Wit and repartee on PM's northern tour

Afour- day tour of the north by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to expedite development projects there also saw some wit and repartee. He was at the District Secretariat, chairing a review meeting on various development projects. Many were the complaints he heard.

One of the participants complained that the Wildlife Conservation Department was periodically issuing Gazette notifications, “arbitrarily” declaring both state land and civilian- owned lands as sanctuaries. This was particularly around the Chundikulam bird sanctuary and the department was doing so using a Google map, the Premier was told.

“This is not the Kuweni (a queen of ancient Lanka) era. The people’s needs have to be attended to without subjecting them to bureaucratic hurdles,” the Premier declared. As a result, the matter has now come under review.

As one subject after another came up for discussion, Education State Minister Vijayakala Maheswaran, known for her controversial remarks, declared that politicians visiting the north should give up hopping from place to place in helicopters. If they wanted to see areas where development was scarce, roads were bad and culverts were damaged, they should travel by road.

“That is why we have a State Minister from the North,” the Prime Minister quipped.

As the visit got under way, there were some distractions, too. One was a news conference held by the fiery Ananthi Sashitharan, a former member of the Northern Provincial Council and now attached to the Samurdhi Unit of the Kilinochchi District Secretariat.

She heaped strong criticism on the Tamil National Alliance ( TNA) and charged there was “genocide” of the Tamil people. She is the wife of Velayutha Sashitharan alias Elilan, a senior LTTE cadre who is “missing”. She contested on the TNA ticket and won the second highest number of votes after Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran at the Northern PC polls.