Sri Lanka Premier in Parents’ Footsteps : Asia: Appointment ends suspense engendered by election in which no party won a majority.

A dynamic if largely untested opposition leader--whose parents both served as prime minister of Sri Lanka--was asked Thursday by the island nation’s president to assume the job herself.

The appointment of Chandrika Kumaratunga ended tremendous suspense and tension sparked by Tuesday’s hard-fought parliamentary election, in which no single party won a clear majority.

After some negotiating, Kumaratunga’s socialist People’s Alliance, the top vote-getter Tuesday, said it had assured itself of the support of several smaller Tamil and Muslim parties, guaranteeing it control of the 225-seat Parliament.

She was supposed to form a Cabinet and be sworn in today.

The nomination of the 49-year-old leftist by President Dingiri Banda Wijetunga was in the grand dynastic tradition that has become common in the Indian subcontinent, often with a sinister sub-current of tragedy and death.

Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s father was his country’s leader before he was deposed in 1977 and executed. Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh’s prime minister, is the widow of an assassinated president. In India, the largest and most influential country in the region, power was long held by the Nehru clan--Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv Gandhi. Only Nehru died of natural causes.

Kumaratunga may be the world’s first head of government to succeed both parents in that office. Her father, Solomon Bandaranaike, prime minister in the 1950s, was assassinated in 1959.

The mantle of leadership in the socialist Sri Lankan Freedom Party, Bandaranaike’s creation, then passed to his widow and Chandrika’s mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. She became the world’s first woman prime minister in 1960-65 and 1970-77, and was the titular leader of the People’s Alliance that on Tuesday handed Wijetunga’s ruling United National Party its first general election defeat in 17 years.

Kumaratunga’s feisty mother has tapped her to become the Freedom Party leader. It is not a job the new prime minister has acknowledged coveting. “I still hope that somebody, someone would fall from the heavens to take up the leadership so I can just be there to do the work,” she said this year.

Her own bitter experience probably lies at the root of her reluctance. In 1972, she abandoned studies for a doctorate in developmental economics at the Sorbonne in Paris, in part to help her husband, actor Vijaya Kumaratunga, campaign for a Parliament seat. In 1988, after the couple formed a socialist opposition party, anti-government radicals assassinated Vijaya. Facing death threats herself, Kumaratunga fled to Britain with their two young children.

“Her life has been a hard fight, marred by tragedy,” commented Leslie Dahanaike, editor of the Sunday Observer, a Sri Lankan weekly. “Both her father and her husband were killed. It was a hard fight to come to the top.”

She returned to Sri Lanka in 1990, formed another party that proved unsuccessful, then joined her mother’s Freedom Party. When her brother Anura turned his back on his family and joined the ruling United National Party, their mother chose Kumaratunga as deputy party boss and said if they won Tuesday’s national election, she would be the party’s choice for prime minister.

As charismatic a stump speaker as her mother, Kumaratunga was elected chief minister of Sri Lanka’s largest province last year. In March, she led the People’s Alliance to a stunning win in regional elections in the south. And while her mother recovered from foot surgery, she led the Alliance’s national campaign.

During the campaign, Kumaratunga pledged to continue Sri Lanka’s free-market policies, but as an avowed socialist, advocated “capitalism with a human face.” She also promised to travel to the heart of Sri Lanka’s Tamil country and talk “unconditionally” to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for their ethnic minority.

The Tamil rebels are reportedly ready to meet her. On Thursday, in the Liberation Tigers’ first reaction to the election results, London-based spokesman Anton Raja said, “We are very happy she is willing to talk to us. We are also willing.” Asked specifically if the Tigers would lay down their guns, Raja replied, “We will, after the talks.”

Kumaratunga will succeed Ranil Wickremasinghe, a member of the United National Party.