Lankan Foreign Minister to visit India from Sunday

The situation in Sri Lanka, which has been witnessing a spurt in violence recently, will come up for discussion here next week when Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama undertakes a visit here.

The Indian side is expected to convey its worry over the situation in the island nation when Bogollagama holds talks with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and meets Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday.

India has been closely watching the situation in Sri Lanka where violence and clashes between army and LTTE have marked a substantial increase.

The Sri Lankan army has said it has launched a major operation to capture LTTE chief V Prabhakaran "alive".

Commenting on the developments in Sri Lanka, Prime Minister said on Monday that the conflict in the neighbouring country "has given a lot of worries because many times it happens that when ethnic tensions increase, there is a tendency of increased inflow of refugees in our country".

It also creates "both domestic problems as well as foreign policy problems," he said.

Bogollagama will extend a formal invite to the Prime Minister for the 15th SAARC Summit to be held in Colombo in August.

The Summit was originally scheduled to be held in the Maldives but the venue was shifted to Sri Lanka after security concerns following a bomb attack in Male.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was established in December 1985 by heads of state or government of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan, Nepal and Maldives. Afghanistan was inducted as the eighth member of SAARC last year.

Source: Hindu