Speaking to journalists while leaving the parliamentary complex after attending the Monday party leaders’ meeting, the Minister said that the government had been asking repeatedly from the opposition not to lead the public for protests and rallies. “I myself have been telling them that this is not the time to stage protests. Results of their protests are now before our eyes. Infected people are found everywhere. Now as the situation is getting worse, the opposition has started chanting a single slogan asking the government to shut the country down. Suppose we would move for such a lockdown, then the very same opposition would cry again demanding that the country be opened. We regret the irresponsible conduct of the opposition. I call on Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake to stop this dangerous nonsense.”
Asked to comment on people closing down their shops in fear of pandemic spread, the minister said that those shop owners should have done so when the opposition-led protesters were marching past those shops several days back. “People should have listened to the warnings of health experts not to support such rallies and stayed away from them. Some of them fell for the opposition’s trick of pushing this country to anarchy. Those who organized those rallies did not do so for the love of people but for their need to fish in the troubled water and they knew very well that disrupting the government’s covid-19 prevention programmes could help them achieve that goal,” the minister said.
