Pro-China dynast is at Lanka’s helm

Sri Lanka’s controversial wartime Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who ruthlessly ended Sri Lanka’s nearly 30-year civil war with the LTTE, has won the hotly contested presidential election, defeating the ruling party candidate Sajith Premadasa by more than 13 lakh votes.

This marks the return of the powerful Rajapaksa dynasty known for its pro-China tilt.

During his brother Mahinda's regime, China started investing heavily in infrastructure projects in the island nation as Lanka faced international isolation at the tail end of the civil war. Critics say it was due to Mahinda that the country has fallen into the "Chinese debt trap".

Rajapaksa is both a controversial and a respected figure in the island nation where he is considered a "war hero" by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, but mostly distrusted by the minority Tamils.

The 70-year-old politician, who as a former military person attended the counterinsurgency and jungle warfare school in Assam in 1980, served as the defence secretary during his elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa's tenure as president from 2005 to 2014.

In 1983, he also gained a masters in Defence Studies from the University of Madras.

Rajapaksa visited India in 2012 and 2013 in his capacity as the defence secretary.

While families of ethnic Tamils killed or disappeared during the civil war accuse Rajapaksa of war crimes, Muslims fear his popularity among Sinhalese Buddhists will further deepen the divide between the two communities post the Easter Sunday terror attack carried out by Islamist extremists that claimed 269 lives.

The Hindus and Muslims together constitute approximately 20 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population.

Rajapaksa is also accused of overseeing torturing and indiscriminate killings of both civilians and combatants, and later of political assassinations.

Rajapaksa, who was a top target of the Tamil Tigers, survived an assassination attempt in December 2006 by an LTTE suicide bomber.