This book is an updated version of two earlier books, Sri Lanka in Crisis: J R Jayewardene and the erosion of democracy, 1977–1988 and Civil Strife in Sri Lanka: the United National Party Government, 1989–1994.

The first of these was an expanded version of Civil Strife in Sri Lanka, published in India in 1986 after the ethnic crisis exploded in July 1983. With every year that passes I am more convinced of the accuracy of the analysis in that first book, which put the blame for the crisis foursquare on the President at the time, J R Jayewardene.

Such an analysis was unique at the time, because commentators either engaged in virtual hagiography of Jayewardene, and saw Tamil claims as illegitimate and associated with terrorism, or else they presented the Sri Lankan state as a Sinhala majoritarian monolith that necessarily oppressed Tamils. My own view was that Tamils had been the victims of majoritarian excesses, but these were piecemeal and often due to political rivalry amongst Sinhala majority parties.

Though in the late seventies I shared the general view in Colombo that Jayewardene was an intelligent and forward looking politician, able to lift the country from the trough, economic, social as well as racial, into which it had fallen, it rapidly became clear that all he was interested in was perpetuating his own power. He entrenched himself through a constitutional change that elevated him to becoming an American-style Executive President.