At The Last Gasp Sirima Chose UNP & Family Over Her Own Party
Uvindu Kurukulasuriya
Sunethra rang me. I was in the middle of something. She asked me ‘what is your prediction?’
A conversation ensued, but before we come to it, let me briefly state the historical context.
Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike was born on the 17th of April, 1916, exactly 100 years ago. As the world’s first female Prime Minister, a woman who served three terms as the Prime Minister of the country, the longest serving leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the wife of a Prime Minister and the mother of an Executive President with credentials as a strong and resourceful leader, her place in the history of post-Independence Sri Lanka is well-established. Her achievements and failures, the good and the bad, have been extensively written about and will probably be the subject of political commentary well into the future. This is not an article of that nature. It is essentially a report of her last political act which can be taken as symptomatic of the overall political culture of the country. That assessment we shall leave to the reader.
What I am about to relate took place over two days, the first being the day before the 2005 Presidential Election and the second being election day itself.
I was at the time working for the Ravaya newspaper. On the evening of the day before the election, the editor of Ravaya, Victor Ivan, and I were considering possible outcomes based on our assessment of the numbers that the two main candidates, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapaksa, were likely to poll in different provinces and districts. It was in the midst of these calculations that Sunethra Bandaranaike called me.
