- During the Sri Lanka President’s visit to India, Indian PM expressed his hope to implement 13th Amendment to Sri Lanka Constitution which flows from the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord 1987.
- Sri Lanka was facing an increasingly violent strife from the early part of the 1980s. The conflict can be traced to its independence from Britain in 1948.
- At the time when the Sinhala majority government came into force, passed a legislation that was deemed discriminatory against the Tamil minority population. In the 1970s, two major Tamil parties united to form the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) that started agitation for separate state of Tamil within the system in the North and Eastern Sri Lanka that would grant greater autonomy to them.
- After the enactment of the sixth amendment of the Sri Lanka Constitution in August 1983 the TULF becomes ineffective and thus the ethnic divisions started flaring into a violent civil war.
13th Amendment to Sri Lanka Constitution
- 13th Amendment to Sri Lanka Constitution made after the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President J R Jayewardene in 1987 in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
- The accord aiming at amending the constitution to transfer some powers such as agriculture, health etc. to the country’s nine provinces and find a constitutional solution to the civil war.