Sri Lanka marks 72 years of independence today. During the past few years, the independence that we won on the February 4, 1948 faced unprecedented challenges.What we can learn from that experience is that achieving freedom and preserving it are two different matters entirely. The freedom that we obtained in 1948 in the eyes of the law, came very close to being vitiated after 2015 through bad politics, states Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa in an Independence Day message.