Sirimavo Bandaranaike
Sirimavo Bandaranaike was prime minister of Ceylon and then Sri Lanka three times, in 1960-65, 1970-77 and 1994-2000, the world's first woman head of government, the widow whom her husband's party asked to lead it when he was shot by a Buddhist monk in September 1959. She wept on the platforms of the campaign of July 1960 and won. The weeping widow of the newspapers then nationalised the oil companies, the banks, the schools and the press's biggest group. She made Sinhala the language of the courts, broke with the Americans over the oil and with the Tamils over the language. In her second government, with the Trotskyists and the Communists in her cabinet, she crushed the JVP youth insurrection of April 1971 with fifteen thousand dead. She wrote the republican constitution of 1972 that renamed the island and gave Buddhism the foremost place. She nationalised the tea estates and rationed the rice and the bread. She hosted the non-aligned summit of 1976 as its chair. She lost the election of 1977 with eight seats. After that Jayewardene's parliament stripped her of her civic rights for seven years for abuse of power. She was born in 1916 into the Ratwatte family of Kandyan chiefs, and educated at a Catholic convent in Colombo. She married S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in 1940, an Oxford-educated lawyer eighteen years her senior, raised three children and did social work while he founded the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and won the election of 1956 on Sinhala only. She had never made a speech before 1960. The third term came when her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga, who had taken the party from her, won the presidency in 1994 and made her mother prime minister, an office the constitution of 1978 had emptied, which she held at seventy-eight in a wheelchair until August 2000. She died on 10 October 2000, the day of the general election, in her car on the way home from voting, at eighty-four. Her son Anura was a minister for the other party and her daughter president, and the family's language politics of 1956 was, by then, in its seventeenth year of civil war.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 2000 CE
- Nationality: Sri Lankan
- Roles: prime minister, politician
