The greatest achievement of Don David Rajapaksa's life was to put Don Matthew Rajapaksa and Don Arvyn Rajapaksa on the political stage.
The Don David Rajapaksa family is an upper-caste family from the Patois region of Giruwa, who held a position named Vidan Arachi in the Ihara Valykarda Kolalai region during the British colonial era and owned their own rice and coconut plantations. Vidan Arachi is a unique administrative position in the colonial era of Sri Lanka, the administrative system is the indigenous chieftaincy system, first created by Portugal, the indigenous chief is appointed by the chief executive of the European colonial countries, as a link between the colonial government and the local people, not only as a translator, but also in place of the colonial government to exercise military, judicial, taxation and other powers, in return, they can get free land or free use of the labor force in the jurisdiction (in fact, to put it bluntly, it is a traitor).
When the British seized Sri Lanka from the Dutch, the colonial governor at the time, North, optimized the indigenous chieftain system in order to facilitate the administration of Sri Lanka, replaced the remuneration system with the form of free access to land and labor, and they became the second-level administration of the colony, directly appointed by the governor. The system of indigenous chiefs in David's time was divided into 5 classes, the highest rank was Maha Mudalar and the lowest rank was Vidan, and David was the penultimate rank in the administrative system, equivalent to the mayor of the continent. Appointments to these positions are non-transferable, but can be hereditary, and are generally chosen from influential local families loyal to the British Crown.
Sri Lanka
David had three sons, the most successful of whom were Matthew and Arwin, matthew was the highest in the position of state legislator, and Arwin was the highest in the government at that time as deputy speaker of parliament and cabinet minister.
Of the two brothers, Alwyn had the highest achievements, but he was brought to the political stage by his brother Matthew, and if it were not for Matthew's untimely death, the achievements would not be under Alwyn.
Born in 1897, Don Matthew Rajapaksa spent his childhood as a student at a local school, and after graduation went to Wesleyan College in Colombo and Richmond College in Galle to receive a good education, but when he was 16 years old, his father David died, so he left school and returned home to run the family business with his brother and take care of their mother.
Born in 1905, Don Alvin Rajapaksa was sent by his family to Wesleyan College in Colombo (education seems to be a matter of great importance to every age and every class), and after graduating from the college, he returned to his hometown to help his father run the family business. From this, we can see that David actually intended to train Matthew, he finished high school at Wesleyan College and then went to Richmond College to attend high school, and Alvin only went to middle school, and their brother did not even have detailed information to prove that he had attended middle school.
In 1931, the year of the most political turmoil in Sri Lanka, Matthew began to enter the political arena. Sri Lanka's independence movement has been uninterrupted, and 1931 can be seen as a watershed year, following the Donomore Reforms, which provided for universal suffrage in Sri Lanka and the right to vote for both men and women over the age of 21, up from just 4 per cent before the reforms. This reform directly contributed to the first election of the Council of State in Ceylon in 1931, which was also attended by the founder of the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, S.A. Vikramasinghe, who was his loyal patron, and in the international environment of the time, communism prevailed, which was also the most advanced ideology of the era, the object of pursuit by young people.
After World War I, The Armistice Day is celebrated every year on November 11, and countries celebrate it in their own way. In britain, the government designates November 11 as the "Invalides Day" to commemorate the martyrs of the war, when the Queen and the people will wear the flowers to show their condolences, while the proceeds from the sale of the flowers on the streets of Sri Lanka are used for British veterans. After 1933, in order to rebel against this situation, young men and women in Sri Lanka took to the streets to sell Surya flowers, competing with the Yu beauty flower dealers, and their proceeds were used for Sri Lankan veterans, a sport known as the Suria-Mar Movement. At the time, both Matthew and Arwin had close ties with the left-wing leaders who led the movement.
In 1936, in the election of the Ceylon Parliament, Matthew defeated his opponent by 17,046 votes and was elected state councilor. At this time, Arwin was still an obscure young man, who had successfully accumulated political experience by helping his brother deal with the affairs of the voters again and again.
The Rajapaksa family's first performance on the political stage came to an abrupt end with Matthew's death. On May 18, 1945, Matthew died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 48.
At that time, Sri Lanka's internal political form was somewhat similar to that of Japan, basically in a state similar to the clan gate valve, and the parliamentary seats of each constituency were almost controlled by a family in a certain era, and these political assets would be passed down within the family. But after the death of his brother, Arwin was reluctant to compete for the seat in the 1945 by-election in hambantota. But some of the politically influential at the time insisted that he should run in the by-election while lobbying him vigorously, and in the end, he agreed and managed to win a seat in the by-election, entering the State Department's Agriculture and Land Committee.
At this point, his political talents began to show. Giruwapattuwa was his hometown, but for historical and political reasons (after the British colonization of Sri Lanka, the Royal Land Ordinance was passed in 1840, which deprived the local peasants of their land, and then began to forcibly expropriate land in other areas), the local farmers were basically landless for farming. Arwin worked hard and maneuvered with many parties to finally adopt a 99-year lease plan, that is, to transfer 5 acres of royal land to landless farmers for planting, which solved the problems of local farmers' production and life while accumulating a certain political influence for themselves.
In the year of his successful by-election, his third child, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was born.
In 1947, in the first general election of the Ceylon Parliament, the Hambantota constituency was divided into two parts, namely the Beriata and Tissamerharama constituency, while most of the Kirova Patois was included in the Beliata constituency, which is Alvin's hometown, where his political achievements can be regarded as the political stronghold of Arwin, so he was elected to the Belita district without controversy.
Two years later, in 1949, the year of our founding, Arvin's fifth child, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, was born, mahinda and Gotabaya, at a time when their father, Arwen,'s career was on the rise. During this time, Arwin also met his Bole.
Solomon Bandaranaike, belonging to another political family in Sri Lanka, had a much earlier origin than the Rajapaksa family, which already had a political position when Arwin was still in the political uphill period. Solomon Bandaranaike spent his early years studying in England, joined the National Assembly on his return to Sri Lanka, and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1947, then to Minister of Health and Local Government and elected Leader of the House of Representatives. Due to too many differences with the government at that time, Solomon finally resigned from the government and moved closer to the opposition of the government at the time, in 1951, Solomon founded the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and when he resigned to the opposition, Arwin and others also followed him and became a founding member of the Sri Lanka Liberal Party.
The 1952 general election year was the first campaign of the Sri Lankan Liberal Party, with Arwin leading the Beliata constituency in support of Solomon, and in the same year, Solomon was elected leader of the opposition. In the 1956 general election, Solomon won the election by a landslide, becoming the fourth prime minister of Sri Lanka, in which Arwin was not only elected to parliament for The Beriatta, but also appointed deputy minister of agriculture and land development, where he devoted his life to the cause of agriculture, and in 1959 he was again promoted to minister of agriculture and land. It was also the year that Solomon was shot and killed, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party lost power in the opposition, and in the 1960 general election, Arwin was defeated, but interestingly, the government of the time dissolved in July of the same year and held a second parliamentary election, this time Arwin was re-elected to the Beliata Parliament. This time he was appointed Deputy Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament, but it was also the last glory of his political career, and in the 1965 general election, he was again defeated and never recovered.
After this failure, he not only lost the power in his hands, but also lost his wealth, he was too depressed to let his children continue to study in Colombo, then he sold his car, rented out his plantation, and even when he was seriously ill in 1967, he was unable to take him to the hospital in time, and by the time he was finally taken to the hospital, his condition had deteriorated extremely and he died a few days later.
In 1970, three years after his father's death, Mahinda entered parliament as a Liberal candidate, inheriting a position his father had vacated five years earlier, and at the age of 24 he became Sri Lanka's youngest ever member of Parliament. The following year, his younger brother Gotabaya also completed his studies and joined the Sri Lankan Army. The brothers took two different paths politically, Gotabaya was promoted to lieutenant in 1972 for his good performance, but Mahinda's path was not so smooth, after 7 years in the position of parliamentarian, he was defeated, and in the following years he focused on the profession of lawyer.
Mahinda (left) and Gotabaya (right) Image credit: Network
In 1983, he was transferred from a rifle regiment to the newly formed Gajaba Regiment, an elite infantry regiment of the Sri Lankan Army, and in the same year he also received a master's degree in defence studies from madras University in India, laying a solid foundation for his future appointment as minister of defence and ending the civil war. During this time, in addition to learning theoretical knowledge, he also gained practical experience. In July 1983, Sri Lanka's Tamil separatist armed groups killed 13 Sinhalese officers and soldiers, a conflict that rose to a massive armed conflict in which Gotabaya participated in the armed crackdown and commanded a regiment to fight in 1987. In the late 1980s, he was also the commander of the government's armed suppression of the Marxist Sinhalese uprising.
Here we want to talk about the armed conflict in 1983, the Sri Lankan civil war began in this year, why did this kind of national division occur? Historically, Sri Lanka has always been dominated by Sinhalese, and during the British colonial era, due to the development of the plantation economy requiring a large amount of labor, the British authorities moved hundreds of thousands of Tamils from southern India. In order to consolidate its rule, the British government adopted a divide-and-rule strategy, they intended to train Tamils to become government officials or other elites, so that Tamils enjoy more resources in education, life and other aspects, while supporting the Tamils themselves armed, Tamils took this opportunity to gain a large amount of territory, constantly squeezing the living space of sinhalese, the seeds of hatred between the two peoples.
In 1976, 18 Tamil political parties formed the United Liberation Front, demanding autonomy in the eastern and northern regions inhabited by Tamils, and the establishment of a "Tamil State", which was later split off by some radicals to form the Tamil Eelam Liberation Tigers (LTTE), whose base in the northern Jaffna Peninsula is its stronghold. In 1983, the LTTE wounded 13 government soldiers, and the civil war began, which lasted for more than 20 years.
1989 was a good year for both brothers, when Mahinda re-entered parliament as a member of parliament for the Hambantota region, and Gotabaya was appointed battalion commander of the first battalion of the Gajaba Regiment, and in the same year he was sent to the United States Army Infantry School in Fort Banning, Georgia, united States to attend the Senior Infantry Officer Course. After returning to Sri Lanka after his studies, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. In 1991, he became the president of a national defense university in Sri Lanka, but Gotabaya did not seem to want to follow this path, and in 1992 he obtained a master's degree in information technology from the University of Colombo and joined an IT company.
Mahinda is different, although his previous career was not smooth, but he is bent on making a difference in Sri Lanka and even on the international political stage. In the 1994 parliamentary elections, sri Lanka's Liberal Party won a big victory, and Rajapaksa became minister of labour and later minister of fisheries and water resources, slowly approaching the center of power.
When Mahinda's political career was smooth, Gorbatta chose another path, immigrating to the United States in 1998 and officially becoming a U.S. citizen in 2003. The following year, Mahinda had risen to the position of prime minister in the then-government.
If the political influence of the Rajapaksa family had previously been limited to the Hambantota region, then with the success of Mahinda's presidential campaign, the family's political influence also radiated to the whole country, and the power of the Rajapaksa family also reached its peak, which was something that Mahinda's father, Alwin, and grandfather David did not dare to imagine.
In 2005, Mahinda officially began to storm the presidency, at this time his younger brother Gotabaya also returned to Sri Lanka to help his brother run for the presidency, on November 17, 2005, Mahinda officially became the president of Sri Lanka, and Gotabaya did not return to the United States to continue to work as a procedural ape, but was appointed as the minister of defense, and he also regained the status of Sri Lankan citizen.
Mahinda's first fire in power began with the LTTE, who had been opposed to Tamil autonomy because he was a nationalist, and immediately after taking office he announced negotiations with the LTTE and reconsidered the very unstable ceasefire agreement reached in 2002, while he decided to use force to resolve the country's division.
In 2006, a man driving an electric tricycle launched a suicide bombing attack on a convoy in Gotabaya, killing the attacker and two soldiers and injuring 9 soldiers and 5 civilians. Mahinda's government blamed the Tamil Tigers for the terrorist attack. That same year, Mahinda announced his decision to root out the terrorist group, a military operation conducted by his brother Gotabaya, who in 2009 defeated the Tamil Tigers once and for all, ending more than two decades of Sri Lanka's civil war.
Victory in the civil war became an important political asset for the two men, with Gotabaya not only being regarded as a "national hero" by the Sinhalese, but Mahinda also gaining a strong reputation for unifying the country and winning re-election in the 2010 general election. But his rival, Fonseca, the commander of government forces in the civil war, accused Mahinda of cheating in the election, but due to the inability to provide evidence, Mahinda still took office, and then Fonseca was arrested for embezzlement, and the next day Mahinda announced early parliamentary elections. Mahinda's Liberal Party won the majority in the election, and on September 8 of the same year, Parliament passed a constitutional amendment that removed the limit on the number of presidents who could only serve two terms, which paved the way for his subsequent elections, granted the president judicial immunity, and gave the president more power to appoint.
During Mahinda's presidency, he vigorously developed the country's tourism industry and domestic infrastructure. The Construction of the Chinese-aided Hambantota Deepwater Port, which began during his tenure, cost a total of $1.5 billion and was loaned by China about $300 million. At the same time, Mahinda has continued to support family members after taking office, in addition to his younger brother Gotabaya, his brother Chamal and younger brother Bashir have held important positions in the government, serving as the Minister of Ports, Aviation and senior adviser to the President respectively, and after being re-elected in 2010, Chamal became the speaker of the national parliament, Gotabaya continued to serve as the minister of defense, and Basil served as the minister of economic development. Mahinda and his brother once ran five key government departments of the country and directly controlled more than 70% of the state budget. When Mahinda was president from 2010 to 2015, it was alleged that in addition to the cabinet, more than 40 members of the Rajapaksa family held government positions.
Rajapaksa Family Tree Image source: Network
In 2014, Mahinda's support declined due to rising domestic prices and popular concerns about his abuse of power, and he decided to hold an early presidential election in order to remain re-elected. In 2015, Mahinda lost the presidential race to former cabinet member Sirisena. In the same year, the new government reinstated the two-term limit of the presidency, and since then, Mahinda's path to the presidency has come to an end, but he has not left the scene, and in August of the same year, Mahinda was re-elected to the Parliament of Kurunegara District.
Immediately after Mahinda stepped down, the new government set up a Division of Investigations to investigate evidence of corruption in the Mahinda family, accusing them of colluding with Sri Lanka's former central bank governor to transfer large sums of money abroad, which according to sources amounted to $5.31 billion in 2007 alone. Mahinda's younger brother Basil, known as "Mr. Nine-Fold," means that he draws around 10 percent of all government projects, and he has been arrested three times for money laundering and misuse of government funds, but has been released on bail. Mahinda's eldest son, Namal, has been arrested on money laundering charges, and Gotabaya has been charged with illegally transferring state-owned weapons for up to $75 million while serving as defense minister.
Interestingly, Mahinda has re-emerged as prime minister in the new government. In October 2018, Sirisena dismissed his former partner VikleMasinha as prime minister and transferred to Mahinda, but this move was not approved by parliament, Sirisena then dissolved the parliament, the other faction could not sit still, by using the Supreme Court to intervene, suspending the dissolution of parliament, after which the parliament cast two negative votes against Mahinda, but Mahinda's allies doubted the legitimacy of his vote, and the two sides were deadlocked. The Supreme Court ruled that the president could not still dissolve Parliament, and Mahinda, in order to avoid further rigidity of the situation, decided to retreat and announce his resignation. To continue his career, Mahinda and his supporters switched from the ruling party to the opposition, and another party founded by his brother, the Sri Lanka People's Front Party, became the leader of the opposition.
In April 2019, sri Lanka had a series of explosions, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than 400 people, and for a while, sri Lankan citizens were full of fear, and people were all worried about their safety. Due to the ineffective handling of the debt crisis and the vicious explosion, the domestic public was already disappointed with the sirisena government at that time.
Here's your chance!
At the end of April 2019, Gotabaya announced his candidacy for the presidency, criticizing the then-government for its negligence in the bombing and promising that after his election, he would rebuild intelligence networks and strengthen surveillance to stop the spread of Islamic extremism. In early August, Gotabaya renounced his American citizenship in order to run for president of Sri Lanka. On August 11, Mahinda's opposition Sri Lanka People's Front announced its nomination to Getabaya for the 2019 Sri Lankan presidential race at a national conference, and Mahinda was also appointed party leader on the same day as a candidate for prime minister. On November 16, 2019, Gotabaya was successfully elected president and Mahinda was elected prime minister.
Two brothers elected Image source: Network
After taking office, Gotabaya used presidential immunity to dispense with all charges against himself and then disbanded the department investigating the Rajapaksa family. At the same time, Gotabaya also began to restore the glory of the family, Mahinda not only became prime minister, his brother Chamar also served as minister of irrigation, brother Basil became minister of finance, and Mahinda's eldest son Namal became minister of sports. The whole country, again, was held tightly in the hands of the Rajapaksa family.
They thought it would be safe, but the glory didn't last long. After coming to power, Gotabaya introduced two measures and buried himself with his own hands. After coming to power, in order to alleviate the pressure on the state, he began to implement tax cuts and promote organic agriculture. However, the tax cut policy has caused the government revenue to continue to decline, directly falling to a record low, accounting for only 9% of GDP, while promoting the organic agriculture policy, due to the prohibition of imports and use of fertilizers, pesticides, etc., which directly led to a decline in food production and rising food prices. During the Mahinda period, the vigorous development of domestic infrastructure led to the continuous rise of domestic foreign debt, but due to the impact of the epidemic, tourism was suspended, foreign exchange reserves were almost depleted, and it was unable to repay foreign debt, resulting in a sharp depreciation of the national currency rupee, which also seriously affected imports, and the domestic people's life was miserable.
Beginning in April 2022, large-scale strikes and protests broke out in the country, and in order to calm the anger of the people, all the officials of the Rajapaksa family except Gotabaya announced their resignation, but the people did not buy it, and finally on July 9, a large number of demonstrators rushed into the president's residence, and the president fled by special plane and announced his resignation at the same time, and a generation of family dynasties ended.
Demonstrators storm the presidential palace Image source: Internet
In stark contrast to the miserable lives of the people at home, when the demonstrators broke into the presidential palace, they were greeted by the president's luxurious interior decoration and private swimming pool, and the underground garage was filled with luxury cars that the president could not see at a glance...