COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s main Tamil party has urged a parliamentary committee to clear the way for provincial council elections immediately, saying any electoral-system reform should come after the vote and not become a reason to postpone it again.
M.A. Sumanthiran, a President’s Counsel and the general secretary of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi, presented the party’s position last week before the parliamentary select committee examining how to hold the elections. He attended at the committee’s invitation with two of the party’s lawmakers, Dr. P. Sathiyalingam and Shanakiyan Rasamanickam, who leads the party’s parliamentary group.
Mr. Sumanthiran told the committee that holding the elections at once was the party’s firm position. If the electoral system needed to be changed, he said, the elections could be held first and the amendments made before the following round of voting.
He said the need to amend the provincial elections law could not be accepted as grounds for further delay, and warned that drawing new constituencies or wards could take a long time. Earlier changes to the laws governing local government and parliamentary elections had been carried out on the basis of existing electoral divisions and wards, he said, and the same approach should be followed so the provincial polls could go ahead without delay.
He also gave the committee documents on private member’s bills he had introduced to make the elections possible and on related efforts in previous parliaments, and said enacting such a bill would open a route to holding the vote.
The provincial councils were created in 1987 under the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, following an accord between India and Sri Lanka, and were intended to devolve power to the Tamil-majority north and east. The councils’ terms expired between 2017 and 2019, and all nine have since been run by governors appointed by the president.
In 2017, Parliament replaced proportional representation for provincial elections with a mixed system of constituency and proportional seats, which required new electoral boundaries. Parliament rejected the delimitation report in 2018, and no replacement has been approved. Under the amended law, no election can be held until the boundaries are in place.
In April 2023, Mr. Sumanthiran, then a member of Parliament for Jaffna District, introduced a private member’s bill to replace the 2017 amendment and allow elections under the previous system. The bill was gazetted the following month but had not reached a second reading when Parliament was dissolved in 2024. He lost his seat in the general election that November.
The government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, whose National People’s Power coalition won a two-thirds majority in that election, has pledged to hold the provincial polls. In August 2025, the leader of the House, Bimal Rathnayake, said the government intended to do so within the first six months of 2026, a target that has since passed.
The select committee, chaired by Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, began meeting in March. The Attorney General’s Department has advised it that returning to the old proportional system would be the fastest way to hold the elections. In September, four opposition members of the committee, among them Mr. Rasamanickam, said they would withdraw, accusing the government of using the panel to drag out the process. Parliament has extended the committee’s mandate to Dec. 17.
