The leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) Rauff Hakeem resigned his seat in the national parliament to contest next month's eastern provincial council election, the SLMC general secretary Hasan Ali said here Wednesday.
Hasan Ali said he and Basheer Segudawood, two other parliamentarians of the SLMC, have also resigned their seats along with Hakeem.
Meanwhile, the government's Muslim allies said that the Muslim community must win the chief ministerial position in the eastern provincial council for their community and it can be achieved only through an alliance with the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse.
"Muslim people must have their own chief minister and the community cannot be kept in the opposition," Rishath Bathiyutheen, the minister of Resettlement told reporters.
Hakeem's SLMC had aligned with the main opposition United National Party to contest the first ever provincial council election for the eastern province.
The province is multi-ethnic with all three communities, the majority Sinhalese, the Tamil and Muslim communities divided around 30 percent each.
The east forms part of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)'s dream of a separate state for the Tamil minority.
The Northern and Eastern provinces became merged for administration purposes in 1987 but came to be de-merged through a court order issued in 2006.
The government claimed that the entire Eastern Province had been rid of LTTE members since July last year.
Elections for the local councils of Batticaloa, a district of the Eastern Province, were held last month.
Source: Xinhua
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