The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake
Bimal Rathnayake responded to a reference to his name, criticizing the use of personal or petty comparisons involving cricketing credentials and citing Muthiah Muralitharan’s career as context. He expressed regret over an incident in the Presiding Member’s district and argued that political leaders should calm rather than inflame communal or social tensions. He accused the opposing Member’s speech of attempting to stoke tensions and warned against politics reminiscent of the violence associated with Black July.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Presiding Member, I take the floor since the Member mentioned my name. We all know Muthiah Muralitharan played for St. Anthony’s College, then First XI matches, then the National Team. Whether someone ever played even for a Dhamma school team is another matter. It is not appropriate to drag things to such a petty level.
¶ 02 I also regret an incident in your district. Such issues in the country must be calmed, not inflamed. The Hon. Member is a senior politician, yet his entire speech sought to stoke tensions. Those who benefitted from Black July’s flames may see advantage in igniting new fires. We regret such low politics.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Tuesday, 18 November 2025 ·No. 22927 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
- Permalink
/lk/speeches/26104
Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 18 November 2025. No. 22927. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/26104