Photo: Flickr / Mahinda Rajapaksa

Six months ago, Sri Lanka stunned the world, and itself, by unseating the country’s neo-monarchical president without firing a single shot, by voting out Mahinda Rajapaksa in the democratic presidential elections. Barely seven months later, however, as the country heads to the parliamentary polls set for 17 August, the contest appears to be revisiting the same playing field with the same players, which many had hoped had been put behind them.

On 8 January 2015, Sri Lankans turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote in a premature presidential election called by Mahinda Rajapaksa, who, together with his brothers had ruled the country with an iron fist for over nine years. As the initial results began to trickle in, indicating a clear victory for the joint opposition and its candidate Maithripala Sirisena, wild rumours about an impending Rajapaksa coup began to circulate. The possibility that the Rajapaksas would depart peacefully seemed unthinkable, to foes and friends alike.

But the unthinkable happened. Long before all the results were in, Mahinda Rajapaksa conceded defeat and left for his private residence in the southernmost district of Hambantota. Within hours, victorious candidate Maithripala Sirisena was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s new president on 9 January, supported by a coalition that included the United National Party (UNP), even as support within his own party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), remained divided with a large section still in support of Rajapaksa. 

The transfer of power was complete when, a few days later, Rajapaksa resigned as the president of the former ruling coalition United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) and its main constituent party, the SLFP. Sirisena, who before his sudden defection to the opposition in November 2014 had been the general secretary of the SLFP and a minister in Rajapaksa’s cabinet, was unanimously chosen as leader of both organisations.

In a world filled with democratic experiments gone awry, Sri Lanka’s was a notable exception. The new president and his minority government unshackled the media, restored a degree of independence to a deeply compromised judiciary, pushed through a constitutional amendment which reduced presidential powers, empowered the Parliament, and partially depoliticised the administration via independent commissions. Some political prisoners were released. The practice of singing the national anthem in Tamil was restored. Anti-Muslim hysteria was addressed as the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), a Sinhala Buddhist group that carried out violent attacks on Muslims and Christians, no longer had state patronage. A populist budget resulted in a rise in wages for government employees. Foreign policy was recalibrated and relations with India and the West strengthened. Sirisena’s unassuming demeanour and consensual methods were a stark and welcome contrast to Rajapaksa’s autocratic mien and monarchic style. Though far from perfect or trouble-free, the shift from autocracy to democracy, from impunity to the rule of law, seemed irreversible.

That the Rajapaksas and their political cohorts were planning a comeback was no secret. There were fears that some calamitous event, perhaps a successful attempt on Sirisena’s life, might enable the Rajapaksas to regain power. But no one thought that Sirisena would buckle under pressure and let his party seniors support Rajapaksa’s resurgence. Until it became a reality. On 9 July, Mahinda Rajapaksa signed his nomination papers for a UFPA candidature for the 17 August parliamentary elections after being nominated by the SLFP, of which Sirisena continues to be the leader, albeit nominally. The process that led to the rehabilitation of Rajapaksa – potentially positioning him as a prime-ministerial candidate after losing power a short seven months ago – has its origins in the events that led to his ouster from the ruling seat.

The January agreement
The unexpectedly smooth transfer of power on 9 January was the result of a deal between the winning and losing sides. UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe played a central role in this. He is said to have kept lines of communications open with the Rajapaksa camp even during the bitter election campaign, and it was to him that Rajapaksa turned to after his purported attempt to extra-constitutionally continue in power was opposed by the armed forces and the police. Wickremesinghe visited Rajapaksa in the early hours of 9 January and reportedly brokered the agreement which ensured a smooth transfer of power.

The contents of that agreement were never publicised, but it was widely rumoured that Rajapaksa wanted protection for himself and his brother Gotabhaya, no prosecution of his family on corruption and other charges, and nominations for himself and his eldest son Namal at the next parliamentary election. This peaceful exit, it seemed, was a tactical move rather than a prelude to political retirement.

During his nine-year rule, Rajapaksa laid the groundwork for one of Southasia’s most recent political dynasties. In an interview after the elections, Namal Rajapaksa defended his father’s practice of familial politics: “The war was ended because of this bond within the family. Leaders needs someone they can trust.” When the interviewer asked if this was a feudal argument in a modern democracy, the younger Rajapaksa replied, perhaps a bit irrelevantly, “We always trusted each other.” The dynastic project was dead but its dreams lingered and fuelled the comeback project.

There was another critical factor which made Rajapaksa plot his political comeback. In his eyes, he was defeated not by ‘true’ Sri Lankans (read Sinhala-Buddhists) but by an alien combo of Tamil, Muslim and Christian voters, India, and the West. As the ‘Bring back Mahinda’ campaign – launched in February 2015 by key Rajapaksa allies in the SLFP/UPFA coalition – gathered steam, anti-minority fear-mongering about threats to national security by resurgent minorities and ‘evil’ foreigners became the main rallying point. The faithful attending these political spectacles railed against the ‘2015 Conspiracy’ and ‘national enemies’. “We want a king, not a puppet,” became a popular slogan. Speaker after speaker claimed that a sinister collation of minorities, and regional and global imperialists, had captured power through the ballot box, undermining the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. No opportunity was missed to make religious and racial insinuations. After a school girl was gang raped and brutally murdered in Jaffna, and violent protests had broken out against police failure to apprehend the suspects assumed to be Tamils, Rajapaksa and his allies tried to depict it as a sign of post-election resurgence of Tamil Tigers.

The minority baiting failed to invoke a response in the Sinhala-Buddhist South. But this did not matter because Rajapaksa’s real strength lay in his continued dominance over the SLFP and the UPFA. For almost a decade, he and his brothers had worked with systematic thoroughness to turn the SLFP into a Rajapaksa party. Consequently, Rajapaksa still commands the support of a large number of party functionaries, including around 80 members of Parliament and the general secretaries of the UPFA and the SLFP.

Although Sirisena and the opposition coalition won a clear democratic mandate in the presidential elections, they were forced to work with a Parliament which had been elected in 2010 and was dominated by Rajapaksa loyalists. Sirisena did manage to win the allegiance of some SLFP parliamentarians by offering them ministerial posts. But the SLFP-led opposition continued to be numerically larger than the UNP-led government, making it difficult to pass even the most urgent bills.