Speaker Mahinda Abeywardana may be Acting President of Sri Lanka

The inflation hit public of Sri Lanka is not in favour of Ranil Wickremesinghe to be appointed as the Acting president after disgraced Gotabaya resigns on July 13. Political parties like SJB and SLFP want both Rajapaksas and Wickremesinghe out of the scene before the decision of Acting President.

Published on: Jul 11, 2022, 12:29:30 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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With no public sympathy for the eternal survivor and former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to succeed the disgraced Rajapaksas, Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardana is likely to be appointed Acting President of Sri Lanka after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa demits office on July 13. This will lead to an interim government with all-party consensus and representatives and thereon calling for general elections to elect a new Parliament after the situation stabilizes in the Island nation.

Irate public instaged by the Leftist narrative on social media stormed Sri Lankan President's official quarters, forcing the incumbent Gotabaya Rajpaksa to seek shelter at the Army Headquarters.

The political meltdown in the Island nation is clearly a result of economic profligacies and poor governance of the Rajapaksa enterprise, which went for white elephant projects funded by high interest loans from China’s EXIM bank. The loans from Beijing are not only contributors to Sri Lanka’s high external debt of over USD 50 billion and loan default, but even the storming of the President Palace on July 9 appears to be orchestrated by Leftist social media in the garb of peoples’ revolution.

Given the present weak political leadership in Sri Lanka with no leader willing to grab the runaway bull by horns, communist parties like Janatha Vimukhi Peramuna (JVP) are active to reclaim the political space and disgraced Rajapaksas are out to promote Ranil Wickremesinghe’s as the man to succeed Gotabaya as part of a tacit understanding, say Colombo watchers. This is even though both Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) have made it clear to the Speaker that both Gotabaya and Wickremesinghe must step down and should not have any immediate role in stemming the political rot in Sri Lanka.

Contrary to reports, both Gotabaya and his brother Mahinda are in Colombo and still want to exercise power through the appointment of Wickremesinghe, whose party has single seat in Parliament, as the Acting President.

While India has offered full support to the Sri Lankan people by sending more than USD 3.5 billion worth of aid and essential supplies, China is only offering loans and support for a Sri Lanka relief package at the IMF. It is not only the weak and ineffective leadership of the Pearl nation that has allowed matters to deteriorate, but the national security agencies also do not have the technical expertise to control the orchestrated Leftist-inspired storm over social media to fan the flames in an already beleaguered country.

With food and fuel running scarce and the global powers dealing with Ukraine and Indo-Pacific, India is left to help stabilize the nation while Beijing is looking for an opportunity in crisis. The Sri Lankan crisis is an example of the inbuilt debt trap in China’s belt road initiative. Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh could be next on the list.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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