A town-wide hartal shut Chavakachcheri on Friday as traders and business owners downed shutters in protest at the removal of the Urban Council's deputy chairperson, G. Kishore, by the Northern Province's centrally appointed governor, in a move condemned as an assault on Tamil democratic representation.
The protest, held at the Chavakachcheri bus stand, followed Extraordinary Gazette notifications through which the governor, Nagalingam Vethanayahan, stripped Kishore of both the deputy chairmanship and his seat on the council.
The same week, the governor removed the Vavuniya Municipal Council mayor, Sundaralingam Kandeepan, from his office and council membership. Both dismissals followed inquiries by a retired district judge, Kandiah Ariyanayagam, whom the governor had appointed to examine the affairs of the two councils, though neither notification set out the detailed grounds for the removals. Kishore had reportedly drawn the governor's action after criticising a circular issued by the Commissioner of Local Government during a council session and tossing a copy of it aside as he spoke.
Addressing the media, the PLOTE leader D. Siddarthan described the governor's actions as a threat to democracy, saying that, to his knowledge, no democratically elected representative had previously been removed from office in such a manner.
Any removal of an elected member, he argued, should be carried out through the courts and the Election Commission, not by executive fiat.
The governor, he said, did not possess the authority to remove an elected representative, and was claiming to exercise powers vested in a minister under colonial-era legislation dating to 1947, powers that, in his view, should not be available even to a minister.
Siddarthan said no satisfactory explanation had been given for the removals, and that Kishore had been dismissed after speaking out against measures affecting traders and business owners in Chavakachcheri.
Turning to the removal of the Vavuniya mayor, he said there had been no grounds for Kandeepan's dismissal at the outset, with allegations of corruption surfacing only later, and questioned how such allegations could stand when the municipal council had carried out no work during the three-month period the governor had cited.
The removals have raised wider concerns about their political effect. In Vavuniya, where the National People's Power narrowly failed to secure a majority at last year's local elections, critics warn that vacating the mayor's seat could reopen the arithmetic of a finely balanced council and hand the ruling party an opportunity to seize control of a body it had lost at the ballot box, without the electoral result ever being overturned by a court.
The episode also deepens a controversy already trailing the governor, who in late May transferred a Jaffna High Court judge weeks after his appointment, prompting the Jaffna Bar Association to write to the Sri Lankan president Anura Kumara Dissanayake warning of possible executive interference in the judiciary. Lawyers linked the transfer to interim orders the judge had issued in a writ petition naming the governor, arising from a similar inquiry into the Point Pedro Urban Council.
Siddarthan called on all democratic parties, regardless of ethnicity, to oppose the move in defence of democratic principles. The former members of parliament Selvarajah Kajendran and Suresh Premachandran, council members, businessmen and members of the public also joined the protest.
For Tamils, the episode revives longstanding objections to a system in which a governor appointed by the president can override the elected institutions of the North-East, underlining how precarious democratic representation in the Tamil homeland remains.