Attorney-at-law Lal Wijenayake, a veteran of the Sri Lankan left and a member of the National People’s Power executive council, died on Saturday evening (31 October), Hiru News reported.
Hiru describes him as a member of both the NPP’s executive council and its operations committee, and as a left-wing politician and senior lawyer. Arrangements for his funeral are to be announced later.
A career that spanned the old left and the new
Wijenayake served for a long period on the political bureau of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the Trotskyist party that was for decades the principal organised force on the Sri Lankan left. He later left the LSSP and was among those who led the formation of the United Left Front.
He was educated at Dharmaraja College, Kandy, read science at the University of Peradeniya, and qualified at Sri Lanka Law College. He also held the post of opposition leader in the first Central Provincial Council — the council elected after the provincial system was created in 1987.
A dissenting voice inside the governing party
Wijenayake remained publicly identifiable with the NPP while differing from it in public. In September he said he would not resign from the party despite having opposed the 22nd Amendment, telling a newspaper he had no intention of leaving after discussions with JVP leader and President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
In the same remarks he drew an explicit line: he would continue to support the Bar Association of Sri Lanka’s opposition to the amendment, which altered judicial retirement ages and the composition of the courts, but would not join protest action organised by the joint opposition against it. Parliament passed the amendment 158 votes to 63 on 25 September.
That position — internal dissent held without defection, argued in the language of the law rather than of party politics — is the one he was most recently associated with publicly.
Not reported
Hiru’s filing does not give Wijenayake’s age, the cause of death, or where he died. It does not name the years of his LSSP politburo membership, the date he left the party, or the term in which he served as Central Provincial Council opposition leader. No tribute from the NPP, the government or the Bar Association is recorded in the material this desk retrieved.
Sourcing note. This report rests on a single Sri Lankan newsroom. Ada Derana carried the death on its English service, but the site has been returning HTTP 403 to this desk for some weeks and the filing could not be fetched or dated, so it is not cited here. Neither the Daily Mirror breaking-news rail nor NewsFirst’s latest feed carried the story when this was written.