Sri Lanka: the State of Nation and relations with India
Today, with the end of terrorism that plagued Sri
Lanka for 30 years, and the rise of India on the world stage, we
have a historic opportunity to once again go back to building our
traditional friendships and restore our age-old ties. And this is a
path that our two nations have already embarked upon,
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Goodbye Emergency, hello again constitutional flaw
We lived through a time of check-points and
barricades, routine security checks and general unease about one
another and each unexplained parcel as we moved from place to place,
in and out of buses and trains, and other crowded places. We saw,
post-LTTE, the barricades disappearing one by one, fewer and fewer
checks, less and less traffic-stops to facilitate movement of VVIPs
in convoys of anything between 10-75 vehicles, and a gradual easing
of the military presence in and around the city. That phasing out, I
believe, was a gradual and necessary,
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Lifting of Emergency and the end to impunity
Thirty four years ago, the country entered a
dark tunnel. In 1977, JR Jayewardene’s UNP won by a landslide at the
general election. So far so good, the democratic right of the people
to elect a government of their choice was vindicated. However, it
was what happened afterwards that was the problem. The Police were
given a holiday. A generalised assault was launched by UNP
blackshirts on the supporters of the Opposition. This degenerated
(as if it were not degenerate enough) into an anti-Tamil pogrom,
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