On February 4, Sri Lanka marks seventy-eight years of independence. It is a date heavy with ceremony, lighter with agreement. Independence anniversaries are meant to reassure nations that time itself is a kind of progress. Sri Lanka’s record resists that comfort. Its postcolonial journey has not been a straight passage but a circling, sometimes frantic, sometimes willful, around choices deferred, lessons misread, and opportunities squandered.To understand this arc, it helps to glance outward. The subcontinent and its peripheries emerged from empire wounded and uneven. India staggered under partition yet endured, absorbing shock after shock without surrendering the idea of plurality. Pakistan, fractured at birth, lost half its body but not its belief in statehood. Bangladesh rose from the wreckage of genocide with a fierce, almost defiant pragmatism. Nepal broke its monarchy through violence and learned, haltingly, to live without it. Bhutan chose restraint over speed. Even the Maldives, despite intense political churn, has so far avoided implosion.Sri Lanka’s tragedy is different. It did not begin from destitution or devastation. It began with time, literacy, functioning institutions, enviable ports, and global goodwill. For a brief while after independence, it seemed to offer a template; an island that might show how postcolonial governance could be humane, educated, and plural. Colombo was a hub, its universities respected, its diplomacy confident. Others watched.That moment passed quickly, and not by accident.I have written before, and still believe, that the voyage from Serendib to Sri Lanka through Ceylon continues to be an uninterrupted tale of opportunities lost, scorned, and spurned. Serendib, root of serendipity, evoked chance and openness, an island discovered almost by accident and enriched by encounter. Ceylon, the colonial name, turned that chance into possession and extraction. Sri Lanka, legislated into being in 1972, marked something more final: the assertion of a singular identity in a place that had never been singular.What followed was not inevitable, but it became cumulative. The narrowing of citizenship hardened into exclusion. Language became weapon and proof. Mobs rehearsed what the state would later perfect. From the late 1970s onward, armed movements emerged, not only in the Tamil north and east, but in the Sinhala south as well, each insurgency teaching the state the same, disastrous lesson: that legitimacy could be substituted with force.The war that erupted in 1983 and ended in 2009 consumed a generation. It hollowed institutions, brutalised political culture, and trained citizens to mistake endurance for victory. Sri Lanka became better known for suicide bombings than for tea, more for mass graves than for gems. India’s intervention left scars that never healed; suspicion hardened into reflex. In the vacuum of trust and capital, new patrons arrived, offering infrastructure without accountability and debt without dignity.Peace did not bring repair. It brought triumphalism. Minorities – first Tamil, then Muslim – were treated not as citizens to be restored, but as problems to be managed. The Easter bombings of 2019 were not an aberration; they were an aftershock of a state that had learned to govern through surveillance and neglect rather than care. Triumphalism proved politically intoxicating, but economically corrosive. The economic collapse of 2022 merely stripped away the remaining pretense. When protestors waded through the presidential pool and ransacked palaces, the images startled the world. For Sri Lankans, they confirmed something long known: that the state had been living on borrowed money, borrowed myths, and borrowed time.What the end of the war did not deliver was settlement. Victory arrived without imagination. Seventeen years on, the Tamil question remains suspended, neither resolved nor allowed to conclude. The promises made at war’s end: to demilitarise, to return land, to account for the disappeared, to share power meaningfully, were spoken often and honoured rarely. What persists in the former war zones of the north and east is not reconciliation, but management: surveillance in place of trust, development in place of dignity, memory treated as a threat rather than a fact.The northeast lives under a grammar learned during war and never unlearned after it. Military camps sit where villages once stood. Commemorations are monitored, sometimes prohibited. Families of the disappeared continue their vigils, year after year, holding photographs that have outlasted governments and commissions alike. The state asks them to move on, while refusing to acknowledge where the past has been buried.This unfinished business matters beyond the Tamil community alone. A state that cannot make peace with its defeated citizens cannot easily promise justice to any of them. The habits formed in the war – impunity, centralisation, suspicion of dissent – did not remain confined to the north. They travelled south, entering institutions, politics, and everyday governance. What was once justified as exceptional became ordinary.Sri Lanka won the war decisively. It has yet to decide what that victory was for.Today, the country is led by an unlikely figure – an elected president from a movement once branded terrorist, now recast as disciplinarian reformers. For some, this feels like renewal. For others, irony. Sri Lanka has often turned, in moments of exhaustion, to the most tightly organised force available, believing discipline might substitute for trust, and order for reconciliation. Whether this turn marks learning or repetition remains unclear.Which brings us back to the voyage. Serendib promised openness. Ceylon extracted value. Sri Lanka asserted control – and in doing so, lost the ease with which difference once breathed. The danger now is not only relapse into old habits, but the quieter temptation to confuse survival with progress. A nation can endure indefinitely without healing. It can stabilize without becoming just.Seventy-eight years on, the question is no longer how Sri Lanka compares to its neighbours, or whether it might yet reclaim a lost stature. The harder question is whether it can relearn what it unlearned early: that plurality is not a concession, that memory cannot be buried without cost, and that force, however effective in the moment, never teaches a society how to live with itself.The sea around the island remains unchanged. What has altered is the willingness to read its warnings.Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs. Views expressed in this article are those of the author.