IMAAD MAJEED

I remember my maternal grandfather’s janazah prayer distinctly. Praying amongst a thousand villagers from our ancestral hometown at a mass burial site: a site he himself had allocated after the cyclone that devastated Eastern Sri Lanka in 1978. He knew we must prepare for disasters to come. And, surely enough, within his lifetime, disaster struck again, not from the sky but from the sea. The 2004 tsunami took thousands along that same coast, and many were buried in the earth he had consecrated for collective grief. Years later, his own body was returned to it.

His foresight was a profound act of care, a preparation for death on a scale he understood the state would not. This stands in stark contrast to the logic that governs Sri Lanka’s crises. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics asks a fundamental question: what is the power to dictate who may live and who must die? Here, that power is seldom a crude, singular act. It operates in the bureaucratic silence before the flood, in the language chosen for the warning, in the map used to plan the relief. It is the slow, administrative creation of zones where life is precarious and death is expected: death-worlds.

This essay traces the relentless genealogy of Sri Lanka’s death-worlds across crises both environmental and political. It begins with three defining weather events: the 1978 cyclone, which revealed the foundational neglect of marginalised regions; the 2004 tsunami, which exposed the theatrics of selective grief and the militarisation of aid; and the 2025 Cyclone Ditwah, which demonstrates algorithmic abandonment through technological failure and linguistic exclusion. This framework of catastrophe extends into the realm of the body and memory: the state’s necropolitical control during COVID-19, exercised through the forced cremation of Muslim bodies, denied an entire community their right to grieve. This logic finds its starkest culmination in the ongoing erasure of the Mullivaikkal Genocide, where Tamil mourning is surveilled, harassed, and punished: a state project to render the dead ungrievable and history itself annihilated. Together, these events form a coherent anatomy of power, illustrating how the state administers life and death across different registers, from the bureaucratic to the intimately corporeal.

1978: Foundations of Neglect

To understand the necropolitics of disaster in Sri Lanka, one must begin in the archive. The cyclone that struck on November 23, 1978, remains one of the most violent in the island’s recorded history. It killed approximately 915 people, displaced over a million, and left the eastern coastline around Batticaloa looking like it had been bombed from the air.

The storm hit a nation already hardening along ethnic lines. A generation earlier, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 had triggered what scholars term “the marginalisation of the former privileged Tamil population,” a legal and cultural relegation that reshaped the demographic and political landscape.

The east, a Tamil-majority region, was not a priority for the central state. When the cyclone made landfall, it exposed an infrastructure of neglect. There was no national disaster plan, no coordinated early warning system that reached fishing hamlets and peasant farms in their own language. Observers noted that what little aid reached Batticaloa was thrown onto the streets. Those affected weren’t even afforded a dignified distribution of aid.

This foundational neglect created the conditions for a more intimate, more surveilled form of violence to flourish in the decades that followed. A violence that would be fully unleashed when the next great disaster struck.

2004: Waves Upon A Divided Island

December 26, 2004. The Indian Ocean tsunami was a planetary cataclysm, but in Sri Lanka, it struck a nation cleaved in two. As the wave receded, it did not wash away the conflict between the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It became a new front line. Over 35,000 were killed. By the end of the week, the UN estimated nearly two-thirds of the dead were in the Tamil-majority North-East, a region already hollowed by two decades of war.

The disaster response was immediately political. The LTTE, which controlled swathes of the North-East, was the first to organise relief in its territory, evacuating survivors and documenting the dead. Simultaneously, it issued an urgent appeal for international aid. The government in Colombo, however, moved to assert its sovereignty over all humanitarian assistance. It made clear that all foreign aid must be routed through its channels, rebuking the Italian Embassy for sending relief directly to affected Tamils.

This was the critical political calculus. The state’s relief priorities, as observed on the ground, appeared to follow a clear hierarchy: first to the Sinhala-majority south, second to Tamil areas under government control, and last to territories held by the LTTE. When the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited days later, the government prevented him from touring the devastated Tamil areas, confining his inspection to the south and government-held parts of the East. Aid was an instrument of control.

The bureaucratic and military machinery of the state became the gatekeeper for survival in the North-East. The army was ordered to take over relief camps set up by pro-LTTE organisations in government-controlled Tamil areas. Meanwhile, reports from the ground detailed a stark disparity. A Jaffna newspaper editorial, three days after the wave, noted that no government relief had yet reached many parts of the North-East. A school principal in Batticaloa, over a month later, said displaced people had still received no food or relief from the state.

This politicised blockade had a strategic dimension. The government, under the newly elected Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, centralised the massive influx of international aid. Critics would later term the ensuing corruption and mismanagement a “second tsunami.” This centralisation served a dual purpose: it starved the LTTE of resources and legitimacy while fortifying the state’s economic and political capital in the south. The failure to establish an equitable, joint mechanism for aid distribution shattered the fragile ceasefire. Within a year, the war would escalate violently, with the state leveraging both its post-tsunami consolidation of power and the LTTE’s perceived weakness.

Thus, the tsunami laid bare the necropolitical heart of the conflict. The state’s power was exercised not merely in battle but in the calculated governance of catastrophe: deciding whose suffering would be witnessed, whose hunger would be alleviated, and whose zones of devastation would be rendered invisible to the world. The wave was natural, but the aftermath was a deliberate political engineering, one that would deepen the death-worlds of the island for years to come.

The post-tsunami reconstruction phase completed this logic. The government imposed a controversial coastal buffer zone, prohibiting rebuilding within 100-200 meters of the shore. This policy, framed in the technocratic language of safety, served a brutal economic and demographic purpose. It permanently displaced thousands of mostly Tamil and Muslim fishing communities, severing their connection to livelihood and place. The vacated land, particularly in the East, became ripe for tourism development and state acquisition. As researchers note, this poorly implemented relocation led to a “second disaster” for affected communities.

The wave had done the initial clearing; the state’s policy finished the job, converting communal spaces of life into zones of capitalist extraction. The disaster was not just managed; it was leveraged.

The world vowed “never again.” In Sri Lanka, a comprehensive Disaster Management Act was passed in 2005, creating institutions and protocols to prevent such chaotic suffering. It was a masterpiece of legislative promise. Yet, twenty years later, when the next great warning came, the Act would be a ghost in the machine, and the state’s necropolitical playbook would be executed with even colder, more digital precision.

2025: Cyclone Ditwah and Algorithmic Abandonment

Cyclone Ditwah should not have been a massacre. Meteorologically, it was a relatively weak storm. Politically, it was a forensic audit of state failure and a chilling evolution of necropower. Its story is one of knowing inaction.

The Sri Lankan Department of Meteorology knew. The department had started monitoring low-pressure systems by mid-November, holding stakeholder meetings on the 17th, 20th, and 23rd of that month. By November 25, a red alert was issued for nine districts.

The data was unambiguous, and the legal mandate was clear: the Disaster Management Act of 2005 enshrines the state’s fundamental “duty to protect life.” Yet, when the forecasts demanded urgent, pre-emptive action, the state chose not to activate this very framework. No comprehensive evacuations were ordered from the most vulnerable slopes. Instead of the planned, protective mechanisms of the Disaster Management Act, the government invoked the far more draconian Emergency Regulations. These regulations, established under the Public Security Ordinance, bestow the President with sweeping executive powers, sidestepping parliamentary oversight. Facing mounting public criticism online for his regime’s handling of the catastrophe, the President then threatened to use these same emergency powers to punish his critics, weaponizing a crisis response into a tool for political silencing.

The Technological Void: A Twenty-Year Delay

This failure was technological and decades in the making. When Cyclone Ditwah hit, Sri Lanka was the only country in the region without weather radar: a vital tool for modern cyclone forecasting. This was not always the case. In the 1980s, the department operated a radar in Trincomalee capable of providing 30 minutes of warning before a cyclone struck. It broke down, was briefly repaired in 2005, and then was left to rot.

The government approved funds for a new Doppler radar system in 2006. Nearly two decades later, due to what audit reports call “mismanagement and negligence,” the first operational radar is not expected until 2027. This delay is not an accident but a policy choice. As the Japanese aid agency funding the project stated, radar is “the single most important feature in improving forecasting” and is “indispensable for flood and landslide prediction”. Without it, the Meteorology Department “has no facility to accurately quantify the rainfall”. The result during Ditwah was broad, provincial-level warnings instead of precise, village-level forecasts that could have saved lives.

The state’s prolonged failure to procure this life-saving technology is a pristine example of necropolitics: the calculated decision to not provide the tools for survival, thereby rendering certain deaths acceptable.

Linguistic Necropolitics: Sinhala-Only Warnings

When the storm hit, the necropolitics played out in the digital realm. In a country where Tamil is an official language, crucial disaster warnings were issued almost exclusively in Sinhala. A study of 68 posts on the Disaster Management Centre’s Facebook page during the peak of the storm found that all key homepage banner information was in Sinhala only, and just 12 of the 68 posts contained any Tamil content.

The discrimination was lethal in its precision. As the storm intensified on the night of November 27, Sinhala speakers received multiple detailed updates through the night. Tamil speakers received none. One severe rainfall warning posted in Sinhala at 3:51 p.m. on November 25 did not appear in Tamil until 6:41 p.m.—a three-hour gap that “could determine whether communities escape rising floodwaters”. Road closures on critical hill-country arteries were explained only in Sinhala, leaving Tamil travellers without essential guidance

This created an “information vacuum” for Tamil-speaking communities, a bureaucratic form of the death sentence. To not warn someone in a language they understand is to have already written them out of the community of the protected.

Extending the Death-World: The Plantation Worker

The hills were left “like wastelands.” The central highlands, home to the centuries-old tea plantation industry, were gutted. Here, the death-world expands beyond ethnic categories to engulf class. The tea estate workers, predominantly Tamil descendants of indentured labourers, are among Sri Lanka’s most precarious communities. The Tamil Guardian report explicitly notes that the language exclusion occurred “despite the high proportion of vulnerable Tamil plantation workers living in the affected hill country”.

These workers, living in line rooms on insecure land, were hit by a perfect storm of state failure: they received no precise landslide warnings because the radar didn’t exist, and the vague warnings that did come were in a language they often could not understand. Their vulnerability, a product of colonial exploitation and systemic neglect, was not a natural condition but a political one, generations in the making. Cyclone Ditwah proved that modern necropolitics does not need jackboots. It needs a meteorologist’s report they can’t produce, a government WhatsApp group that excludes Tamil, and a cynical calculation that some losses are an acceptable cost of doing, or rather, not doing, business.

The Ungrievable: COVID-19 Cremations & the Mullivaikkal Genocide

To understand the full architecture of Sri Lanka’s death-worlds, we must move beyond the storm and examine how the state governs the body in death itself. Here, necropolitics operates on the most intimate scale: the management of the corpse. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this power was exercised with surgical precision against the Muslim community. The state mandated the cremation of all who died from the virus, falsely claiming burial risked water contamination. This policy was a direct assault on Islamic funeral rites, which require burial. The victims included a 20-day-old infant and a woman later found not to have had the virus.

The state did not just cause death; it seized control of its aftermath, determining how grief could be performed and memory formed. This is the essence of what philosopher Judith Butler terms grievability: the question of which lives are deemed worthy of being mourned. By denying Muslim dead their rites, the state rendered them ungrievable, their deaths stripped of social and sacred meaning.

This logic of ungrievability finds its most horrific scale in the Tamil experience of Mullivaikkal. The brutal end of the civil war in 2009 was not an endpoint but the genesis of a sustained necropolitical project: the eradication of memory. Tamil grief is not a private right but a surveilled and punished activity. The state deploys tens of thousands of troops in the North-East to quash remembrance. University students are beaten for silent protests. The draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) is used to detain those organizing memorials. Memorial for Tamil martyrs are repeatedly demolished.

This is necropolitics extended temporally; it is the state’s assertion of power not only over who dies but over who is allowed to be remembered. The simultaneous assault on Muslim burial and Tamil mourning reveals a cohesive ideology: for the majoritarian state, certain deaths must be unmarked and un-mourned to sustain the myth of a unified, Sinhala-Buddhist nation.

Cosmological Underworlds & Indigenous Animism

To grasp the profound violence of this enforced ungrievability, we must descend into the island’s deeper cosmological layers, to beliefs that predate the modern state. The Vedda, the island’s indigenous inhabitants, practice what early ethnologists called a “cult of the dead”. Their worldview did not radically polarize life and afterlife; the deceased become ‘nehya yakoon’: kindred spirits who watch over the living, visited in dreams and sickness. Death was a simple burial, integrated into the community’s continuum. Similarly, the syncretic Sinhala Buddhist cosmology is populated by devas and demons, where apotheosis, i.e. the transformation of historical figures into spiritual beings, is a living process

These systems understand death as a transition, a change of state that requires ritual engagement by the living to maintain cosmic and social balance.

The modern state’s necropolitics is a violent perversion of this ancient logic. It does not facilitate the spirit’s journey or integrate the dead into the community of ancestors. Instead, it seeks to sever the connection entirely. The forced cremation of Muslims is a ritual of spiritual annihilation, denying the soul its passage. The harassment of Tamil memorials is a policy of cosmic disconnection, aimed at preventing the dead from becoming ‘nehya yakoon’ for their people. The state, in its majoritarian form, behaves not as a custodian of ancient tradition but as a malevolent spirit itself: a ‘hetha’ that kills and then haunts the vicinity, forbidding the offerings that would placate it.

This necropolitical contract finds its most grotesque expression in the symbiosis of the occult and the material: ousted president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s trusted astrologer, Gnanakka, reportedly framed mounting COVID-19 deaths as “sacrifices to the Goddess Kāli” for the “future wellbeing and prosperity of the country” — and thus, the stability of his rule — while his brother Mahinda leveraged millions in stolen tsunami aid to consolidate the political capital that would help him “end the war” and cement a dynasty. One brother instrumentalized mass death through supernatural narrative, the other through material plunder; both acts were offerings on the altar of power.

The true “death-world” is this: a society where the state actively works to disenchant death, to strip it of its ancestral, communal, and sacred meanings, leaving only raw, political power.

Class & Warfare

The Sri Lankan state’s death-worlds are architected along a matrix where class and ethnicity intersect to determine expendability. Long before a cyclone makes landfall or a war begins, policy has engineered a permanent underclass. The 1948 Citizenship Act rendered Indian Tamil plantation workers stateless, locking generations into indentured poverty on vulnerable slopes. The 1956 Sinhala Only Act and 1971 university standardization policies systematically curtailed Tamil social mobility, while also privileging a Sinhala-educated bureaucratic class over the rural poor of all ethnicities. These laws created the raw human material of vulnerability: landless laborers, a precarious urban workforce, and communities severed from the political power to secure their own futures.

This engineered socioeconomic vulnerability translates directly into catastrophic body counts when disaster strikes. Analysis of Cyclone Ditwah confirms that its victims were not random but precisely targeted by pre-existing conditions: the most affected were coastal communities, marginal farmers, plantation workers, and informal settlers on hazardous land. The 2004 tsunami further illuminated this calculus; its recovery, marked by politicized aid and a “buffer zone” that dispossessed coastal poor: a “second tsunami”. The state’s necropolitical power is thus evident in its routine creation of precarious life, ensuring that when catastrophe arrives, natural or economic, it harvests those already made weak.

This logic of using the poor as shock absorbers reached its zenith in the civil war, where the state weaponized the desperation of one underclass to subjugate another. The army’s ranks, which swelled by over 65,000, were filled largely by sons from the Sinhala rural poor: the very class marginalized by the state’s own economic policies. Offering one of the few stable salaries and paths to mobility, the state monetized their poverty, conscripting their bodies as instruments in a war that preserved the elite’s political power. The “farmer’s son” was thus sacrificed in a conflict that ultimately reinforced the class hierarchy that made him expendable in the first place.

Ultimately, necropolitics in Sri Lanka operates through a ruthless ethno-class calculus. The 2025 cyclone made this undeniable: Sinhala-only warnings specifically failed the Tamil-speaking plantation worker, a figure defined by both ethnic marginality and economic indentureship. From policy that creates poverty, to disasters that prey upon it, to wars that monetize it, the state continuously sorts populations. It asks not only “who may live and who must die,” but more precisely, “who has been made poor and desperate enough to be sacrificed, and for what purpose?” The death-world is a sustained political project of creating and then exploiting the underclass.

An Island of Death-Worlds

From the neglected coasts of 1978 to the algorithmic abandonment of 2025, from the violated bodies of Muslim COVID-19 victims to the surveilled memorials of Mullivaikkal, a consistent pattern emerges. Sri Lanka is not merely a site of occasional disasters but an archipelago of death-worlds, meticulously maintained across different regimes and crises. The theoretical frameworks of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Judith Butler’s grievability provide the lenses to see this not as random tragedy but as structured political practice. The state’s power is ultimately measured by its capacity to decide not just who lives and dies, but how they die, how they are buried, and if they may be remembered.

To resist this is to engage in an act of cosmic rebellion. It is to insist on burying your dead according to ancient rites. It is to light a candle where soldiers forbid it. It is to speak the names of the 20-day-old infant, the 35,000 tsunami dead, the 640 lost to Ditwah, and the 146,679 of Mullivaikkal. It is to reaffirm the most ancient belief on this island: that the dead are not gone, that they watch over us, and that our remembrance is what keeps the world whole. The struggle is for the soul of the island: will it be a realm of haunted, state-enforced silence, or a world where every spirit is allowed its rightful place in the memory of the living?

The journey from the 1978 cyclone to Cyclone Ditwah is not a linear progression of worsening storms, but a spiraling descent into a more efficient, more callous politics of abandonment. The death-world is not a static place; it is a process. It is the slow violence of neglect (1978), the militarized theater of selective compassion (2004), and finally, the cold, algorithmic exclusion of the digital age (2025).

At each stage, the state has refined its tools—from outright neglect, to the weaponization of aid, to the digital barring of language and the deliberate defunding of forecasting technology—to decide which bodies bear the brunt of the storm. The 2025 cyclone, with its foretold path and foretold failures, makes the necropolitical contract explicit: the state foresees the death of its marginal citizens and, through a combination of inaction, exclusion, and technological disinvestment, permits it.

But if the state’s power is exercised by rendering certain lives and deaths irrelevant, then the radical act is to insist on remembrance, on granular detail, on grief. To say the names of the 915 in ’78, the 35,000 in ’04, the 640 in ’25. To document not just the fact of the Tamil tea plucker’s death on a landslide, but the Sinhala-only SMS she never received, the radar that was twenty years delayed, the line room she lived in. This act of testimony is a refusal of the state’s archive of silence. It is an attempt to reclaim grief from the realm of security threat and return it to the realm of human truth.

My great grandfather was an autodidact. Yet, he developed a keen sense for the elements. He served as an irrigation engineer in his lifetime, and even wrote an academic paper on the significance of wind and cloud in forecasting weather in the Amparai district. He taught his grandchildren to listen to the ocean to hear whether a storm was coming. I never got to meet him. Yet, he visited me in a nested dream in 2017. I, too, just as the animists, believe that the departed watch over us.

The storms will keep coming.

Will we build a politics of common shelter,
or continue to perfect the architecture of the death-world?

In the future of my dua:

the dead are allowed their rites

the mourned are allowed their monuments

the warning is heard in every tongue

the warning reaches the most precarious slope

we become keepers of each other’s ghosts

we build shelters in the ruins of the state

the kindred spirits of the land are acknowledged

the ancient waters of memory are not damned

the future is built on ground that remembers every name.