JVP vows to scrap Adani power project in Sri Lanka if voted to power

Dissanayake, whose party had long been opposed to India, told a political chat show that he will scrap the pact signed between Sri Lanka and Adani Group that envisages developing 484 megawatts of wind power in Mannar and Pooneryn in the war-ravaged region.

Chennai: Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), whose leader Anura Dissanayake is in the race to be Sri Lanka’s next president, has said it would cancel the wind power project awarded to Indian conglomerate Adani Group in the island’s northern region if it came to power in the September 21 elections.

Dissanayake, whose party had long been opposed to India, told a political chat show over the weekend that he will scrap the pact signed between Sri Lanka and Adani Group that envisages developing 484 megawatts of wind power in Mannar and Pooneryn in the war-ravaged region.

“Yes. We will definitely cancel it as it threatens our energy sovereignty,” Dissanayake told the chat show, responding to questions about a massive row over the project. The Sri Lankan government and Adani Energy signed the MoU earlier this year which has already run into rough weather with a bunch of petitions being filed in the country’s Supreme Court.

JVP, the Marxist-leaning party known for its Sinhala chauvinism, led a bloody protest against the Indian involvement in Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis in late 1980s. JVP’s protest was against the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement that led to the Indian government sending a peace keeping force to the island to disarm the cadres of the LTTE, which led to further bloodshed.

In January this year, India courted Dissanayake as he emerged as one of the key contenders for the Presidential polls by inviting him to New Delhi.

It is believed that slain LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran decided to assassinate former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as a revenge for his decision to send the force.

Dissanayake’s comments assume significance in the wake of speculations about the future of the project in the event of incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe losing the September 21 polls, one of the keenly contested elections in recent time.

Adani’s power project in Sri Lanka has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in the past few years. Amid the economic crisis in 2022, former head of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), M M C Ferdinando, had testified before a Parliament Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) that the project was awarded to Adani after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi exerted ‘pressure’ on then Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

In June, the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka refused approval to award procurement of the 484 MW wind power plant. And in August, the company was dragged to the court following which a three-member bench of the Supreme Court ordered the respondents – Sri Lankan government, Board of Investment, and the Central Environmental Authority, to file their objections.