Rajapaksa’s win

Sri Lankans have elected Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former secretary of defence and brother of two-time former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, as their new president in an election that has seen rising religious tensions take centre stage.

Gotabaya's election marked a return to majoritarian politics in the predominantly Buddhist South Asian island nation and left Sri Lanka's myriad minorities, especially the Muslims who constitute roughly 10 percent of the population, in a precarious position.

He secured victory with an impressive 52.25 percent of the vote but achieved this result with hardly any support from Sri Lanka's minorities. This marked a significant shift in Sri Lankan politics since Muslims have long been perceived as "kingmakers" in the country and played a key role in determining the winners of presidential and parliamentary elections.

But not having any representation in the cabinet is only the tip of an iceberg of problems awaiting Sri Lanka's Muslims following Gotabaya's election.

The newly-elected president, who served as defence secretary under his authoritarian older brother between 2005-2015 and helped him bring an end to Sri Lanka's 26-year war with Tamil rebels, based his campaign for Saturday's election on providing strong leadership on national security issues in general and the perceived threat of "Muslim extremism" in particular. This raised concerns among Sri Lanka's human rights activists, who fear Gotabaya could repeat the human rights violations allegedly committed against minorities during his brother's tenure.

Gotabaya's election victory came on the back of a series of coordinated bombings on Easter Sunday that killed at least 257 people and wounded hundreds of others. The attacks, which were claimed by a little known local Muslim armed group, caused the country's Sinhalese Buddhist majority to openly turn on the Muslim community. In the months that followed, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) documented in a recent report, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists waged a campaign of "violence and hate" against Sri Lanka's Muslims, while "a weak and divided political leadership has either stood idly by or, worse, egged on the abuse".

As part of the Buddhist hardliners' campaign against Muslims, it is estimated that more than 30 mosques and Quranic schools, as well as 50 Muslim-owned shops and more than 100 houses, were attacked.

All this boosted the political fortunes of Gotabaya who seized the opportunity to position himself as the nation's protector against the "Muslim threat" and to run for president on a security ticket.

Excerpted from: 'Sri Lanka's Muslims have reason to fear the new Rajapaksa era'.

AlJazeera.com