Monday, 16 March 2015 02:35
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NIE: Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe broke tradition to receive Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the airport on Friday.
Cabinet Minister Lakshman Kiriella was to do the honours as the Minister-in-Waiting, but at the last moment, perhaps in deference to the importance of the visit, the first State visit by an Indian PM in 27 years, the Lankan PM himself undertook to receive him.
“Frankly we didn’t expect the Lankan PM to be there. Normally it is the duty of the Minister-in-Waiting to receive such dignitaries, but we were happy to have the PM there,” said a senior Indian official.
President Maithripala Sirisena also broke tradition by receiving Modi at Anuradhapura, the Buddhist pilgrimage and archeologically rich town in North Central Lanka on Saturday.
Anuradhapura is where the sacred Mahabodhi tree is located. It was brought to Sri Lanka by Emperor Ashoka’s daughter Sangamitta. Anuradhapura later became the capital of the island and today it is where political parties kick off their election campaigns after worshiping the Bodhi tree.
Modi is said to have requested the inclusion of Anuradhapura in the itinerary given his interest in Buddhism and archaeology.
As Chief Minister of Gujarat he had encouraged the Indian State Department of Archaeology to dig up Buddhist relics. He is today keen on putting Gujarat on the Asian Buddhist pilgrimage circuit, a resolve he formally expressed at the talks he had with President Sirisena here on Friday.
Modi himself departed from past practice by visiting the Mahabodhi society in Colombo founded by Anagarika Dharmapalala, a contemporary of Swami Vivekananda and a fellow delegate at the World Congress of Religions in Chicago.
Speaking extempore at Mahabodhi Society, Modi underlined the fact that his hometown Vadnagar was a major Buddhist centre in the 7th Century AD – a place visited by the Chinese Buddhist priest cum traveller Hiuen Tsang in 1641 AD. Modi said that at that time Vadnagar was home to more than 10,000 Buddhist monks.
