By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : A radical Sinhalese Marxist party wants India to clarify if it influenced the Sri Lankan government’s move to finally implement a controversial constitutional amendment in a bid to resolve the ethnic conflict.
“We don’t know whether India influenced the decision. But in 1987 India forced Sri Lanka to accept the India-Sri Lanka Accord and go for a constitutional amendment,” Somawansa Amarasinghe, who heads the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JPV), told IANS.
“We want India to clarify whether this time too it had forced the government to accept the 13th amendment as the solution to the conflict,” he said.
The 13th amendment was the first serious bid to dent Sri Lanka’s unitary constitution by devolving powers to its provinces, including the Tamil-majority northeast.
Amarasinghe said: “We have always opposed the 13th amendment and we will do so now also. We opposed it in 1987 because India thrust it on us. We believed then, as indeed we do believe now, that solutions for Sri Lanka’s problems would have to be indigenous. We have to seek a solution that will suit us and not India or any other country.”
The All Party Representative Committee (APRC), tasked with unveiling suggestions to push Sri Lanka towards a federal set up, last week recommended the full implementation of the 13th amendment after President Mahinda Rajapaksa expressed a wish for such a suggestion.
“Perhaps the president wants to please India but this is not the way to please India. If he wants to please India, there are other ways of doing so, ways in which both countries will gain 50:50,” Amarasinghe said.
“The JVP believes that India’s main concern in its dealings with Sri Lanka is its security. We should guarantee that our actions would not be prejudicial to India’s security interests. And India must approach us with true friendship based on give and take,” the JVP leader said.
Amarasinghe mocked Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) for swearing by the 13th amendment now, forgetting that it had organised street demonstrations against the India-Sri Lanka pact in 1987.
That amendment, of 1987, led to the formation of elected provincial councils, unification of the Tamil-speaking northern and eastern wings into a single entity and the grant of a measure of autonomy to Sri Lanka’s nine provinces.
The Sinhalese, who make up more than 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s population, opposed the India-Sri Lanka Accord because they saw it as an Indian imposition.
Then president J.R. Jayewardene used his brute majority in parliament to get the 13th amendment passed amid protests by the opposition.
Subsequently, Sri Lankan politicians across the board accepted the amendment and the provincial councils.