Explained: What led to the fall of Sri Lanka’s powerful Rajapaksa clan?

The anger against the Sri Lankan leadership boiled over, as tens and thousands of protesters took to the streets of Colombo over the weekend, storming into President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s residence and setting Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s house on fire.

The demonstrators, who were seen swimming in the pool and flexing muscles in a gym at the presidential palace, have refused to leave until Gotabaya steps down. The president, who has fled with the navy and whose location remains undisclosed, is expected to resign on 14 July.

Also read: Pool parties and picnics galore: What's going on inside the Sri Lankan presidential palace?

Gotabaya has been facing calls for resignation since March but has remained defiant until now. His brother Mahinda was ousted as prime minister on 9 May after protesters turned violent and torched their ancestral home in Hambantota. The anger against the political family has been brewing for months as the nation of 22 million is facing a shortage of fuel, food, and medicine, plunging it into the worst economic crisis ever.

The Rajapaksas were once hailed as heroes but now the public thinks of them as the country’s biggest villains. What has led to the downfall of the family, which has been dominating Sri Lanka for the better part of the last 15 years? We take a look.

The rise of the family

Don Alwin Rajapaksa, the father Mahinda and Gotabaya, was a co-founder of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLLP). However, another founding member SWRD Bandaranaike wrested more control and was heading the party. His wife Sirimavo took over after his assassination in 1959.

Senior Rajapakasa’s sons Chaminda, Mahinda, and Gotabaya followed in their father’s footsteps. In 1994, when Chandrika Kumaratunga took charge of the SLLP, Mahinda had spent two decades in politics. He served as Cabinet minister during Kumaratunga’s two terms as president.

Mahinda was elected president in 2005 after Kumaratunga quit politics. And there was no looking back for the family, which has been largely at the helm for the last decade and a half.

With Gotabaya as his defence minister, Mahinda led Sri Lanka to a victory against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant separatist group fighting for an independent homeland for Hindu Tamils in the northeastern part of the country. In 2009, the 26-year civil war that left the country ravaged and divided ended. The Rajapaksas became “war heroes” and had the support of the island’s Buddhist-Sinhalese majority.

Exploiting their influence

After the defeat of the LTTE, the Rajapaksas thought of themselves as invincible. When Mahinda won the second term, he amended the Constitution to remove the two-term bar, confident that he would be Sri Lanka’s eternal president.

Gotabya continued in defence. No criticism of the Rajapaksas was tolerated. Several of those who spoke against the government disappeared; some were eliminated – Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader, was killed in 2009 and a year on, Prageeth Ekneligoda, a cartoonist, went missing.

Chamal, the eldest brother was Speaker and the youngest brother Basil was the minister in charge of economic development. This was the time when there were around 40 Rajapaksas in the government, controlling the country and its economy.

Mahinda became closer to China, which became a concern of India as well as the United States.

During the family’s first stint in office, the government took out big loans from China to invest in projects like a deep-sea port in its home district of Hambantota. But many projects stalled and foreign debt more than doubled between 2010 and 2020, reports Bloomberg.

It started going downhill from 2015

Mahinda remained in office until 2015 when he lost to the opposition after his Cabinet colleague Maithripala Sirisena joined hands with rival Wickremesinghe. However, they bided their time and launched the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP or People’s Front) in 2016 as the party of the people, mainly appealing to the majority Sinhala-Buddhist community.

Mahinda made a comeback in local elections in 2018. President Mathripala Sirisena sacked the then PM Wickremesinghe and appointed his old boss Mahinda as prime minister.

A year on, Mahinda could not run for president because the two-term bar on the presidency had been restored by the previous government. In 2019, Gotabaya won the presidential election on a promise to restore security in the wake of the Easter Sunday suicide bombings that killed 290 people. He gave up his US citizenship to be able to qualify as a candidate.

Gotabaya vowed to bring back the muscular nationalism that had made his family popular with the Buddhist majority and lead the country out of an economic slump with a message of stability and development, reports the news agency Associated Press. But instead, he made some big mistakes that ushered in the unprecedented crisis.

After the bombings, tourism had already taken a hit and foreign loans on the development projects – including a port and an airport in the home district of the Rajapaksas needed to be repaid. It did not help that Gotabaya passed the largest tax cut’s in the country’s history against the advice of his economic team in his first Cabinet meeting after becoming president. It was meant to spur spending, but critics warned it would slash the government’s finances. Pandemic lockdowns and an ill-advised ban on chemical fertilisers further hurt the fragile economy, according to AP.

Amid all this, the island nation continued to receive large loans from China. In 2020-2021, Colombo’s debt repayment to Beijing amounted to nearly US $2 billion.

Sri Lanka started running out of money and could not pay its huge debts. The shortages of fuel, food, cooking gas and medicine brought the country to a standstill. Hourslong power cuts made life hell in the island nation.

Public anger against the Rajapaksas grew over the mismanagement of finances and corruption, which led to the country to a collapse.

In March, anti-government protesters started calling for the resignation of Gotabaya. “Gota go home” became a rallying cry. But he refused to step down, saying that he had been elected by “6.92 million people”, which is a majority of 52.25 per cent and that he was entitled to the rest of term, reports The Indian Express.

He thought the anger would diffuse, but with everyday life becoming a struggle it become impossible to placate the common man. The calls for his resignation only grew louder but he held on to power.

He made his brother Mahinda, Basil and Chaminda resign. After Mahinda quit as prime minister, he brought in Ranil Wickremesinghe. But with no respite for people waiting in line for fuel, food and medicine, even Wickremesinghe could not be of any help.

Now hundreds of thousands are camping in Colombo, demanding that Gotabya take responsibility for the crisis which has caused misery to the people of Lanka.

“Our struggle is not over,” student leader Lahiru Weerasekara told. “We won’t give up this struggle until he actually leaves.”

With inputs from agencies

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