Sri Lanka polls | Most Tamil votes go to Premadasa, not to ‘common Tamil candidate’

In a slap to Tamil nationalist politics, most Tamils in Sri Lanka voted for main Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, a Sinhalese who came second in the presidential race, and not to the “common Tamil candidate”.

Data given out by the Election Commission show that Premadasa, son of former president Ranasinghe Premadasa who was assassinated by the Tamil Tigers, won the highest share of the Tamil minority votes.

According to local reports, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who defeated Premadasa, fared poorly in Tamil areas. This was expected as he decided not to even campaign in Tamil districts.

Premadasa scores big among Tamils

Premadasa cumulatively secured over 40 per cent of the votes across the island’s Tamil-majority north, multi-racial east and the central hill areas, home to Tamils of Indian origin who work mostly in tea estates.

Premadasa, who heads the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), got more votes than P Ariyanethiran, a former Tamil MP from Batticaloa who was fielded by some political actors and civil society groups as a “common Tamil candidate”.

Ariyanethiran got over 200,000 votes in the north and east, half of them in Jaffna, the Tamil heartland. He finished fifth among the 38 presidential candidates.

Premadasa and 13th amendment

Premadasa was the only mainstream presidential candidate who publicly promised to implement the 13th amendment to the constitution which followed the 1987 India-Sri Lankan agreement and which gave provincial councils as a symbol of political and administrative devolution.

Ariyanethiran knew that he would never win the presidential contest and claimed that votes for him would be a “vote for liberation” and would make “it clear that the Tamil national issue remains unresolved”.

Tamil party splits over Ariyanethiran

When the dominant Tamil political party, the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), pledged support for Premadasa, a section of the party broke away and campaigned for Ariyanethiran, who also secured the backing of sections of the Tamil diaspora.

While supporters of the Tamil candidate claimed they had lost faith in the Sri Lankan political leadership dominated by the Sinhalese, others warned that such a stand would weaken the bargaining power of the Tamil community.

Sumanthiran congratulates Tamil voters

Posting on social media platform X after Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected the president, ITAK leader and MP MA Sumanthiran congratulated the Marxist leader for “an impressive win, achieved without recourse to racial or religious chauvinism”.

At the same time, he thanked the Tamil people in the north and east, where the Tamil Tigers waged a separatist war for a quarter century, who voted for Premadasa while “rejecting others”.