COLOMBO — Sri Lanka's Parliament has weathered no-confidence motions, a sovereign default, and, on one notorious day in 2018, chairs and chili powder flung across the chamber floor. This week, the latest parliamentary battle was over who should sit next to whom.
Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, leader of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, has formally petitioned the Speaker to move the seat of Archchuna Ramanathan, the independent lawmaker immediately to his left, after accusing him of repeated abuse and threats — reducing one of Sri Lanka's most public political rivalries to a dispute over who sits next to whom.
In a letter to the Speaker, Mr. Ponnambalam wrote that Mr. Ramanathan had “constantly” abused him, threatened violence, and used derogatory language — at District Coordinating Committee meetings and, in the modern manner, on social media. The conduct had deteriorated, he wrote, to the point where sharing a bench had become “impossible” and was distracting him from his parliamentary duties.
Mr. Ponnambalam, whose party carries a long lineage in Tamil nationalist politics, also raised a question of protocol. Mr. Ramanathan, a medical doctor elected as an independent in 2024, is a first-term member, and such lawmakers, the letter noted, are ordinarily seated after the leaders and senior members of recognised parties. Instead, he complained, this one had been “allowed to sit between recognised political party leaders and senior members” — an affront, in his telling, to the natural order of the chamber.
There is a certain symmetry to the grievance. Mr. Ramanathan’s own parliamentary career opened with a seating controversy: on his first day in the House, in November 2024, he installed himself in the chair reserved for the Leader of the Opposition and declined to vacate it, obliging Sajith Premadasa, the actual opposition leader, to perch in the corner of the row. He has since asked the Speaker, on his own account, to reassign his seat.
The two Jaffna politicians have carried their rivalry well beyond the chamber. At a recent District Coordinating Committee meeting in Tellippalai, Mr. Ramanathan called Mr. Ponnambalam a “dog,” among other epithets, and the pair have traded accusations on social media and at public events for months.
The Speaker’s Office has not responded publicly to either man’s request — leaving the two lawmakers, for now, exactly where they started: side by side.
