How to Kill a President: A Journalist Reopens the Mystery of Premadasa’s Assassination
Nandana Weeraratne’s new Sinhala book revisits the 1993 assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa — and raises a controversial question about the possible role of Indian intelligence
Few political assassinations in Sri Lanka have generated as many unanswered questions as the killing of President Ranasinghe Premadasa on 1 May 1993.
More than three decades later, veteran investigative journalist Nandana Weeraratne has returned to the case with a new book, How to Kill a President? — a work based substantially on his reporting for the Sinhala newspaper Ravaya. Weeraratne has described the book as an attempt to examine the circumstances surrounding Premadasa's assassination and the wider political environment in which it occurred.
The book promises to take readers beyond the official narrative and into the maze of political intrigue, intelligence operations, militant networks, personal relationships and competing theories surrounding one of the most consequential assassinations in modern Sri Lankan history.
From a May Day rally to an investigation
Weeraratne's account begins with his experience covering the May Day rally at which Premadasa was assassinated.
Rather than treating the bombing simply as an isolated act of terrorism, the journalist followed a trail of individuals, organisations and events surrounding the President's movements and political network.
Among the characters examined are figures connected with the President's Sucharita political circle, including individuals known by names such as Babu, Fanta Raja and Kiri Raja, as well as people associated with Premadasa's political and personal networks.
The investigation also explores allegations concerning money-lending activities, associates and petitions that, according to the book's narrative, raised questions about relationships surrounding the President in the period before his death.
It is this investigative approach that gives How to Kill a President? the character of a political thriller — although its claims must ultimately be judged against documentary evidence and independent historical records.
Premadasa, power and political paranoia
The book does not restrict itself to the final moments of Premadasa's life.
It attempts to reconstruct the political atmosphere of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the extraordinary concentration of political power around the presidency, the violence of the period, the rise of political assassination and the increasingly complicated relationship between Colombo, the LTTE and India.
Weeraratne also examines the darker political culture surrounding the Premadasa presidency, including allegations of political intimidation, black magic and the influence of superstition and personal mythology within Sri Lankan politics.
These episodes are presented as part of a much larger question: how could a sitting President, surrounded by an extensive security apparatus, be killed at such close range?
That question remains one of the central mysteries surrounding the assassination.
The LTTE, India and the geopolitical dimension
One of the most politically significant sections of the book concerns Premadasa's relationship with the LTTE.
Premadasa's government pursued negotiations with the LTTE after the withdrawal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. His government also became involved in the controversial episode in which weapons were supplied to the LTTE — a decision that subsequently became one of the most disputed aspects of his presidency.
The book places these developments within the broader India–Sri Lanka relationship and the extraordinary geopolitical tensions of the period.
It also revisits the assassination of other major political figures, including General Ranjan Wijeratne, Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake, arguing that the pattern of political violence against senior UNP figures deserves examination as part of the wider historical context. Weeraratne himself has highlighted that several leading UNP figures were assassinated during this period and questioned why subsequent UNP governments did not pursue deeper investigations into those killings.
The most controversial thesis: RAW
The most provocative aspect of the book is its examination of the possibility of involvement by India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in Premadasa's assassination.
This is a highly consequential allegation.
The book should therefore be read as an investigative work presenting a thesis to be examined, rather than as conclusive proof that RAW ordered or carried out the assassination. Establishing such a claim historically would require corroborating documentary evidence, intelligence records, credible witness testimony and independent investigation.
Nevertheless, the question itself is significant.
India had been deeply involved in Sri Lanka's conflict during the preceding years. The Indo-Lanka Accord, the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, the subsequent withdrawal of Indian troops and Premadasa's negotiations with the LTTE created an extraordinarily complicated geopolitical environment.
Weeraratne's book asks whether that history provides grounds for reconsidering the circumstances of Premadasa's death.
A journalist returning to unfinished business
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is that Weeraratne is not approaching the subject as a historian writing several decades after the events.
He was a journalist who reported during that turbulent period.
In his own account, the book grew from his earlier Ravaya reporting on Premadasa's assassination.
That gives the work a different character. It represents an attempt by a journalist to return to old investigations, reconsider information gathered at the time and connect previously separate pieces of the political puzzle.
The result is likely to provoke debate — particularly among those who lived through the Premadasa era.
What about Sajith Premadasa?
The publication also creates an interesting political question for the present.
Sajith Premadasa, the current Opposition Leader, is the son of the assassinated President.
Weeraratne's own article announcing the book specifically notes that Sajith Premadasa held senior ministerial positions in subsequent UNP governments but questions why his father's assassination was not pursued more deeply by those administrations.
That inevitably raises a question for Parliament:
Will Sajith Premadasa publicly respond to the central allegations and questions raised by this new book about his father's assassination?
A parliamentary discussion would be particularly significant because the issue is no longer merely historical. It concerns the assassination of a former head of state and the possibility — if the allegations could ever be substantiated — of foreign intelligence involvement in a political murder in Sri Lanka.
More than a book about one assassination
How to Kill a President? is therefore more than a conventional biography of Ranasinghe Premadasa.
It is an investigation into a particular period of Sri Lankan history when political violence, intelligence operations, the LTTE, India, the UNP leadership and the presidency intersected in extraordinary ways.
The book's conclusions will undoubtedly be debated. Some of its allegations may require substantial further evidence before they can be accepted as historical fact.
But that is precisely why such investigative journalism matters.
Three decades after Premadasa's death, Sri Lanka still has unanswered questions about some of the most consequential political assassinations of its modern history.
Weeraratne's book has reopened one of them.
The question now is whether politicians, historians, journalists and, above all, the Sri Lankan state are prepared to reopen the evidence.
And perhaps the most politically interesting question is whether Sajith Premadasa himself will address, in Parliament, the allegations and unanswered questions raised by a book investigating the death of his father.