COLOMBO: The first chief minister of Sri Lanka's Northern Province, C V Wigneswaran on Wednesday resigned from the country's main Tamil party and formed a new political alliance, as he slammed the Sirisena government and the party for failing to address the issues of war-affected Tamils.
Wigneswaran, who completed his five-year term as the northern council's first chief minister on Tuesday, said the new alliance will be named the Tamil People's Alliance (Tamil Makkal Kootani) and will consist of a group of Tamil political parties.
"The new party will uphold the fundamentals of Tamil nationalism," said the 79-year-old former judge of the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, in his final speech at the last sitting of the Northern Provincial Council, which was elected to power in 2013 after the post-war polls, Wigneswaran slammed the TNA members in the Constitutional Assembly, the body to form a new constitution, and accused them of acting arbitrarily without consulting the council on the issues of Tamils.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is the main party representing northern Tamils. He also attacked the Sirisena government for its "failure" to deliver Tamils what they had been promised in 2015 including a new constitution to address Tamil's demand for political independence.
"The good governance government (of Sirisena) which came to power in 2015 was no different to the previous governments except some symbolic steps were taken to appease the international community," he said, adding that some 60,000 acres of Tamil civilian lands were still under military and government control.
"I sticked to the core Tamil demands - a Tamil nation of merged north and east for a federal administration for which I received an overwhelming mandate," Wigneswaran said.
The five-year term of the Northern Provincial Council ended on Tuesday. The first ever Northern Provincial Council was elected to office in 2013 and Wigneswaran became its chief minister. Previously, the North and the East had a merged council with the East in terms of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of 1987.
The Accord as a result of the Indian intervention then saw Sri Lanka's nine provinces having elected provincial councils. The TNA had swept the first ever election to NPC with Wigneswaran becoming the chief minister with over 80 per cent of the vote.
Since 2015, Wigneswaran's differences with the TNA hierarchy was surfacing in public when he began towing a hard nationalist line as opposed to the TNA's policy of consensus for reconciliation. The TNA supported President Maithripala Sirisena against Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential election mainly to win political rights of Tamils in a new constitution.
The Tamil public discontent against Sirisena government's slowness in delivery of its promises strengthened Wigneswaran's hardline. The Tamil nationalists were rallying behind Wigneswaran as opposed to the moderate TNA.
Wigneswaran's Tamil People's Alliance is the second political party to be formed by the Tamil nationalists in recent weeks. Ananthy Saseetharan, a Wigneswaran follower in the NPC last week said she had formed The Eelam Tamil Self Rule Organisation.
She said her party's aim was to win self-determination of Tamil through a federal set up for the north. She accused the government of duping the Tamils after having pledged so much in 2015 leading to the election.