To understand why a Sinhalese revolutionary movement would attack the holiest Sinhalese Buddhist site, you need to understand what Sri Lanka looked like in the late 1980s. Two insurgencies raged simultaneously. In the north and east, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and other Tamil militant groups had been fighting since 1983 to carve out an independent Tamil state. In 1987, India intervened, deploying the Indian Peace Keeping Force under the terms of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. The JVP, a Sinhalese Marxist party with roots in the rural south, saw this as Indian imperialism. Their grievances were real: deep economic inequality, youth unemployment, and a political system they believed served only the elite. The JVP had already attempted and failed at an insurrection in 1971 against Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike's government. In 1987, armed with that hard experience, they launched a second revolt against the ruling United National Party.

The JVP's military wing, the Deshapremi Janatha Viyaparaya, had been escalating attacks on government and civilian targets throughout the insurrection. Public spaces were vandalized, government supporters threatened or killed. The temple attack was planned at meetings attended by senior JVP figures, including D.M. Ananda, the party leader for the Western and Sabaragamuwa provinces, and Somawansa Amarasinghe, who would later become the JVP's overall leader. A former JVP member named Adhikari, interviewed by The Sunday Leader in 2001, described participating in the operation. He was a trained fighter who had taken part in attacks on the Pallekele Army Camp and the Bogambara prison. The assault on the temple turned chaotic. In the confusion at the shrine entrance, gunfire erupted. A bystander named Sisira, sitting on a bus stopped in front of the temple, was shot in the leg by a gunman chasing a guard. Four bullets were later removed from his leg, and after eight months in the hospital, his leg was amputated.

In the aftermath, the JVP's politburo issued a statement flatly denying the attack had occurred. This claim was rejected by the Diyawadana Nilame, Neranjan Wijeyeratne, the chief lay custodian of the Temple of the Tooth, and by the Mahanayaka theros of both the Malwatte and Asgiriya chapters, the two most senior Buddhist prelates in the country. Wijeyeratne was unequivocal: "There was blood-letting at the Sri Dalada Maligawa as five persons were killed in the JVP attack." The controversy became a major political issue. The JVP's willingness to attack a site sacred to the very population they claimed to represent undermined whatever sympathy their economic grievances had generated. The government's counterinsurgency campaign crushed the JVP by the end of 1989, killing most of its leadership. The party eventually reemerged as a legitimate political movement, but the memory of what happened at the temple that February night remains a stain that decades of democratic participation have not fully erased.

The JVP understood something fundamental about Sri Lanka when they chose this target. The Tooth Relic is not merely a religious artifact. Since Princess Hemamali smuggled it to the island in the fourth century, it has functioned as the supreme symbol of sovereignty. Kings built their palaces beside it. Colonial powers tried to seize or destroy it. To attack the Temple of the Tooth was to attack the idea of Sri Lanka itself, and the JVP knew that a government unable to protect it would lose its claim to authority. That the attack failed in its political objective does not diminish its significance. It demonstrated how desperate the insurrection had become and how willing its leaders were to cross lines that most Sri Lankans considered inviolable. The temple was repaired. The rituals continued. But the 1989 attack was only the beginning; nine years later, a far more devastating assault would test the temple's resilience again.