Sri Lanka, July 1 -- Our main job on the Election Commission is to uphold election laws and conduct free and fair elections. Of

necessity, this involves interdicting election law violations, usually by powerful politicians. Politicians promote the fiction that when they violate the law, we must not name them; that naming them is to violate Commission neutrality. As a result, after the Parliamentary Elections Act was enacted in 1981, there has been no major conviction of a politician, although several violent election violations have occurred during certain polls.

A powerful former militant who successfully attacked Elephant Pass and took it over, issued a video in Nov. 2017 using hate speech on Muslims for electoral gain. A complainant ...