Sri Lanka's opposition on Monday dismissed the president's invitation to join a unity government as "nonsensical" and instead demanded he resign over the country's worsening shortages of food, fuel and medicines.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's overture came as armed troops looked to quell more demonstrations over what the government acknowledges is the country's most severe economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948.
Police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse thousands of protesters trying to storm the private home of the prime minister -- the president's elder brother and the head of the family political clan -- in Tangalle, once a bastion of support for the Rajapaksas in the island's south.
The president asked opposition parties represented in parliament to "join the effort to seek solutions to the national crisis," after the late-night resignation of nearly all cabinet ministers to pave the way for a revamped administration.
But the leftist People's Liberation Front (JVP) responded by urging Gotabaya Rakapaksa and his once popular and powerful family to immediately step down.
"He really must be a lunatic to think that opposition MPs will prop up a government that is crumbling," JVP lawmaker Anura Dissanayake told reporters in Colombo.
The main minority opposition party, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), also dismissed the idea of their joining a Rajapaksa-led administration.
"His offer to reconstitute the cabinet with opposition MPs is nonsensical and infuriates the people who have been demanding his resignation," TNA spokesman and lawmaker Abraham Sumanthiran told AFP.
The main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party made no formal statement, but its leader Sajith Premadasa vowed on Sunday that it would not join any government featuring members of Rajapaksa's family.
Every member of Sri Lanka's cabinet except the president and his elder brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, resigned on Sunday.
The country's central bank governor Ajith Cabraal -- who has long opposed the International Monetary Fund bailout now being sought by the country -- also stepped down on Monday.
The departures cleared the way for the country's ruling political clan to seek to shore up its weakening position and attempt to stem growing public protests.
But the president has already reappointed four of the outgoing ministers -- three of them to their old jobs -- while replacing brother Basil Rajapaksa as finance minister with the previous justice chief.
VPN use spikes
Sri Lanka's attempt to contain spiralling protests by blocking popular social media platforms led to an extraordinary spike in the use of censorship-dodging virtual private networks, a tracking firm said.
Demand for VPNs went up by a staggering 17,000% on Sunday when the ban came into effect, Top10VPN.com said after tracking downloads by Sri Lankan users.
"There were 27,815 searches for VPN compared to a daily average of 321 over the previous 28 days," Simon Migliano, the firm's head of research, told AFP in an email.
"This is a huge increase in interest in what's essentially a very niche tool for most people."
Sunday's ban blocked access to WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube and a host of other popular platforms but it was lifted after 15 hours, following a ruling by the country's Human Rights Council deeming the blackout illegal.
The head of the country's internet regulator resigned after the ban order went into effect and technology minister Namal Rajapaksa, the nephew of Sri Lanka's president, also publicly criticized the policy.
"The availability of VPN, just like I'm using now, makes such bans completely useless," Rajapaksa said on Twitter.
"I urge the authorities to think more progressively and reconsider this decision."
