{"id":108017,"date":"2020-10-25T16:30:38","date_gmt":"2020-10-25T23:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=108017"},"modified":"2020-10-25T16:30:38","modified_gmt":"2020-10-25T23:30:38","slug":"did-government-provide-ammunition-to-trouble-makers-of-20a-new-constitution-not-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/10\/25\/did-government-provide-ammunition-to-trouble-makers-of-20a-new-constitution-not-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"DID GOVERNMENT PROVIDE AMMUNITION TO TROUBLE MAKERS OF 20A? NEW CONSTITUTION NOT NEEDED!"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><strong data-rich-text-format-boundary=\"true\">By M D P DISSANAYAKE<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>During\nboth Presidential and General Elections, the main promise was to scrap\n19A.&nbsp; Rarely we heard a counter view that some of the conditions will be\nretained.&nbsp;&nbsp; The public would have been suspicious as to which\narticles would be retained requiring the SLPP&nbsp; to provide an\nexplanation.&nbsp; <strong>The strategy to promise to scrap 19A in its entirety\n&nbsp;worked well, on both occasions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then,\nin the process of drafting 20A, the government wanted to curry favour the\npublic, for which it gave publicity that under the new draft the President\u2019s\nterm will be reduced to 5 years from 6 years and maximum of two\nterms.&nbsp;&nbsp; Nobody gave any credit for the government for reducing the\npresidential term to 5 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By\nproviding a lengthy 43 page, <strong>the government has opened a can of worms.<\/strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\nIt provided an opportunity to the opposition, toothless tigers in the cabinet,\nsocial media, trouble making buddhist monks to dig deep into each and every\nArticle in the draft, which easily &nbsp;received wide audience.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;\nThis was an absolute foolish act on the part of the government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Instead,\nas promised during the campaign, <strong>the draft&nbsp; should have sought the\napproval to scrap the 19A in its entirety instead of arguing that&nbsp; the\npurpose of 20A would be similar to the status at 18A.&nbsp; This argument&nbsp;\nwas not true as clearly clarified by the Judiciary. If the intention of the\ngovernment was to revert to18A, the simplest methodology was to scrap, delete,\nabandon 19A.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>In\nour opinion, after the difficult passage of 20A, the current constitution is in\nfine form, Sri Lanka need to simply scrap 13A in its entirety.&nbsp; No need of\na new constitution. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Lets\nget on with solving basic issues and economically develop the country, at least\nto the levels of Malaysia and Vietnam.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By M D P DISSANAYAKE During both Presidential and General Elections, the main promise was to scrap 19A.&nbsp; Rarely we heard a counter view that some of the conditions will be retained.&nbsp;&nbsp; The public would have been suspicious as to which articles would be retained requiring the SLPP&nbsp; to provide an explanation.&nbsp; The strategy to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-m-d-p-dissanayake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}