Sri Lanka\u2019s presidential election on Saturday is turning out to be a showdown between a man offering free sanitary pads and a former soldier dubbed the \u201cTerminator\u201d by his own family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, 70, a retired army lieutenant colonel, was the de facto military chief who crushed Tamil guerrillas and ended a 37-year separatist war, but Saturday\u2019s vote is his battle of ballots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His family calls him Sri Lanka\u2019s \u201cTerminator\u201d because he promises to fight corruption and Islamic extremism, a key issue since the Easter Sunday suicide bombings this year that killed 269 people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In contrast to the tough-talking Rajapaksa, his main challenger, Sajith Premadasa, a low-key politician, is hoping to appeal to women voters with promises to improve menstrual hygiene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Menstruation remains a taboo subject in the conservative Buddhist society and \u201cperiod poverty\u201d is a global issue. Premadasa, 52, was ridiculed by the Rajapaksa campaign for openly discussing the subject and ridiculed him as the \u201cPad Man\u201d.Premadasa was referring to accusations that Gotabhaya led death squads during his brother Mahinda\u2019s decade in power up to 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He denies that he was the architect of what is known as \u201cwhite van abductions\u201d, when dozens of opponents were abducted never to be found again.While Rajapaksa has no experience in politics, he makes up for it by campaigning with his charismatic older brother Mahinda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sri Lanka\u2019s presidential election on Saturday is turning out to be a showdown between a man offering free sanitary pads and a former soldier dubbed the \u201cTerminator\u201d by his own family. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, 70, a retired army lieutenant colonel, was the de facto military chief who crushed Tamil guerrillas and ended a 37-year separatist war, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74459,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74457\/revisions\/74459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}