All Ceylon Tamil Congress
Encyclopedia : A : AL : ALL : All Ceylon Tamil Congress
All Ceylon Tamil Congress (in Tamil: அகில இலங்கைத் தமிழ்க் காங்கிரஸ்), is the oldest Tamil political party in Sri Lanka. The ACTC was founded in 1944 by G.G. Ponnambalam. Due to the cooperation of ACTC with United National Party a group led by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam broke away in 1949 forming the Federal Party (FP).
The ACTC was largely discredited when their ally UNP moved away from bilingual and bicommunal policies towards a pro-Sinhala stance. Thus the FP emerged as the major Tamil party in 1956.
In 1972 the ACTC and the FP formed the Tamil United Front, which later evolved into the Tamil United Liberation Front in 1976.
Ahead of the 2001 elections, ACTC joined the LTTE-backed Tamil National Alliance. In the 2004 elections the TNA won 6.9 % of the popular vote and 22 out of the 225 seats in parliament.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.