Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe pledged to continue to with the preservation of Buddhist sites across the island, as he slammed the former regime for claiming to be ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ without spending as much on archaeology as the present government has.
ColomboPage reports Mr Wickremesinghe as stating “it is no use of claiming 'Sinhala Buddhist' to obtain the votes without preserving the ancient historic Buddhist temples to tell the world about their glory”.
He went on to state that the current government has spent Rs. 2.5 billion for the conservation of Buddhist and archaeological sites across the island since coming to power in 2015. In contrast, he stated that the former government, led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, only spent Rs. 1.1 billion from 2012 to 2014.
His comments come as Sri Lanka’s Archaeology Department has been increasingly used by the state to seize Tamil lands across the North-East. Just this week in Vavuniya, the Archaeology Department announced that it had taken control of land on which an ancient Tamil temple is situated.