Arrested, assaulted in 2018; Sri Lanka Parliament Speaker six year later
COLOMBO – Dr Ashoka Sapumal Ranwala was unanimously elected as the Speaker of the 10th Sri Lanka Parliament on Thursday (21), days after his party, the ruling National People’s Power (NPP) recorded a landslide majority in the parliamentary poll last week.
A chemical engineer by profession with a PhD in Biochemistry from Waseda University, Japan, Ranwala has, since a young age, been in the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which is the key coalition partner of the NPP led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
He has served as the Convenor of the Trade Union Collective for Conservation of Fuel Resources and led protests against the state-owned Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) losing its monopoly to the state-owned Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) in the past.
A graduate of the University of Moratuwa, Ranwala was employed at the island nation’s only Iran-built CPC’s Sapugaskanda Refinery.
He represented the JVP in the Biyagama local government body once and the Western Provincial Council twice as an elected member.
In January 2018 just before the local government elections, he was arrested over charges of allegedly threatening the Officer in Charge of the Sapusgaskanda Police, Crimes Division. However, he later said he was assaulted by Sapusgaskanda Crimes police when he was questioned regarding an assault on a youth in the area.
He contested from the Gampaha district in the November 14 election and was elected for the first time to the parliament with 109,332 preferential votes.
-economynext.com
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