Agriculture, Livestock, Land and Irrigation Minister K. D. Lalkantha has said that offenders should be punished under the law but the Buddhist robe should not be treated as being at fault for what an individual does — and that Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera is a friend of his, the Daily Mirror reported at 4.33 p.m. on Wednesday.
“I personally do not like punishing the robe. The robe was punished even during the colonial era. Our Buddhist monks were shot dead while wearing the robe. I do not like that. Just because an individual commits a wrongdoing, the robe itself is not at fault. According to the law, it is fair to punish the person, not the robe.”
The remarks place a sitting cabinet minister inside a controversy that has run for ten days, since Gnanasara Thera was produced in court in lay clothing after being returned to Welikada Prison to serve the remainder of a six-year contempt sentence.
He is answering an allegation against his own government
Lalkantha’s second set of remarks is a direct rebuttal, though he does not name what he is rebutting.
“There is a law in the country, and that law was not made by us. It was not because of us that Ven. Gnanasara Thera ended up in that situation. He had been imprisoned before, and this was not the first time.”
On 12 October, Pivithuru Hela Urumaya leader Udaya Gammanpila alleged that the disrobing was carried out under pressure from the top leadership of the National People’s Power — an allegation the government answered by announcing that police would record a statement from Gammanpila, on a complaint lodged by the prison authorities themselves. “It was not because of us” is the denial of that charge, from a minister of the accused government.
His final clause is correct on the record. The sentence now running is not a new one: the Thera served part of this same six-year contempt term before a presidential pardon in 2019, and was separately convicted of inciting religious hatred in 2022 and pardoned again. Both former presidents involved have spoken this month — Ranil Wickremesinghe said the 2019 pardon followed monks’ objections to the prospect of a disrobing, and Maithripala Sirisena, who signed it, said on Wednesday that he acted within his constitutional powers.
The 63 monks: a fourth official use of a figure nobody has broken down
Lalkantha said around 63 Buddhist monks are currently in prison, and asked why their cases had not drawn similar attention.
“Even today, the Thera is being used for politics. There is no discussion about the 63 Buddhist monks currently in prison because they cannot be used for political purposes.”
This figure now has four government users in nine days, and this newsroom has been tracking a contradiction in it since 6 October. The Prison Media Spokesman described more than 63 senior clergy who have served sentences “at various times” — a historical total offered as precedent. Cabinet Spokesman Nalinda Jayatissa said on the same day that 63 monks are currently serving sentences. Only one of those can be right, and no filing has resolved it.
Lalkantha lands on the present-tense reading, as the President did when he said he had examined the cases of all 63 monks now serving sentences. Three of the four usages now treat it as a live headcount. But Lalkantha is the first to hedge it — “around 63” — a qualifier on a number two of his colleagues gave exactly.
The claim that nobody is discussing the 63 does not survive the government’s own record. The committee President Dissanayake appointed on 8 October is drafting amendments to the regulations governing imprisoned monks as a class, not to Gnanasara Thera’s case. The Maha Sangha’s own proposal — that a Nikaya be informed, and robes permitted outside prison on its recommendation, whenever a monk is sentenced to more than three years — would apply across that whole group. And the President reviewed all 63 files. The 63 are the formal subject of the policy process, not an ignored remainder.
What is genuinely missing is narrower, and this desk flagged it on 8 October: no filing reports how many of the 63 are serving more than three years — the number that would determine how far the proposed rule reaches. That is an absent breakdown, not an absent discussion.
The timing sharpens the point. Lalkantha spoke on the day the committee handed its report to the Secretary to the President, eight days inside a fourteen-day mandate.
”An honest person who had been used”
Lalkantha described the Thera as an honest man exploited by various groups, and said the monk knew it.
“What is happening is that certain fringe groups, unable to gain any real traction on their own, are exploiting a Buddhist monk by using him as a vehicle to push their agendas of ethnic and religious chauvinism.”
The characterisation sits awkwardly against the monk’s own legal record, which the minister does not address. Gnanasara Thera founded the Bodu Bala Sena, was convicted in 2022 of inciting religious hatred, and in April this year was served indictments at the Colombo High Court over remarks held to insult Islam. Describing him as a vehicle for religious chauvinism rather than an author of it is a political judgement, and the filing records no evidence offered for it.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not say where or when Lalkantha spoke, or in what setting — the filing carries no venue, event or occasion, and an aggregator carried the same remarks a day earlier, suggesting the statement may predate Wednesday’s write-up. It does not name the “fringe groups”, give any basis for the claim that the Thera is aware he is being used, or say whether Lalkantha was speaking for the government or in a personal capacity — a distinction his phrasing (“I personally do not like”) raises but does not settle.
Nothing in the filing addresses whether Lalkantha’s position matches the committee’s recommendations, which remain unpublished, or how a rule that spares “the robe” rather than the person would work in practice. The source of his “around 63” figure is not given, and the breakdown by sentence length is still missing.
This article is single-sourced. No other verified newsroom had filed on the remarks at the time of writing.
