Twice there were popular rebellions to overthrow rulers in Sri Lanka. In the country they call “the tear of india” because that is what its geography looks like on the map, the first rebellion occurred in 1971, when tens of thousands of young people came out armed to overthrow the prime minister, called by the press “the weeping widow”. The second great rebellion has just happened: crowds flooded the streets of the capital, Colombo, to topple the military man who held the presidency.
In a paradox of history, “the weeping widow” barricaded himself in the presidential palace and faced the uprising promoted by the Popular Liberation Front with a scorched earth war that left between five thousand and ten thousand dead, while, half a century later, the lieutenant colonel who held power fled in terror when a mob invaded the palace presidential.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa not only did he flee from the official building assaulted by the mob; he also fled the country and mailed his resignation from Singapore. The housewife who had to take over the leadership after the assassination of her husband, the founder and leader of the Freedom Party, put together the dilapidated police-military apparatus in record time to crush the violent Marxist rebellion with blood and fire, while the military man who had been Minister of Defense did not even manage to resist the peaceful protest that occupied the presidential palace without looting or breaking anything.
It is not the only curiosity in this parallel between that uprising and the town that has just occurred. In March 1971 there were no objective reasons for a social explosion or for a leftist uprising. The island then called Ceylon was governed by a leftist front that included Stalinists and Trotskyistsand had a socialist economy that provided full employment and free generous rations of rice to all inhabitants.
It was due to a question of time and the conspiratorial nature of some Marxist groups that the violent uprising that Sirimavo Bandaranaikethe “weeping widow”, responded with a genocidal repression.
Instead Rajapaksa was brought down by a social outburst caused by objective conditions: unmanageable indebtedness with China, growing hunger because the ban on the use of agrochemicals spoiled crops in a country that exports food, creating a situation aggravated by the drop in grain imports from Ukraine and blocked by Russia.
Tourism, the other great turbine of the economy, began to fall with the attacks of an ISIS metastasis against the Christian minority, and collapsed with the pandemic. The conjunction of evils paralyzing the economy and dragging the population to hunger, caused the outburst that led the crowd to invade government headquarters. Thus ended the power of the family clan that won the war against Tamil separatism.
Before gaining independence from the British in 1948 along with India and Pakistan, Ceylon was known for the exquisite tea that it exported to much of the world. The best land for growing tea is in the north of the island: the Jafna Peninsula. But the English settlers argued that the best farmers and harvesters were not the Sinhalese, the majority ethnic group that professes the Buddhist religion, but the peasants of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. That is why they promoted Tamil migration to North Ceylonwhere after independence the Tamil minority began to promote secession.
The Liberation Tigers Eelam Tamil was the most powerful of several separatist militias from that minority of Hindu religion. They had been fighting for decades, until in 2005 Mahinda Rajapaksa, son of a prominent legislator and older brother of Lieutenant Colonel, came to power. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whom he appointed defense minister. Those brothers declared total war on the Tamil Tigers and crushed them, executing Velupillai Prabhakaran, their leader.
That military success was one of the reasons the Sinhalese majority voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019, making him president. But this time, the military lost the economic war that he had to deliver, generating the dire situation that led to a social explosion.
Thus concluded the second political dynasty of Sri Lanka. The first was unwittingly initiated by Solomon Bandaranaike, the leader who created a centrist party in a country infected with (Buddhist) religious nationalism and an exotic range of Marxisms.
As prime minister, a Buddhist monk assassinated him in 1959, leaving the leadership orphan of the Freedom Party. The leaders of that political force with a social democratic tendency resorted to the wife of the assassinated leader, although he lacked charisma and experience. To the electoral campaign of the following election she did it crying the death of her husband in the proselytizing acts. That is why the press called her “the weeping widow”. The incredible thing is that her tears made her win, making her the first woman in the world to become head of government. Shortly after, Golda Meir would arrive in Israel and Indira Gandhi in India.
It was Sirimavo Bandaranaike who renamed the country, which was renamed Sri Lanka. She was also the longest-serving prime minister from where she promoted her daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, as a political figure, who became president in 1994 and held it for eleven years.
In addition to having the geographical silhouette for which they call it “indian tear”, in the history of Sri Lanka there are rivers of tears. Those who wept over Solomon’s murder; those spilled by his widow in the electoral acts and those spilled by the relatives of the thousands of young people brutally murdered for rising up against his government.
The first woman to come to power in a democracy faced an absurd rebellion. In a country where everyone ate three times a day and no one was homeless, his coalition with Stalinists and Trotskyists had to face a violent rebellion that had to do with the times and with ideological overdoses, but not with objective conditions. and she crushed committing genocide.
Half a century later, the next large-scale rebellion took place. A social explosion caused by errors and objective conditions put the president on the run, burying another dynasty in “the tear of India”.
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