“The hunt goes on. People are still being arrested. (The shooting of arrested people has been a common feature of the whole action. This has continued well beyond the frantic early days of the revolt. Exactly what proportion of those arrested have been shot will never be known but, undoubtedly, large numbers have been shot.) Suspects are being rounded up. Many of those who had been known to have held radical views or associated with radical thinking have been questioned. More are being investigated. Petitions by and information from various people – many of them by those bent on personal revenge – are being followed up. Many who have had no connections at all with the J.V.P. have suffered. Will this go on indefinitely.

Here, a fundamental question must be posed. Are the J.V.P. essentially a comparatively insignificant minority of misguided youth who have been indoctrinated and led astray by a coterie of power-hungry politicians? If this is so, a policy of continued “mopping-up” will succeed. But this is not the case. Whatever their weakness may be and whatever other elements may be mixed-up with them, the J.V.P. are essentially part of a movement of history and have spontaneously sprung up from the heart of the people. Their struggle is part of the struggle for liberation throughout the world. So a policy of “mopping-up” will not only fail, it will accelerate the development of the very tendencies that are sought to be checked, though at a terrible cost. Their movement has already been strengthened by martyrdom, and every innocent person suffering at the hands of the security forces tends to turn an increasingly larger number of people against the government.

We now turn to a consideration of the action of the government in this crisis. The United Front government had come into power in May 1970 election with an overwhelming majority. Clearly, they had no alternative but to take firm action to put down the revolt. For this, they had to turn to the security forces – that is, the armed forces and the police. Various military men were appointed as Coordinating Authorities in different areas and, to all appearances, were given a free hand to go ahead. It has already been pointed out what followed.

To what extent the government tried to mitigate the excess of the security forces is not known. Certain private admonitions must surely have been made? But the people got the impression that no such attempt was made. Some maintain that the government gave a firm order to destroy the rebels, and a public broadcast by a prominent Minister at the height f the crisis, in which he assured the people that the rebels would be “ruthlessly stamped out” lends support to this view. Also, while several public announcements were made by the government in which the security forces were congratulated and thanked, none of these contain any admission of the severity of their methods nor any words to restrain them.”

An excerpt from Violent Lanka: The Day of Slaughter, by Yohan Devananda. Published by Devasaranaramaya, Ibbagamuva, N.W.P., Sri Lanka, 1972