Navin questions UNP stand

11 June 2010 05:08 am

By Jamila Najmuddin                                                           VIDEO


Government Member of Parliament and former UNP member Navin Dissanayaka, in a live interview with Daily Mirror online, questioned the stand taken by the UNP working committee not to remove UNP leader Ranil Wickramasingha despite having the authority to do so.

Dissanayaka noted that the internal democratic structure of the party allows anybody to get up in the working committee and ask Mr. Wickramasingha to step down and questioned as to why the current working committee is not exercising that right.

“Technically if you look at the working committee, they can very well ask Mr. Wickramasingha to leave. The fact that they have not done that raises a question mark as to how far the working committee wants him to leave. There are 70 odd members in the working committee so doesn’t anyone have the backbone to get up and tell what’s happening in the party and ask Mr. Wickramasingha to step down?” Dissanayaka asked.

Dissanayaka said that as an individual he has nothing personal against the UNP leader and the only difference he had with him was where Nuwera Eliya was concerned as he felt that district was not being looked after by the UNP administration at that time.

“Secondly in 2005 when Mr. Wickramasingha lost the Presidential Election, I felt the reform process in the party should have been more genuine and I felt that where the 17 of us who left were concerned, if he had certainly made an attempt to stop us from leaving the party, that could have happened,” he said.