(b. April 17, 1916, Ratnapura, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka]—d. Oct. 10, 2000, Colombo, Sri Lanka)

Upon her party’s victory in the 1960 Ceylon general election, Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike became the world’s ﬁrst woman prime minister. She left ofﬁce in 1965 but returned to serve two more terms (1970–77, 1994–2000) as prime minister. The family she founded with her late husband, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, rose to great prominence in Sri Lankan politics.


Bandaranaike carried on her husband’s program of socialist economic policies, neutrality in international relations, and the active encouragement of the Buddhist religion and of the Sinhalese language and culture. Her government nationalized various economic enterprises and enforced a law making Sinhalese the sole ofﬁcial language.

By 1964 a deepening economic crisis and the SLFP’s coalition with the Marxist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (“Ceylon Socialist Party”) had eroded popular support for her government, which was resoundingly defeated in the general election of 1965. In 1970, however, her socialist coalition, the United Front, regained power.

As prime minister, Bandaranaike pursued more radical policies. Her government further restricted free enterprise, nationalized industries, carried out land reforms, and promulgated a new constitution that created an executive presidency and made Ceylon into a republic named Sri Lanka. While reducing inequalities of wealth, Bandaranaike’s socialist policies had once again caused economic stagnation, and her government’s support of Buddhism and the Sinhalese language had helped alienate the country’s large Tamil minority.

The failure to deal with ethnic rivalries and economic distress led, in the election of July 1977, to the SLFP’s retaining only 8 of the 168 seats in the National Assembly, and Bandaranaike was replaced as prime minister.In 1980 the Sri Lanka parliament stripped Bandaranaike of her political rights and barred her from political ofﬁce, but in 1986 President J. R. Jayawardene granted her a par-don that restored her rights. She ran unsuccessfully as the SLFP’s candidate for president in 1988, and after regaining a seat in parliament in 1989 she became the leader of the opposition.

Bandaranaike’s children, in the meantime, had become major political ﬁgures within the SLFP. Her son, Anura P.S.D. Bandaranaike (b. 1949), was ﬁrst elected to parliament in 1977 and had become the leader of the SLFP’s right-wing faction by 1984. He was frustrated in his bid to become the party’s leader, however, by his sister Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (b. 1945), who held left-wing views and was favoured by their mother for the leadership. In response, Anura defected from the SLFP and joined the rival United National Party (UNP) in 1993.

Chandrika had been active in the SLFP before marrying the ﬁlm actor Vijaya Kumaratunga in 1978, and after his assassination in 1988 she rejoined her mother’s party. She soon came to head its left-wing faction, and a string of electoral victories propelled her to the leadership of an SLFP-based coalition that won the parliamentary elections of August 1994.
