The Rajapaksa Syndrome(s)
By Krishan Siriwardhana –July 21, 2015
Krishan Siriwardhana
The downfall of Mahinda Rajapaksa regime is one of the most significant recent political events took place in the south Asian region. Even though Mahinda Rajapaksa was democratically defeated by citizens of this country on 8th of January, we can still see how Rajapaksa ideology is being functioned in the contemporary Sri Lankan society. Unlike other Sri Lankan political leaders, Rajapaksa was quite successful in creating die hard Rajapaksa follower base in every strata of the society. In this article, I identify few key social and political syndromes emerged as a result of the deeply rooted nature of the hegemonic rule of Rajapaksa and how our political context is still being dominated by some of these issues.
Former President Rajapaksa was effective in using his rhetoric to emphasize the fact that the country is under severe threat caused by national and international agents even in the post war era. During his first parliamentary speech after defeating LTTE, he claimed that there are only two groups in this country here after as the people who love their nation and who do not love their nation. One would think this is an ordinary rhetorical act any leader would make in a war memorial speech. But that classification helped Rajapaksa to easily drag opposition parties like UNP. JVP and TNA in to the category of the people who do not love their motherland. The main ambition of his political propaganda was to maintain LTTE as the enemy in a context where they do not physically exist and create a fallacy that all his political opponents were trying to bring back LTTE to destroy ‘motherland’. He was tactical in driving bitter colonial memories in the minds of the people in to a more anti-western perspective by highlighting UN human rights council’s action on war crimes. On the other there were large hoardings of Rajapaksa and his wife with President Obama in the city of Colombo. But these hoardings were limited to Colombo area as he wanted to maintain his anti-western politics in the Sinhala Buddhist village context. This would not have been possible if media acted critically questioning paradoxical nature of his political actions and the way of treating political other. But it was clear that media was under severe threat and there was no space for democratic debate.