Colombo, Jun 12 (DIN NEWS)<\/b> Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena today inducted seven new ministers in his government, including a Tamil who is the only elected representative of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party from Jaffna, the capital of Northern district.<\/p>\n
Two state ministers and five deputy ministers were sworn-in by Sirisena at a function at the Presidential Secretariat, amid an internal bickering within the unity government.<\/p>\n
Angajan Ramanathan, of the Sirisena-led Sri Lanka Freedom Party from Jaffna, was appointed as a deputy minister.<\/p>\n
The main Tamil party, Tamil National Alliance, had last week objected to Ramanathan being appointed as the deputy Speaker of Parliament.<\/p>\n
Five out of the seven ministers appointed today are from Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe-led United National Party (UNP).<\/p>\n
Sirisena and Wickremesinghe are involved in a political tug of war since mid February when the President asked the Prime Minister to step down.<\/p>\n
The expansion is being seen as a reward to the UNP back benchers, who stood by Wickremesinghe when no trust motion against the premier was brought by the united Opposition in Parliament in early April.<\/p>\n
With today’s swearing-in, the number of state ministers and the number of deputy ministers has increased to 22 each.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Colombo, Jun 12 (DIN NEWS) Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena today inducted seven new ministers in his government, including a Tamil who is the only elected representative of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party from Jaffna, the capital of Northern district. Two state ministers and five deputy ministers were sworn-in by Sirisena at a function at the Presidential Secretariat, amid an internal bickering within the unity government. Angajan Ramanathan, of the Sirisena-led Sri Lanka Freedom Party from Jaffna, was appointed as a deputy minister. The main Tamil party, Tamil National…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13103"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13105,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13103\/revisions\/13105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}