{"id":94120,"date":"2019-10-20T13:13:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-20T20:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=94120"},"modified":"2019-10-20T13:13:50","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T20:13:50","slug":"declare-ones-religion-truthfully","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/10\/20\/declare-ones-religion-truthfully\/","title":{"rendered":"Declare one\u2019s religion truthfully"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>V. KITHSIRI Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Our constitution is there to safeguard the rights of every individual irrespective of their race, religion, and ethnicity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is one of the basic requirements in a secular country. I&#8217;m in the opinion that application forms for the candidates for the forthcoming Presidential election do not require them to declare their religion on the forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> Well and good we all will say. However, it should equally safeguard the voters from those culprits who masquerade as belonging to a certain religion, for the votes from that community. News is floating in social media\/web that certain candidates contesting this election are duping the masses, proclaiming on stage that they belong to Buddhism when they are not so actually.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As much as any individual belonging to any religion has the right to contest an election in the country, will it not be a violation of the election rules to fake your identity? However, a candidate cannot be held responsible for faking if he is not required to declare his religion on the form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Therefore, I see the necessity for the Elections Commission to request all the candidates to reveal their religion on forms for accountability, if it is not the case already.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>V. KITHSIRI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>V. KITHSIRI Courtesy The Island Our constitution is there to safeguard the rights of every individual irrespective of their race, religion, and ethnicity. This is one of the basic requirements in a secular country. I&#8217;m in the opinion that application forms for the candidates for the forthcoming Presidential election do not require them to declare [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94120","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=94120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}