Sri Lankan government apologises for failure to act on intelligence tip off
Colombo: The Sri Lankan government has apologised for its failure to act despite receiving advance intelligence inputs about the possibility of terror attacks that rocked the island nation on Easter Sunday, killing 310 people.
A series of eight coordinated blasts ripped through three churches and three high-end hotels frequented by tourists and left 500 people injured in the country's deadliest violence since the devastating civil war ended in 2009.
Government spokesperson Rajitha Senaratne said that the warnings about the blasts were received in the days before the attacks, the CNN reported.
"We saw the warnings and we saw the details given," he said.
"We are very, very sorry, as a government we have to say -- we have to apologise to the families and the institutions about this incident," Senaratne, also the health minister, said.
All the families would be compensated and churches rebuilt, he said. The spokesperson said that one of the warnings referred to National Tawheed Jamath, or NTJ that defaced Buddhist statues in the past.
However, he did not believe that a local group could have acted alone. "There must be a wider international network behind it," he said.
Seven suicide bombers believed to be NTJ members carried out the series of blasts. However, no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but police have arrested 40 people in connection with the blasts.
In the wake of bombings, the military has been given a wider berth to detain and arrest suspects powers that were used during the civil war but withdrawn when it ended.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said he feared the massacre could unleash instability and pledged to "vest all necessary powers with the defense forces" to act against those responsible.
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If Constitution amendment bill is passed, democracy will be finished in India: Priyanka
New Delhi (PTI): In a stinging attack, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Thursday said the government began finishing off democracy by putting pressure on institutions, such as the Election Commission (EC) and the judiciary, but now, an "open attack" has been launched on democracy with the Constitution amendment bill.
Participating in a debate in the Lok Sabha on three bills introduced for amendments in the women's-quota law and setting up a delimitation commission, Priyanka Gandhi asked why can't the government give 33 per cent reservation to women on the current 543 seats of the Lok Sabha.
She said the bill talks of increasing the number of Lok Sabha seats to up to 850 -- to be done by a delimitation commission on the basis of the 2011 Census data.
"This seems fine on the surface but the real meaning comes to the fore when one carefully reads it. It smells of politics," the Congress leader said.
She said on reading the fine print, it shows that the three members of the delimitation commission will decide the fate of the states and their representation in Parliament.
"The government began finishing off democracy by putting pressure on institutions, such as the Election Commission, the judiciary, the media etc., but now, an open attack on democracy is being launched," Priyanka Gandhi said.
If this Constitution amendment bill is passed in Parliament, democracy will be finished in India, she added.
The Congress MP also narrated a background to the issue of women's reservation in legislative bodies.
"This issue is close to the heart of every woman. There is a background to this issue. The prime minister said this issue was blocked for 30 years. This was started by a person called Nehru. Not the Nehru they avoid so much but Motilal Nehru, who as the president of a committee prepared a list of 19 rights which were then passed as a resolution at the Karachi session of the Congress and formed the basis of giving women equal rights in Indian politics," she said.
She said it was Rajiv Gandhi who, as the prime minister, brought a bill for women's reservation in panchayats and nagarpalikas and finally, the bill for it was passed during the P V Narasimha Rao government of the Congress.
"Under the UPA, this was passed in the Rajya Sabha but a consensus could not be reached in the Lok Sabha. In 2018, Rahul Gandhi wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling for women's reservation," Priyanka Gandhi said.
Taking a swipe at Modi, she said it seems from the prime minister's address that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a champion of women's reservation.
"Any woman would tell you that women easily recognise those who try to mislead them," she said and urged the BJP to be careful.
"In 2023, when this law was passed, the Congress supported it and today also, the Congress is strongly in support of women's reservation. But the truth is that the debate is not on women's reservation. The bill that the government has brought has changed the direction of the debate," Priyanka Gandhi said and hit out at the BJP over the delimitation provisions in the bill.
The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill to tweak the women's-quota law was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Thursday after a division of votes.
Two ordinary bills -- the Delimitation Bill and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill to implement the proposed amended women's-quota law in the Union territories of Delhi, Puducherry and Jammu and Kashmir -- were also introduced in the House.
