The Underworld and Power: Then and Now
Colombo Wire – Special Investigative Feature
Sri Lankan politics did not shake hands with the underworld by accident. It was a calculated embrace, born of fear, ambition, and the hunger for absolute control. The moment politics discovered it could outsource violence, intimidation, and silence to the criminal underworld, the boundary between the state and the shadows collapsed. What followed was not governance, but a long-running thriller in which ministers, gang leaders, and law enforcement played interchangeable roles.
The marriage between organised crime and mainstream politics first became institutionalised during the era of J. R. Jayewardene. This was the period when executive power was centralised, dissent criminalised, and democracy re-engineered for control. It was also the period when Ranil Wickremesinghe cut his political path forward—not through street politics, but by navigating this new ecosystem where power no longer needed popular legitimacy, only protection.
Yet it was not Jayewardene, nor Wickremesinghe, who exploited the underworld to its fullest potential. That distinction belongs to Ranasinghe Premadasa. Premadasa did not merely tolerate the underworld; he weaponised it. Political opponents were not debated or defeated—they were erased. The underworld became a parallel enforcement arm of the state. This was a moment unprecedented in Sri Lankan history: a time when criminal power exceeded institutional authority, when the leader of the country and the leader of the underworld were, functionally, the same man.
The consequences were immediate and bloody. Senior figures within the ruling party itself were assassinated. Fear became the currency of loyalty. No underworld leader died a natural death during this era. Silence was enforced permanently. The logic was simple: dead men tell no stories, and stories were dangerous.
After Premadasa, Sri Lanka briefly convinced itself that the nightmare had ended. It had not. It was merely dormant.
The Rajapaksa era revived and refined the same architecture of terror. What Premadasa pioneered in raw form, the Rajapaksas industrialised. Underworld networks were not only used for political intimidation, but also for economic crime—drug trafficking, smuggling, and large-scale corruption. The underworld was no longer just muscle; it was logistics.
The political undercurrents surrounding the sensational killing of notorious underworld enforcer Dhanushka Perera—better known as Beddagana Sanjeewa, a figure long linked to the Presidential Security Division (PSD)—run far deeper than a routine gangland execution. During the Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga era, Beddagana Sanjeewa was widely understood within Colombo’s power circles to be more than a street thug; he was an asset, used to intimidate, silence, and eliminate inconvenient voices operating at the margins of politics, media, and business. His eventual killing did not close a chapter—it tore it open.
What followed was a chilling sequence of violence that bore the unmistakable signature of political clean-up. Journalists who probed Sanjeewa’s PSD connections were gunned down or forced into silence. Tamil politicians who allegedly possessed knowledge of his operations met similar fates, as did two businessmen believed to have acted as financial conduits between political handlers and underworld operators. Each killing carried the same message: the problem was not the thug’s death, but what he knew—and who he served.
In retrospect, the Beddagana Sanjeewa saga exposed how deeply embedded the underworld had become within the state’s security architecture. It illustrated a period when political power did not merely tolerate criminal figures but actively deployed them, confident that violence could erase evidence and memory alike. The fact that so many associated witnesses were eliminated after his death suggests not chaos, but coordination—an organised effort to bury a political secret beneath a trail of blood.
During this period, internal gang wars mysteriously disappeared. There were no turf battles, no open shootouts between rival groups. Why? Because when the underworld has a single political patron at the top, discipline is enforced from above. Chaos is bad for business. Violence was centralised, regulated, and directed outward—towards journalists, activists, and political opponents.
The story, long whispered in Colombo’s political corridors, reads like a crime thriller with a constitutional loophole at its centre. Sunil—better known as Goawala Sunil, a Justice of the Peace by background—was convicted in 1978 for a brutal crime: the rape of a young woman named Margaret in Kadawatha. The courts did what the law demanded, handing down a ten-year sentence. Yet justice, in this case, proved disturbingly fragile. By 1981, barely three years into his term, Sunil walked free, the result of a presidential pardon that, according to contemporaneous accounts and political gossip of the era, bore the unmistakable imprint of high-level intervention. Multiple reports alleged that Ranil Wickremesinghe personally lobbied his uncle, then President J. R. Jayewardene—writing letters and making repeated visits—to secure Sunil’s early release. Whether fully documented or deliberately buried, the episode has endured as a dark parable of how power, proximity, and patronage could bend the justice system long before the public ever learned to question it.
Police custody became a death sentence. Suspects were arrested and then killed, conveniently silencing potential witnesses who could expose the political sponsors behind criminal operations. This was not rogue policing; it was policy by omission. Once again, no major underworld figure survived long enough to testify.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake later made a blunt observation that unsettled many: underworld leaders had begun entering formal politics. This was not a metaphor. It was strategy. Criminal figures sought legitimacy, immunity, and respectability. Politics offered all three.
For years, the main opposition actively cleared the path for these figures. The reason was neither ideological nor accidental—it was financial. Opposition politics had become dependent on black money. Election campaigns, media operations, and organisational survival were quietly underwritten by criminal capital. The underworld did not just fund politics; it insured it.
When the new government came to power, the old equilibrium collapsed.
Shootings increased. Assassinations returned to the streets. The opposition rushed to frame this as a breakdown of national security. But a closer look revealed a far more uncomfortable truth: those being killed were almost exclusively linked to organised crime.
What had changed?
For the first time in decades, underworld figures arrested by the police were no longer being murdered inside police custody. The old method of silencing had been shut down. Faced with the risk of exposure, the only remaining option for those threatened by testimony was pre-emptive execution—kill before arrest.
This wave of violence was not random. It was panic.
Political figures and corrupt police officers who had long relied on the underworld now found themselves exposed. The government continued to arrest gang leaders and foot soldiers alike. Corrupt officers were removed. Protection networks collapsed. The old guarantees vanished overnight.
As a result, both the underworld and the political opposition entered crisis mode.
This explains the intensity of the opposition’s narrative today. Their strategy is no longer about alternative policy; it is about delegitimisation. They attempt to convince the public that the government has failed, that the previous system—however brutal—was more “efficient.” They claim state officials can no longer perform their duties, that fear has returned.
The public response tells a different story.
Ordinary citizens report that tasks which once took years now take days or weeks. Files move. Offices respond. The invisible toll booths of corruption have been dismantled. What the opposition describes as dysfunction, the public experiences as liberation.
Perhaps the most significant shift has been in the fight against narcotics. For the first time, drug networks are being disrupted without political interference. The spread of narcotics—once protected as a revenue stream—is being actively curtailed. Parents see it. Communities feel it. A future generation is being pulled back from the edge.
This is why the resistance is so fierce.
The underworld does not fear law enforcement alone; it fears political isolation. The opposition does not fear reform; it fears exposure. What is unfolding is not simply a crime wave—it is a violent withdrawal from power by forces that once ruled from the shadows.
Sri Lanka has seen this movie before. The difference now is that the ending has not yet been written. The question is no longer whether the underworld and politics were once intertwined—that is settled history. The question is whether this time, the country has the will to finally sever that bond.
Because this is not just about crime.
It is about who truly governs the state: elected institutions—or men with guns and immunity.