evidence: President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s Historic Win and his Promising Start by Rajan Philips [...] In electoral politics, the first steps after victory go a long way in showing the sincerity, the commitment, and the ability of the winner and the winning party to follow the people’s mandate, honour their trust, and deliver on the electoral promises. So far, as the newly minted President, Anura Kumara Dissanayaka has been making all the right moves and avoiding obvious mis-steps. His decisions are good outcomes forced by the virtue of necessity, on the one hand, and constrained by his own commitments, on the other. His first steps are both laudable and promising. [...] One of the concerns of the Western bloc of countries and India in particular was the foreign policy orientation of the NPP and its presidential candidate. The surmise was that with the NPP’s core constituent the JVP, being a Marxist-Leninist party as stated on its website, that the NPP would be tilted towards countries with a similar ideology. In the aftermath of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s victory, the international media gave credence to the view that the government would tilt towards China and Russia, which have been long term allies of Sri Lanka, especially during the period of war and when it came to human rights issues in the context of that war.