ECONOMYNEXT \u2013 A Sri Lanka legislator has voiced strong disappointment that the President\u2019s budget speech failed to make a single mention of the Tamil national question.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is very unfortunate that in His Excellency the President\u2019s speech, there has not been a single word mentioned about the Tamil national question. Not a single word,\u201d Shanakiyan Rasamanickam said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA budget speech generally, is a policy direction of the government for the next year. The budget speech is not only a statement of the country\u2019s fiscal position or the economy\u2019s position. It is the country\u2019s, the government\u2019s, plan, or what the government plans to do the following year. That\u2019s a policy statement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former presidents would at least mention the Tamil question even if it was not resolved, he said.<\/p>\n
Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe in his speech, in his policy statement, he would mention: \u201cThe Tamil national question must be resolved,\u201d Rasamanickam said.<\/p>\n
Former Presidents Maithripala Sirisena and Gotabaya Rajapaksa also mentioned that the national ethnic question must be resolved, he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery President, every country\u2019s Head of State, in their policy statements, have acknowledged the fact that there is an unresolved national issue, the Tamil national question, that it needs to be resolved. Various governments have proposed various mechanisms; none of them have succeeded, but at least it was mentioned.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s budget made allocations for the Office of Missing Persons, and the Office of Reparations. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut the domestic mechanism is a mechanism that the victim community has rejected. So you all are allocating money to a mechanism where the victim community is not going to be part of.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year\u2019s budget 1 billion was allocated to be spent on the Trincomalee and Jaffna airports. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhere was that 1 billion for the Trincomalee and Jaffna airports spent last year?\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThe trajectory of this government, Honourable Deputy Speaker, is worrying to me. It\u2019s really worrying to me. Because if the objective is to say that there is no Tamil national question, if the objective is to say that you all have resolved any ethnic issue that this country faced, then Honourable Deputy Speaker, then I think the Tamil people will teach this government a very, very, very harsh lesson in the future.\u201d (Colombo\/Nov13\/2026)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ECONOMYNEXT \u2013 A Sri Lanka legislator has voiced strong disappointment that the President\u2019s budget speech failed to make a single mention of the Tamil national question. \u201cIt is very unfortunate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sripuwath.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}