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UPFA vows to restore Jaffna’s glory
First off the mark to launch its campaign for the long-awaited Northern Provincial Council elections, the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) vowed yesterday to “take Jaffna back to its glory days”. A spokesman for the alliance told the Sunday Times the UPFA would not be stampeded into nominating a chief minister from its list of candidates despite the TNA’s surprise decision on Monday to nominate former Supreme Court judge C.V. Wigneswaran as its candidate for the post of chief minister.
“Our party traditionally tries out its candidates during the campaign and nominates a leader after the election,” said Angajan Ramanathan, who was given pride of place at the UPFA campaign launch in Jaffna on Friday and looks set to become Chief Minister if the party wins the September poll.
Former LTTE spokesman Daya Master was among a handful of people to speak at the launch and he is likely to be on the list of candidates to be announced on July 25. Nine names will be chosen for the Jaffna district from 52 UPFA applicants interviewed in Colombo over the past fortnight.
Busy Temple Road in central Jaffna town was closed off for the campaign launch on Friday at UPFA headquarters, with seats for the public arranged in rows across the road. A huge poster festooned the front of the building, and around it were posters showing Mr. Ramanathan and President Mahinda Rajapaksa together, with the slogan: “We will be together under one umbrella – it will be a bright future for Jaffna.” Mr .Ramanathan, the SLFP’s chief district organiser in Jaffna, said that about 750 people attended the meeting but the Sunday Times believes the figure was closer to about 350, the estimate of Daya Master.
The former LTTE spokesman, trim in a striped blue shirt, gave a broad smile when the Sunday Times asked him if he was excited at the start of a new phase in his chequered life. Addressing the crowd on Friday, he said plainly, “I am an ex-LTTE member but now I am with the Government, and I ask for your support in the election. I met about five ex-LTTE members at the meeting,” he said yesterday. “I told them to come and work with me and they agreed.”
A Muslim candidate, M.N Shiraz also spoke at the meeting. The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, which is allied to the UPFA at the national level, has decided to field its own candidates at the NPC poll. Minister and UPFA General Secretary Susil Premajayantha, who came from Colombo to address the meeting, said: “We don’t hold elections to lose – but we win through free and fair means”.
The UPFA is the only game in town as far as a public election presence. Large posters of a smiling President Rajapaksa have gone up all over Jaffna, and a poster of Namal Rajapaksa adorns the SLFP Youth Wing office. The other parties are hard to spot. A few faded posters of EPDP leader Douglas Devanananda are pasted on some buildings. There are no UNP posters.
Strangely, there is scant public sign of a TNA campaign yet although that is expected to change next week when the party announces its list of candidates. Jaffna TNA MPs Mavai Senathiraja — who had been expected to be named chief ministerial candidate — and E. Saravanabhavan were unavailable for comment despite repeated efforts to contact them.
A TNA list was expected to be announced this week but is reportedly bogged down in party debate. Thirty-year-old Mr. Ramanathan stood as a UPFA candidate in Jaffna for the 2010 parliamentary elections. He said yesterday he saw a huge difference in the willingness of Jaffna citizens to work for the UPFA between then and now.
“I know the difficulty of getting people to stand as candidates for the party,” he said. “But things now, in 2013, are different. All the people who have put themselves forward as candidates want to be part of the governing process. They want to participate in the development of Jaffna that they see is taking place all around them. They want to give even more to the people of Jaffna.”
Asked what he saw as a priority for the north, he spoke energetically. “We talk about how good our people were 30 to 40 years ago. We had good education, we had jobs. Now we have lost our high standards of education, businesses and our quality of life. “What we need is to get back to our glory days. We need education. The Tamils have traditionally seen education as a way to get ahead. The original cause of our troubles was the education quota (that saw Tamil students getting limited entry to universities). Now we really need a quota again — a quota that would see more Jaffna students entering higher education. Only through education and hard work will we prosper.”
“I am not just a person of words,” he told the crowd at Friday’s campaign launch. “The people of the north know that I am a person of action.”
(Additional reporting Skanda Gunasekera)
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