Ranil Wickremesinghe arrested: The rise and fall of the politician known as ‘the Fox’

Former Sri Lankan president Ranil Wickremesinghe has been arrested.

Wickremesinghe, who was also previously Prime Minister of Sri Lanka six times, has been taken into custody today (August 22) by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

Wickremesinghe had taken over as Sri Lanka’s acting president after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country in 2022 with his wife and security officials in the aftermath of mass protests.

Wickremesinghe, who was later elected as the president of Sri Lanka, stepped down in September 2024. He was succeeded by Anura Kumara Dissanayake.

Wickremesinghe has been a long-time player in politics with a career spanning decades. He is the chief of the of the United National Party (UNP), which is the country’s oldest political party

Let us take a look at the rise and fall of 75-year-old Wickremesinghe, also known as ‘the Fox’.

Early years

Wickremesinghe was born on March 24, 1949, in Colombo into an affluent and powerful political family.

His father Esmond Wickremesinghe, was a prominent lawyer. His mother, Nalini Wickremesinghe, hailed from the powerful Wijewardena family – which owned the Lake House publishing group. In fact, his maternal grandfather DR Wijewardena owned newspapers that had backed the independent movement. His paternal grandfather, CG Wickremesinghe, meanwhile, was the most senior Sri Lankan colonial government servant.

Wickremesinghe underwent his schooling at the prestigious University of Colombo. At this time he was also involved in student politics and became president of the Law Students’ Union. He would later attend the University of Ceylon and graduate from the Ceylon Law College in 1972. He began practicing law and was appointed as a faculty of Law of the University of Columbo.

However, politics would come soon calling. He took the political plunge in the mid-1970s as the chief organiser of the UNP in Kelaniya Constituency and then organiser of the Bigayama Constituency.

The UNP at the time had first suffered a massive defeat at the hands of coalition led by late Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. However by 1977 it had roared back to power led by Wickremesinghe’s cousin JR Jayawardene. That was the year that Wickremesinghe first entered Parliament as an MP.

The rise

Wickremesinghe was first appointed Deputy Foreign Minister and then became Minister of Youth Affairs and Employment. Aged 28, he was the youngest cabinet minister in the entire Jayawardene government. He held several positions over the years including Cabinet minister for Youth Affairs, Education and Industry, Science and Technology.

It was his time as industry minister under President Ranasinghe Premadasa that increased the spotlight on Wickremesinghe. His policies resulted in reforms being made to the Sri Lankan stock market and an influx of foreign investors. He would serve as leader of the House between 1989 and 1993.

In May 1993, Wickremesinghe became Prime Minister of Sri Lanka for the first time following the assassination of Premadasa. It was a post he would hold six more times – though he would never complete his full term of office. Wickremesinghe would hold that post till 1994. Unfortunately, the UNP would be defeated in elections that year.

In 1994, Wickremesinghe became leader of the UNP after several of his senior colleagues were killed in assassinations.  Wickremesinghe then served as the leader of the opposition for the next half a decade. In 1999, he ran for president of Sri Lanka in 1999 as the UNP candidate but was defeated by incumbent president Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga of the People’s Alliance. Sri Lanka at the time was engulfed in a civil war at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Bandaranaike, the daughter of late prime minister SWRD Bandaranaike, interestingly was a childhood friend. In 2000, Wickremesinghe would return as prime minister under her in a coalition government. They would later go on to become political rivals.

The government at this time signed a ceasefire agreement with the LTTE and began talks with the group. However, this did not go down well politically inside the country. Wickremesinghe and Chandrika fell out after she assumed control of some of the UNP ministries including defence, interior and media and when he was travelling abroad. This resulted in a constitutional crisis where neither of them willing to back down.

Wickremesinghe ran for president again in 2005. However, this time he was defeated by Mahinda Rajapaksa in a close contest. Wickremesinghe yet again took up the post of leader of the opposition. He would never run for the post of president again.

However, Wickremesinghe would return as Prime Minister in 2015 . This came after he tied up with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) of Maithripala Sirisena, who had defected from Rajapaksa. Wickremesinghe then served three more consecutive terms from 2015 to 2019 – all under President Maithripala Sirisena.

However all was not smooth sailing with the two men. Wickremesinghe and Sirisena engaged in a nearly two-month-long stand-off over a scandal with then central bank governor Arjuna Mahendra coming to light. Sirisena in 2018 tried to remove Wickremesinghe as prime minister. In the case of politics making for strange bedfellows, Rajapaksa became prime minister under Sirisena. However, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court intervened and overturned Sirisena’s decision – returning Wickremesinghe to the post.

Then, in 2019, things took a dramatic turn for Wickremesinghe. Not only did the UNP lose the presidential election, it followed that happened 2020 by a historic collapse in parliamentary polls. The UNP, Sri Lanka’s oldest party, was reduced to merely one seat In Parliament. Wickremesinghe could not even manage to save his own seat. Many considered Wickremesinghe a spent force.

But Wickremesinghe wasn’t done. In June 2021, he returned to Parliament as the UNP’s solo MP. In 2022, Sri Lanka witness massive protests after a crisis engulfed the island nation. The economy collapsed, fuel, food, and medicine shortages and power cuts were witnessed and inflation skyrocketed. Public anger erupted into nationwide protests demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

In the midst of the turmoil,  Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as prime minister. Gotabaya then turned to Wickremesinghe in an attempt to stabilise the situation.  However, after things turned violent, Gotabaya himself fled the country in July 2022. It was then that Wickremesinghe became acting President of Sri Lanka – though not in the way he’d imagined or hoped for. A vote was held later that month in which Wickremesinghe defeated opposition candidate Dullas Alahapperuma.

The fall

Wickremesinghe’s joy at being president would not last. His policies of trying to stabilise Sri Lanka via IMF-backed reforms, debt restructuring, and state enterprise privatisation were heavily criticised. His crackdown on protesters, whom he called ‘fascists’, also did not help the image of him as an elitist in the public’s mind.

In September 2024, Wickremesinghe crashed out of his re-election bid after receiving just 17 per cent of the vote. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Marxist-leaning candidate and leader of the National People’s Power (NPP), would prevail with 42 per cent of the vote.

Experts blamed the austerity measures, which helped Sri Lanka return from the brink, but greatly angered voters. Wickremesinghe was graceful in defeat. “Mr President, here I handover to you with much love, the dear child called Sri Lanka, whom we both love very dearly,” Wickremesinghe, conceding defeat, wrote in a statement to Dissanayake. Since then, Wickremesinghe has largely remained out of the public eye.

Then today, the shocking news emerged that Wickremesinghe was arrested for allegedly “misusing government funds”. Wickremesinghe had come to at the Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID) on Friday morning to provide a statement about a September 2023 visit to London.

Wickremesinghe was attending a ceremony for his wife at a British university while he was head of state. He has been accused of using state resources for personal purposes. Wickremesinghe had stopped in London in 2023 on his way back from Havana, where he attended a G77 summit. In the UK capital, he and his wife attended a University of Wolverhampton ceremony.

Wickremesinghe had maintained that his wife’s travel expenses were met by her and that no state funds were used. He has now been taken into custody. He has now received bail. Unfortunately, Wickremesinghe has now the distinction of becoming the first ex-president in Sri Lanka’s history to be arrested.

With inputs from agencies