Senior Sinhala Buddhist monks called on the public to support Sri Lanka’s new president Gotabaya Rajapaksa last week, as he met with members of the clergy in Colombo.

“The Maha Sanga invoke their blessings and provide guidance towards the efforts being taken by the President to lead the country on the right path to make Sri Lanka a developed and prosperous nation,” Elle Gunawansa was quoted as saying, as monks blessed Rajapaksa on Friday.

The BJP’s Tamil Nadu state secretary warned that if citizenship was granted to Eelam Tamil refugees then Sri Lanka would become a “a complete Buddhist land” and claimed that the DMK was conspiring with Sri Lanka’s prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka said it “highly appreciates” a statement from Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who declared his government would not renegotiate a deal over the Hambantota Port, which was handed to China on a 99-year lease in 2017.

Rajapaksa stressed that the deal was a commercial agreement and though his government would not renegotiate it, they would be examining the security of the port to see if additional clauses are needed in their agreement.

On February 20 2017, Tamil families of the disappeared started their roadside protest across the North-East, starting off in Kilinochchi, followed by Vavuniya, Trincomalee, Mullaitivu and Maruthankerny.

Families of the disappeared marking 1000 days of their protest in Vavuniya

A Tamil man from Jaffna who had been summoned to Sri Lanka’s Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) has been reported as missing by his family.

38-year-old Paramu Vijayakumar was summoned to the TID office in Colombo on the 6th of December. His wife said that Vijayakumar had left for Colombo but has not been seen since.

When she went to file a missing persons complaint at her local police station in Valvettithurai, they reportedly told her they had been in contact with the TID and no summons had been issued for her husband.

Tamils in Jaffna staged a protest in the city centre last week, demonstrating against illegal sand mining that has stepped up across the North-East in recent months.

The Sri Lankan government has criticised Fitch Ratings after the agency downgraded the Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) of Sri Lanka from ‘Stable' to ‘Negative’, directly citing new Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s actions.

The ratings agency had blamed a “significant shift in fiscal policy” in Colombo for the downgrade but Sri Lanka’s finance ministry claimed “erroneous assumptions” had been made, reports Xinhua.

"Taking all into consideration, the best estimate of the budget deficit would be around 5.5 percent of GDP in 2020, as against the Fitch's projection of 6.5 percent of GDP," the ministry said.