Opposition MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam told Parliament on Friday that the President’s 2027 Budget speech did not contain a single reference to the Tamil national question.
“It is very unfortunate that in His Excellency the President’s speech, there has not been a single word mentioned about the Tamil national question. Not a single word,” he said, EconomyNext reported during the second reading debate.
The argument
Rasamanickam’s case rests on what a budget speech is for. “A budget speech generally is a policy direction of the government for the next year,” he said. “The budget speech is not only a statement of the country’s fiscal position or the economy’s position. It is the government’s plan, or what the government plans to do the following year. That’s a policy statement.”
He argued that previous heads of state had acknowledged the issue even where they did not resolve it, naming Ranil Wickremesinghe, Maithripala Sirisena and Gotabaya Rajapaksa as presidents whose policy statements referred to the national or ethnic question.
“Every President, every country’s Head of State, in their policy statements, have acknowledged the fact that there is an unresolved national issue,” he said. “Various governments have proposed various mechanisms; none of them have succeeded, but at least it was mentioned.”
On the transitional justice allocations
The MP acknowledged that the Budget makes allocations to the Office on Missing Persons and the Office for Reparations, but said the money goes to a structure the affected community does not accept.
“The domestic mechanism is a mechanism that the victim community has rejected,” he said. “So you all are allocating money to a mechanism where the victim community is not going to be part of.”
A question about last year’s money
He also asked what had happened to an allocation in the previous budget: “Last year’s budget, 1 billion was allocated to be spent on the Trincomalee and Jaffna airports. Where was that 1 billion for the Trincomalee and Jaffna airports spent last year?”
The filing does not record an answer from the government.
The warning
“The trajectory of this government is worrying to me,” Rasamanickam said. “Because if the objective is to say that there is no Tamil national question, if the objective is to say that you all have resolved any ethnic issue that this country faced, then I think the Tamil people will teach this government a very, very, very harsh lesson in the future.”
A note on sourcing
This report carries a single source. EconomyNext was the only verified newsroom to have filed the remarks at the time of writing; a keyword sweep of the Daily Mirror, Hiru News and NewsFirst rails returned nothing on them. Budget debate speeches by opposition backbenchers are frequently covered by one outlet only. The quotations above are reproduced from the EconomyNext filing.
Not reported
The filing does not give a government response, does not say which minister was in the chair, and does not state the size of the Office on Missing Persons and Office for Reparations allocations in the 2027 Budget. It does not record whether other Tamil parliamentarians made the same point during the debate, and it gives no reply to the Trincomalee and Jaffna airport question.
The 2027 Budget’s own airport allocations, which this desk reported on Thursday, cover Bandaranaike International, Mattala and Ratmalana — the filing on those does not mention Trincomalee or Jaffna.