Why no serious consideration was given to provide sufficient security despite protests from Buddhist groups against the show, Sri Lankan Tourism Minister Anura Banadaranaike asked the Tourist Board.
Sri Lanka's World Cup-winning captain was sworn in on Friday as deputy minister of Industries, Tourism and Investment Promotion.
The Sri Lankan prime minister also vowed to reopen Parliament, which was suspended on Tuesday by President Chandrika Kumaratunga.
``We have full faith in the prime minister,'' declared Labor Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, quoting from a a letter signed by 124 of the nation's 225 MPs.
The "message" was given to Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen during his meeting with LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran.
The government wants to test public opinion before going in for drastic constitutional changes, officials said.
This is Modi's first visit to the Maldives as prime minister. The last visit by an Indian Prime Minister to the Indian Ocean island nation was by Manmohan Singh in 2011.
Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa has debunked international criticism over the treatment of the island nation's Tamil minority population.
Wickremesinghe is the first Sri Lankan president to be elected by Parliament following a vote.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on a two-day visit during which she is expected to discuss the fishermen's issue and rights of minority Tamils with the Lankan leadership.
Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka's president-elect, was a low-profile cabinet colleague of longtime president Mahinda Rajapaksa until he switched sides to become joint opposition candidate and emerge as the proverbial dark horse in the presidential polls.
Maithripala Sirisena was considered so meek and self-effacing that he appeared no threat to anyone. What a mistake his rivals made!
For India to view the new Sri Lankan leadership only through the prism of the past or through their narrow view on China, is fraught with possibilities that should be avoided, asserts N Sathiya Moorthy.
Voicing concern over violent non-state actors controlling large territories across the world and unleashing "barbaric violence", Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said that ideologies should give way to dialogue to resolve conflicts.
Few debut novels in recent times have been received with such critical applause as Akil Kumarasamy's Half Gods. 'The prose itself is a marvel,' declared The New York Times Book Review. A glimpse of Akil Kumaraswamy's ability to 'distill the mysteries of the human soul', revealed in this excerpt from her story The Office of Missing Persons.
The country has a fiendishly complicated electoral system that is a combination of population-based proportional representation and party-based national lists, says Aditi Phadnis
The two countries also signed memoranda of understanding in education and health sectors after visiting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Lankan counterpart Mangala Samaraweera co-chaired the 9th Indo-Lanka Joint Commission meeting in Colombo.
President Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Rajapaksa will transform Sri Lanka's political landscape after Thursday's electoral triumph, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran Colombo watcher.
'As I went around Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Jaffna and Mannar, my mind went back to my visit in January 1990 at the fag end of the IPKFs mission in Sri Lanka,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
From Sri Lanka's most popular political family to its most despised -- going by the voices on the streets calling for the Rajapaksas' ouster -- what went wrong for the clan? Veteran Sri Lanka watcher N Sathiya Moorthy offers an insight.
'We should expect a cold-blooded, transactional relation that requires a lot of engagement and mutual trust to sustain,' says Constantino Xavier, Fellow, foreign policy, Brookings India.
As the island heads for elections, two major factors worry Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. One is the division in the Sinhala vote and the other is the prospect of the Tamils and Muslims voting heavily against him.
Gota has to decide if he could order elder brother Mahinda's arrest as the agent provocateur of Monday's violence. Then he has to prepare for an interim government, in which no one would now want to become a cabinet minister leave alone prime minister, explains N Sathiya Moorthy.
Former RA&W chief A S Dulat, who served as Atalji's adviser on Kashmir, gives us an insider's glimpse of a prime minister he has hailed as the 'greatest after Nehru'.
A double-quick analysis of the Lankan election results would show that the relatively narrow victory margin of challenger Maithripala Sirisena was made up by the three minority communities of Tamils, Muslims and Christians, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
