‘Failed state’: Sri Lanka’s Buddhist leaders want gov’t to resign

The island’s most influential Buddhist clerics now join a growing list of former allies calling for the government’s resignation.

Sri Lanka’s beleaguered government faces new pressure to resign from influential Buddhist leaders over the island’s escalating economic crisis.

The country’s worst downturn since independence in 1948 has brought widespread hardships to its 22 million people, with months of regular blackouts and acute shortages of food and fuel.

As the crisis triggers nationwide protests, the country’s most influential Buddhist clerics have now joined a growing list of former allies, calling for the government’s resignation.

“The country is fast becoming a failed state,” senior monk Medagama Dhammananda told reporters in the central city of Kandy on Monday.

Dhammananda said he and fellow Buddhist leaders had jointly petitioned President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to establish an interim government “to pull the country out of this crisis”.

Such a move would require the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa – the president’s brother and head of Sri Lanka’s powerful ruling family.

Gotabaya has faced similar calls to step down, with thousands of protesters camped outside his seafront office in Colombo for more than two weeks.

Before the crisis, both men were beloved by much of the country’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority for bringing a decades-long ethnic civil war against the Tamil Tigers to a brutal end.

Recent weeks have seen the fracturing of the government’s ruling coalition, along with business leaders and a former cabinet minister urging the Rajapaksas to resign.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES