Sri Lanka’s disenchanted Tamils are divided this election

Sri Lankan Tamils face a dilemma in the presidential election, torn between a potential winner and a symbolic Tamil candidate.

Sri Lanka’s northern Tamil voters are torn this presidential election, between a candidate who may win, and one who will certainly lose.

While some are backing one of the frontrunners among the Sinhalese candidates, others have decided to support a Tamil candidate. Every voter knows well that “Tamil common candidate” P. Ariyanethiran — fielded jointly by some political and civil society groups based in the island nation’s north and east — cannot win, given the numeric reality of Sri Lanka’s electoral map. The Sinhalese majority make up around 75 % of the country that was torn apart by bitter ethnic conflict between the two communities. All the same, many Tamil voters see him personifying their grievances.

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“After the civil war ended in 2009, our people hoped that even if their political rights were denied, they could live with some security and dignity. Listening to our [Tamil] political leadership, they backed different candidates in past elections. What did we gain?” asks Fr. Santhiyogu Marcus, President of the Mannar Citizens Committee, an influential civil society group in the coastal district.

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For at least two decades Tamils had a straightforward choice and delivered a bloc vote — except when the rebel Tamil Tigers enforced a boycott in 2005 — in the presidential elections. They despised the Rajapaksa clan, accused of serious human rights violations during and after the civil war. They emphatically rejected Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010 and 2015, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2019. The main Tamil party representing Tamils of the north and east, too, invariably backed the chief challenger of the Rajapaksas in every national election.

However, this is the first election campaign in 20 years that is not dominated by a Rajapaksa surname. Two years after a people’s uprising evicted Mr. Gotabaya from office in 2022, when the island faced a crushing economic crisis, Sri Lanka’s political terrain looks starkly different. The September 21 election, the first poll since, has three candidates at the fore – incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe, opposition politicians Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, one of whom is expected to win.