About Mahinda Rajapaksha

Today he is the President of a country and a people to whom he gave dignity and self-respect. And yet, he is still a villager from Medamulana; feet firm in his native soil, head held high and proud to inhale the winds that caress the concerns of the most humble and gentle people, conscious of his past, looking to the future and doing what has to be done right now. For his motherland. For his people. Sixty-four years is a long time. Mahinda Rajapaksa achieved so much in this time and remains as energetic, focused, determined and confident as has been throughout his life.

On the 18th day of November, 1945, a child was born in a small hamlet called Medamulana in Hambantota. Mahinda Rajapaksa was the second son in a family of six boys and three girls. He grew up like any rural lad, breathing the air of ancient ways that had sustained a civilization for well over two millennia. He walked an earth nourished by ancestral ash and the sweat of proud labour. He learnt simple ways of being and sharing, the higher worth of community and the power of solidarity.

He began schooling at Richmond in 1951, the alma mater of his father, Don Alwin Rajapaksa and his politically inclined brothers, and later moved to Nalanda and then to Thurstan College in Colombo.

Mahinda has politics in his blood. His father was a Member of Parliament, his uncle D.M. Rajapaksa, a Sate Counsel and his other uncle, George an MP and a Deputy Minister. In 1967 at the relatively tender age of 22, he was appointed as the SLFP candidate for Beliatta after his father’s death. In 1970 he was elected to Parliament with a record majority of 6626 votes. Ever the activist and man of initiative, he formed the SLFP Lawyers’ Association in 1973 after he entered Law College. It was with similar commitment and enthusiasm that he formed the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine in 1975 of which he remained Chairman for 30 years.

In 1976 he took oaths as an Attorney-at-Law and did his apprenticeship under President’s Counsel Daya Perera. In 1977 began the long period of political marginalization of the SLFP after the UNP scored an unprecedented electoral victory, securing a five-sixths majority in Parliament leading to a new constitution and the creation of an Executive Presidency. Those were dark days for the opposition. It was the hour for the stoic, the strong-willed, the determined. That period saw the political blooding of Mahinda Rajapaksa, which include a three month incarceration in the Magazine Prison in 1985.

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