Two Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna organisers exchanged heated words and then blows at a private function hall in the Thispane area on Sunday afternoon, and the party meeting they had gathered for was cancelled outright.
Hiru News reported the incident shortly after midnight Colombo time, naming the two men as Nimal Piyathissa, the SLPP’s Nuwara Eliya district organiser, and Parakrama Dasanayake, the organiser for the Kothmale electorate. Both spoke to the station. Their accounts do not agree on who started it.
Two versions of the same afternoon
Dasanayake said Piyathissa had called the 2 p.m. meeting without informing him, even though it fell inside the seat he organises. Though the two are organisers in the same district, he said, he went to ask why a party meeting was being held in his electorate without his knowledge — and the confrontation began there. Piyathissa then left without holding the meeting, he said. He added that he would report the matter to the party’s general secretary.
Piyathissa gave a different version. He said the gathering was one he had organised ahead of the Nuwara Eliya district convention scheduled for next month, and that Dasanayake arrived with a group of thugs to disrupt it. He said he and his supporters then set upon that group, beat them and drove them off.
The second account is the more striking of the two, because it is Piyathissa describing an assault he says his own side carried out. Hiru reports both claims without adjudicating between them, and this desk does not either.
The unrest was severe enough that the meeting was abandoned completely.
A name worth keeping straight
Hiru’s Sinhala text gives the Kothmale organiser’s surname as දසනායක — Dasanayake. It is a different surname from Dissanayake, which belongs to the President, and the two should not be conflated.
Not reported
Hiru does not say whether police attended, whether anyone was injured or sought treatment, or whether any complaint has been lodged. It gives no indication of how many people were present, and no comment from the SLPP’s general secretary or any national party figure. Whether the dispute is purely procedural — who may convene a meeting in whose seat — or reflects a wider contest ahead of next month’s district convention is not addressed.
No verified newsroom this desk tracks had filed on the incident at the time of writing. The only other account located was on an unverified site, which does not count toward this article’s sourcing.
