Government Must Also Consider Ethnic Minority Concerns
Jehan Perera
The government is getting ready to pass a 19th Amendment to the constitution as an urgent bill. For the past several weeks, the government has been engaging in internal debate about the powers of the provincial councils and how they should be reduced. The urgency arises from the government’s much debated decision to finally hold the long-postponed elections for the Northern Provincial Council in September. The proposed constitutional amendment seeks to take away the power of two (or more) adjacent provincial councils to decide to merge together to form one merged province. The merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces has been a sore point for successive governments and Sinhalese opinion leaders. They see the possibility of a merged North East province to be a threat to the unity of the country. Such a province would have a non-Sinhalese majority, and being about 30 percent of the country, could also become a viable independent state in which the majority of the population would be Tamil and Muslim.