President Sirisena’s 67-year question and the 100-Day Plan 

by Rajan Philips-February 7, 2015

"We have failed in the essential task of nation building," said President Chandrika Kumaratunga in her speech to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Sri Lanka’s independence. That was in 1998. Seventeen years later, on Independence Day last week, President Maithripala Sirisena soul searchingly spoke of our "great responsibility and duty … today to ask where we have gone wrong, and how we could correct those errors, (and)… as we look at the path we have trod in the 67 years of freedom, and especially since 2009, can we be satisfied with what has been achieved after the restoration of peace?" For his part, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe drew attention to the dissipation over the years, of the level of unity that prevailed among the island’s different communities at the time DS Senanayake ushered in Lanka’s independence from British colonial rule in 1948. Why string together the Independence Day musings of these three political figures to reflect on where we are as a polity and a society and what lies ahead for the country?

President Sirisena’s 67-year question and the 100-Day Plan .odt by Thavam Ratna