When Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga sat down with Australian journalist Michael Maher in July 2005 for an interview on the ABC program Foreign Correspondent, her presidency was drawing to a close. Asked about the allure of supreme political office, Sri Lanka’s first female president brushed aside the notion that she was captivated by high status. It’s always mesmerizing to study how powerful people of the world perceive power. And Kumaratunga said: “I’m a workaholic, I like to work. And I’m in this, not to fill my pockets like lots of others, or because the idea of power thrills me – I find it a joke.”“Yes. I find power a joke – I laugh or I get very angry with it,” she doubled down.Michael Maher was surprised and called the president a rare politician who does not like power and called it a joke. “I don’t like it at all. The only thing that attracts me in power is that it gives me the authority and the possibility of doing what I think should be done for this country,” Kumaratunga said.To evaluate this statement, one must look at the extraordinary personal tragedy and political inheritance that shaped her worldview.
Daughter of two PMs who claimed to have disliked power
Born into Sri Lanka’s ultimate political dynasty, she was the daughter of two prime ministers: Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, who was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first female prime minister.Political power was not an abstract concept or a distant goal for her; it was the atmosphere of her childhood home. Yet it was also the primary source of immense personal loss. Her life was repeatedly upended by political violence. After her father’s assassination, she studied in Paris, absorbing political science and left-leaning intellectual traditions away from the intense glare of Colombo politics.Upon returning to Sri Lanka, she allied herself with Vijaya Kumaratunga, a charismatic actor-turned-radical politician who broke away from the traditional establishment to champion ethnic reconciliation. In 1988, Vijaya, also Chandrika’s husband, was brutally assassinated on their doorstep by political extremists.Eleven years later, while serving as president, Chandrika herself was targeted by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during an election rally, surviving the blast but losing vision in her right eye.When someone whose father and husband were both murdered by political violence says that power is a joke, the sentiment carries a distinct, cynical weight.
Chandrika Kumaratunga ‘s political journey
From her perspective, political authority was an absurd, dangerous theater that brought immense personal suffering rather than genuine fulfillment. It was an instrument to be endured rather than celebrated, useful only for the structural authority it granted to implement policy. Yet this insistence on being a reluctant steward of power stands in sharp tension with the political reality of her governance.In the same 2005 television feature, her sister, Sunethra Bandaranaike, offered a starkly different portrait, suggesting that despite her claims of disliking authority, Chandrika loved power, thrived on it, and treated it like an addictive drug. This internal family dynamic captured the dual identity that defined her presidency.Sweeping into office in 1994 on a massive public mandate, Chandrika promised to end the long-running civil war through negotiation and to roll back the authoritarian executive presidential system established by the United National Party. She framed her ascension as a mission to re-humanize Sri Lankan politics and resolve the ethnic conflict through devolution. However, when early peace talks with the Tamil Tigers collapsed in 1995, her administration pivoted to an aggressive policy known as “war for peace,” launching heavy military offensives in the north while attempting to push through constitutional reforms.Throughout her eleven years in power, she proved to be a shrewd and uncompromising politician. Far from treating the executive presidency as a lightweight burden, she utilized its vast constitutional powers to navigate bitter parliamentary feuds, manipulate party coalitions, and manage complex military campaigns.In 2003, when her political rival Ranil Wickremesinghe served as prime minister during a fragile ceasefire, she invoked her executive prerogatives to seize control of key ministries, demonstrating a fierce grasp on state authority when she felt her vision for the nation was threatened.Her statement to Michael Maher encapsulates the fundamental paradox of her legacy. On one level, viewing power as a joke reflected the philosophical detachment of someone who had seen the lethal consequences of political ambition firsthand. On another level, claiming that power only mattered as a tool to execute her personal vision for the country highlighted the executive paternalism that often defined her reign. It reflected a deep conviction that she alone understood what Sri Lanka required, transforming political authority from a personal desire into an absolute necessity.
