The people of Sri Lanka have made the cause of democracy proud by handing a humiliating defeat to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, ending 10 years of authoritarian rule. Mr Rajapaksa called an early election, and lost to his former health minister Maithripala Sirisena - despite his last-minute attempts to rope Bollywood stars into his campaign and desperate appeals to vote for the “known devil”.

All South Asians should celebrate this result because it represents a big setback to the majoritarianism and militarist national-chauvinism that Mr Rajapaksa personified, and creates the hope that our countries could become more inclusive, pluralist democracies that can accommodate and genuinely respect difference and diversity in religion, culture and ethnicity.

Foreign minister Mangala Samarweera, no less, has alleged that Mr Rajapaksa toyed with the idea of a coup to prevent the announcement of the election result. These charges must be seriously and impartially investigated. If found true, they would warrant Mr Rajapaksa’s prosecution. At any rate, the fact that they are levelled, and believed by many, testifies to the climate of confrontation and suspicion that he created.

This points to the difficulties and challenges that President Sirisena faces. The first challenge is to knock together the different components of the rainbow coalition that amazingly catapulted this relatively low-key, if not faceless, politician, to power. This includes the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist group Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), the two main Muslim parties, and political arch-rivals: former President Chandrika Kumaratunga and former Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe.

Unifying these streams won’t be easy-although Mr Sirisena has paved the way to an extent by appointing Mr Wickramasinghe as Prime Minister, as promised. Nor will it be easy to convince the Northern or Jaffna Tamils that they have a stake in supporting his government and can realistically expect a better deal under him than under Mr Rajapaksa.

It is estimated that more than 80 percent of Northern Tamils, traditional supporters of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), voted for Mr Sirisena. In a brilliant tactical stroke, TNA leader R Sampanthan delayed announcing his support until a week before the polling to deny Mr Rajapaksa an opportunity to win Sinhala votes by polarising the contest along ethnic-chauvinist lines.

Not much is known about the political acumen of Mr Sirisena, who served under Mr Rajapaksa until late November. But fulfilling the promise of major political reform-abolishing the executive presidency and moving over to a parliamentary system of government within 100 days-and holding parliament elections, will prove a great challenge to even the most astute of leaders.

A shift to the new system would require the support of two-thirds or 150 members of the 225-strong parliament. This cannot be done without effectively neutralising the Rajapaksa brothers, whose Sri Lanka Freedom Party holds 135 seats in Parliament.

Mr Rajapaksa has reportedly agreed to surrender the SLFP’s chairmanship to Mr Sirisena, but on the condition that all inquiries related to his family’s corruption and undemocratic conduct be dropped. This cynical manœuvre must be opposed by getting top SLFP leaders to advise party MPs to understand the true import of the election results - while their impact is still current and strong.

Similarly, the new President will have to negotiate hard with the JHU and with Gen Sarath Fonseka, a “war hero” with political ambitions, who became Mr Rajapaksa’s rival and who recently demanded that he be made Field Marshal. Mr Sirisena will have to do a lot of fancy footwork to keep his widely divergent Sinhala supporters together while the 100-day transition takes place.

In the Tamil North, it will be equally tough for him to send the army back to the barracks and demilitarise the civilian administration. Many soldiers have illegally grabbed lands belonging to displaced Tamils. Evacuating them won’t be easy. Yet that’s a precondition for defending the livelihoods of large numbers of this ethnic minority which feels cornered and persecuted.

Another big challenge would be arresting the drift towards neoliberalism and great dependence on foreign capital for growth. When the civil war ended in 2009, foreign aid and Western investment dried up. The government opened new avenues for financial flows, primarily from China, through real estate-related investment, expansion of casinos, and for-profit universities and hospitals.

This has aggravated unemployment in the Sinhala South. The North and East, with a large Tamil presence, are plagued by a serious economic crisis, marked by a collapse of agriculture and small industry, a fall in rural incomes, and widespread indebtedness.

This comes on top of the dispossession, privation and terrible crimes against humanity which large numbers of Tamils suffered during the civil war. Up to 40,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed during the last phase of the massive armed operation against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam war, many of them in targeted or indiscriminate attacks.

The Rajapaksa government always described the war as an “anti-terrorist” operation, and inflicted cruelties on civilians after branding them LTTE’s colluders or supporters. This is impermissible even under the laws of war with a foreign power, leave alone civil war. Colombo has defied all attempts by United Nations agencies to hold its functionaries accountable for war crimes.

Sri Lanka’s neighbours, especially India, failed to restrain the Rajapaksa regime, and supported its “sovereign” right to “defend” itself against the LTTE-except for the occasional, token, and usually hypocritical, protest from the ethnic-Tamil parties that were part of India’s recent ruling coalitions.

In fact, Sri Lanka’s “all-out” war against Tamil separatism became a right-wing, militarist-Hindutva model for what India should do in Kashmir, and more generally, how it should deal with its recalcitrant minorities: by deploying maximum force to “teach them a lesson”.

Its proponents argue that gross human right violations, butchery of civilians, and war crimes are permissible if they deliver “results”: the short-term price is worth paying to achieve a stronger, more united India in the long run. This view is dangerously mistaken. It fails to recognise that short-term excesses create more discontent which feeds counter-violence, worsening the long-term prospect.

Mr Sirisena unfortunately inherits his predecessor’s “anti-terrorist” premise about the war. His manifesto said: “No international power will be allowed to ill-treat or touch a single citizen of this country on account of the campaign to defeat terrorism.” This is retrograde national-chauvinism.

The international community, particularly South Asian governments, must mount pressure on Mr Sirisena to fix responsibility for the war crimes, if necessary through a domestic truth commission.

Such efforts are most likely to succeed if there’s a domestic process of devolution of powers to the North and East and a sincere effort is made to win the confidence of the ethnic minorities as part of a grand reconciliation package to rebuild inter-ethnic relations equitably.

This hope is not entirely misplaced. In the mid-1990s, under President Kumaratunga, a “devolution debate” could be sustained despite opposition from hardliners on both sides of the ethnic divide. Mr Sirisena should not reject sensible devolution proposals simply because they weren’t part of the terms on which the Tamil and Muslim parties supported him during the election.

Their support was unconditional, not negotiated. But it reflected the overall character of the election, itself a referendum on corruption, cronyism and family-based rule, represented in a venal, concentrated form by Mr Rajapaksa. Mr Sirisena helped set up the referendum, at the right moment.

Mr Sirisena didn’t win on the strength of his ideology, manifesto or even personal image, but simply because the people were fed up with Mr Rajapaksa, and didn’t want to degrade Sri Lankan democracy further by subjecting it to a third term under him. During the campaign, Mr Sirisena punctured the myth of Mr Rajapaksa’s invincibility and showed he could be trounced by appealing to simple-sounding ideas like “good governance”. And trounced he was.

There is a larger lesson in Sri Lanka’s election results for us South Asians. We too can get rid of half-dictators and self-styled national-heroes-turned-tyrants who seem invincible, as Mr Rajapaksa did until recently. We should at least try-through mass mobilisation, where necessary.

Besides the ethnic issue, many Indian analysts have focused, obsessively narrowly, on the security implications of the change in Sri Lanka, which offer India a chance to displace China as a major source of finance and armaments to that country. Chinese policy is of course totally opportunist. Mr Rajapaksa fully exploited it to shield himself against Western pressure on human rights.

But the Indian state is no paragon of virtue. It regards its whole neighbourhood as its “natural” sphere of influence, where there must be no rivals. India has repeatedly bullied its smaller neighbours. It first armed and trained the LTTE, and then turned against it. But India’s military intervention in Sri Lanka (1987-90) was a disaster.

India must seek a balanced relationship with Sri Lanka, which isn’t militarily determined. The new situation opens a good opportunity.

Praful Bidwai