President Maithripala Sirisena will appoint a committee chaired by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to obtain inputs from minority parties and suggest changes to the Delimitation Committee’s final report, Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) High Command Member and Parliamentarian M.H.M. Salman told the Sunday Observer.
The SLMC, like the other parties of the minorities, initially opposed the Provincial Councils Elections Amendment Act, citing that they were not consulted beforehand, not given adequate time to study its impact on their communities and the wrong procedural method that was adopted for its passage, M.H.M.Salman said.
He was commenting on the SLMC’s present stance on the Act as some senior party members have recently made contentious statements on the Act saying it had unjustifiably delayed the PC polls beyond the due date.
There is no election law in place as of now to hold the PC polls and it might take quite some time for the delimitation committee to submit its report after re-demarcating borders of constituencies and that has to be passed with a two-third majority in Parliament, Salman said.
The position of the SLMC is that the delimitation process should be expedited so that the PC Polls could be held soon and that the process should be just and fair by the minorities, to ensure their proportionate and adequate representation, he said.
The party position on the unification of the North and the East, is that in the event of unification under the proposed new constitution, or any other democratic procedural methods provided for in the constitution, the SLMC would want a separate unit of devolution, by bringing all Muslim majority areas in the North and the East together to form an independent and autonomous unit of devolution, he said.
The SLMC and other minority parties got the 60 percent First-Past-the-Post (FPP) and 40 percent Proportional Representation (PR) proposed in the original Bill replaced with 50 percent on each and also got suggestions on more multi-member constituencies, to ensure representation to the various minority communities, incorporated in the Bill, Salman said.