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JVP leader says elections should be held in the east

Somawansa Amarasinghe

COLOMBO: The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) is of the firm view that the Mahinda Rajapaksa government in Sri Lanka should hold elections to the provincial council in the east as soon as possible, under the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, to consolidate the recent gains made by the military against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In an interview to The Hindu, JVP leader Somawansa Amarasinghe said that though his party was opposed to the 13th Amendment, made as a follow up to the 1987 India-Sri Lanka Accord, it believed that elections in the east would encourage democracy and promote development.

“Our party has reservations about the India-Sri Lanka accord and the consequent 13th Amendment to the Constitution. However, since it is now part of the statute, we see no difficulty for the Rajapaksa government in holding elections to the local bodies as well as the provincial council in the east. Otherwise, the military advances in the east would not be useful,” Mr. Somawansa argued.

He said elections in the east would not only bring back democracy and equality, but also encourage people in the Wanni under the control of the LTTE to rise against the outfit and send the right signals for economic growth.

The JVP leader maintained that any attempt to impose a ‘federal system’ on Sri Lanka would not resolve the problems in the country as the national question in the island nation was not related to territory, but about democracy and equality.

“We believe efforts to resolve the national question should not violate the mandate of the people. It is the conviction of the JVP that the mandate of the people is to safeguard the status of Sri Lanka as a unitary state,” he said.

Mr. Somawansa conceded that there were certain obstacles in the way of free and fair elections in the east, particularly with the presence of certain armed groups, and maintained that the Government could overcome them by offering a general amnesty to all those who were ready to join the democratic mainstream.

The JVP leader said no government in the country in the last 25 years paid attention to the socio-economic problems of the people and the whole debate about the national question was lop-sided.

“We should not play around with the Constitution. All talk about a federal solution has no meaning. It is often not realised that more than 50 per cent of the Tamils in Sri Lanka live outside the so-called homeland of Tamils. What do they stand to gain by a federal set-up? In our view, it would only create more problems for the Tamils.

“There are huge gaps in the development status of provinces. For instance, while the western province accounts for 50 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the share of eastern province is mere 2.5 per cent. That is why we say the issue is not federalism but democracy and equality,” the JVP leader said.

Mr. Somawansa said his party chose to walk out of the All Parties Representative Conference, constituted by the President to evolve a national consensus on a resolution of the ethnic conflict, when it began its work without “defining the problem of what constituted national question and came forward with a draft for a federal solution.”

On the Mahinda Rajapaksa government, the JVP leader said that while the military gains in the east were a plus point, inflation, corruption and a jumbo size Cabinet imposed huge burdens on the people.

On India, Mr. Somawansa said that while the JVP believed that New Delhi had a role to play in helping Sri Lanka based on its sovereignty, the statements such as the one made by National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan that Colombo should only look to New Delhi for its defence needs would not be helpful.

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