Following the Indo-Lanka accord, the JVP, with the leadership of Wijeweera and a secondary faction, launched a military and social campaign with the aim of overthrowing the government of Sri Lanka.

While they succeeded in killing Wijeweera, the JVP maintained its identity as a political party and later joined a coalition government, and eventually in 2024 came into power.

He was disabled after an attack by thugs believed to be members of an opposing political party during the 1947 Parliamentary election campaign for the Hakmana electorate candidate Premalal Kumarasiri.

[3] Having become active in the communist party, he applied and gained a scholarship to attend the Lumumba University to study medicine and in September 1960 he went to the Soviet Union.

There he started an admiration for Josef Stalin and also for Mao Zedong; he met with members of the Stalinist Labour Party of Albania in 1965, as they visited Ceylon.

[4] Soon Wijeweera was impatient with the CCP Maoist leaders due to what he saw as their lack of revolutionary purpose, and formed his own movement on 14 May 1965 after a discussion held in a house at Akmeemana in the Galle district with like-minded youth.

[5] Initially identified simply as the "New Left", this group drew on students and unemployed youths from rural areas, most of them in the 16 to 25-year-old range who felt that their economic interests had been neglected by the nation's leftist coalition governments.

[6] Capturing state power for the purpose of implementing the JVP's socio-economic policies in the country was the key part of Wijeweera's political agenda.

The commission sentenced him to life imprisonment, after which he made an historic speech, stating "We May Be Killed But Our Voice Will Never Die", echoing "History Will Absolve Me" by Fidel Castro at the end of Moncada Barracks trial in 1953.

After the victory of the pro-United States United National Party in the 1977 elections, the new government attempted to broaden its mandate with a period of political tolerance.

Unlike in 1971, this was not an open revolt, but a low intensity conflict with subversion, assassinations, raids, and attacks on military and civilian targets.

A rumour circulated that he was taken to a cemetery, shot in the leg and then summarily executed by being burnt alive in the crematorium,[10] The official line from Minister of State Defence Ranjan Wijeratne's press brief was that Wijeweera and a fellow JVP member H.B.

It was originally written in Sinhala[13] Wijeweera wrote "What is the answer for the Eelam Question" following the beginning of the Sri Lankan Civil War.