by Luxman Aravind
The Rajapaksas are fighting for more than a political comeback. They are fighting for survival as a political idea. The JVP, operating through the NPP, has occupied much of the political space created by the collapse of the Rajapaksa order, while the government has shown little inclination to preserve the networks and influence that sustained the family’s dominance. The confrontation is therefore larger than a struggle between two political camps. It is a struggle over whether the Rajapaksa model of power can survive its own collapse—and whether the family can reinvent that model before it disappears with the generation that created it.
The Rajapaksas did not simply lose power. They lost the story through which they had justified power. For more than a decade, the family became larger than an ordinary political dynasty. Mahinda Rajapaksa was not merely a president. He became a historical character: the village man who defeated the country’s most formidable insurgency, understood the anxieties of the Sinhala majority, embodied protection and distributed the rewards of development. His brothers acquired complementary roles within the same political imagination, while his sons represented continuity. The family itself became a political institution. That was both its great achievement and its fatal weakness. The family had converted governmental success into personal glory. When the economy collapsed, governmental failure therefore became family failure.
Corruption, authoritarianism, nationalism and nepotism explain parts of the Rajapaksa phenomenon, but none fully explains its emotional power. People do not experience politics as a spreadsheet of policies. Mahinda located himself inside those emotions. He did not merely promise security; he embodied the person who would provide it. He did not merely speak about the village; he performed rural authenticity. He did not merely invoke Buddhism; he entered a civilisational narrative in which the ruler protects a threatened national community. Political loyalty consequently acquired something of the quality of personal loyalty. For some supporters, criticism of the leader could feel like criticism of the nation itself. The ballot box became, in part, a referendum on identity.
Rajapaksa politics, nevertheless, cannot be reduced to Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. That was its ideological centre, but around it were development, patronage, security, personal access and the promise of getting things done. Different constituencies inhabited different versions of the same project. Sinhala-Buddhist voters could see national protection. Rural voters could see roads, jobs and development. Business interests could see access and stability. Some Tamil and Muslim politicians, as well as sections of minority society, also entered the Rajapaksa orbit at different moments, often for pragmatic reasons. The Rajapaksa machine was not simply a single ethnic bloc. It was a political network built around a powerful ideological centre, capable of offering different groups different reasons to remain attached to the same family.
The collapse began when these bargains stopped fitting together. Family interest, political interest and state interest became too closely fused. Concentrated power could produce speed, but it also weakened correction. Loyalists had incentives to confirm rather than challenge. Officials learned where power really resided. Relatives became trusted because they were relatives. Political allies became dependent. Institutions increasingly operated through relationships. Political confidence gradually became political blindness, while dissent became harder to hear inside the system. Insulated power eventually begins to misread reality.
The 2022 catastrophe shattered that arrangement. Queues, shortages, power cuts and economic desperation stripped away the protective mythology surrounding the family. The most devastating defeat was not the resignation of a president. It was the destruction of the emotional equation between the family and national protection. Once that equation disappeared, the Rajapaksa name itself became politically expensive. The family had personalised success so thoroughly that it had also personalised failure.
A Rajapaksa return, therefore, cannot mean simply restarting the old machine. The historical conditions that produced Mahinda’s dominance have changed. The war is over. A younger generation did not experience it in the same way. The economic crisis permanently altered the meaning of competence. The family name carries both nostalgia and resentment. The old symbols of triumph and dynastic confidence have lost their innocence. Once family and state are identified with one another, every governmental failure becomes an indictment of the family.
Re-emergence would consequently require ideological reconstruction, not public relations. The old proposition joined strong national leadership, cultural protection, security and development to concentrated authority. A new proposition would have to explain why those objectives can survive without family control of the state. Nationalism would have to be separated from dynasty. Sinhala-Buddhist identity could remain politically important without becoming a licence for minority insecurity. Tamils and Muslims would have to be presented not as tolerated participants in someone else’s national story, but as equal owners of the country. Development would need economic credibility rather than spectacle. Political access would need to be replaced by institutional competence. Scrutiny would have to be treated as legitimate rather than as an attack on the family.
The hardest reconstruction would be psychological. Political families inherit stories about themselves until those stories become obligations. The father becomes founder, the brothers custodians, the sons heirs and the party a family archive. Each generation is then tempted to prove that the family’s greatness continues. Namal’s problem is therefore larger than carrying his father’s name. That name gives him recognition, networks and inherited political capital while simultaneously imprisoning him inside his father’s historical achievement. He cannot reproduce Mahinda’s greatest moment because it belongs to another era. If he imitates his father, he risks becoming an imitation. If he rejects his father completely, he risks destroying the inheritance on which his political identity rests.
A viable reconstruction would have to turn inheritance into reinterpretation. Mahinda could remain the founder of a political tradition without remaining its blueprint. A younger generation would need an identity built around economic modernisation, institutional competence, technology, employment, international engagement and generational change. The family would paradoxically have to become less visible. It would need fewer symbols of personal glorification, more independent recruits, genuine internal disagreement and a clear separation between family loyalty and political loyalty. The dynasty would have to become an organisation.
This is where the rise of the JVP matters. It has occupied much of the political space created by the collapse of the old order and challenged the idea that Sri Lanka should be governed through political families. A Rajapaksa movement that simply recreated personalised power would therefore be confronting the political lesson of its own defeat. A movement that accepted institutional restraint, economic accountability and broader national belonging would be attempting something different. It could preserve some of the emotional forces that sustained Rajapaksa politics while abandoning the machinery that consumed it.
The real question is not whether the Rajapaksas will return to office. It is whether Rajapaksa politics can survive without Rajapaksa rule. Political ideas can outlive political families. The economic collapse destroyed the family’s claim to infallibility, but it did not destroy the anxieties from which its politics emerged. National insecurity, cultural anxiety, rural resentment, the desire for order and suspicion of Colombo elites remain available for political mobilisation. Whoever learns to organise those forces may inherit part of the space once occupied by the Rajapaksas. A restored dynasty would repeat the past. A reconstructed Rajapaksa ideology would have to break with it.
