A former First Lady is in remand custody. Her son is already there. A former President was remanded earlier. Sri Lanka is entering territory that would once have been almost unimaginable. The real test, however, is not who gets arrested. It is whether the law can now finish what it starts.
Shiranthi Rajapaksa, wife of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, was remanded until October 13 by the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court yesterday. She has not been convicted of any offence and is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
That qualification matters because Sri Lanka has spent decades developing a political culture in which proximity to power frequently appeared to offer protection from accountability. Presidents departed office. Ministers changed sides. Governments changed colour. Files were opened, investigations announced and television cameras assembled outside investigative agencies. Then, remarkably often, very little happened.
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That history is why the significance of yesterday cannot be measured simply by another remand order.
Shiranthi Rajapaksa was First Lady for a decade. Her husband remains one of the most consequential political figures in post-independence Sri Lanka. Their son Namal Rajapaksa is an MP, the National Organiser of the SLPP and himself presently in remand custody in connection with a separate investigation.
There is therefore something unmistakably different about the political landscape.
Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe was earlier remanded in connection with allegations concerning public expenditure on his 2023 UK visit. Now a former First Lady has been remanded. Namal Rajapaksa remains caught in the criminal justice process while investigations and court proceedings continue.
Political pedigree is plainly not providing the insulation it once appeared to provide.
That should be welcomed if it represents equality before the law. It should be resisted if it becomes equality before political theatre. The distinction is fundamental.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the NPP were elected after campaigning heavily on corruption, accountability and the promise that political status would no longer protect anyone from investigation. There is consequently an understandable temptation among Government supporters to regard each arrest as evidence that the promise is being fulfilled.
Perhaps it is. But arrests are the beginning of criminal justice, not its conclusion.
Remand is not punishment. An allegation is not a conviction. A courthouse appearance is not proof of guilt. If Sri Lanka forgets those distinctions simply because the accused once possessed enormous political power, the country will merely replace one abuse with another.
The Government must therefore be particularly careful.
Investigators must be allowed to investigate. Prosecutors must decide cases on evidence. Magistrates and judges must operate without political pressure. Suspects must have every protection available under the law, irrespective of whether they are popular, unpopular, powerful or politically inconvenient.
There is another reason why that standard matters. Every weak prosecution ultimately strengthens the person who was prosecuted.
If politically prominent defendants are arrested amid enormous publicity and cases subsequently collapse because evidence was inadequate, procedure was defective or investigations were incomplete, the result will not merely be an acquittal. It will permit those defendants to claim that the entire anti-corruption programme was political persecution.
Sri Lanka has seen enough unfinished investigations to understand that danger.
The Rajapaksas remain a deeply polarising family. To some Sri Lankans Mahinda Rajapaksa remains the leader who presided over the military defeat of the LTTE and the end of a long war. To others the family represents the concentration of political power, allegations of corruption, weakened institutions and the economic and political system that eventually collapsed spectacularly in 2022.
Neither view should determine what happens inside a courtroom.
Evidence should.
That is precisely why yesterday matters. If Shiranthi Rajapaksa has committed offences, the prosecution must prove them. If it cannot, she must walk free. The same principle applies to Namal Rajapaksa, Ranil Wickremesinghe and everybody else who enters Sri Lanka’s increasingly busy criminal justice machinery.
The achievement Sri Lanka should be seeking is not a photograph of another famous political figure entering a prison vehicle. It is a country in which it genuinely makes no difference whose wife you are, whose son you are, which party you belong to or whether you once occupied the highest office in the land.
That would be change.
Everything else is still an allegation.
