The Hon. G.G. Ponnambalam

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Speaker, I congratulate you and the Government for an unprecedented, well-deserved mandate.

¶ 02 In the last Parliament, the NPP and our party refused to engage with President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s Government as we believed it lacked a mandate. Therefore, when President Anura Kumara Dissanayake speaks of democracy in his Policy Statement, I remind him we stood consistently with the NPP against a government we considered rogue.

¶ 03 I particularly welcome three statements on page 1 of the English text: - “I acknowledge that there are communities that did not trust us but instead placed their faith in other political movements.” - “The essence of democracy lies in the coexistence of diverse political ideologies and groups.” - “Our government and I are committed to fulfilling the needs and aspirations of the citizens from every community, both those who voted for us and those who did not.”

¶ 04 He also states: “We will not allow ethnic-based politics in our country. Similarly, we will not tolerate religious extremism. We are a people who have suffered enough from ethnic conflicts.”

¶ 05 There is a possible contradiction. Our party—the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, Sri Lanka’s oldest Tamil party—and the Tamil National People’s Front, believed in a Sri Lankan identity and worked with governments, including our leader joining Cabinet. But over 76 years, “Sri Lankan identity” has often been a facade for a Sinhala-Buddhist dominant identity that excludes others. After decades of disenfranchisement, land grabs and demographic engineering in the North and East—including recent colonization schemes in Batticaloa’s Mayilathamadu and Madhavanai and north of Vavuniya—when Tamils raise these issues, will that be labelled “racism” under the new policy? To simply insist on “Sri Lankans” without acknowledging the history of discrimination erases that lived reality.

¶ 06 Even the UN Human Rights Council’s Prince Zeid noted Sri Lanka could not rely solely on internal accountability given the ethnic conflict’s history and institutional corruption preventing justice. These realities must be addressed to create genuine security for all, especially Tamils who believe they have been discriminated against.

¶ 07 On the PTA: memorialization of LTTE cadres and Tamil civilians who died is no different from JVP memorialization; both armed struggles were silenced by the State and arose from legitimate grievances. Allowing one to commemorate freely while restricting the other—based on a 2011 circular from a government you call racist—is unfair. The PTA should not be used—neither in the North and East nor in the South. Existing penal laws suffice. The PTA is used to deny bail and punish before trial. I urge the Minister of Justice and National Integration—whom I know well—to address this and also the issue of nine Tamil political prisoners. Please release them early. One known as “Morris,” known to the Hon. President and Hon. Vijitha Herath, was transferred from Magazine Prison to Hambantota without cause; please inquire.

¶ 08 Thank you.