This has reference to the letter contributed by Raja M. B. Senanayake and published in your journal of the 8th September.

The banning of ethnic and religious parties is an absolute necessity in the national interest. Countries like the UK operate such ban. Of course, as Mr. Senanayake contends, attempts to circumvent the ban will be made. That will come to light when such parties function and then the voters will rightly oppose them and even seek legal remedy to stop them. However, ethnic and religious favouritism will continued to a certain extent as in the past even at examinations in regard to which Mr. Senanayake may have experience. Nevertheless such favouritism and bias needs to be curbed and the ban on ethnic political parties, will help the process.

Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s decision to make Sinhala the official language was not wrong. Continuing with English as the language of administration after independence was not the proper thing, despite English being the world’s unofficial Lingua Franca, a language used by those whose native languages are different though Chinese Mandarin and Spanish surpass English as spoken languages. Other countries too did the same. What went wrong is the failure to give Tamil equal status in the context of the situation in our country. If parity of status was given, the language problem would not have surfaced and the Tamils would have learned Sinhala whilst the Sinhalese would have learned Tamil. On the other hand downgrading the study of English was a wrong step.

The Government under the Premiership of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike did not forcibly take over the denominational schools. The private schools that could not function without government financial subsidies were voluntarily handed over to the Government and that applied to Buddhist schools as well. In fact it is the Buddhists who were deprived of their schools. However there are religious denominational schools still receiving government funds which needs to discontinued. The admission of non-catholic students to catholic denominational schools is being limited to 10%. Is that democratic? Does that not amount to religious discrimination? Do such practices exist in other countries? Mr. Senanayake could perhaps give the answers.

I do not agree with Mr. Senanayake’s view that the present President came to power on an appeal to Sinhala nationalism. He never raised the ethnic issue at the hustings. It is his promise to end terrorism that attracted the voters towards him.

The LTTE did not trust the UNP leader whilst the terrorist leadership expected Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa to be a weak President with no international backing, making it open for Prabakaran to achieve his Eelam dream with the covert backing of the West which was to establish a separate State linking Sri Lanka, Tamilnadu and Malaysia. The UNP leader was unpopular over his handling LTTE terrorism. His wrong utterances and weak approach towards the LTTE turned the voters against him.

The President proved his metal. He kept his promise and defeated the LTTE and terrorism. The nation is indebted to him for that.