Ranasinghe Premadasa
Ranasinghe Premadasa was president of Sri Lanka from January 1989 to May Day 1993, when a Tamil Tiger with a bomb in his clothes walked into the May Day procession in Colombo and killed him and sixteen others, the first head of state the Tigers murdered. He had been Jayewardene's prime minister for eleven years and the first president from outside the English-speaking elite, a man from the Colombo slums who built a million houses, or said he had, fought the Marxist JVP insurrection in the south with death squads that killed perhaps forty thousand people in two years, sent the Indian army home, and armed the Tigers against it before they turned on him. He was born in 1924 in Colombo, the son of a small trader from a low caste, which he was reminded of by the parties of the elite all his life, and rose through Colombo municipal politics and the Labour party to the United National Party, for which he held a city seat from 1965. Jayewardene made him prime minister in 1978 under the new presidential constitution, an office with the housing and the villages in it, and he used it: the Gam Udawa village-awakening programme, the housing targets, the free school uniforms and the Janasaviya poverty grant made him the party's vote in the countryside. He won the presidency in December 1988 with fifty per cent in an election the JVP tried to stop by killing voters. The JVP's second insurrection, begun in 1987 against the Indian intervention, was crushed in 1989 and 1990 by the army and by unnamed squads that left bodies burning on tyres at the roadsides. The leader Wijeweera was captured and shot in November 1989. He demanded the withdrawal of the Indian peacekeeping force in June 1989, opened talks with the Tigers and, it is generally accepted, gave them weapons to use against the Indians, who left in March 1990. The Tigers resumed the war in June by killing six hundred surrendered policemen. An impeachment motion in 1991 by his own party's rebels failed. The Tigers killed his defence minister in November 1992 and the opposition leader Athulathmudali a week before they killed him. The bomber's head was found on a roof and the body identified from a cyanide capsule. D. B. Wijetunga succeeded him.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 1993 CE
- Nationality: Sri Lankan
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
