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Basil Rajapaksa

Sri Lankan politician (born 1951)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 7, 2026
Entity authorityQ3179975
Source-derived summary

Basil Rajapaksa (born 27 April 1951) is a Sri Lankan politician. He is a former Minister of Finance and Member of Parliament for the national list.

He was also a member of the Sri Lankan Parliament from 2007 to 2015. During the period of 2005–2010 he served as a presidential senior advisor for President Mahinda Rajapaksa and in 2007 he was appointed as a member of parliament from the national list. He was the Cabinet minister for Economic Development in President Mahinda Rajapaksa's second term (2010–2015). In the 2010 parliamentary election, he was elected from Gampaha district by receiving the highest number of preferential votes in Sri Lanka. He entered the parliament again from the national list and was appointed the Finance Minister during which he was accused of extreme negligence and mismanagement resulting in the worsening of the Sri Lankan economic crisis and was ultimately forced to resign under increasing protests by general public in the 2022 Sri Lankan political crisis. He resigned his seat in parliament on 9 June 2022.

Family

He hails from a well-known political family in the southern part of Sri Lanka. His father, D. A. Rajapaksa, was a prominent politician, independence agitator, Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister of Agriculture and Land in Wijeyananda Dahanayake's government.

Editorial summary

“Basil Rajapaksa” enters the record as sri Lankan politician (born 1951). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Basil, Rajapaksa and Lankan can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1951, 2007, 2015, 2005—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1951. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Basil, Rajapaksa and Lankan.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Basil Rajapaksa” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Basil, Rajapaksa and Lankan provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3179975. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 2007, 2015 and 2005.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Basil Rajapaksa”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Basil Rajapaksa primary sources, Basil Rajapaksa archive and Basil research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Basil Rajapaksa”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Basil Rajapaksa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.