Minorities in Sri Lanka are living in challenging times and it would be a blessing if during the period of the current Presidency changes occur in the life of the ruled, in particular the minorities to move the country towards a fair and progressive era.
Since 1948 independence, Sri Lanka has been ruled in turn by leaders that came from the two majoritarian parties, the SLFP and the UNP, promising much, but in reality, delivering very little to the people to deprive the minorities of their basic rights that forced many uprisings.
Though succession occurred on many occasions of ruling elites and despite many pledges by them to resolve economic and social issues that divide communities the country is yet to see any such issues successfully resolved.
The rulers lead the ruled by their nose with out resolving their issues for decades. This lead to many uprisings and a bloody cruel civil-war that lasted many decades. The war was brought to finish in 2009, without resolving any of the issues and most affected were the Tamil speaking minorities.
In this same period for the Tamil speaking minorities that started with couple of political parties in 1948 are today splintered into many tens of groups of various compositions with all claiming and strangling each other to get their peoples issues resolved by the rulers, at the top of the pack is the Tamil National Alliance (TNA).
A decade of negative peace passed and now in the year 2020 the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) are in the forefront to wrest a settlement from the rulers. But the rest in the groups, without helping TNA are constitutionally finding fault with their efforts to get resolution of issues of their people.
With the 2020 General Election due on 5 August this year, the splinter groups are presenting their candidates for selection to be their representatives in parliament. There are 7,452 candidates from 70 political parties and 313 independent groups in the fray and 16,263,885 voters are eligible to vote on August 5.
It is the same situation prevailing in North and East provinces, though most of the splintered groups fielding candidates will end up as also rans. Yet will deprive TNA from gaining more seats than the number they had in the last parliament.
In this scenario, the Tamils in the North and East provinces must use franchise wisely, accepting that representative selected could only succeed as a force, if they act as a group to make them more productive in parliament. For this to happen, every citizen must pick to cast their vote from their ballot paper a quality TNA candidate.
Northern Breeze 