The no-confidence motion against Speaker Jagath Wickramaratne will not be taken up for debate on Tuesday 3 November, Leader of the House Minister Bimal Rathnayake said on Friday afternoon — because, on the government’s account, the Opposition did not hand in a revised motion conforming to Parliament’s Standing Orders before 28 October.
Hiru News reported the statement at 1.51 p.m. Colombo time. It is the clearest indication yet that the debate fixed a week ago has slipped again.
The morning position, and the afternoon outcome
Two hours before Rathnayake spoke, the Daily Mirror reported that a “stormy” party leaders meeting was expected on Friday, with the two sides set to decide the motion’s fate.
Chief Opposition Whip Gayantha Karunathilaka told the paper the Opposition would not give ground:
“We will inform our stand at today’s party leaders meeting. We will tell them that we will stick with the original [motion] and will not be amending the motion.”
The government’s position, as the Daily Mirror set it out, was that the motion had to be amended because parts of it would have a sub judice effect — a matter before the courts cannot be debated in the House. The Opposition’s answer was that the hearing of the case filed against the Speaker has not yet begun, so nothing is sub judice.
Read in sequence, the two filings describe a standoff and its result: the Opposition refused to redraft, and the government says the deadline for a redraft has now passed.
What the government says the deadline was
Rathnayake’s stated ground is procedural rather than political. On Hiru’s account, the motion was required to be amended to conform to Parliament’s Standing Orders and submitted before 28 October, and that was not done.
That date matters because it falls before Friday’s party leaders meeting. On the government’s telling, by the time the two sides sat down to argue about diluting the motion, the window to file the amended text had already closed.
Neither filing explains who set the 28 October deadline, or when. Nothing in this desk’s archive of the motion records it being communicated, and the Opposition’s public position as late as Friday morning was that it was still deciding what to tell the party leaders meeting — not that it had already missed a cut-off. Whether the Opposition accepts that such a deadline existed is not reported.
The allegations
The motion carries 50 allegations against the Speaker. The Daily Mirror lists among them:
- Renting an apartment rather than occupying the official residence near the parliamentary complex, in violation of the establishment code, with Rs 760,000 paid in rent for the leased apartment
- Feeding his personal secretary without the due payments being made
- Partiality in handling House matters
The paper adds a separate detail: an inventory of the Speaker’s official residence that went missing a month ago still remains missing.
How the motion reached this point
| Date | Stage |
|---|---|
| 5–8 October | Opposition begins collecting signatures |
| 9 October | Motion handed to the Secretary General with 44 signatures and 50 allegations |
| 16 October | Government group proposes referring the motion to the Attorney General |
| Later in October | Debate adjourned indefinitely |
| 27 October | Rejected on sub judice grounds; a revised motion listed for 3 November |
| 28 October | SJB’s S. M. Marikkar says the government asked the Opposition to dilute the motion and it refused |
| 28 October | Government’s stated deadline for a Standing-Orders-compliant revised motion |
| 30 October | Opposition confirms it will not amend; Leader of the House says there will be no debate on 3 November |
The 27 October listing was always for a revised motion “to be submitted by the Opposition” — a text that had not been handed in when the agenda was set. Friday’s developments indicate it was never handed in.
A caution about one sentence
The Daily Mirror’s own text says the Opposition is “not prepared to dilute the motion as requested by the Opposition.” That is self-contradictory — the Opposition cannot be asking itself to water down its own motion. Every other account, including Marikkar’s on 28 October and the surrounding paragraphs of the same filing, has the government making that request. This desk reads it as a slip for “as requested by the ruling party” and has not reproduced the phrase as written.
The same filing quotes Karunathilaka saying the Opposition will “stick with the original meeting”, where the sense is plainly motion. The word has been bracketed in the quotation above.
Not reported
Neither filing says what happens to the motion now — whether it can be relisted on a later date, whether the Opposition can still submit an amended text, or whether the motion lapses. Neither reports what was actually decided at Friday’s party leaders meeting, as distinct from the positions the two sides brought into it.
No response from the Speaker is reported, and no Opposition reaction to Rathnayake’s statement had been filed at the time of writing. Neither source says which of the 50 allegations the government considers sub judice, nor which case against the Speaker is said to be pending.
On sourcing: the two filings are complementary rather than independent confirmations of one fact — the Daily Mirror carries the Opposition’s morning position, Hiru carries the government’s afternoon statement, and neither outlet reports the other’s material. A check of the NewsFirst and EconomyNext output on Friday found no filing on either development, and Ada Derana has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for roughly 50 consecutive days.
