By TON Sri Lanka

On Saturday mobs ended the Rajapaksa Raj in Sri Lanka. As huge crowds of angry youth stormed the official residences of the President and the Prime Minister and set fire to the private residence of the Prime Minister forcing the hands up of both the two leaders.

Both President and Prime Minister declared their intention to resign. While the President said he would quit on July 13, the Prime Minister said he would quit as soon as the proposed all-party government was formed.

Meanwhile, a meeting of all parliamentary parties called by the Speaker had demanded the resignation of the President and the Prime Minister and proposed that the Speaker take charge as interim President for thirty days within which parliament should elect a President to complete the outgoing President’s term.

The party leaders rejected PM's plea that he be allowed to complete critical talks with the IMF for a bailout package and get petroleum from various countries. The mob violence was unprecedented because it was the first time that anger was directed against the top rulers of the country and not a minority community, Tamils or Muslims.

The police and fire services watched as thousands broke iron barricades and occupied the President’s colonial-era mansion and the Prime Minister’s official residence. Later in the night, the mob gleefully set fire to the Prime Minister’s private residence destroying hundreds of books, antiques, and paintings collected by the PM and his wife, both aesthetes.

It looked as if the Sri Lankan State machinery had smashed under the heaviness of the agitators’ numbers as well as the public support they enjoyed. The island nation’s citizens suffered for months for want of basic necessities like food, fuel, and medicines. Both the President and Prime Minister were in residence at the time of the attacks, having been displaced to unidentified safe houses by the army.

Now it is obvious to President that the political situation has turned against him irrevocably. The first sign of the system's downfall seemed when the courts declined the police’s request to ban rallies near the President’s house.

The curfew that the police had clamped the previous night, was lifted at 8 am on Saturday on the demand of the Bar Council of Sri Lanka. Trains and buses, which were not supposed to run on Saturday, did run, carrying thousands of protestors to Colombo.

The police, who were fighting the marchers primarily eventually gave in and allowed the crowd to attack the President’s and the PM’s official residences and residences. The army had decided not to act, seemingly because Western nations had warned against the use of force against “serene” protestors.

Above all, several members of the ruling coalition led by the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) demanded the resignation of the President. It looked as if the President had no legs to stand on. His support structure, comprising the ruling party and its coalition partners, the law and order machinery, and the courts, had collapsed. Extra-constitutional forces like the “Gota Go Home” agitators.

The common demand was for an all-party government under Prime Minister whose political legality was probed because he was not an elected MP but a selected one. And he represented the United National Party (UNP) which did not have even a sole elected MP. That PM had the support of the President and the SLPP, the single largest party in parliament.

According to the news, President has fled just moments earlier, helped by troops who fired into the air to clear his escape. Once he had left, the mood inside the compound was celebratory.

Sri Lanka’s future is now extremely uncertain for many reasons as the formation of an all-party government is difficult because the parties in parliament are an extremely disparate lot, each in hard rivalry with the other. Further, there is no energetic leader to gather the many groups under one umbrella. Given the uncertainty reasons the IMF package is also in jeopardy, foreign aid may stop, and foreign investment will not come which has increased Sri Lanka's solidarity in danger. Leaders like Sajith Premadasha should step forward to control the situation.