Colombo, July 28: Sri Lanka’s Tamil-dominated Jaffna district will have its parliamentary seats slashed from nine to six as the Election Commission said the region had witnessed number of voters dropping to half the previous figure of 700,000.
The officials said the fall in number of parliamentarians was due to the country’s complicated proportional representation system of elections.
Vowing to oppose the move, the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance (TNA) which recently swept the local election in the province, alleged that the fall in voters had been due to people being forced to leave their homes due to a three-decade long ethnic violence.
“People are still returning from India after the end of the war. The diaspora still feel unsafe to return to Jaffna but when they decide to return you will find that they will not be able to exercise their franchise,” Suresh Premachandran, the senior TNA MP said.
Elections commissioner’s department officials said that the Jaffna district will have just six MPs representing the voters as opposed to the current number of nine MPs.
The decision has been made in view of the decreased number of voters in Jaffna. The current voter figure dropped to just over 300,000 from the previous 700,000.
During the height of the military conflict in the north and east when the LTTE waged a war to create a separate homeland for the Sri Lanka Tamils, a large number of Jaffna residents fled the area, either migrated mostly to West or located themselves elsewhere in the country, mostly in the capital Colombo. The three seats slashed in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna district would be added one each to the southern districts of Ratnapura, Matara and Kurunegala districts in the south of the country, officials said.
The number of registered voters in these districts had increased, officials added.
The national parliament has 225 seats, which will not change. It will remain at 196 members elected and 29 members appointed based on the national proportional representation of the cumulative votes polled by each political party.
In the first post-LTTE provincial elections in the north that came in more than 25 years, the pro-LTTE TNA emerged as a major force, bagging two-thirds of the council seats, even as President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s coalition swept polls in other parts of the country.
—PTI