Lanka reacts defensively to TN assembly resolution

Sri Lanka has reacted defensively to the Tamil Nadu assembly's resolution calling upon the Government of India to get the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to abandon the path of war and begin talks to resolve the ethnic conflict in the island.

"I do not wish to comment on the internal matters of a foreign government. But I would like to say that the Sri Lankan government has consistently worked towards finding a negotiated solution to the conflict in the island,” Foreign Secretary Dr. Palitha Kohona told this website’s newspaper here on Thursday. “President Rajapaksa has many times said that he is ready to go the extra mile to find a peaceful solution.”

"However, unfortunately, it is the LTTE which has consistently refused to come to the negotiating table," he added.

Kohona recalled that only recently, the LTTE had mercilessly murdered the Sri Lankan minister for highways, Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, showing scant regard for the fact that he was the father of two young children.

However, many Sri Lankans feel that Sri Lanka can do pretty much what it likes, regardless of the resolution. India, they say, has been little more than a windbag after the failure of its first, and last, intervention in the 1980s, which culminated in the withdrawal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) at the insistence of the Sri Lankan government in 1990, and in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE in 1991.

Since then, New Delhi's statements have been low-key, most of the time. If they have been strident at times, these have not been followed up by any concrete action.

An article entitled, "Indian diplomacy in Sri Lanka," by the veteran Sinhala-language journalist Upul Joseph Fernando in the Daily Mirror on Thursday reflected this thinking succinctly.

Given the changing political scenario in Tamil Nadu, the Sonia Gandhi-led regime in New Delhi might well ask the Mahinda Rajapaksa government in Colombo to stop the war and talk to the LTTE, and this request could be sent through the Indian High Commissioner, Alok Prasad, Fernando speculated.

But if Rajapaksa were to ask Prasad: "If I do not accept the Indian proposals, what would be the repercussions, as you visualize? Alok Prasad would not have any answer to give," Fernando pointed out.

"Today, the biggest problem India faces with regard to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is this inability of India to answer this question," he stressed.

Prasad would not be able to say that the LTTE would seek military help from Tamil Nadu, as Tamil Nadu had become vigilant against the LTTE, Fernando said. And he could not warn that the unity of Sri Lanka could come under threat because any such threat to Sri Lanka would be a threat to India too, he pointed out.

Fernando says that India has no teeth. It had "lost its dentures" during the misadventure of 1987 when it imposed the India-Sri Lanka Accord and then followed it up with the induction of the IPKF with disastrous results, he said.

According to Fernando, Rajapaksa knows that India cannot bite, and so, he does things pretty much as he pleases, while "petting" India with "deceiving talk," making full use of the Indian media.

Source: newindpress