The man who annihilated the LTTE: MAHINDA RAJAPAKSA SRI LANKA'S MOST SUCCESSFUL PRESIDENT

Last week, Veteran journalist D.B.S. Jeyaraj, writing the first of a two-part article on Mahinda Rajapaksa turning 80, aptly surmised the protagonist as 'demonised by the opponents and deified by supporters'.

- By Ranga Jayasuriya

While I am not particularly interested in the birthdays of politicians, this made me ponder Mahinda Rajapaksa's legacy in Sri Lankan politics. That was also in relation to a recent debate on social media about the most successful Sri Lankan president, for which the analyst in question had, funny enough, picked Chandrika Kumaratunga.

CBK was indeed a grandiloquent and callous failure: Twenty thousand soldiers, more than two-thirds of the total military death toll of the 30 years of war, perished during the first five years of her term. The army lost all major military garrisons, including Mullaitivu and Elephant Pass, and Jaffna was saved by a miracle.

I am not a fan of Mahinda Rajapaksa. political However, preferences or differences should not obscure objective assessment. What should be the commonsense measure to gauge the performance of a Sri Lankan leader? For the second part of independence (post-1980), it was the economy, and, probably more importantly, fighting the war. In retrospect, we know that there was no solution to what was primarily a terrorist problem other than a military solution.

For the first part of independence, it was also the economic growth and addressing the emerging ethnic problem through accommodation, as well as through the forceful implementation of ethnic management, similar to that in Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew or Malaysia under Mahathir Mohammed era.