Dinesh
Gunawardena, 73, took oath as Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Friday. The former
foreign affairs and education minister in the Gotabaya-Mahinda government,
Gunawardena is said to be a close confidante of Mahinda Rajapaksa and was a
classmate of current Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Reputed for not
mincing words, Dinesh Gunawardena is the son of Philip Gunawardena, one of the
foremost socialist thinkers of Sri Lanka. Philip and his wife Kusuma, Dinesh
Gunawardena’s parents, were underground activists for India’s freedom from
British rule and were apprehended by British Intelligence in 1943.

They were first
jailed in Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail and were deported to Sri Lanka a year
later. After Sri Lanka gained freedom from British rule in 1948, a year after
India, Philip and Kusuma became members of the Sri Lankan Parliament.

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Philip Gunawardena
later went on to become a cabinet minister and the leader of the People’s
Revolution government in 1956. All four of his children have occupied high
political posts and now one of them is the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.

Despite his
proximity to the Rajapaksas, Dinesh Gunawardena has largely maintained a clean
image. He did his schooling from Royal Primary School, Colombo and subsequently
went to Royal College, Colombo. After school, Gunawardena pursued a diploma in business
management from the Netherlands School of Business. A BBA degree from the
University of Oregon followed.

In spite of being
from a political family, Gunawardena was initiated into politics while in the
United States when he joined protests against the Vietnam War. Gunawardena
found a job and settled in New York, but in 1972, when his father died, he
returned to Sri Lanka. He became a member of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP)
party’s central committee in 1973 and the general secretary of the party of
1974.

He contested his
first parliamentary elections in 1977 from Avissawella but lost. Gunawardena’s
first successful electoral bid was in the 1983 by-election. Now, amid a
burgeoning economic crisis, Dinesh Gunawardena has taken charge of Sri Lanka as
Prime Minister.