The Red Banner: Still Flying Here?
In Sri Lanka as everywhere 1 May – Labour Day – 2025 is now a thing of the past. Except not in Colombo, largely thanks to the image reproduced above of President Dissanayake, snapped by award-winning local photographer Lahiru Harshana, captured in an intense, seemingly quasi-religious moment during his May Day speech.
The photo seems not to have pleased the president’s team, in particular his media outfit, who according to Sanjana Hattotuwa rapidly went into overdrive in their efforts to stop Lankan media outlets publishing it once it had first been sighted. As is often the way with what amounted to a somewhat ham-fisted attempt at censorship, the result was the precise opposite, with, as Sanjana notes, ‘influential domestic, and foreign journalists … subsequently tweeting the same photo across Facebook, and Twitter (and complimenting Harshana on t/his capture)’.
So what is about this photo that so ruffled official feathers? The answer isn’t too hard to discern. The president captured in impassioned, quasi-mystical mode? Yes, possibly. But the real elephant in the room is surely to be found lurking behind, not in front of him. The Hammer and Sickle, representing proletarian solidarity between industrial and agricultural workers first adopted during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a globally-recognized icon of Communist parties and movements ever since.
Including by the JVP, the president’s own political party, which as I suggested in a recent interview, currently appears to be keeping attention away from itself from behind the mantle of the rulling National People’s Power (NPP) alliance of which it is the most powerful member. As anyone with some knowledge of recent Sri Lankan history knows, the JVP is a party with a fair bit of historical baggage: most notably two attempts, in 1971 and 1987-89, at violent overthrow of the state: baggage that the president’s media handlers would presumably rather not see highlighted in the manner suggested by that May Day speech image.
It’s baggage, moreover, that’s been remarkably absent from public discourse during the NPP’s tenure in government since late 2024. Will continuing circulation of that iconic photo help to tip the balance in favour of greater, open discussion of the JVP’s violent past, in articular the nature of the contemporary party’s relationship to that past? And what, if anything, such a public discussion might mean for Sri Lanka today? That remains to be seen.