Sri Lankan military agrees to reopen road to Palaly temple after 35 years

The Sri Lankan military has agreed to reopen the permanent access road to the Rajarajeshwari Amman Temple, which lies within the High Security Zone in Palaly, and to allow devotees to worship at the shrine daily from morning until 10pm, according to the member of parliament K. Ilankumaran.

The residents of Palaly were displaced on 15 June 1990 during the armed conflict, after which the area was sealed off under military control as a High Security Zone for more than 35 years, cutting off the historic temple from the community that had worshipped there. Access has since been restored only in limited and precarious forms.

In June last year, the military permitted public access to the temple through a temporary route that ran across privately owned land and the premises of a nearby Vairavar temple, an arrangement that allowed devotees to visit only to worship before turning back.

Residents continued to press for the restoration of the original access road, pointing out that the temporary route had been improvised precisely because a military vehicle-repair facility occupied part of the traditional roadway to the temple. They urged the authorities to relocate the garage and reopen the permanent road for public use, and raised the matter with the deputy defence minister during his visit to Jaffna last month.

The decision was confirmed, Ilankumaran said, during a special meeting between himself and the Jaffna District army commander, who informed him that the permanent road would be reopened from Friday, with devotees permitted to visit and worship daily from morning until 10pm.

The move follows years of on-off access at the temple, consecrated in 1846 and severed from its worshippers when almost all of Palalys 44,000 residents, overwhelmingly Tamil, were driven out in 1990. The military opened the temple for daily worship in late 2024 after 34 years, only to bar devotees with barbed wire the following day, and as recently as last July residents were still condemning the restricted hours and the lack of any written guarantee of access.

Welcome as it will be to devotees, the reopening of a road is not the return of a homeland. That the permanent route had been blocked by the armys own vehicle depot captures in miniature the wider reality of Valikamam North, where the militarys infrastructure sits atop displaced Tamil life.

More than 6,000 families from the division remain displaced, and over 2,700 acres of their land, taking in homes, schools, farmland and places of worship, remain under occupation. Given the history of concessions granted and then withdrawn at this very temple, residents are likely once again to seek written assurances, and to insist that access to the shrine be matched by the return of the land on which their lives depend.