The government is helpless to influence the situation at this late stage, despite appeals from DMK and its own party members to stop the fighting.
The Sri Lankan crisis has caught the Congress-led UPA government on the wrong foot.
The government is helpless to influence the situation at this late stage, despite appeals from ally DMK and its own party members to stop the fighting.
India can keep appealing to Colombo and the LTTE to allow Tamil civilians out of the war zone, but is helpless and cannot stop the onward march of the Sri Lanka army to claim the final stretch of land where fierce fighting continues.
Neither president Mahinda Rajapaksa, scenting a major military victory, nor Prabhakaran, locked in a deadly last-minute fight, is in a mood to heed such calls, not just from India but from the US, Britain, Australia and the UN.
New Delhi’s concern for the fate of Tamil civilians is also linked to the election prospects of the Congress and ally DMK in Tamil Nadu. The Congress does not want to take a wrong step when every seat in the state counts.
Late on Wednesday evening prime minister Manmohan Singh called a meeting to review the crisis in the island nation. The government then issued a statement. “We are very unhappy at the continued killing of innocent Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka. These killings must stop. The Sri Lankan government has a responsibility to protect its own citizens. And the LTTE must stop its barbaric attempt to hold civilians hostage,” foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee said.
The government stressed on both Colombo and the LTTE not to play with the lives of civilians. But home minister P Chidambaram, contesting from Sivaganga constituency in Tamil Nadu, went a step further and blamed the Mahinda Rajapaksa government. He said Colombo was “more at fault” as it thought military solution could end the strife.
“We have been making the demand continuously for many days. But both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government are not paying heed to our request,” he told reporters on Thursday. “The issue cannot be resolved by the army. It has to be resolved through negotiations. The Tamils should be given equal respect, status and rights. One or two Tamil dominated provinces should be made states with equal rights within the Lankan federal set-up,” he said.
Chidambaram was echoing Pranab Mukherjee who also stressed the importance of a political solution to the ethnic problem and the need to give Tamil minorities their rights.
PTI quoted Chidambaram as saying it was wrong to say that the UPA government did not take any steps to stop the hostilities in the island. Right from 1983, successive central governments had been following the same policy vis-a-vis the Sri Lankan strife. PMK, AIADMK, MDMK had been allies in those governments, he said. “Now some political parties are trying to mislead the people and claiming it is a poll plank,” Chidambaram said.
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