Who will be the first Muslim CM in the East?

OPINION 

BY President, South Eastern Social Welfare Association, M H M Haleem

A M Jameel

It has been confirmed that a Muslim will be appointed as the Chief Minister (CM) in the Eastern Province. There is also a confirmation that the first Muslim CM position will be occupied by a member from the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC).  

The SLMC having won 7 seats in the just concluded Eastern Provincial Council (EPC) elections by contesting independently and campaigning against the government during the run up to the elections has now become the deciding factor or as one may call it the ‘kingmaker’ in deciding which party would govern the Eastern Province.

Therefore, a situation has arisen that if the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) headed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa is to govern the Council in the East, it cannot do so without the support of the SLMC and therefore it has been forced to sacrifice the CM position to a member from the SLMC.
In the current scenario, there has been a growing debate both among SLMC supporters and the Muslims in general as to which SLMC member would be the most fitting and eligible candidate out of the SLMC members elected who could take up this huge mantle of the CM.

“It’s a wild wild market…”

Clamour for credit and indirect pressure exerted to stop investigations have been the main demands of the so called ‘stock market mafia’ existent on the Colombo Bourse, says Tilak Karunaratne, who tendered his resignation as the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday.  Reluctantly stepping down barely nine months after taking over the position, the former Chairman said that he had tried to fast track investigations into market malpractices under his tenure so as to bring sanity to what he described as ‘a wild market where some people were shooting  from the hip’.
In what could be his first interview with The Nation Gain following his resignation, Karunaratne explains the sequence of events that led him to call it a day and his expressions showed that his main disappointment was that he could not effectively take some of those real perpetrators of the Colombo’s Stock Market to task.