'I am Ranil Wickremesinghe, not Ranil Rajapaksa', asserts Sri Lanka president before India visit

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe on Tuesday made an assertive statement when he met Sri Lanka's Tamil parties over the issue of the contentious 13th amendment. This was his first meeting with the Tamil parties in Sri Lanka after becoming the president last year.

President Wickremesinghe assured Tamil parties that the 13th Amendment will be fully implemented but without police powers.

This didn't go down well with some of the Tamil parties and Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP MA Sumanthiram told the president that former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa had promised to implement the amendment in full in the past.

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“I am Ranil Wickremesinghe and not Ranil Rajapaksa. I am not bound by what President Rajapaksa did,” said Wickremesinghe on this as quoted by the Sri Lankan news outlet Daily FT.

Wickremesinghe's statement came just a day before his two-day visit to India.

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“The president outlined plans for devolution, stating that the 13th Amendment with full powers except for police powers as outlined under List 1 (the subjects reserved for provincial councils) will be implemented, including specified functions in List 3 in the provincial councils list subject to agreement among political parties in Parliament,” the president’s office said in a statement.

The List 3 entails provincial powers subjected to concurrence with the Centre.

The 13th Amendment

The 13th Amendment is the outcome of an agreement reached between India and Sri Lanka following the deal of 1987. It talks about the devolution of land and police powers to the provinces in Sri Lanka.

India has been insisting that Sri Lanka should fully implement the 13th Amendment as the answer to the Tamil demand for political autonomy for the Northern and Eastern regions.

There has always been tension between minority Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka with the majority Sinhalese. There is a long history of failed negotiations to end Tamilclaims of discrimination.

An Indian effort in 1987 that created the system of a joint provincial council for the Tamil-dominated north and east faltered as the Tamils claimed it fell short of full autonomy.

Tamils say that not enough power had been devolved to the provincial councils to make them meaningful.

Wickremesinghe himself tried an aborted constitutional effort between 2015-19 which too came to be scuttled by the hardline majority politicians.

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The demand for autonomy for Tamils has existed since the country's independence from Britain in 1948. The demand and the tension between the communities started a bloody armed conflict in the 1970s.

Hardliners in the Tamil communities in Sri Lanka formed LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). LTTE ran a military campaign for a separate Tamil country for nearly 30 years before its collapse in 2009 following Sri Lankan Army's campaign against LTTE. The leader of the militant group V Prabhakaran was killed.

(With inputs from agencies)

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