The Tamil language should be made compulsory for all Sri Lankan parliamentarians so they can understand the problems of all communities; foreign media reported National Co-existence, Dialogue and Official Languages Minister Mano Ganesan as having said yesterday.

Ganesan had said parliamentarians should be bilingual - meaning they should know Tamil besides Sinhala, which is spoken by the majority of the population. He said legislators who conversed in only one of the two languages, faced difficulty in understanding the problems of all communities.

“This country's problems can never be solved as long as you differentiate them as Sinhalese and Tamil problems,” he told DNA.  He said extremists in the south and the north regions carry out a ‘disinformation’ campaign to mislead people, despite government's attempts to maintain communal harmony.