A Letter from the Grave: Lalith Athulathmudali’s Message to Sajith Premadasa
My dear Sajith,
They tell me you are the Leader of the Opposition now, a man seeking the highest office in the land. I watch from where I am—a place no one should have been sent before their time—and I feel compelled to write. You carry your father’s name, and for that, I have no animosity. You were a boy then. But you also carry the weight of a legacy built on blood, and it is time you knew the truth.
I was a threat to your father. Not just politically, but personally. I had studied at Oxford—Jesus College, to be precise—and I had the audacity to be the President of the Union, a feat of oratory and intellect that your father could never hope to match . I had returned from Harvard with a Master of Laws, my thesis accepted into the university’s permanent collection . I spoke with clarity, with logic. I was a "brilliant orator and scholar," as they wrote . Your father, however, was a school dropout who came from humble beginnings, renting out rickshaws for a living . Yes, he was a transformer of the poor, a man of the masses, but he was also a man haunted by a deep insecurity—an insecurity he took out on anyone who outshone him .
Do you know why he sent you to Mill Hill School in London? It was not for your education; it was for his own validation . He wanted to prove that the son of a rickshaw-owner’s son could stand on equal footing with the sons of the elite, like me. He wanted you to be the Oxford man he could never be. But what happened, Sajith? You dropped out of the London School of Economics. You never finished your postgraduate studies at the University of Maryland . The very education he sacrificed everything to buy you, you threw away. And yet, you stand on podiums today, trotting out English words to impress the foreign diplomats. Why do you do this? Is it because you believe the language of the colonizer confers legitimacy? Or is it because you, like your father, are desperate to prove you belong in the rooms of power that I walked into with effortless grace?
Your father hated me for my education. He hated that I had been removed from the UNP not because of incompetence, but because I was a challenger to his throne . He saw my party, the Democratic United National Front, as a knife at his throat. I see you are now the leader of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya—the very kind of breakaway movement your father feared would destroy his regime . You are doing what I did, and yet you claim to honor his memory. The irony is staggering.
On the 23rd of April, 1993, I was gunned down. The world believed it was just another assassination in a country drenched in political violence. But I know the truth, Sajith. The bullets that killed me were ordered by your father. I know the state resorted to "extremely oppressive measures to hold its political enemies at bay," as they say now . I was the greatest of those enemies, and so I had to be removed . Your father was a man who “violated people’s democratic rights blatantly” . He killed me because I was better than him—better educated, better spoken, and too dangerous to be left alive.
Do not let your father’s paranoia define you. When you speak English to show off, you are merely echoing his insecurity. When you claim the legacy of the UNP, you are clutching at a ghost. You are your own man, Sajith. You must forge your own path.
We were both victims of the same political machine, and we are both survivors. Stop trying to be the son of the man who killed me. Be the man who rises above it.
With a heavy heart,
Lalith Athulathmudali