Fri 07 August 2020:
Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa brothers have secured a two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections, giving them powers to change the constitution and unravel democratic safeguards.
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP) won 145 seats and can also count on the support of at least five allies in the 225-member legislature, according to the results released on Friday.
The SLPP’s main opponent obtained just 54 seats in Wednesday’s vote, which saw more than 75 percent of the 16.2 million eligible voters cast their ballots.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Mahinda Rajapaksa to congratulate him. In a tweet, Mahinda Rajapaksa said he looked forward to working closely with Modi and added that the two countries were “friends and relations”
The Rajapaksa family have dominated Sri Lankan politics for the past two decades. Mahinda was president from 2005 to 2015 but was ousted after a revolt within his own party and a public backlash against alleged nepotism and corruption.
Gotabaya – a former army officer dubbed “The Terminator” by his own family – won comfortably in November’s presidential election, running on a law-and-order ticket while capitalising on government infighting.
He swiftly appointed Mahinda as his prime minister.
Anti Muslim
Last year, self-radicalised Islamist extremists carried out multiple bombings, killing 269 people in churches and hotels, the lives of many Muslims have been thrown into turmoil. Some were attacked and shops and homes were destroyed by Sinhala Buddhist mobs, and some were arbitrarily arrested.
Women were banned from wearing headscarves in public, and in July newspaper front pages carried the unsubstantiated story of a Muslim doctor who had allegedly sterilised 8,000 Sinhala Buddhist women without their knowledge.
The hostility towards Muslims has been simmering for several years in Sri Lanka, stoked primarily by Buddhist nationalist groups such as Bodu Bala Sena (BBS). Firebrand monks have propagated the idea that Sinhala Buddhists are under threat from overpopulating Muslims who plan to control the economy, overthrow them and then wipe them out.
Many Muslims in Sri Lanka fear a similar fate to the minority Muslim Rohingya community in Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalist monks – who follow the same purist Theravada strain of the faith – were responsible for stirring up much of the racist violence that led to ethnic cleansing and tens of thousands of Muslims killed in 2017.
