armed.

It was on their return journey that the incident took place, at Kuruwita, a few miles before Ratnapura town.

Susantha Punchinilame, UNP Member for Ratnapura district and first accused in the Ellawala Assassination, insists that the confrontation began earlier, when the SLFP group provoked UNP supporters after the Nominations.¹⁷ He does not specify where. Mahinda Ratnatilaka, UNP mayoral candidate in the forthcoming elections and second accused, also says the SLFP initiated clashes.

Alternately, some SLFP sympathisers allow for some over-exuberance on both sides. There was an incident near the Kuruwita school, says a long-time SLFP-loyalist. I think Nalanda appo’s group was a bit irresponsible.¹⁸ They pulled down some flags which UNP party-workers had just put-up. This upset them, and they called Punchinilame on his mobile and complained. This is why they came charging behind.

The SLFP group in the jeep do not mention the incident near the school. But they focus on a previous incident. A few miles before Kuruwita, Dilan Perera tells the Magistrate of the Ratnapura District Court, we met a UNP motorcade speeding towards Colombo. One vehicle veered towards our jeep, and Nalanda swerved sharply onto the left curb, narrowly missing a collision. I remember Upali Sirisoma, Nalanda’s security officer, opened the window and shouted at the driver.

Perera seemed to see this incident as material to the events which followed.

“As we approached the Kuruwita bridge”, continues Perera, “a group of supporters on the pavement complained to Nalanda about harassment by UNP activists. He stopped his jeep and alighted, and the rest of us did the same. After exchanging a few words with the men we got back into the jeep and drove off. We passed the clock tower. As we came to the bus-halt a little further down, another group of PA supporters flagged-down the vehicle. There was a bus at the halt, decorated in green flags.¹⁹ Nalanda stopped his jeep in the middle of the road, and we all got down again.”

“Moments later”, he says, “the UNP motorcade we saw earlier returned to the spot. It was led by Susantha Punchinilame driving the red cab, and Mahinda Ratnatilleke driving the green one. There were about 15 persons in this group”, he says, “of which about 5-6 were armed, including Punchinilame and Ratnatilaka.”

It was at this point that the first shoot-out occurred.

It is not clear who began shooting. The SLFP group insists that those in the UNP motorcade arrived shooting. Punchinilame says his bodyguards were compelled to open fire to protect him from a hail of bullets.²⁰

P D Gunasena, a gem-trader, was waiting for a bus at this bus-halt. “At around 3.30 pm”, he tells the Ratnapura Magistrate, “I saw Nalanda appo driving towards Ratnapura. He suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, in front of the bus-halt, and got out. There was a bus decorated with green flags, and as he walked towards it, the passengers started getting out hastily. When the shooting began, appo was immediately in front of me. I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him through the front door of the dispensary behind the bus-halt. Everyone was running to save themselves. I slammed the door”, he says, “and held him against the wall.”

In this first shoot-out, PC Jayasena, Perera’s bodyguard died almost immediately. But Ellawala himself remained unhurt, and Perera escaped with superficial injuries.

It was the second shoot-out which fatally wounded Ellawala.

“When I got him inside the dispensary”, says Gunasena, “appo was unhurt. But he kept saying, they’ve killed Dilan, they’ve killed Dilan and he pushed me aside, went to the window and jumped out again. The window also faces the road. I followed him.”

“At that moment I saw Sirisoma, appo’s security officer shoot, once, maybe twice. I couldn’t see what he was shooting at. When I turned round, appo was walking towards Punchinilame mantrituma²¹ with his hands raised. Punchinlame mantrituma was standing near appo’s jeep. Appo said, Susantha ayye (elder-brother), if there’s a problem, we can talk it over and resolve it; we don’t need to be shooting at each other like this. At this time”, says Gunasena, “I was about three feet away from him. It was then that one of the gunmen – he had a weapon about 2’6” long – said to me, stop. But before I could do so, he shot me. He shot me from a distance of about 4-5 feet. I clutched my stomach with both hands. He then aimed at my chest. I said, ‘But why do you shoot me?’, I just got off that bus, pointing to the bus with the green flags. He then pointed his gun away. I flattened myself against the ground for a few minutes, hauled myself up and crawled away as fast I was able.”

“I saw nothing after that”, he says.

Gunasena was hospitalized for months with gunshot wounds to his stomach.

K M Somaratne, glasscutter at the Hardware Store next to Sumudu Motors and across from the dispensary, says he witnessed the second shoot-out. “I watched Mahinda Ratnatilaka get out of his vehicle”, he tells the Ratnapura Magistrate, “and walk over to the pavement in front of Sumudu Motors. He went down on his knees, with his arms stretched out and his pistol aimed in the direction of Ratnapura. It was then that I saw appo jump out of the dispensary window. I shouted, ‘Appo, don’t come this way’. I did so because I feared that in the situation which prevailed, something terrible might happen to him.”

“Appo looked at me”, he says, “and then he started walking in the opposite direction. Susantha mantrituma was standing near the vehicles in the middle of the road. He had something like a pistol in his hand. As appo came closer, he suddenly struck appo across the face. Then he kicked him in the stomach with his knee. Another person, dressed as a private security guard, but carrying the kind of gun issued to the police, hit appo across the back. Then Susantha Punchinilame shot him just below the chest.”

“Appo clutched his wound and walked towards Sumudu Motors. He was bent over onto one side. He sat on the pavement for a while, then got up and started walking again. It was then that Mahinda Ratnatilaka shot him. He fell down in front of Sumudu Motors.”

“Later, people put appo into a vehicle and took him away.”

“I saw Mahinda Ratnatilaka shoot both PC Jayasena and Nalanda appo”, he says. “I also saw Susantha Punchinilame shoot appo.”

Sumith Ratnayake, a bus-conductor, also witnessed this scene. “At around 3.30 pm”, he says, “I was by the clock tower, when I heard what I thought were the sound of crackers. Everyone started running in the direction of the noise, and so did I. When I arrived at the scene, the shooting had stopped. I saw the vehicles parked across the road. I recognized Nalanda appo’s jeep, and the vehicles blocking it were in front of Sumudu Motor Stores, opposite the bus-halt. I saw Susantha Punchinilame mantrituma standing by his jeep, next to appo’s vehicle. He had a weapon in his hand, about 6” long. There were others with him. There was a bus decorated with green flags near the bus-halt opposite.”

“I saw Nalanda appo come across from the bus-halt towards Susantha Punchinilame. Punchinilame mantrituma grabbed appo by his collar and shook him. Then the others surrounded appo – there were about 30 people there. They were hitting him. There was more shooting. When the shooting began”, he says, “I crawled back about 7-8 feet. Though I heard them shoot, I couldn’t see who was shooting. Soon afterwards, the other vehicles drove off.”

“Nalanda appo was lying on the road”, he says, “he was moaning in pain. I was trying to raise him, when someone took him from my arms and put him into his jeep. They took him to the hospital.”

Both Punchinilame and Ratnatilaka deny any wrongdoing. Punchinilame even posits the existence of a ‘mystery gunman’ who - somehow unseen by the crowds watching - fired the ‘fatal’ shot.²²

It is not clear which of Ellawala’s many injuries were induced by the first or second accused. But he was clearly unarmed at the time he was fatally shot, and did not pose a threat to anyone. This did not stop them from shooting him.

Still, if the killings were pre-meditated, the perpetrators would hardly have chosen a busy public highway in broad daylight.

It would seem that the UNP-group did arrive in response to a complaint by party-workers that Ellawala’s group had pulled down their flags. In this charged climate, this becomes an act of provocation. And since many of the UNP-group were armed, they did intend to intimidate Ellawala’s party. To establish to their own activists that they had some control of the situation, they had to ‘teach the SLFP-group a lesson.’ Only such a publicly-enacted rite would restore their prestige, untenably diminished by the symbolic act of pulling-down the flags. This would probably have involved nothing more than giving Ellawala himself a thrashing and making a spectacle of him before his supporters.

So what went wrong?

It was Ellawala’s seemingly conciliatory call to Punchinilame that they should resolve their problem by discussion rather than bullets which seemed to have enraged him and triggered the second and fatal shoot-out.

But why was he so angry?

This appeal seemed to have enraged him because – even while the younger man courteously addressed him as ‘elder-brother’,²³ his words clearly implied a rebuke. Here Ellawala posited his own idiom – discussion and resolution – against that of Punchinilame’s well-known idiom of violence and bullets, suggesting that the latter was beneath them both.

For Punchinilame, it was not for the younger man to define how he should conduct himself in public. This becomes an insolence, specially since he felt it was the PA’s armed guards who began shooting. After first starting the shoot-out, this sudden inference that shooting is what minions do, and that they, the superior classes, should confine themselves to words, was an – obliquely-worded slap-on-the-wrist.

It seemed to disparage Punchinilame’s much-vaunted gun-toting political-style; a style which had never been publicly reproved in this way throughout his brief political career. On the contrary, it was one which he thought had won him the adulation of the electorate.

Ellawala’s words now conveyed a degree of impatience with his whole menacing (vulgar?) performance as he stood with his gun cocked.

This ‘shamed’ him before his equally-armed henchman.

The confrontation then, stemmed from a clash of personal idioms, idioms rooted deep in the intractable class-cleavages of the Ratnapura district. In order to grasp the dynamics of this clash, perhaps a glance at local politics in Ratnapura is insightful.

Local Politics in the Ratnapura district

At independence, Ratnapura was among the most undeveloped and unpopulated of the Kandyan districts. Though famed for its mineral resources, its’ gem-mining industry suffered from capital-scarcity, and could not absorb the labour-surplus of its - equally-struggling - agriculture. Hence social relations tended to lag behind that of the rest of the island. Even more so than elsewhere in the island then, local politics in Ratnapura continues to be coloured by notions of ‘shame’ (lajja) and ‘status’ (tatvaya) which mark Sinhala discourse.

Party politics in Sri Lanka arrived in 1946 with the Soulbury Constitution. This outlined a Prime Ministerial system with Parliamentary majorities, all of which required party-based elections. Hence the favoured British candidate, D.S. Senanayake, large-landowner and staunch defender of the plantation-economy project, hurriedly put together the United National Party (UNP). The UNP at this point was comprised of large-landowners, mostly from the dominant govi caste, ranging from the old feudal strata to arriviste groups who had enriched themselves through the new opportunities in trade.

In the Ratnapura district, local politics was dominated by the well-known Ellawella family. Of illustrious lineage, they converted to Anglicanism in the British period and appeared to have assumed a more Anglicised life-style than the rest of the Kandyan nobility. Nalanda’s grandfather Sydney, though himself not involved in politics, was known to back the UNP candidate Nicholas Attygalle who held the Ratnapura seat in Parliament. This validated Attygalle’s local image.

But Sydney Ellawala seems to have had a troubled relationship with his somewhat impetuous son, Nanda, and this had critical consequences for local politics in the district. Nanda, father of Nalanda, went on to be a dynamic political presence in the district throughout the next two decades, until his untimely death in 1989.

There are many narratives about the roots of the clash between father and son. There was this argument in the (prestigious) Pelmadulla Club, says Mr. Handuwela, a retired schoolteacher. Nanda supported one faction and his father the other. The management went on to bring legal charges against Nanda. His father did not intercede on his behalf. Subsequently, Nanda spent around six weeks in remand custody. This incident was much talked about. Standing up to his father and going to jail, he says, was a dramatic gesture which made him a hero in the village.

But why did his father – one of the most powerful figures in the region - not intercede on his behalf? It is not clear. Most likely, in the Anglicised circles in which he moved, Sydney Ellawala was socialised to believe that the Law should take its course, even with his son, and that it was not for him to intervene. It was precisely this stance of paternal objectivity, which the village could not identify with. Sydney Ellawala was seen to have broken a basic cultural code of commitment to one’s own. It was this public perception of symbolic betrayal which made Nanda a ‘hero’ in the eyes of the ‘village’ or his family’s retainer/tenant-cultivator base.

At the national-level, the UNP’s main opposition stemmed from the Marxist parties. These were mostly comprised of professionals, located from the rising ‘lower’ castes of the karawa, durawa, salagama and marginal groups within the govi, all of whom were an important segment of the new middle-class. At the village-level then, while the UNP had the support of the feudal families and their local agents such as the village Headmen, the Left parties strove to find strong, committed candidates who could stand up to these figures and their social networks which become an in-built support-base. But in 1952, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, rising star in the UNP and scion of the aristocratic Bandaranaike family, broke away to form his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In subsequent elections, the SLFP often engaged in no-contest pacts with the Left and soon captured the mantle of the main electoral alternative to the UNP.²⁴ The entry of the SLFP radically redefined the electoral landscape at the local-level. For the unlike the Left parties, the SLFP was often able to call on members of the feudal elite to stand as their candidate against the UNP. The Ellawalas, though close relatives of the Banadaranaikes, stayed with the UNP.

However, in the 1960s, the UNP presence in the Ratnapura district was relatively weak. It was the Communist Party which dominated politically. The CP was represented by Sarath Muttetuwegama, who unlike most Left candidates was himself the product of a distinguished Kandyan family. Sarath, says a long-time admirer, brought a new idiom into politics in Ratnapura, which was after all, a very backward region, even by Kandyan standards. He was a lawyer, and his politics were marked by two attributes. He would intercede, free of charge, on behalf of anyone he thought had been wronged, (madihatveema); and he would take up public issues he thought were important (idiripatveema). This made him a feared opponent, specially for pro-establishment UNP types. It also provided him with a solid mass base, but this, he says, was earned the hard way.

Perhaps, but Sarath also profited from the emotionally-captive retainer-base which inhered from his class-position. In the end though, he did transform the role of the candidate in the Ratnapura district. It was no longer confined to being the recipient of feudal fidelities, but involved actively exploiting the structures of the democratic system to defend the rights of one’s supporters. Interceding for one’s own carried great symbolic weight. Unlike in the past when they could control village politics through a local proxy then, now the demands of the first-past-the-post system obliged at least some ‘feudal’ candidates to get directly involved in local politics. This added a new dimension. The ‘lord-follower’ relationship becomes closer to a candidate-supporter nexus, signifying different degrees of reciprocity.

Thus in the late-1960s, when the SLFP was exploring its options in the Ratnapura district, its leadership understood that in order to make an impact in the region, they would have to field a candidate who could weigh-up to both Muttetuwegama’s personal drive and social background. What they needed, says Mr. Gunasena, a Kuruwita-based lawyer, was a forceful candidate (satankami apekshakayek), not just someone from a good family. Family background was important, because the thinking of the people in these parts was still very feudal, you understand. But after Sarath, they needed something more.

They picked on Nanda Ellawella of the even more aristocratic Ellawella family. He took up the challenge.

The forming of the SLFP-led United Left Front (ULF) in the late-1960s and the subsequent no-contest pacts with the Left benefited Nanda enormously. Sarath Muttetuwegama, the CP candidate was – reluctantly – persuaded to move to the neighbouring Kalawana seat, and Nanda became the ULF candidate for the Ratnapura electorate. By this point, however, he had already made a name for himself. This attracted subtle and not-so-subtle attacks from the UNP.

At this time, reminisces a long-time SLFP activist, the well-known film star Gamini Fonseka - who was also a strong UNP supporter - produced the movie Atmapooja (‘Soul-sacrifice’). This was basically a caricature of Nanda. He was portrayed as a village chandiya (hardman). This was seen as an attempt to disparage his radala (aristocratic) status. In many ways, he says, it was a powerful and subtly-projected critique; that someone from such a background should enter politics and play this kind of role.

Such then, were the egalitarianising arrows of democracy. Nanda’s populist political style was apparently not in keeping with his elevated background. Atmapooja also articulated a new trend; the perceived convergence of the role of the village hardman and political candidate. Nanda understood the importance of responding to this public attempt to ‘shame’ him, though. Thus in the wake of the ULF victory of 1970, his supporters marched onto the Laxmi Cinema where the controversial movie was showing, and occupied the building, which the SLFP subsequently nationalised.

It was a spectacular, performative response to an obliquely-expressed attempt to belittle his public stature (tatvaya). Filled with punitive overtones, it conveyed a powerful message to potential political detractors.

It was G.V. Punchinilame, small-time gem-trader and father of Susantha, who played a leading role in the Laxmi Cinema episode.

By this point G.V. Punchinilame had already emerged as one of Nanda’s key henchman. His background as a gem-trader was not irrelevant for this role. The gem-trade, says Piyadasa mudalali²⁵ who runs a boutique in Ratnapura town, is, by definition, the most violent of occupations - since every daily-waged miner would of course try to hide any gems he finds - and those who survived in the trade were those who could sustain a climate that was so coercive (bhayanaka) as to discourage petty theft on a daily basis.

It is a violent trade, admits Sumanasiri, himself a gem-trader. But creating ‘terror’, he says smiling, does not always call for actual violence. Do not think that. But you have to instill a certain psychological state (manasika-tatvayak).

Such a profession then, required not so much physical violence, as the ability to inspire fear, performatively, through mien and bodily demeanour. It became the ideal training ground for the chandi persona.

Soon after the ULF victory, however, Punchinilame distanced himself from the SLFP. Why did this happen? Again, there are many stories. Punchinilame demanded the Chairmanship of the newly-formed State Gem Corporation, says Mr. Gunasena, the SLFP thought this was ambitious. This embittered him.

After Punchinilame’s exit, Nanda did not have a smooth time. An election petition was brought against him in 1972, citing his time in remand custody, which was longer than the 30-day limit allowed for sitting MPs. This obliged a by-election. By this time though, the required time-lapse since his detention had run its course and he re-won the Ratnapura seat.

Still, during this very fraught election campaign, Punchinilame was already working for his UNP rival.

By the mid-1970s, the UNP appeared to have shifted gears and were now recruiting candidates among prominent members of the populous ‘lower’ castes and non-elite groups. This seemed to allow new axes of animosity among emergent groups to be articulated, even as electoral politics reinforced ancient rivalries. It also created a space for the acting out of local enmities under the guise of party politics. Thus by 1974-5, Punchinilame who supported the ascendant Jayawardene faction within the UNP, seemed to be gaining important political support within the Party. With the death of Attygalle, Punchinilame became the UNP candidate for Ratnapura.

It is at this point that Mahinda Ratnatilaka, also a petty gem-trader, enters the picture as Punchinilame’s key henchman.

By the mid-1970s the ULF was coming apart. The CP and LSSP broke away in 1975. The SLFP itself was increasingly torn by factional in-fights. Nanda, critical of what he felt was a move towards the right, broke away and contested the 1977 Elections as an Independent. He lost his seat. G.V. Punchinilame, the UNP candidate won. In this election, says Mr. Gunasena, Punchinilame polled a little more than 19,000 votes. Nanda himself polled over 16,000. The SLFP candidate polled around 5,000 votes. Punchinilame only won because of the divisions within the SLFP.

By the 1970s, party politics often seemed to play itself out in the spectacular idiom of the feud. At this point, says Mr. Bandara, local enmities often took the form of post-election violence, where supporters of the victorious party attacked the property of the losers and engaged in wild acts of arson. But it was perhaps the General Elections of 1977 which saw something approaching to a systemization (kramanukula-vidiyakata) of this ‘post-election violence’ syndrome, when the Leader of the victorious UNP announced a one-week holiday for the police. This move, he says, was seen as a signal for UNP supporters to attack their opponents, without the police to stand in their way.

Here the new government was seen to be – silently - encouraging its supporters to assume an intimidatory stance vis-à-vis their electoral opponents, even as they loudly deplored the breakdown of law and order.

The 1977 Elections were a real watershed. Profiting handsomely from the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, the UNP blazed into power with a two-thirds majority. Faced with the seductive possibility of ‘rolling back’ the electoral map once and for all, at this point, its’ leaders capitulated. They now stepped down the slippery path of evoking selective political and constitutional changes in their favour. These ranged from setting-up a Presidential System including - a somewhat contentious - form of proportional representation, to the extraordinary move to revoke the civic rights of the Leader of the Opposition.

These tactics contained the electoral map for the next 17 years.

Consequently, throughout the 1980s the SLFP was in deep retreat. Yet in this last decade of his life, Nanda’s own fortunes both ebbed and flowed. With its charismatic Leader now neutralised, the SLFP was left without a credible candidate to run in the first Presidential Elections of 1982. Still, Nanda decided to support the besieged SLFP nominee - a close relative - and repaired his relations with the party. By this time, Ratnatilaka had fallen out with Punchinilame, and was now working for Nanda. His reputation as a chandiya was already significant and he was seen to strengthen Nanda’s hand against Punchinilame’s UNP stalwarts. Consequently, says Mr. Bandara, Nanda was one of the few figures who refused to yield to UNP thuggery at this time.

But the Referendum in December 1982 was a real test.²⁶ “It was a terrible, terrible election”, says Mr. Bandara who was an SLFP Returning Officer at this election, “and after this, I decided to retire from election duty. I had worked as a Returning Officer since 1970. The climate then was very different; after all the counting was over, everyone could shake hands. In 1977, things were a lot more unstable, but I never feared for my personal safety. In 1982 I was even unsure if I would be able to get home safely, he says, but I was not attacked.”

The violence of the 1982 Referendum then, came as a shock even to long-time loyalists like Mr. Bandara. Political scientists argue that the elections of 1982 - specially the Referendum - saw electoral malpractices of a magnitude never witnessed before.²⁷ While some of this may have been sanctioned by the UNP hierarchy, could such extensive malpractices have been centrally orchestrated? It didn’t seem possible. It was to do with the political climate created, says Mr. Bandara. Senior UNPers were making statements from public platforms, expressing their intolerance of any kind of civic dissent. This seemed to have spurred local leaders to greater heights of aggression at the village-level. Many local leaders and supporters, he says, appeared to have acted on their own initiative, taking their cue from the tone of senior party figures.

Still, reports of actual bodily harm seemed at odds with expectations of harm. Here UNP-supporters acted out their contempt for the electoral process performatively, in order to terrorize the voting public. They succeeded, for many who like Mr. Bandara were not attacked, feared they would be.

Further, in the wake of the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983, a range of Left groupings - including the Sinhala-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) – were banned.²⁸ Tamil militant groups took to arms in the Tamil-speaking districts of the North and East, and were only contained in mid-1987 by the arrival of Peacekeeping troops from India. However, it was the presence of the Indian troops, which, together with its electoral expulsion, led the JVP to launch their bloody July uprising.

The uprising was crushed by 1990.

But none of these developments seemed to reduce levels of repression against SLFP activists, student organizations, trade unions, women’s groups or human rights campaigners in the Sinhala-speaking South. Electoral dissent then, seemed to be fraught with as much danger as actively taking to arms.

Despite the political strife however, with the opening of the economy in the 1980s the gem-trade in Ratnapura boomed. The influx of foreign entrepreneurs willing to pay good prices for quality stones brought in much-needed capital. Both the Punchinilame and the Ratnatilaka families appear to have thrived in this new climate and became considerably enriched.

Political developments also furthered their rise. The Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of 1987 made provisions for the new Provincial Councils. These were subnational-level bodies meant to devolve greater powers from the centre to the provinces. G.V. Punchinilame became the UNP nominee for the post of Chief Minister of the Sabaragamuwa Provincial Council, which was comprised of the Ratnapura and Kegalle districts.

But the Provincial Council elections of early-1988 were boycotted by many parties, including the SLFP and the JVP.²⁹ Thus the main opposition to the UNP was provided by the United Socialist Alliance (USA), a motley collection of Left parties. The untimely death of Muttetuwegama, the CP candidate in 1986, and the abdication of the SLFP now ensured a UNP victory. Still, it was not an easy one.³⁰

G.V. Punchinilame’s vacation of his Parliamentary seat obliged a by-election. At this point, his son, Susantha requested and won the UNP nomination for the Ratnapura electorate.³¹

At this by-election, however, the JVP decided to support the SLFP candidate, Nanda Ellawala, and many young JVP activists campaigned tirelessly on his behalf. Consequently, Nanda won with a resounding majority. In the context of the SLFP’s retreat throughout the island, the results of the Ratnapura by-election created great elation. Nanda’s stature across the island had never been higher. He went on to win the Ratnapura seat in the Parliamentary Elections of February 1989, polling over 75,000 votes in the most difficult and unstable political climate yet seen in Sri Lanka.³²

It was in the wake of the July 1988 by-election that the failed UNP candidate, Susantha Punchinilame first came into the public eye.

Though by mid-1988, the JVP uprising was gaining momentum across the island, insurgent activity in the Ratnapura district was still relatively subdued, and it was this which made the event which followed in some ways so inexplicable. It was enacted in the Ratnapura Public Library, a well-known gathering place for a range of radical student groups. By this point, the UNP had issued its MPs and parliamentary candidates with firearms and security personnel for their ‘protection.’ Soon after the July by-election, Susantha Punchinilame’s security guards stormed the Public Library and arrested three students. Weeks later, the SLFP MP Anura Bandaranaike reported in Parliament that a medical student, Padmasiri Tirimavitana had been abducted with two others in broad daylight from the Ratnapura Library, and their whereabouts were still unknown.

Sometime later, the tortured and hideously mutilated bodies of the three boys were exhumed in Wellawaya, some miles away from the Ratnapura district. Susantha Punchinilame, says an ex-student-leader, was briefly detained on suspicion of involvement in these deaths. This was on the evidence of two of the army security guards stationed at the Punchinilame residence, who admitted that the boys had been brought to the house.³³

However, in the chaotic climate of the times, he was released on bail. While a protracted court case - extending over seven years - was conducted by the SLFP-led PA government after the fall of the UNP in 1994, he was finally acquitted due to a lack of evidence.

Why were these particular boys taken? Again, there are many stories. Tirimavitana was a JVP student-leader, says Mr. Gunasena. He was known to be an excellent organizer. He campaigned hard for Nanda Ellawala in the 1988 by-election. There are those who ascribe a good part of Nanda’s electoral triumph to Tirimavitana. Who knows? Though he was JVP, he may have gone over to Nanda at some point. For Susantha Punchinilame, it was his first election and the defeat would have shamed him because the UNP won everywhere else. He may have seen the boy as somehow instrumental in his own public humiliation (prasidda lajjava).

In the climate which prevailed, remarks Mr. Bandara, Punchinilame may have thought nobody would query his actions because the boy had JVP links.³⁴

In this discourse, the bodies of the boys are now tortured, defaced and reduced to spectacle, since they were seen to be implicated in the political humiliation of a failed candidate. They conveyed a clear message to the electorate, including any wavering supporters with half-a-mind to shift their allegiance in the face of a seeming SLFP resurgence.

In this increasingly repressive climate then, politics in the Ratnapura district were now no longer acted-out upon a public ‘theatre’, but upon the bodies of political opponents. Like Foucault’s execution, the torn and tortured body of the victim becomes the site for the re-activation of political power.

Consequently, many were deterred.³⁵ But amazingly, the killings also – briefly – generated enormous public outrage.

How did this happen?

“The bodies were found at Wellawaya”, says Piyadasa mudalali, “which was a JVP stronghold. The JVP organized a strong protest. There was a lot of bad feeling about the killings throughout the area. Wellawaya is a very undeveloped area with high levels of unemployment. Young people struggle to get into university, and to (prestigious) faculties such as Medicine. It was also felt that the killings had to do with the electoral enmities with the Ellawalas. There was much feeling for this boy, caught between the politics of the big families (loku-loku aya).”

One unintended victim of the entire episode was G.V. Punchinilame, who was forced to resign from his post as Chief Minister of the Sabaragamuwa Council.

This was not just an issue about Ratnapura, says a lecturer at the Colombo Medical Faculty, who was then a student. The whole Medical Faculty was in a state of enragement. There was a massive funeral. The entire Opposition, trade unions, everyone came. It was such an embarrassment for the party that Premadasa³⁶ forced G.V. Punchinilame to resign his post.

His father’s resignation, ironically, seemed to convince many of Susantha Punchinilame’s guilt.

If the son was not guilty, asks a Colombo-based human rights activist, why did the father agree to resign his post? They bowed before the people’s anger.

The JVP-led public response then, also took the form of a tremendous, spectacular gesture with strong coercive overtones, which seemed to intimidate the UNP into making important concessions.

Still, at the December 1988 Presidential Elections, the UNP candidate Premadasa won by a narrow margin. In the February 1989 General Election, once again described as the most violent up to-date, the UNP received a majority in Parliament. Nanda Ellawala died later in the year, and this, together with the earlier demise of Muttetuwegama, seemed to leave an unbridgeable gap in the anti-UNP front in the Ratnapura district.

Considering the violence unleashed upon it throughout the 1980s, however, the SLFP’s resilience in these two elections was nothing less than remarkable. While SLFP leaders incessantly deplored the ‘gun culture’ and ‘contract-killings mentality’ introduced by the UNP, it was an aspect of the political culture which the SLFP itself had to address in fielding candidates between 1988-94. This transformed SLFP politics. Thus being a ‘strong candidate’ now meant the ability to put-together a group of loyalists who could withstand violence offered by UNP candidates. This required the constant presence of large numbers of supporters living-in with the candidate’s family, a situation which advantaged those who could still call upon a captive retainer-base. It also called for new levels of organizational skill. A new group of young SLFP MPs, baptized in fire, arrived in Parliament.

With the death of Muttetuwegama, the Kalawana seat became vacant. Ratnatilaka now demanded the SLFP nomination. The Party refused, and he returned once again to the UNP in the early-1990s.

However, after the dramatic May Day assassination of President Premadasa in 1993, the UNP’s grip on the electorate began to crumble.³⁷

The Provincial Council Elections which followed were contested with renewed vigour by all opposition groups. Though the new SLFP-led PA did well island-wide, the Ratnapura district was swept by the UNP.

It was at this election that Nalanda Ellawala, son of Nanda, made his political debut, becoming the youngest member of the Sabaragamuwa Council at 26 years.

But it was of course the General Election of 1994 which finally deposed the UNP. Nalanda Ellawala resigned his seat and contested on the PA ticket, polling 52,371 votes. This time, Susantha Punchinilame, contesting as a UNP candidate also did well, polling 57,029 votes. But in the Ratnapura electorate itself, Ellawala polled a large majority. Athula Attygalle, son of the former UNP MP, polled 44,327 votes but lost his seat. Mahinda Ratnatilaka also contested on the UNP ticket and lost.

This was followed by the Presidential Elections later in the year where the new Leader of the PA, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga won with a resounding majority.

This created a sense of euphoria across the island, signalled by rapturous headlines and editorials in the mainstream as well as alternate media. Since many of those in the new PA government had campaigned on human rights platforms, over the next year a number of Presidential Commissions of Inquiry on the political assassinations of a spectrum of public figures were initiated.³⁸ Also ‘disappearances’ linked to arbitrary army/police activity between 1988-90 were also now being heard in the courts.

Further, the ‘mulberry group’, involving a number of radical young PA backbenchers, who were critical of its leadership had also emerged, and Nalanda Ellawala seemed to be finding his voice within this group.

Nalanda displayed a lot of political acuity, says a PA colleague, even though he was only 29-years-old. He was an excellent organizer, and very articulate. He was going to be bigger than Nanda.

For UNP supporters in the Ratnapura district of course, this was no consolation. The situation became increasingly difficult. The anti-UNP violence which erupted in the wake of the election never really subsided. In 1995, Athula Attygala failed UNP candidate was killed, the most high-profile political slaying after 1994. The new PA regime made no attempt to retrieve the large number of weapons issued to political figures including the SLFP and the Left parties between 1988-90 by the previous government.

Moreover, in January 1996, the Sabaragamuwa and the North-Central Provincial Councils - controlled by the UNP – were abruptly dissolved by the President, a move which not only incensed the UNP but also dismayed civic rights groups across the island. In September 1996, the UNP began celebrating its 50th Anniversary with a series of rallies throughout the island. These frequently provoked confrontations with PA supporters.

On 10 October, a series of episodes took place in Ratnapura. A UNP meeting was due to be held, says Sirisena mudalali who runs a hardware shop in the Ratnapura Bazaar. Some PA supporters set fire to a boutique because the owner had links to the UNP. They set tyres on fire along the roads. At Kalawana, they bombed a bus bringing UNP supporters to a meeting. A liquor-store was burnt, a petrol shed. These kinds of things happened.

PA supporters on their part claim that the attacks were ‘provoked’ by UNP thugs shooting at PA activists.

All of which developments led to the confrontation of 11 February 1997.

* * *

Clearly then, this confrontation must be seen against the special context of the Ratnapura district in the 1980s. Here Nanda Ellawala’s forceful political presence became a serious problem for the Punchinilame family, specially in the context of the UNP’s success everywhere else. Articulate and politically acute, Nanda was often able to unite the anti-UNP front in a way that didn’t happen elsewhere.

Unlike many other candidates of his background, Nanda could reinforce the emotionally-captive support-base attached to his social-position with his charismatic political persona. Thus issues of social class cannot be dismissed. For democracy did bring egalitarianizing shifts into local politics. It transformed the political repertoire of a candidate like Nanda. Always a controversial figure, the style he evolved included spectacular, symbolic gestures with the coercive connotations which brought him a chandi image. But it was a ‘hardness’ of a particular kind: he never seemed to feel called upon to engage in the butchery and violence which became part of the s persona in the late-1980s. Guns did not intimidate him either, and here his radala background appeared to give him a sense of his moral right to represent ‘his’ people over that of aspirants such as G.V. Punchinilame.

The Punchinilames on their part were products of the radical political and economic upheavals of the 1980s in the Ratnapura district which brought about shifts in the playing-out of class-relations and transformed the political role of the chandiya. Consequently coercive acts involving overt violence emerged as a valid political-style that could effect a submissive voter-base while simultaneously shattering the feudal appo-mentality of the electorate.

Thus at one level, the resurgence of the SLFP in the mid-1990s also seemed to imply the revival of certain ‘reactionary’ class-interests exemplified by ‘out-dated’ political-styles which could threaten the hard-won social gravitas of groups such as the Punchinilames. The final confrontation between Susantha Punchinilame and Nalanda Ellawala then cannot be divorced from the status-anxieties of emergent groups, and fears that a public withdrawal of deference by a new generation of political rivals would untenably diminish their social weight.

Subsequent Developments

By late evening on 11 February 1997 enraged SLFP supporters were running amok, engaging in an orgy of arson against the properties of the Punchinilame and Ratnatilaka families. A police curfew was called across the district. Nalanda Ellawala’s funeral on 16 February was, even according to the pro-UNP Sunday Leader, attended by more than a 100,000 persons.39 Subsequently the Ratnapura Police Station was attacked by a crowd of 600-700 SLFP supporters. In the ensuing confrontation with the police, two rioters were killed and more than 150 injured.

The army now had to move in to contain the situation.

The security situation in Ratnapura was more critical than it had ever been during the uprising of 1988-90.

But though the PA won the March local elections in Ratnapura, Mahinda Ratnatilaka, now in police custody, polled the highest number of votes.

By October 1997, despite death threats received by a key witness, Dilan Perera and by the Magistrate of the Ratnapura Court himself;⁴⁰ and the suspicious death of at least one important eye-witness,⁴¹ both Ratnatilaka and Punchinilame were released on bail, along with the other nine accused.

On 22 July 1999, the Chief Magistrate of the Ratnapura Court decided to commit all 11 accused in the Ellawala Assassination to the High Court.

Despite this, Punchinilame received a UNP nomination for the 2000 General Elections, where he polled an amazing 77,197 votes. Ratnatilaka, also contesting on the UNP ticket, polled a surprising 49,803 votes and entered Parliament.

In May 2001, on the day before the certified copies of the Ellawala Assassination were to be forwarded to the Attorney General’s Department, arsonists set fire to the stores and registry of the Ratnapura Court Complex. The Ellawala case-file – extending over 80,000 pages - was destroyed in the blaze.⁴²

This act seemed to intimidate even some members of the Attorney General’s Department. These are politicians, says a senior prosecutor bitterly, how can we (i.e. the Attorney General’s Department) clash with them?

This set the tone for a period of instability. The PA government subsequently fell. In the December 2001 General Elections, Susantha Punchinilame continued to improve his performance, polling 101,033 votes. Ratnatilaka also did better. Though the UNP again fell in the April 2004 General Elections, Punchinilame retained his majority, polling over 97,000 votes.

Seven years and three General Elections later, the High Court hearings into the Ellawala assassination have still not commenced.

In retrospect then, while the shooting itself may not have been pre-meditated, over the years, it has assumed the dimensions of a bloody, spectacular, coercive gesture, and one which appears to have given a tremendous boost to the political career of the perpetrators.

Bibliography

1.Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. (1995). The Ninth Parliament of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Lake House Publishers.
2.Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe & Leo Spitzer (1999). Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover N. H.: University Press of New England.
3.Barthes, Roland (1991) ‘Listening’ in Barthes, Roland Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp 245-60.
4.Butler, Judith (1990)
5.Campbell, Kirsten (2002) ‘Legal Memories: Sexual Assault, Memory and International Humanitarian Law’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn), pp 149-78.
6.Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge University Press.
7.Department of Elections (1994) General Elections to Provincial Councils: 1988-1994. Final results by polling divisions of electoral districts. Election Secretariat: Colombo.
8.______, (1994) Parliamentary General Election: 16 August 1994. Detailed results (votes & preferences). Election Secretariat: Colombo.
9.______, (1999) General Elections to Provincial Councils of Western, Central, North-Central, Uva & Sabaragamuwa Provinces – 6 April 1999. Final results by polling divisions of electoral districts. Election Secretariat: Colombo.
10.De Silva, Jani (1993) ‘The Ethics of Struggle: Changing Political Perceptions Among High School Students in a Southern Sri Lankan Electorate’ in Everding, Ulrich (ed.) Problems of Democracy, Constitutionalism and Political Violence. Colombo: Goethe Institut, pp 73-118.
11.______, (1998) ‘Language, Praxis & Silences: The July 1987 Uprising of the JVP in Sri Lanka’ in Michael Roberts (ed.) Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited. Vol. 11, Colombo: Marga Institute, pp 163-198.
12.Feldman, Allen (1991) Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Island. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
13.Felman, Shoshana (1999) ‘Forms of Judicial Blindness: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions’ in Austin Sarat & Thomas (ed.) Kerns History, Memory and the Law. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp 25-93.
14.Jeganathan, Pradeep (1998) ‘All the Lord’s Men? Ethnicity and Inequality in the Space of a Riot’ in Michael Roberts (ed.) Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited. Vol. II, Colombo: Marga Institute, pp 221-46.
15.Perera, U. L. Jayantha (1981) Social Change and Class Relations in Rural Sri Lanka. Unpublished PhD thesis, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.
16.______, (1982) ‘Leaders in Changing Rural Sri Lanka – A Typology’ in Sri Lanka Journal of Agrarian Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, (June), pp 1-10.
17.Woolf, Leonard (1981). Village in the Jungle. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Notes

¹ See Butler 1990. Butler of course argues that social identity is a performance rather than something that inheres in the individual. We choose particular gender and social roles out of our cultural repertoire and act them out endlessly. Each of these performances then, emerges as a new version of the original role. It is this element of novelty which holds the potential for personal agency and creativity.
² I have named the victim and the main perpetrators since their identities have been in the public domain – including the print and electronic media - since February 1997; this was after all a very public act. I have also named the witnesses for the prosecution whose evidence to the Ratnapura Magistrate I taped extensively. These testimonies were widely covered in the Sinhala and English media and is therefore already in the public domain as well.
³ The literature on the politics of memory is vast. See Connerton 1989, Barthes 1991 and Bal, Crewe & Spitzer 1999 among others.
⁴ In the wake of the mass human rights violations in Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor, new work on the nature of legal memory contests notions of such kinds of ‘factual truth’ as the only kind of legally-admissible evidence. See Campbell 2002, Felman 1999 among others.
⁵ Though ambiguities prevailed in the colonial practice of the Law which allowed for various degrees of racism towards different native groups.
⁶ By the mid-19 century the Bow Street Runners had given way to the institution of the Metropolitan Police in the UK. This entrenched a tradition of rational/impartial investigation into the causes of violent crime. Further, the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle seemed to have substantiated this with a discourse of empirical investigation supported by forensic evidence. Here the ‘rationality’ (i.e. the unemotional aspect) of the investigation is posited against the passion and excess of the crime itself.
⁷ Foucalt 1979: 49.
⁸ See also Butler 1990. Theatre of course, works when the audience collectively (and involuntarily) suspends their disbelief and is captivated by the narrative/message unfolding before their eyes. It is this sense of thrall that Brechtian audience participation techniques attempt to break. Despite such theatrical mechanisms, in the domain of ritual for instance, theatre creates a space where the dramatist/exorcist/religious practitioner is able to hold the audience in thrall.
⁹ This is not to deny the relevance of other socio-judicial institutions such as the gam sabha which operated on the principal of collective responsibility rather than re-allocating power. But while attempts have been made in the post-independence period to reactivate the gam sabha idiom through the creation of mediation councils, these have had limited success, particularly in mediating issues of political violence. Alternately, the feud idiom, with its symbolic dimensions appears to have grown enormously in currency. Thus while a range of institutions addressing the same question – social order – may persist in a given political culture, some become ascendant, perhaps because they address the needs of the collective, while others are phased out. In fact, many activists I met on the field argued that while sociologists celebrate bodies such as the gam sabha, it is more complex idioms such as the feud which need to be analyzed. In this paper I try to respond to these criticisms from the field.
¹⁰ See Perera, 1981; 1982.
¹¹ The chandiya is a recurrent motif in Sinhala cinema and in the political culture at the local level. See also Jeganathan 1998, for a brief sketch of the role of the chandiya in the context of an open economy in the 1980s. See also Feldman 1991 on the role of the Irish hardman.
¹² The radala were of course the elite subcategory of the govi, and the important administrative posts of, the ratemahatmaya, dissave and korale were drawn from this group.
¹³ Bandarage 1983; Obeyesekere 1984: p 57. In the coastal or low-country regions colonized early on by European powers, such titles were dispensed by these powers.
¹⁴ Obeyesekere 1984; Roberts 1994.
¹⁵ See Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle for an evocative narrative of the village feud.
¹⁶ It was precisely to avoid inter-party clashes that party leaders agreed to choose different days to hand in their Nomination papers.
¹⁷ See his interview with Christopher Kamalendran in the Sunday Times of 23 February 1997.
¹⁸ Appo is a feudal honorific which much of the populace of the Ratnapura district still seems to use to address members of the Ellawala family – even while criticizing them!
¹⁹ Green is the UNP colour, the SLFP-led PA has blue, and the Left parties have red.
²⁰ See interview with Kamalendran in the Sunday Times of 23 February 1997.
²¹ Polite title for Members of Parliament.
²² See interview in Sunday Times, 23 February 1997.
²³ This becomes particularly significant when one considers the elevated social status of the Ellawalas vis-à-vis the Punchinilames. Many informants referred to this and seemed quite baffled by Punchinilame’s ‘perfidy’ in the face of Ellawala’s courteousness. It should be mentioned that both men studied at the prestigious St. Thomas’ College, Colombo and knew each other since boyhood. This, however, was clearly not a static relationship and changed with shifts in the fortunes of the Punchinilames.
²⁴ Against the ‘comprador’ capitalism of the UNP, the SLFP addressed itself to reviving the production-base of the economy. This allowed the Left parties to view it as representing the interests of the ‘national bourgeoisie,’ which in turn created ideological space for the ‘no contest’ pacts of the next few decades.
²⁵ Mudalali is a term of respect used to describe successful traders and entrepreneurs.
²⁶ Through this Referendum, the UNP Leader Jayawardene wanted to extend the term of the present Parliament - in which the UNP had a two-thirds majority – for another six years without subjecting its members to a General Election.
²⁷ See Hewage & Warnapala.
²⁸ All commentators agree that this step by the UNP leadership was a reprehensible one, since there was clear evidence that the July killings were conducted by factions within the UNP itself. It was also a foolish move in that it helped to create the conditions for the dreadful July uprising.
²⁹ Since the rational behind the Provincial Councils was the greater devolution of political powers to the provinces, the JVP argued that this would be a first step towards the granting of a separate State of Tamil Eelam in the Tamil-speaking regions of the North and East, as demanded by the militant Tamil Tigers. At this point, the SLFP agreed with this stand.
³⁰ Out of a total poll of 294, 404 in the Ratnapura district, the UNP’s lead was just over 22,000 votes.
³¹ Since this election was the last one to be fought on the first-past-the-post system, polling was still concerned with the electorate as opposed to the district. From 1989, PR and the list-system came into place.
³² During this election campaign, conducted on PR and a list-system, for the first time in post-independence history, large numbers of SLFP candidates were assassinated by pro-UNP armed militias and a significant number of UNP candidates killed by the JVP.
³³ These two witnesses who gave evidence to the police inquiry appeared to have themselves ‘disappeared’ subsequently, and they did not give evidence at the Court case.
³⁴ By this point, such was the level of insurgent activity in many parts of the island that any one suspected of having links to the JVP or its military arm the Deshapremi Janatha Vyaparaya (DJV) were liable to be detained, shot or killed by the security forces. Pro-UNP militias were also active in this project. In particular, many students ‘disappeared’ during 1988-90. See De Silva, Jani 1993; 1998, Chandraprema 1991, Gunaratne 1990, Alles 1990.
³⁵ It should be remembered that none of the eyewitnesses to these daylight abductions – including the army officers – would give evidence at the court hearings.
³⁶ By this point UNP strongman Premadasa had replaced the wily Jayawardene as leader of the Party.
³⁷ This assassination, by a suicide-bomber, is popularly seen to have been the work of the Tamil Tiger militants in the North rather than Sinhala opposition groups based in the South.
³⁸ These ranged from prominent politicians within the UNP itself, to Army General Denzil Kobbekaduwa, to leading PA politicians, including the husband of the President Chandrika Bandaranaike.
³⁹ Sunday leader 17 February 1997, p 5.
⁴⁰ Daily News, 10 July 1997. Statement by the Ratnapura Magistrate Chandradasa Nanayakkara. Report by P.D.A.S. Gunasekera.
⁴¹ Island, 8 June 1997. On the exhumation of the body of Dhanawardena Perera. Also Daily News 15 July 1997.
⁴² Daily Mirror, 15 May 2001, leader by Ajit Lal Shantha Udaya & K Arasaratnam.