“When the Easter bombings took place, the Rajapaksas were still reeling from the October constitutional coup and had been left politically stranded…”
Someone remarked while browsing newspapers at a newsstand.
“So, are you saying the Rajapaksas were behind the bombings?” the shop owner asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know that. But what I do know is that the Rajapaksas used the Easter bombings to blow up Mr Ranil’s government…”
Having said that, the man walked into the shop and then left without even buying a newspaper.
There is a degree of truth in that observation. In 2018, after engineering a constitutional coup, then-President Maithripala Sirisena removed Ranil Wickremesinghe from the premiership and appointed Mahinda Rajapaksa in his place. However, Mahinda was unable to demonstrate a parliamentary majority of 113 seats and was left deeply embarrassed. Subsequently, when the Supreme Court ordered him to vacate the office of Prime Minister immediately, he found himself in an extremely difficult position.
Before that, Mahinda and the SLPP had gained considerable momentum from the 2018 local government elections. Yet Mahinda squandered much of that advantage by accepting the premiership from Maithripala. While the SLPP was still struggling to recover from that political blunder, the Easter bombings occurred—almost as if the Rajapaksas and the SLPP had won a political lottery.
Almost immediately after the attacks, Gotabaya Rajapaksa told foreign media that he would contest the presidential election. From that point onwards, Gotabaya, Mahinda, Basil Rajapaksa, the entire Rajapaksa family, the SLPP, and allied leaders such as Wimal Weerawansa, Udaya Gammanpila, and Dinesh Gunawardena began working in unison.
In 2004, Chandrika Kumaratunga’s strategy to bring down Ranil’s government was to accuse him of appeasing the LTTE. In 2019, the Rajapaksas’ strategy to destroy Ranil’s government was to accuse him of appeasing Muslim extremists.
In 2004, Chandrika’s camp used Velupillai Prabhakaran as the symbol of that accusation. In 2019, however, the Rajapaksas could not find a Muslim figure comparable to Prabhakaran. Instead, they substituted Rishad Bathiudeen, one of the most powerful ministers in Ranil’s government. They branded him a terrorist. They alleged that Ranil and the UNP government had nurtured Muslim leaders who supported extremists and had turned a blind eye until the bombings took place.
The day after the attacks, Mahinda visited Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and secured a public acknowledgement from the Cardinal that the bombings had occurred due to the government’s failures.
At that moment, Ranil appeared to be operating in a different political reality. UNP MPs who met him were told something entirely different.
“Watch how Mahinda and his people are trying to pin this on Maithripala,” Ranil reportedly told them.
Ranil believed that the Rajapaksas’ hostility was primarily directed at Maithripala and that, since Maithripala was the Minister of Defence, they would use the bombings to politically destroy him. Whether the Rajapaksas deliberately encouraged Ranil to take that line is unclear. What is certain is that UNP MPs argued that Maithripala had excluded Prime Minister Ranil from National Security Council meetings and therefore should bear responsibility for the security failure.
However, by then, the Rajapaksas had already reached an understanding with Maithripala regarding the upcoming presidential election. Their objective was to secure the approximately 1.4 million votes that Maithripala had received in the 2018 local government elections. Consequently, they calculated that the Easter attacks should be blamed on Ranil and the UNP, thereby destroying the party politically.
Using the Easter bombings as fuel, the Rajapaksas set the entire country ablaze politically. Ranil and the UNP came to be portrayed as traitors who were nurturing terrorists’ intent on destroying the country. The public was persuaded that the accusations repeatedly made by the Rajapaksas, Udaya, Wimal, and Dinesh—that Ranil had first appeased the LTTE and was now appeasing Muslim extremists—were true.
The Rajapaksas further alleged, citing international media reports, that Sri Lanka had become a breeding ground for suicide bombers destined for international Islamist terrorist operations and that radical Sri Lankan Muslims were receiving training in Syria.
The anti-Muslim and anti-UNP political tsunami created by the Rajapaksas was so overwhelming that Ranil’s government eventually asked all Muslim ministers to resign.
Chandrika and Mahinda had earlier weakened Ranil and the UNP by branding them as LTTE sympathisers. After the war ended, that label gradually lost its effectiveness, which contributed to the UNP’s victory in 2015. But just as Ranil and the UNP were beginning to recover from that stigma, the Rajapaksas attached a new label to them—that of ISIS sympathisers.
The controversy surrounding Dr. Shafi, who was accused of secretly sterilising Sinhalese Buddhist women, was used by the Rajapaksas, Wimal Weerawansa, and Udaya Gammanpila to spread fear and alarm throughout the country.
In fact, the Rajapaksas had been building this narrative of “Muslim terrorism” against Ranil and the UNP even before the Easter attacks. For that purpose, they allegedly used Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, who was accused of helping suppress allegations against the head of Avant Garde, a figure associated with Gotabaya Rajapaksa, while simultaneously creating tensions between President Maithripala and Prime Minister Ranil.
When the UNP pressured Maithripala to remove Wijeyadasa from his positions as Minister of Justice and Minister of Buddha Sasana for undermining the government from within, Maithripala reluctantly complied.
After losing his ministerial portfolio, Wijeyadasa became one of the first figures to accuse senior government leaders of protecting Muslim extremists. When the Easter bombings eventually occurred, he claimed that his earlier warnings had been vindicated and joined the campaign to elect Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president.
Today, however, the Easter bombing issue has come full circle for the Rajapaksas and the SLPP—the very forces that once used it to politically annihilate the UNP. And this reversal has occurred not because of anyone else, but because of Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the JVP.
The situation has now turned so dramatically that the UNP and the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) should be lighting lamps and offering flowers in gratitude to Anura Kumara.
