Former Chief Minister of the Northern Province C V Wigneswaran denied claims he is backing any of the candidates in the upcoming Sri Lankan presidential election and said that with the exception of one outsider, all other Sinhala candidates have ignored demands put forward by Tamil political parties.

Releasing a statement earlier today, the former Supreme Court Justice also said he had not called for a boycott of the polls as reported in some Southern media outlets.

Wigneswaran’s TMK and four other Tamil political parties had put forward a set of 13 demands to all candidates in next month’s polls.

“You will remember that in 2015, a position like this came up. In order to bring back democracy we worked very hard for President Sirisena,” said the statement. “But then once he came to power, he just forgot about all his liabilities. He never had any sort of feeling of remorse for having kept away from doing the needful to the Tamil community or the minorities - both Tamils and Muslims.”

“Though we set out all of these requests, we find that… almost all the other Sinhalese candidates have rejected or did not want to even discuss it or open the file even and have a look at the problems that we have,” he continued.

The exception was Sirithunga Jayasuriya, who Wigneswaran claimed had told him he would “consider [the proposals] very favorably and that he is fully in support of all of our requests”.

Wigneswaran went on to state that “under those circumstances we have decided that we will not ask our people to vote for a particular person, but allow a free vote with regard to our people, let them decide, whomever whom they want to vote for, one”.

See the full text of the statement here.