Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the man who ruthlessly ended Sri Lanka’s nearly 30-year civil war with the LTTE, 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 man attended the counter-insurgency 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 attacks carried out by Islamist extremists that claimed 269 lives.
The Hindus and Muslims together constitute approximately 20 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population.
