MOST SRI LANKANS trust in the stars. Astrological pronouncements guide private lives and public affairs, from the naming of a new-born to the timing of an election.

Sumanadasa Abeygunawardena was no ordinary practitioner of what the Buddha had warningly termed “debased arts”. Known as the “royal astrologer”, he was a trusted advisor to Sri Lanka’s sixth executive president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and thus privy to the inner workings of the country’s first family. So when, in June 2009, he publicly predicted that Sri Lanka was destined for half a century of Rajapaksa rule, it was regarded as a statement of intent if not fact.

Ground reality did seem to be aligning with the stars. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan military won the country’s 26-year-long Eelam War. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fighting for a separate Tamil homeland in the country’s Northern and Eastern Provinces, were wiped out, and the group’s leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed. At the start of 2010, Mahinda cruised to victory in a surprise presidential election and returned to office for a second term. That April, his political alliance, the United People’s Freedom Front, secured a near two-thirds majority in parliament. Among the winners were his oldest son, Namal, his brothers Chamal and Basil, and his niece Nirupama. In September, Mahinda pushed through the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka, which removed presidential term limits and let him contest the presidency as many times as he desired.

Mahinda’s second investiture took place on 19 November 2010, the day after his 65th birthday. The twin occasions were celebrated with a week of glitzy spectacle aimed at projecting the Rajapaksa family’s magnificence and invincibility. On his birthday, Mahinda had ceremonially opened a deep-water port in Hambantota, built by China and named after himself – the Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port. More than 300 chefs cooked the world’s largest milk-rice cake, with 12,000 kilogrammes of white rice, 1500 coconuts and 300 kilogrammes of cashew nuts – the proceedings broadcast on live television. Military parades, cultural performances and tree-planting campaigns abounded. Posters and banners hailed Mahinda as the sun and the moon of Sri Lanka.

Mahinda’s swearing-in was a solemn affair. It was held against a backdrop depicting a giant anthropomorphic sun in the traditional Sinhala style, with a cherubic face and curly rays. At the auspicious moment, the painted sun parted and Mahinda emerged to the sound of drums and conch shells, followed by his wife and three sons.

Basil Rajapaksa, the president’s younger brother and minister of economic development, called the ceremony the beginning of an era of “ruler kings”. Western ideas such as transparency, accountability and limits to presidential power were alien to “Asian culture”, he said. “Among his many presents, the President should have received a crown,” Basil added. The Economist called it “A coronation in Sri Lanka” anyway.

Now, less than 15 years later, that past seems like another universe.

In September 2024, Namal Rajapaksa contested Sri Lanka’s latest presidential election. Two years earlier, the country had been plunged into bankruptcy and economic crisis by Rajapaksa misgovernance, with policies that included a massive tax cut, a money-printing binge and a ban on chemical fertilisers. In July 2022, raging protesters had forced the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa – Mahinda’s younger brother – to flee the country. Memories of the endless queues, crippling shortages and half-day blackouts that had accompanied the economic crisis were still fresh. The Rajapaksas probably knew Namal could not win, but even then they seemed to have underestimated the extent of their fall from public grace.

The Rajapaksas are not ideological. They are consummate users of an ideology. They use Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism as sword and shield, as path to power.

Despite seeming to be in ill health, Mahinda crisscrossed the country for weeks to campaign for his son. “People who love me will definitely love Namal,” he proclaimed days before the vote. Yet Namal came a poor fourth, winning less than three percent of the national vote. In the parliamentary election that followed, the Rajapaksas’ current party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, also won just three percent of the vote, taking a mere three seats – down from the 145 seats it had secured in 2020. The National People’s Power (NPP), a coalition dominated by the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), won both contests. In the Rajapaksas’ time of eminence, their loyalists had mocked the NPP as thunpawo, or tripeds, over its three-percent vote share at the time. Now the roles were reversed.

On 18 November 2024, Mahinda celebrated his 79th birthday sans power, rejected even by Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Buddhist majority – a community that had once revered him as its saviour. There were no national galas, no teeming crowds, no panegyrics.

Yet, in a political landscape changed beyond recognition, one thing remains changeless : Mahinda and his family have not lost the will to power. The ends they will go to in pursuit of it may yet shape Sri Lanka’s still uncertain future.

IN 2011, Gotabaya, in his capacity as the permanent secretary to the ministry of defence, organised a musical reality show for Sri Lanka’s armed forces. The finale of Ranaviru Real Star – “War Hero Real Star” – became the occasion for the unveiling of a new Rajapaksa family tree. Created by Jackson Anthony, an actor turned television historian, it traced the Rajapaksas’ descent from the Buddha’s own family via Dutugemunu, Sinhala Buddhism’s original hero-king.

The reality is much more mundane. The Rajapaksas were a leading family in the poor rural district of Hambantota, in the Sinhala heartland of the Sri Lankan South. Mahinda’s grandfather was a vidane arachchi, a high-level local official, and his father and paternal uncles served as parliamentarians. During Mahinda’s rule, his father, D A Rajapaksa, was rebranded as a co-founder of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), one of Sri Lanka’s traditional duo of ruling parties. This placed him on par with S W R D Bandaranaike, the SLFP’s founder, who won the country’s 1956 election by promising to make Sinhala the sole national language. D A Rajapaksa’s actual story appears to have been far more modest : he was not a member of Bandaranaike’s 1956 cabinet, and was made a minister only under Bandaranaike’s successor, Wijeyananda Dahanayake.

Mahinda, the third of D A Rajapaksa’s nine children, entered parliament in 1970 with the SLFP. Defeated in the 1977 election alongside his party, he placed himself at the forefront of the SLFP’s struggle against the new government led by its traditional rival, the United National Party (UNP). For 17 turbulent years, he remained a minor thorn in the side of the administrations of the presidents J R Jayewardene and Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Ironically, in light of the bloodletting, enforced disappearances and other abuses that would come to characterise his own presidency, Mahinda made himself a name primarily as a human-rights crusader. His defence of human rights, though, was always qualified ; he agitated against rights violations in the Sinhala-dominated South while ignoring the greater plight of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority.

He gained popularity as a Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist with his visceral opposition to any devolution of power to the Tamil-dominated Northern and Eastern Provinces – a key demand of even the most moderate of Sri Lankan Tamils, victimised for decades by discriminatory laws and mob violence. When, under Indian pressure in 1987, Jayewardene signed the Indo–Sri Lanka Accord, conceding to a degree of provincial devolution, Mahinda, together with other SLFP leaders, vehemently rejected it, equating it with separatism.

In 1994, the SLFP, under Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, returned to power at the head of a broad coalition, the People’s Alliance (PA). Mahinda held the labour and fisheries portfolios in the new government. When the UNP, now under Ranil Wickremesinghe, won the 2001 parliamentary election, Mahinda became the leader of the opposition – a position that let him build his own support base among opposition parliamentarians.

In 2004, Kumaratunga, using her powers as president, dissolved the parliament. The PA, then in alliance with the JVP, won the subsequent parliamentary election. The Marxist party wanted the foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, to be made the new prime minister. Kumaratunga, alarmed at Mahinda’s rise, agreed. Kadirgamar, though Tamil, was popular among the Sinhala majority and even Buddhist monks for his staunch and effective stand against the LTTE. Mahinda arranged a protest outside Kumaratunga’s official residence. She gave in, and made him the prime minister instead.

In December 2004, a tsunami devastated much of Sri Lanka’s coast. This included the Rajapaksa bastion of Hambantota. Mahinda, as prime minister, set up a national relief fund. In 2005, the Sunday Leader carried an exposé accusing Mahinda of channelling international aid from the prime minister’s fund to a private organisation, Helping Hambantota. When the police launched an investigation, Mahinda petitioned the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka for relief. A bench under the Chief Justice, Sarath N Silva, halted the investigation, leaving Mahinda clear to contest the coming presidential election. (Years later, and long retired, Silva would publicly regret the decision.)

That November, Mahinda contested the presidential election as the head of a new SLFP-led coalition, the United People’s Freedom Front. He defeated the UNP’s Wickremesinghe by a wafer-thin margin – the result of the LTTE imposing an electoral boycott on all Tamils, thereby denying the more moderate Wickremesinghe his expected share of minority support. It was subsequently alleged that Basil Rajapaksa paid the LTTE to incentivise the step, something both sides denied.

As president, one of Mahinda’s first moves was to appoint Gotabaya as the secretary to the ministry of defence. Since Gota, as he is popularly known, was a retired army officer, the appointment seemed a logical choice rather than what it was – a first step towards familial rule. When Mahinda appointed Basil to parliament, in July 2007, that family-ruled future became clearly visible.

Mahinda himself, besides being president, was also the minister of defence, finance, public security and law and order, religious affairs and moral upliftment, as well as highways and road development. Gotabaya was de facto the minister of defence, and Chamal, the oldest of the Rajapaksa siblings, was the minister of irrigation and water management, ports and aviation. Basil presided over mammoth infrastructure projects. He also acted as Mahinda’s trouble-shooter with fractious local allies and key international players. Mangala Samaraweera, Mahinda’s lead campaigner in 2005 before he turned dissident, called the new status quo “Three Rajapaksas’ rule”.

Three was just the beginning. Soon the next generation of Rajapaksas, led by Mahinda’s sons, was striding across the landscape. In February 2008, as the Eelam War raged, the defence ministry deployed some 1800 policemen and 800 soldiers to provide security for an off-road motorcycle race in Hambantota. The event was called Carlton Motocross, after the president’s private residence, and was organised by Tharunyata Hetak – “A tomorrow for the youth” – a private entity formed by Mahinda’s sons Namal and Yoshitha. The line of demarcation between the state and the ruling family was no more, and the Rajapaksa tendency to treat the state as their private fief fully entrenched.

Mahinda’s personality cult commenced during these early years. The naming of his 2005 presidential election manifesto – Mahinda Chinthanaya, or “Philosophy of Mahinda” – was a warning of what was to follow. Mihin Lanka, a government-owned budget airline that never made a profit ; Mihindu Sevana, a home-loan scheme ; and Mahinda Randora, an infrastructure programme, were all named after him. His followers competed to bestow the most outrageous accolades on the president, a process that culminated in him being hailed the Maha Rajaneni, the Heaven-sent High King, less than 48 hours after the Eelam War ended.

Another core Rajapaksa characteristic that became evident in the early years was the equation of democratic dissent with terrorism. Journalists began to be incarcerated under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act for alleged collusion with the LTTE. The trend began in January 2007, when the government tried to arrest one of the country’s preeminent editors, Lasantha Wickrematunge of the Sunday Leader. His supposed crime was indirectly aiding terrorism by exposing a plan to build a luxury bunker for Mahinda. The most famous victim of this brand of repression was the senior journalist J S Tissainayagam. An ethnic Tamil, he was arrested in 2008 and indicted six months later for inciting communal disharmony and furthering terrorism. Tissainayagam was sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment.

Abductions, often using unmarked white vans, were another signature Rajapaksa practice. The journalist Keith Noyahr was abducted and brutally assaulted, his life saved only due to timely intervention by his colleagues.

In January 2009, Wickrematunge was murdered in a high-security zone in a Colombo suburb, marking the end of even a marginally free press in Sri Lanka.

But the Rajapaksas’ most consequential contribution to Sri Lankan politics was the creation of an ethno-religious framework for Sinhala Buddhists to perceive and understand their reality. While Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism has long been ubiquitous in Sri Lankan politics, the Rajapaksa variety of it was near unique for its three axes : the myth of eternal national insecurity, the myth of miraculous development, and the myth of the infallible hero-king.

In this rendering, Sri Lanka, as the only home of Sinhala-Buddhist civilisation, is perennially threatened by a host of inimical Others. These range from Tamils and Muslims to India, the United States and the Vatican. Salvation requires the patriotic unity of the Sinhala race, the Buddhist religion and the Sri Lankan armed forces under a Janamula Nayakaya – a “leader rooted in the people”. This leader will return Sri Lanka to its glorious past, a time of national wealth and global pre-eminence.

Winning the long Eelam War without making any political concessions to the Tamils was the sine qua non for this worldview. Mahinda’s first presidential term was spent on achieving that goal.

IN AUGUST 2006, rumours of Buddha statues emanating Budu res – halos – spread across the South. For three days, tens of thousands of people converged upon wherever a Buddha statue was to be found, stopping work, clogging roads and even delaying international flights. The spectacle was given live coverage on television and radio. According to media reports, Mahinda was delighted that the first halo sighting had been at a temple in Hambantota.

By this time, the ceasefire agreement between the government and the LTTE, signed in 2002 while Wickremesinghe was prime minister, was in its death throes. Most Sri Lankans regarded the prospect of renewed fighting with trepidation. Whether spontaneous or engineered, the halo outbreak was used by Rajapaksa propagandists to allay the fears of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority. The gods had spoken. The coming war would be a struggle to save Sinhala Buddhism and its sole refuge, Sri Lanka, from enemy aliens. And it would be won.

Framing the final Eelam War as divinely mandated also enabled Mahinda and Gotabaya to prosecute it with total indifference to the fate of civilian Tamils. The no-holds-barred confrontation with the LTTE that followed – made inevitable by the LTTE leader Prabhakaran’s own intransigence and determination to win a separate Tamil state on the battlefield – was termed a “Humanitarian Offensive” with zero civilian casualties and a rescue operation to free ordinary Tamils from the LTTE’s clutches. Since the offensive could not kill Tamil civilians by definition, anyone who died at the hands of government forces had to be a terrorist.

A famous tale from the Mahavamsa, the foundational chronicle of Sinhala Buddhist history, was seminal in the effacement of all civilian casualties. After the Sinhala hero Dutugemunu defeats a Tamil king to unify the island of Lanka, he is overwhelmed with remorse at killing “a host numbering millions”. Buddhist monks assuage his conscience by reminding him that he fought to save the faith. Killing non-Buddhists for the protection of Buddhism was no crime, for they were “unbelievers and men of evil life … not more to be esteemed than beasts.”

Mahinda and Gotabaya’s war marked a regression to a time before the 1987 Indo–Sri Lanka Accord, when the existence of an ethnic problem in Sri Lanka and the need for a political solution to it was routinely denied by Sinhala politicians. The country’s ethnic conflict was reduced to a “terrorist issue”, and all Tamils were labelled terrorists. This was the justification for Black July – the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, in response to the LTTE killing 13 soldiers in Jaffna, that ignited the Eelam War. As the scholar and activist Rajan Hoole pointed out, “From 2006, the government began to do what would have been unthinkable after 1987... Intense shelling and deliberate displacement of Tamil populations became integral to its military strategy. … This scorched-earth policy towards Tamil civilians was later to be repeated in the Vanni,” the region that became the last refuge of the LTTE in the final phase of the fighting.

During the Second and Third Eelam Wars – earlier phases of the conflict – presidents Ranasinghe Premadasa and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga had often been accused of waging war half-heartedly. Sirisena Cooray, Premadasa’s closest political companion, explained that this cautiousness “is the result of our democratic system.” The majority of Tamils “are unarmed, peaceful civilians ; they may sympathise with the armed separatists ; they may even help in some ways ; but still they are non-combatants and citizens of this country. Any leader of Sri Lanka will have to think of this group, rather than about the LTTE. Any leader would have to satisfy these people ; or at least not antagonise them too much … After all, it is not a war against some invader from outside ; the enemy is from your country, part of your people, your voters. If you do not think that way, then even genocide becomes possible.”

But the Rajapaksas did not see Tamils – or Sri Lanka’s Muslims, for that matter – as their people ; only the Sinhalese. The fate of Tamil civilians in the war zone was of little interest to them.

Under the Indo–Sri Lanka Accord, the Sri Lankan government had officially accepted the concept of a traditional Tamil homeland in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, as well as a conditional merger of the two – both key demands of all Tamil parties and groups. Every Sri Lankan leader since had abided by this commitment. Mahinda ditched the multi-partisan consensus. He rejected the concept of a Tamil homeland and vowed to retain the unitary Sri Lankan state, devolution be damned. As president, he allowed the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) – his political allies at the time – to obtain a Supreme Court verdict ordering the unilateral de-merger of the North and East. Wickremesinghe, as head of the opposition UNP, offered his party’s support for a parliamentary act to nullify the verdict. Mahinda rejected the offer.

Mahinda also ended the post-1987 practice of not allowing members of the government to use incendiary language against Sri Lanka’s minorities. Ministers were given free rein to vent against Tamils and Muslims. A 2008 pronouncement by Patali Champika Ranawaka, then a cabinet minister, was a classic case in point : “The Sinhalese are the only organic race of Sri Lanka. Other communities are all visitors to the country, whose arrival was never challenged out of the compassion of Buddhists. But they must not take this compassion for granted. The Muslims are here because our kings let them trade here and the Tamils because they were allowed to take refuge when the Moguls were invading them in India. What is happening today is pure ingratitude on the part of these visitors.”

The degree of the regression was especially clear in Mahinda’s reported indifference to a race-riot in the making. In April 2006, the LTTE set off a bomb in the main market of Trincomalee, the largest city in the Eastern Province. Some Sinhala residents began to riot against Tamils. Mahinda, observing Sinhala New Year traditions in his village in Hambantota, did not order the police or the military to quell the violence. Nor did he respond to desperate telephone calls by Tamil legislators. He was compelled to abandon this studied indifference only after a call from the Indian prime minister. By then, at least 20 people had been killed.

Two incidents early in Mahinda’s presidency presaged the “Humanitarian Offensive” to come. In December 2005, the LTTE carried out an attack on the Sri Lankan navy off the island of Mannar. Previously, government forces had either ignored such attacks or responded to them with remarkable forbearance. This time, navy personnel went on a rampage, assaulting a group of displaced Tamil civilians in the 100 Houses Housing Scheme ; four houses were destroyed and 11 people killed. The murder of five students by armed police in Trincomalee followed in January 2006. Targeting civilians soon became the norm instead of an aberration.

During the war’s ultimate offensive, with civilians trapped in the crossfire, the LTTE declared that it wanted to save Tamils from the Sri Lankan army. The government insisted it was trying to liberate Tamils from the LTTE. The LTTE’s political chief, Balasingham Nadesan, categorically rejected the notion of trapped civilians. “They are not trapped,” he said, “they are still struggling to get their life back in their land with dignity.” Gotabaya responded angrily when questioned about civilian casualties. “If you want to believe me, believe me, no civilian casualties. We have taken all the precautions to avoid civilian casualties,” he said. “The world has to appreciate this, if somebody doesn’t appreciate this – bad luck.” Caught between their merciless saviours, tens of thousands of Tamils died.

Mahinda had never made a secret of his lack of belief that Sri Lanka had an ethnic problem. Yet he adroitly used the promise of a political solution to the conflict to neutralise India and the West. In January 2009, for example, just months before the military finished off the LTTE, he promised the visiting Indian foreign minister that his government would “implement the 13th Amendment to the Constitution quickly as possible” – a major Tamil demand, which would have created provincial councils to facilitate the devolution of power. Mahinda also pledged to “explore the possibility of moving beyond the 13th Amendment.” This was a promise made to be broken the moment the LTTE was gone, just like so many Rajapaksa promises.

After the war, instead of the promised political solution or even just resettlement of displaced civilians, the Rajapaksas penned almost the entire populations of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu districts – around 300,000 Tamils – behind barbed wire. In typical Rajapaksa fashion, these open prison camps, with inhuman conditions, were called “welfare villages”. The Rajapaksas allegedly meant the camps to be a permanent arrangement, and they abandoned them only due to concerted Indian and Western pressure.

In 2007, when the LTTE had attacked an air force camp in Anuradhapura and government forces had paraded the stripped corpses of the attackers – including three women – through the town, many Sinhala residents reacted with embarrassment and even outrage. Within two years, this sense of decency, this pity for the fallen – expressed in the popular, timeless and untranslatable Sinhala phrase aney pau – was no more. When image after grisly image emerged of captured LTTE cadres, including women, with marks suggesting torture, rape and murder, the public in the South reacted with indifference. The Rajapaksa ethos had become the norm : the enemy deserved everything he or she got. Compassion depended on the identity of the victim.

As even General Sarath Fonseka, the Sinhala-Buddhist army commander who led the war, was to find out.

During the war, Mahinda, Gotabaya and Fonseka functioned as a triumvirate. Once the war was won and Fonseka’s usefulness ended, he was seen as a potential threat to Rajapaksa dominance. His effacement began when he was kicked upstairs as the chief of defence staff, stripping him of actual command. Then his photograph was removed from an exhibition organised to commemorate the army’s 60th anniversary. Soon a rumour was circulated of Fonseka planning a military coup. When Fonseka, having left the military, contested the 2010 presidential election against Mahinda, government ministers accused the opposition alliance backing him of planning not just a coup but a “Bolshevik coup” – probably because the JVP was also part of that coalition.

Mahinda’s re-election in the wake of the LTTE’s final defeat was a foregone conclusion. What happened the day after the 2010 presidential election, though, was as unexpected as it was unprecedented.

The military surrounded the hotel where Fonseka and other opposition leaders were temporarily residing and arrested the army guards provided to him by the government. Fonseka himself was arrested a week later. Most of the Sinhalese who had hailed him as a great hero just months ago now watched his arrest and subsequent conviction with indifference, willing to believe Rajapaksa statements about his treachery. His fate was a forewarning of what awaited in the second Rajapaksa term.

THE DAY THE Eelam War was won, an elephant calf was born in an elephant orphanage. It was named Dinuda – “Victory Day”.

Or so the country was informed.

Even a child could connect the dots, for every Sinhala child knew the story of Kandula from the Mahavamsa, an ancient Lankan buddhist chronicle. Kandula, an elephant calf, was born on the same day as Dutugemunu. That birth was a sign of the glorious future in store for Dutugemunu and Lanka. The birth of Dinuda on the day the Eelam War was won amounted to an equally propitious omen of the magnificent future awaiting Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka.

In 2014, a plan to export Dinuda to a private zoo in South Korea leaked to the media. Outrage ensued, and the government backtracked. During the brouhaha, the truth about Dinuda was revealed. He was not born on Victory Day but rather eight months earlier – and he was not even a he !

The apocryphal tale of Dinuda was symbolic of the concerted propaganda campaign the Rajapaksa government waged post-war to portray Mahinda as Sri Lanka’s new hero-king, the successor to Dutugemunu. In 2010, a state-owned television network organised a musical show, Jaya Jayawe – Victory Victorious. It began with a lullaby, a mother crooning the “heroic saga” of how King Mihindu and chief general Gotabaya had defeated demonic enemies and saved Mother Lanka. It ended with a song dedicated to Mahinda’s mother. “Mother, are you watching from heaven,” it asked, “as the Son, whom the gods and the Brahmas sent to your womb from golden palaces, is protecting the Nation ?” In between songs, the show hailed Mahinda as the “Lion in the Lion Flag”, “Father of the Nation”, “Wonder of the World and the Universe”, and more. Delivering a guest lecture, J R P Suriyapperuma, a veteran politician turned Sinhala-Buddhist ideologue, called Jaya Jayawe a symbol of the emerging “New Civilisation”.

Winning the Eelam War gave the Rajapaksa project enormous traction and credibility. But claims of gratitude are subject to diminishing marginal utility. During Mahinda’s second term, the Rajapaksas looked to fill the growing gap between soaring myth and sordid reality with three offerings : miraculous development, perennial enemies, and repression. The first and the second were mostly illusory ; the third was frighteningly real.

The Rajapaksas’ brand of development can be best understood by what they did in and to their pocket borough, Hambantota. The dream was to turn it into a vast metropolis to rival Colombo. An international port was the first step. In 2006, Mahinda tried to tap multiple funding sources, including India, sans success. Then China stepped in, seeing in Mahinda’s desperation a chance to gain an ally on India’s doorstep – and, possibly, a seaport in the Indian Ocean.

The port was built and named after Mahinda. There were promises of it creating 56,000 jobs. The first ship to dock there, a Sri Lankan navy vessel bearing Buddhist artefacts and pirith-chanting monks, arrived in October 2010. The hundredth came almost three years later, making for an average of less than three ships a month. Not a single new job was created.

Other massive infrastructure projects followed, all named after Mahinda or his family. A new airport in the wilds of Mattala became known as the loneliest airport in the world. A massive new convention centre remained mostly unused, as did a new international cricket stadium. To showcase Hambantota to the world, and to strengthen the illusion of development, the Rajapaksas made bids for a Commonwealth summit and the Commonwealth Games to be held there. The summit came, but it was held in Colombo. The Commonwealth Games did not come, fortunately, since the estimated cost of hosting them was in excess of USD 3.5 billion. When asked about the money spent on the unsuccessful bid – huge sums of it reportedly never accounted for – Ajith Cabraal, the governor of the central bank and a co-chair of the bidding committee, replied, “it was necessary to change the perception that Sri Lanka was still a Third World country.”

These extravagances were funded mostly with borrowed dollars, almost always from China. Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport was a case in point. The airport was built against the advice of the Strategic Enterprise Management Agency, which instead advocated expansion of the existing international airport near Colombo. But that airport was already named after the Bandaranaikes ; Mahinda obviously wanted an airport named after his family too. So a loan of USD 190 million was obtained from the Export–Import Bank of China. The airport became operational in 2013 but kept losing money, plagued alike by a dearth of flights and a surfeit of elephants and peacocks. In the meantime, millions of dollars had to be spent every year on servicing the loan.

Despite all the borrowed money poured into exhibitionist projects, Hambantota continues to be a backwater, its people poor. “We used to live in the cashew plantation in ‘Aaru Bokka’,” one displaced local villager explained to a journalist. There were about 70 families, all owning about two and a half acres of land. “Around this time of the year, the cashew would have brought us the most income … We had brick-making huts.” Now they lived on plots of little more than one-tenth of an acre. “Before we left, they told us that one member from each family would be given a job … No one was given a job.”

In 2024, the administration of Wickremesinghe, which replaced Gotabaya’s government after his downfall, inaugurated a programme to provide free rice to the poor. In Hambantota, 52 percent of the populace qualified.

The attempts to hide the disconnect between the glitzy superstructure and the underdeveloped base sometimes bordered on the ridiculous. In one case, police told shopkeepers near the Mahinda Rajapaksa International Cricket Stadium to put large king coconuts and impressive produce out for sale to impress foreign visitors. They also asked them to dress their children in national outfits when out and about on match days.

Creating and maintaining the illusion of miraculous development had two seminal consequences. One was a spurt in the national debt. In 2010, despite the absence of war, Sri Lanka’s total debt increased by over 10 percent. Much of this came from a risky shift away from concessional debt in favour of more commercial borrowing at high rates – a change that would make a critical contribution to Sri Lanka’s 2022 bankruptcy.

The other was the pivot to China. Beijing excelled at Rajapaksa management, increasing its footprint in Sri Lanka by fulfilling the whims and fancies of its first family. Sri Lanka’s entry into the space age was indicative of how the country ended up in China’s orbit during Mahinda’s second term. Rohitha, Mahinda’s youngest son, had dreams of becoming the world’s youngest astronaut, and the first from Sri Lanka. The first Sri Lankan satellite was launched in 2012, with customary Rajapaksa pomp and pageantry. Rohitha was hailed as the creator of the country’s satellite programme. Of course, this was another illusion. Sri Lanka never had a satellite programme. The much-vaunted “Sri Lankan” satellite was actually a Chinese satellite rented for the occasion.

Initially, an absolute majority of Sinhalese believed that Mahinda and the Rajapaksas would deliver developmental success just as they had martial victory. But, over the next two years, this confidence began to evaporate. Rising economic distress and falling economic expectations caused the Rajapaksas’ core constituency to start to lose faith in Mahinda and the family.

This haemorrhaging of support made the creation of a suitable new enemy a life-and-death matter, politico-electorally, for the Rajapaksas. Attempts to resurrect the spectre of the LTTE failed. Having flirted briefly with reviving the Christian enemy, the Rajapaksas settled on the Muslim enemy instead. In the second half of 2012, a well-organised and generously financed anti-Muslim campaign appeared, picketing Muslim-owned shops, organising anti-Muslim demonstrations and attacking mosques. The police watched on as the law was broken and hate incited. Since Muslims – unlike Tamils – were not making any political demands, they were portrayed not as a political but rather a cultural Other, rich parasites conspiring to corrupt Sinhala women, install Sharia law and turn Sri Lanka into a Muslim country by 2020. A relatively new all-monk organisation, the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) – the “Buddhist Power Force” – led the charge.

As hate and fear of the new enemy swirled, the government insisted that nothing was wrong. Mahinda assured the public that all Buddhists are free of racialism. At the opening of Meth Sevana, the BBS’s Buddhist Leadership Academy, Gotabaya as the chief guest insisted, “these Buddhist clergy who are engaged in a nationally important task should not be feared or doubted by anyone.”

In March 2013, a monk-led mob torched a Muslim-owned department store, Fashion Bug, in the Colombo suburb of Pepiliyana. The attack happened consequent to a false rumour of a 15-year-old Sinhala-Buddhist employee being raped within the store premises by a Muslim fellow-employee. A few weeks earlier, the head of the BBS, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, had accused Fashion Bug’s owners of conspiring to turn pure Sinhala-Buddhist maidens into harem inmates. The connection between the accusation, the false rumour and the mob violence was obvious. But Mahinda, when questioned about it, was dismissive. “What was in the background ? Why were they attacked ? Now see a girl was raped. Seven-years-old girl was raped. Then naturally they will go and attack them whether they belong to any community or any religion.”

Rising anti-Muslim hysteria eventually led to Sri Lanka’s first anti-Muslim riot in a century. Monk-led, white-clad mobs went on a rampage in the town of Aluthgama in June 2014, attacking mosques and Muslim homes and shops, unhindered by the presence of thousands of police and military men. The violence was clearly orchestrated and began soon after Gnanasara made an incendiary speech at a BBS-organised meeting in the town. “In this country we still have a Sinhala police, we still have a Sinhala army,” the monk thundered. If a single Muslim “touches a single Sinhalese … it will be their end.”

The new enemy was helpful in justifying another core Rajapaksa policy – the militarisation of a pluralist society by a mono-ethnic military. The process began post-war, under Gotabaya’s auspices. Soon, the army would have its own brand of resorts and its own travel agency. The air force had a helicopter-tour outfit and managed two golf courses. Basil Rajapaksa proclaimed, “Only those who support terrorism can request to reduce allocations for defence.” In August 2014, the commander of the army announced that new bases would be set up in each of the country’s administrative districts.

Gotabaya also introduced a practice of forcing civilians to undergo “Leadership Training” by the military. All new entrants to national universities had to attend residential training sessions in army camps, as did the principals of government schools (they were awarded brevet ranks afterwards). He even organised a two-day military-run workshop for all ministers and parliamentarians.

As economic distress and public discontent mounted, repression became more generalised. Initially only journalists, media organisations and political activists were targeted. Gradually, repression began to reach every level and corner of society. The impeachment of Shirani Bandaranayake as the Chief Justice in 2013 and her replacement with a Rajapaksa supporter was a case in point. Bandaranayake had refused to give the go-ahead to two landmark pieces of legislation pioneered by the Rajapaksas – an amendment to the Sacred Areas Act, and the Divineguma Act. The first would have authorised Gotabaya to expropriate any private land by declaring it a “sacred area” ; the second would have given Basil control over a huge chunk of welfare and development expenditure as well as the right to appoint a host of unelected village-level officials accountable not to the people but to him.

In August 2013, the people of Rathupaswala, a village outside Colombo, held a peaceful protest demanding clean water, accusing a factory in the area of polluting their drinking wells. The factory belonged to a businessman close to the Rajapaksa family. The government sent in the military, under the command of Brigadier Anura Deshapriya Gunawardena, who had played a prominent role in the final battle of the Eelam War. Soldiers herded media personnel into a vehicle – some were also assaulted – and shot out street lights to plunge the area into darkness. Then they fired live bullets into the crowd of mostly Sinhala Buddhists, killing three and injuring scores.

In the immediate aftermath, an unofficial curfew was imposed, electricity disconnected, and house-to-house searches conducted. The army reportedly shot at and assaulted people sheltering inside a church. The South was getting a taste – albeit on a miniscule scale – of the Rajapaksas’ “Humanitarian Offensive”. The point was not lost on the victims. “If they treated us like this for engaging in a demonstration, one can imagine the situation in the North,” one villager told the media. “We thought they did something big by finishing the war in our country. Now it looks as if they just killed innocent people.”

Towards the end of 2014, Mahinda announced a new presidential election, two years ahead of schedule. The decision would have been made in accordance with the stars as interpreted by the royal astrologer, but an awareness of the government’s growing unpopularity might have contributed too. This was also an attempt to take the opposition by surprise – but the opposition pulled its own coup by getting the general secretary of Mahinda’s own SLFP, Maithripala Sirisena, to cross over and become the common opposition candidate.

As campaigning began, even with massive abuse of state power and resources in their favour, it was clear that the Rajapaksas were headed for defeat. Even attempts at again inciting anti-minority hate did not have the expected success. In the Daily Mirror, Rohitha Rajapaksa made the family’s best case : “I am of the view that if a country is to be developed, the leader should remain unchanged for a long time.”

There was little doubt about what a third Mahinda term would entail. If Mahinda won the vote, the minister Dullas Alahapperuma promised, “legal action will be taken against foreign agencies and individuals who allegedly funded the common opposition election campaign and induced government ministers to cross over to the opposition.” The BBS, campaigning for Mahinda, promised much the same. The opposition politician Malik Samarawickrama informed the media about a telephone conversation he had with Mahinda : “Mr. Rajapaksa accused me of doing all the damage to him in collaboration with Mangala Samaraweera. He said after the presidential election, when he wins, he would be a different President Rajapaksa. You will then see what happens.”

The election was held in January 2015. Sirisena beat Mahinda, taking 51 percent of the vote. An alleged attempt by the Rajapaksas to nullify the result had to be abandoned due to opposition from the heads of the military and the police, as well as the attorney general. Mahinda conceded defeat and went home to Hambantota in a helicopter provided by his successor.

Most Sri Lankans (including this writer) thought Mahinda’s life in politics was over, and that he, like his presidential predecessors, would now retire from active political involvement. They could not have been more wrong. The comeback battle began on the very day after the election, when Mahinda made a speech to supporters at his ancestral home, Medamulana, blaming the minorities and international conspirators for his defeat. It would end in November 2019, with Gotabaya winning the presidency on a fresh wave of anti-Muslim hysteria.

A MAN WAS invited to Naga Lokaya – the Cobra World – by its king. There, he was presented with 14 relics of the Buddha. The relics were brought to an ancient temple and placed on a special dais. A pious cobra emerged from the river to worship the relics, was caught, and then imprisoned in a five-litre plastic bottle. All this happened just a week before the 2019 presidential election. It was fantasy as politics, Rajapaksa style.

The arrival of relics courtesy the Cobra King was to signal that Sri Lanka would have a good leader by 2020, the chief incumbent of the Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara, a temple with deep symbolic ties to political power in Sri Lanka, informed the media. Monks presented lotus buds to devotees arriving to worship the relics. The lotus bud was the electoral symbol of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) and its candidate, Gotabaya.

The Rajapaksas’ organised attempt to win back power began in February 2015 with Mahinda Sulanga – the Mahinda Wind – a mammoth rally in the Colombo suburb of Nugegoda. Other rallies on the same theme followed. Their target was to gather the faithful before the coming parliamentary election and install Mahinda as prime minister.

The effort was premature. The Rajapaksas’ depredations were still not forgotten, and the new government, under a Sirisena-Wickremesinghe partnership, still popular. The UNP won the parliamentary vote and Mahinda and his loyalists organised themselves as the unofficial opposition. In 2016, Basil formed the SLPP, a political outfit made of, by and for the Rajapaksas. The new party held a 100,000-strong May Day rally in 2017, a show of political force dwarfing that of all other contenders. In 2018, the SLPP scored a landslide win in local-government elections.

Religion and politics, racism and superstition – these are powerful intoxicants. But to be truly effective electorally, the Rajapaksas also needed economics as a binding agent. In 2015, any economic case for backing them was absent. By 2017, economic discontent was raising its head again, and with it anti-incumbency. The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration had reverted to an economics of austerity in 2016, re-imposing a Nation Building Tax and increasing value-added tax. This resulted in an across-the-board increase in prices. A storm of protests followed, including by small traders – a Sri Lankan first. When the Supreme Court ruled the tax hike illegal since it was effected bypassing parliament, the government brought it back into force via its new budget. Those Sinhala voters who had ditched the Rajapaksas in 2015 for economic reasons began to reposition themselves. This opened the floodgates of national-populism, enabling a Rajapaksa comeback.

In March 2018, another anti-Muslim riot erupted in Teldeniya, near Kandy. The government’s inaction dealt a lethal blow to its democratic and pluralist image. Meanwhile, Sirisena and Wickremesinghe’s competing presidential ambitions had caused a near collapse of their working relationship, with inevitable effects on governance.

The 19th Amendment to the constitution, which the new government had pushed through in 2015, had reintroduced presidential term limits, ruling out a Mahinda candidacy. Perhaps Sirisena thought he could gain Rajapaksa backing to win a second term, with Mahinda as prime minister. Behind the scenes, the two sides began to negotiate. The process culminated in a 52-day coup.

In a lightning strike, in October 2018, Sirisena dismissed Wickremesinghe as prime minister and appointed Mahinda in his stead. He also dissolved parliament. An image of the Inspector General of Police saluting Gotabaya – who held no official position – while a smiling Mahinda looked on, revealed who was really in the saddle.

The coup failed because civil society and the opposition led by Wickremesinghe fought back. Wickremesinghe and the UNP refused to recognise Mahinda’s appointment. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that Sirisena had violated the constitution when he dismissed Wickremesinghe and dissolved the parliament. Mahinda reportedly advised Sirisena to ignore the order, but Sirisena complied.

Then, on Easter Sunday in April 2019, a group of local Islamists carried out coordinated suicide bombings in numerous churches and luxury hotels. The Rajapaksas had kept anti-Muslim politics alive during their years in the opposition, and now they seized on the explosions as their opening to power. Barely four days after the attacks, as the victims’ funerals were just beginning, Gotabaya announced his decision to run for president.

Over the next several months, Rajapaksa supporters used false news to keep anti-Muslim hysteria at the highest pitch possible. The parliamentarian Wimal Weerawansa accused a Muslim doctor at a public hospital of secretly sterilising more than 25,000 Sinhala-Buddhist mothers. He called it gharbasha uddaya – a “war of wombs”.

That September, Mahinda publicly anointed Gotabaya as the SLPP’s presidential candidate. Sirisena decided to back the Rajapaksas. An internecine battle for the UNP candidacy between Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa was resolved in the latter’s favour. The election, held in an atmosphere of religious over-determination, could have only one outcome. It delivered a new Rajapaksa saviour, titled “Our Hero who Labours” by his adoring supporters.

An omen of Gotabaya’s style of rule had come at the only press conference he faced as a candidate. When asked how he would finance the generous promises he was making, he had no answer. He was equally silent when questioned about the country’s mounting debt crisis, mutely turning to Mahinda for help. Questioned about extremism, he stared, smiled and made a circular gesture with one hand, eventually giving an answer that had little to do with the question. The next day, Dullas Alahapperuma, now his spokesperson, issued guidelines to the media on how to question Gotabaya.

“Ask the future,” Gotabaya had told a journalist at the press conference. That future was not long in the making. Gotabaya slashed taxes and began a money-printing binge to finance the government’s widening fiscal deficit. Public investment was slashed. Recurrent expenditure, inflation and money supply increased while revenue collection and private-sector credit growth decreased. Then the country was closed down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. From there to bankruptcy was a short, straight and narrow road. An unrealistic exchange rate and the government’s ban on artificial fertilisers – a ploy to save dwindling foreign reserves by decreasing imports – served as accelerators. The fertiliser ban predictably caused agriculture production to plummet. That plus chronic fuel shortages left millions of Sri Lankans struggling to put a meal together by 2022.

People took to the streets demanding that Gotabaya step down. The ruling coalition unravelled. Mahinda resigned in the vain hope that this would be enough to calm the protesters down. He was replaced as prime minister by Wickremesinghe. In July 2022, close to a million Sri Lankans converged on the streets of Colombo and literally drove Gotabaya out.

AFTER GOTABAYA FLED the county, the parliament held a vote to decide on his successor, as set down in the constitution. Wickremesinghe, with Rajapaksa backing, won the vote and became president. In less than three months, he ended the fuel queues by rationalising fuel distribution, and queues for cooking gas by improving the management of the state-owned gas company. Runaway inflation was curbed, tourism recovered, and foreign remittances started flowing back in. In March 2023, he succeeded in signing a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund. By the year’s last quarter, the economy was growing again. But these developments did little to curb increased poverty, which had doubled between 2021 and 2022. Measures to bolster public finances – such as huge rises in value-added tax as well as water and electricity rates – spurred familial dysfunction and popular discontent.

While Wickremesinghe focused on the economy, the Rajapaksas plotted a comeback. In December 2022, Basil came out in the open, telling the media that Mahinda should be made prime minister again. Wickremesinghe responded by dispensing patronage to try and woo Rajapaksa loyalists over to his side. Over the next year and a half, Wickremesinghe and the Rajapaksas waged a behind-the-scenes battle for the loyalty of SLPP parliamentarians and voters. Most parliamentarians were up for grabs, and Wickremesinghe would win that contest ; but most voters, disillusioned with the Rajapaksas and their cronies, were looking for alternatives. Economic collapse had cured them of their infatuation with Mahinda. Revelations of Rajapaksa waste and extravagance – such as the hundreds of millions of rupees in public funds spent on renovating and refurbishing the official residence allocated to Mahinda as a former president – exacerbated the disenchantment.

In 2022, Wickremesinghe had saved the Rajapaksas from popular wrath, sending security forces in to clear protest sites and choosing not to pursue aggressive accountability measures. Gotabaya slunk back into Sri Lanka less than two months after he fled, content that he had nothing to fear. Wickremesinghe seemed to have hoped that the Rajapaksas would back him at the next presidential election, in 2024, if not from gratitude then out of self-interest. They, however, demanded that he contest as the candidate of the SLPP, with the party under Basil’s control. Wickremesinghe refused, contested the election as an independent candidate, and lost.

The Rajapaksas had been grooming Dhammika Perera, a businessman turned politician, as their preferred candidate. But Perera backed out at the last moment, citing personal reasons. The SLPP eventually chose Namal Rajapaksa as its presidential candidate.

His stinging loss left him a very distant fourth to the victorious Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the NPP, whose campaign promised tough anti-corruption measures. Namal had to contend with not just a hostile electorate but also a fragmented party. Wickremesinghe had managed to disembowel the SLPP by winning the backing of over 90 of its parliamentarians and many more of its electorate-level organisers.

This February, with the NPP now firmly in control of the government, the attorney general filed an indictment against Namal. The charges traced back to a years-old investigation into the misappropriation of funds given by an Indian real-estate company for the development of rugby in Sri Lanka. The previous month, his brother Yoshitha had been arrested on charges of money laundering. Other cases against Rajapaksa family members are said to be in the pipeline. If Namal or anyone from the immediate family faces a proper trial and is convicted, it could be a death blow to Rajapaksa hopes of a comeback in Sri Lanka’s next election, scheduled for 2029. But the Rajapaksas’ political obituary has been written before, only to find them again among the living.

There seems little doubt as to the means they will employ. When Mahinda spoke to grieving supporters at Medamulana after he lost the presidency to Sirisena in 2015, he left little to the imagination. “We must remember,” he declared, “they got their majority vote from Eelam” – the Tamil heartland in the country’s North and East. That declaration reframed his defeat as the defeat of Sinhala-Buddhist Sri Lanka by alien minorities.

This Medamulana Doctrine, with its politics of majoritarian grievance, paved the way for the Rajapaksa comeback in 2019 – admittedly with more than a little help from Sirisena, Wickremesinghe and the Easter Sunday bombers. It is likely to remain the foundation of the family’s efforts at rejuvenation going forward. Once again, fear and hatred of Sri Lanka’s minorities will be used to remake a familiar ethno-religious contract, offering Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy in return for Rajapaksa power. Class conflict will be supplanted by a dream in which the poorest Sinhala Buddhist has more clout in the final analysis – that is, in the moment of the mob – than the richest Tamil, Muslim or Christian.

In November 2024, when the government belatedly returned some military-occupied land in the North to its original owners, Namal was quick to put this doctrine to use. “While the release of lands is not an issue if it is done in consultation with the security forces, it should not be done at the cost of compromising national security,” he posted on X. “SL fought 30 yrs of terrorism & today all communities enjoy freedom at the cost of thousands of lost lives. It is of utmost importance that national security is maintained whether it is in the North or South.” What Namal only hinted at the monk-led extremist outfit Sinhala Ravaya was happy to say directly. It accused the new president, Dissanayake, of being a diaspora agent trying to rejuvenate the LTTE and start another Eelam War, and promised a struggle to save the nation from this “Elara” – Dutugemunu’s Tamil nemesis.

This May, Sri Lanka will hold elections for local government bodies, presenting the Rajapaksas with a new ordeal by fire. The SLPP entered the election season showcasing a new controversy around a temple in Jaffna. In 2021, the military began to build a new Buddhist stupa on land that the area’s Tamil residents claim is theirs. The stupa’s unveiling was to happen this March under military patronage, but after Tamil residents complained to the government the military was ordered to stop its institutional patronage of the ceremony. The SLPP immediately seized upon the issue, accusing the government of giving in to Tamil separatists and endangering national security. A retired admiral turned SLPP activist thundered that, for the first time in history, a government had stopped the offering of dane – alms – to Buddhist monks. Unfortunately for the Rajapaksas, no public outcry resulted. The issue was ignored by the electorate and by chief monks. But failure this once does not mean that the cry of the country, the race and the religion being in danger will be abandoned.

The Rajapaksas are not ideological. They are consummate users of an ideology. They use Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism as sword and shield, as path to power. “Islam has been, in Pakistan and also in other Muslim countries, a refuge for weak and scoundrel regimes and leaders in modern times,” the Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad wrote. “Whenever they feel threatened and isolated – and are losing their grip, losing popularity and losing the consensus of the people – they bring out Islam from the closet and use it as a political weapon.” That is what the Rajapaksas have repeatedly done with Sinhala Buddhism and what they will do again. And Sri Lanka may yet succumb again to the old plague.