NPP Minister using obscene words during the budget debate? Find out the facts..

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A viral claim accompanying a video implied that a Minister from the National People’s Power used obscene words in the parliament during the budget debate. Here is an investigation we conducted regarding that.

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On February 17^th, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented the inaugural budget of the National People’s Power Government in the Parliament. On the following day (February 18) a video was posted on Facebook with the statement “You filled the parliament with PhD people who utter foul language?” (“මේ  වාගේ කුනු හරුප කියන phd කාරයොන් ගෙන්ද බන් උබලා ඕක පිරෙව්වේ”), in which a minister made an obscene statement in the parliament 

Since the educational qualification of Ministers of National People’s Power was a major topic in the past few months, the video was further posted on social media, implying that it is an instance of one of the PhD scholars from the government using utter foul language.

But did such an incident really happen during the recent budget debates? Let’s look at the facts.

Fact – Check:

President Anura Dissanayake presented the budget speech for the year 2025 on February 17th. The debate on the second reading of the budget was held for seven days from February 18th to 25th. The debate in the budget committee is held from February 27^th.

Accordingly, we checked the live broadcast of the budget speech to see whether a minister had used obscene words during the debate after the budget speech, but we did not observe such an incident.

Also, such a situation wasn’t reported in the mainstream media as well.

Also, this video mentions the caption “The foul language uttered by the state minister during the budget” (“අයවැය අතරතුර රාජ්‍ය ඇමති කියූ කුණුහරුපය”). However, the National People’s Power government did not appoint any state ministers, only cabinet ministers and deputy ministers.

Accordingly, as the state ministers were not appointed by the current government, as mentioned in the video, we made an inquiry to find out who the minister making the relevant statement was.

We inspected a few keyframes from the video using a reverse image search, and it became clear that the video was posted on Facebook on December 4th, 2022, during the budget debate.

This relevant news was published on a website at the time, and this video was also quoted there. It is mentioned that it is the parliamentary state minister Tenuka Widanagamage of Sri Lanka Podujana Peramune (SLPP). A copy of his speech in the Parliament on December 3rd, 2022, was also included in the Hansard report on that day. 

He was the State Minister for Urban Development and Housing at that time, having taken up that position in September 2022. He represented the eighth parliament from 2017 to 2020 and the ninth parliament from 2022 to 2024.

However, he is not among the Cabinet Ministers and Deputy Ministers of the National People’s Power government and does not represent the current parliament either.

Furthermore, we went through the footage on 18th February to find out whether there had been any similar incident in which an NPP Minister had used foul language; however, there was no report of any such incident either.

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Conclusion:

Our investigation has made it clear that the video clip implying that an NPP minister was using obscene language during the recent budget debate was not actually a recent clip and did not represent any NPP parliamentarian. 

The viral clip dates back to a budget debate in December 2022. The person in question is then-state minister Tenuka Vidanagamage of SLPP, and he is not a current parliamentarian either.