Sri Lanka’s Ruling Rajapaksas: Down But Not Out

Sri Lanka’s most powerful political dynasty, the Rajapaksa family, is in trouble.

With the economic crisis worsening over the past few months, daily life has become extremely difficult for the Sri Lankan masses.  The country’s dire foreign exchange situation forced it to cut back on imports, resulting in a severe shortage of food, fuel, and medicines.

Many Sri Lankans hold the Rajapaksas responsible for their suffering. Anger against the clan, which is pervasive in the country’s power structures, has boiled over onto the streets of Colombo and other cities. At protest sites, calls for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his elder brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, have only grown louder.

Several Rajapaksas stepped down from ministerial positions when the Sri Lankan cabinet resigned en masse on April 3. They included Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa and Irrigation Minister Chamal Rajapaksa, who are brothers of the president and prime minister, as well as Sports Minister Namal Rajapaksa, the prime minister’s eldest son.

But Sri Lankans are saying that this isn’t enough. They want Gotabaya and Mahinda to step down, too. They want the entire Rajapaksa clan to leave the island.

Only a few years ago, Gotabaya and Mahinda were adored by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority. But now they are perceived as the main villains responsible for the current crisis.

When Mahinda was president between 2005 and 2015, Gotabaya, a former colonel in the Sri Lankan Army, was defense secretary. The two brothers oversaw military operations against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). They gave the armed forces a free hand not only to wipe out the insurgent group, but also to carry out aerial bombing and shelling of civilians and the execution of surrendered LTTE fighters. The military operations culminated in the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009.

With the end of the 25-year civil war, Mahinda and Gotabaya came to be revered as “war heroes” by the Sinhalese majority. A wave of Sinhalese triumphalism gave Mahinda a second term as president.

During his second term, the tentacles of the Rajapaksa dynasty spread rapidly. As minister for economic development at that time, Basil oversaw the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and is reported to have taken a personal cut of every project. The Rajapaksas and corruption became synonymous. They also emerged as strong advocates of Chinese loans. Not only was China willing to extend massive loans to fund extravagant vanity projects but also it protected the family from global censure for war crimes.

Mahinda was ousted from power in the 2015 presidential election. However, the Rajapaksas bounced back a few years later.

In November 2019, Gotabaya won the presidential election with a massive mandate. Ten months later, the family’s party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP), swept elections and waltzed into parliament. Gotabaya appointed Mahinda as prime minister.

Political dynasties are common in South Asia. India’s Nehru-Gandhis and Pakistan’s Sharifs and Bhutto-Zardaris are the most well-known, but dozens of others are thriving in the region. In Sri Lanka, the Bandaranaikes dominated politics for decades last century and the United National Party (UNP) was often derided as the “Uncle Nephews Party.”

However, no other dynasty in the region has engaged in the level of brazen and pervasive nepotism seen under the Rajapaksas. Besides Mahinda, Gotabaya, and the other brothers – this is the third generation of the dynasty – there are dozens of other relatives who sit in parliament and provincial assemblies, work in embassies abroad, or head departments and corporations.

The family’s control over political power has given them control over resources, too. In July 2021, when Basil joined his brothers in the cabinet, it was “estimated that 75 percent of the total budgetary allocations to ministries are to those under the purview of the Rajapaksa family,” noted political commentator D.B.S. Jeyraj wrote in an article in the Daily Mirror. This has been more or less the situation over the past decade in Sri Lanka under the Rajapaksas.

Sri Lankan voters are partly to blame for the Rajapaksas’ stranglehold over power. Sinhalese nationalists, who form the core of their vote base, have repeatedly supported the family in elections. In the 2020 general elections, for instance, the SLPP won a massive victory and with its allies secured a two-thirds majority in parliament – a huge achievement under the country’s proportional representation electoral system.

This two-thirds majority helped the Rajapaksas enact in October 2020 the 20th amendment to the constitution, which significantly enhanced the powers of the executive presidency. With this the Rajapaksas cemented Gotabaya’s grip over power. Dislodging him from the presidency will be a near impossible task.

Opposition parliamentarians are seeking to build support for a no-confidence motion against the government. This will require a simple majority. But so far, the opposition has not been able to cobble together the numbers needed. Impeachment of the president is even more challenging as it is a tedious, long, process that requires a two-thirds majority in parliament to support the motion.

The Rajapaksas will not give up easily, either. They have too much to lose in terms of state power and resources. Most importantly, loss of power would mean loss of impunity for the Rajapaksas. It could mean being tried for rampant corruption, even for war crimes. Clearly the stakes are high for the family and they will use every means at their disposal, including the use of violence, to hold onto power.

Polarizing the people along ethnic lines has been an oft-used strategy of Sri Lanka’s political parties. For decades, they demonized the Tamils to win the votes of the Sinhalese.

After they vanquished the LTTE, the Rajapaksas targeted the island’s Muslims. Gotabaya patronized the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), an outfit of Sinhalese-Buddhist radicals, to unleash violence on Muslims. It burnished his credentials as a guardian of Sinhalese-Buddhists.

Late last year, as the economic crisis in the country was gathering momentum, Gotabaya appointed BBS founder-chief Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero to head the Presidential Task Force to implement his “One Country One Law” project.

The Rajapaksas are past masters of the politics of polarization. They can be expected to pit one community against another in the coming weeks and months, if only to divide the ongoing protests.

The anti-Rajapaksa rallies have seen the participation of people of all ethnicities, religious backgrounds, and classes. Stirring the insecurities of the island’s Sinhalese-Buddhists by reviving old fears of “Tamil terrorists” and “Islamist extremism” is a ploy that the Rajapaksas could attempt to hold on to power.

The Rajapaksas may be down now, but they are nowhere near defeated.