Sri Lanka missed the richness of plurality – Amartya Sen

[TamilNet, Monday, 21 May 2007, 19:58 GMT]
While answering a question put to him on Sri Lanka, the Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen observed that Sri Lanka successfully implemented a number of welfare programmes such as free education, free health etc., to its people which should have contributed to peace in that country. But, by taking a position of upholding exclusive status to Buddhism and Sinhalese, it isolated other sections of the society from having a sense of national identity. Now, there is no likelihood that the Sri Lankan state will go back from that position. Sri Lanka didn’t realize the richness in plurality, said the Nobel Laureate Professor Sen to a tightly packed audience in Oslo on Monday.

Prof. Amarthya Sen of Cambridge and Harvard Universities delivered the Spring Lecture on Poverty, War and Peace, at the Nobel Institute, Oslo, on Monday evening, which was attended by the Crown Prince of Norway and many academic luminaries.

In 1998 Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in development economics.