COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A senior government minister has welcomed a new political platform uniting six parties that represent Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking communities, casting it not as a minority initiative but as a judgment on the opposition leader, Sajith Premadasa.
The parties — representing Sri Lankan Tamils, Muslims, and Indian Tamils — announced last week that they would work together on constitutional reform, the long-delayed provincial council elections, and land disputes affecting their communities. They called it a common platform, not an electoral alliance, and said each would keep its own identity, ideology, and policy positions.
Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation Minister Lal Kantha offered a different reading.
“The unity of Tamil-speaking political parties in seeking solutions to the fundamental problems of the Tamil people is welcome,” he told reporters after an event in Kandy.
“Having realised in advance that there is no longer any benefit in joining forces with the Leader of the Opposition, the Tamil and Muslim political parties represented in Parliament have come together through a common consensus,” he said. “This is a good development.”
Mr. Premadasa, he added, “no longer has a political future.” Tamil and Muslim leaders had grasped that staying with him would block them from delivering development to the voters who elected them, the minister said.
The platform brings together the Sri Lanka People’s Congress, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, the Ceylon Workers’ Congress, the Tamil Progressive Alliance, the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, or ITAK, and the Democratic Tamil National Alliance, or DTNA. It was announced at a joint news conference at a hotel in Colombo, where Rishad Bathiudeen of the People’s Congress, Rauff Hakeem of the Muslim Congress, Jeevan Thondaman of the Workers’ Congress, Mano Ganesan of the Tamil Progressive Alliance, M. A. Sumanthiran, ITAK’s general secretary, and Selvam Adaikkalanathan and Surendran Gurusamy of the dTNA appeared together.
Their joint statement set out three priorities: a new constitution with meaningful devolution and power-sharing; provincial council elections, delayed for years; and settlements to land disputes affecting Tamil, Muslim, and Indian Tamil communities. The forum, the parties said, would let them trade views, find common ground and coordinate without surrendering their separate ideologies.
The breadth of the grouping is also its problem. Critics and political observers have asked whether parties that disagree on the constitutional and territorial foundations of the Sri Lankan state can sustain a common project at all.
The sharpest fault line is the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. ITAK and the parties inside the dTNA have long backed unification, treating the North and East as the traditional homeland of the Tamil-speaking people. Muslim parties, whose base is concentrated in the East, have opposed a merger or registered deep reservations about it. Nothing in the platform resolves that.
Sceptics have read the initiative as expediency, and they have a pointed precedent to work with: ITAK and the DTNA, rooted in the same Northern and Eastern Tamil electorate, have been trying to form a broader Tamil alliance of their own for months, and have yet to sign anything. If parties competing for the same voters cannot combine, the argument runs, a platform stretching across Tamil, Muslim, and Indian Tamil politics has a longer distance to travel.
Turning to farmers’ disputes, the minister accused Mr. Premadasa of repeatedly trying to politicise grievances against the government. The administration had met farmers’ basic demands, he said, including subsidised fertiliser and money allocated for paddy purchases. He also questioned Mr. Premadasa’s record on farmers during the previous “good governance” administration.
