Decisive leadership needed to ensure changing minority political representation does not hinder claims for rights and justice in Sri Lanka

■New report by Oxford Brookes University's Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) and Minority Rights Group (MRG) comes with key recommendations

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SRI Lanka's local election results have corroborated the warnings of a new report on minority politics in the country.

Recent National People's Power (NPP) losses in the North and East suggest that the NPP has not addressed core concerns of Tamil and Muslim communities despite its public stance on equality.

This underlines the findings of the new report by Oxford Brookes University's Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) and Minority Rights Group (MRG): that firm commitments to minority rights must be made now for justice and equality in the long term.

Otherwise, Sri Lanka risks a renewal of ethnic grievances.

The vibrant and successful minority politics that Sri Lanka has experienced in the past decades is collapsing, crushed by years of structural majoritarian nationalism, ineffective leadership within minority parties, and the failure of national parties to put forward clear proposals on constitutional reform or power-sharing.

The failure of national parties to address the grievances that caused the country's ethnic conflict is a major contributing factor to the crumbling of minority electoral representation.

Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist actors have implemented different strategies, from sowing division within ethnic minority parties to preventing them from acting in the interest of the communities they represent.

"The power minority representatives used to wield, in national parties and through their own, has disintegrated," said the report's lead researcher Dr. Farah Mihlar. "Minority political representation is divided, and parties have splintered, making it ever more difficult to raise minority rights and justice issues," she added.