Mr. President, You Have Blood On Your Hands: Modern Day Dévadatta Is Going Berserk On A Seemingly Cursed Path “I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Gotabaya In the sixties and the seventies Ceylon’s scourge was the Bandaranaikes – Sirimavo, her children and Felix Dias. The massive parliamentary election victory of the then Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1970, which led to a near-extinction of the then United National Party (UNP) led by Dudley Senanayake, lent the Bandaranaikes a false sense of permanency of political power. The two Bandaranaikes, Sirimavo and Felix Dias were the prime movers in the then SLFP-led government. The SLFP was backed by the traditional left at the time. That traditional left which consisted of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party (CP) were led by N M Perera and S A Wickremasinghe respectively.