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While successive post-independence governments’ ethnocentric policies undermined liberal democracy and led to Sri Lanka’s civil war, the extraconstitutional and extrajudicial strategies President Mahinda Rajapaksa adopted to defeat the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the tactics he has since pursued to perpetuate his tenure as president, and the malpractices he and his supporters have perpetrated in order to create a Rajapaksa family dynasty have ushered in a soft authoritarian dispensation that could very well lead to a hard authoritarian milieu.