Govt firm on its stand on Sri Lanka

"Any division of Sri Lanka would result in yet another partition of India," Media minister and cabinet spokesman M Samaraweera told foreign correspondents in Colombo.

New Delhi has consistently held that it was committed to the maintenance of sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka which it described as a friendly neighbouring country.

“The position of the Government of India on the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is consistent, well-known and unchanged,” a foreign office spokesman said.

Asked how India viewed the remarks of Samaraweera, the spokesman said “I have not seen the full text of his statement and responses to questions. It is not fair on my part to comment without seeing it.”

Taking a view contrary to the official position Karunanidhi had said Sri Lanka should either devolve more rights to the Tamils or follow the Czech model where the ethnic communities of Czech and Slovaks agreed for territorial separation.

“We are in constant touch with Sri Lanka,” the spokesman said and added Sri Lankan government “understands” New Delhi’s position.

Meanwhile, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu CM M Karunanidhi today launched a scathing attack on the critics of his suggestion for a Czech model solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife saying those who talked of the country’s unity and integrity did so from their "air-conditioned comfort" without understanding the ground realities.

Stating that his suggestion was based on a "humanitarian approach and was not rooted in “linguistic chauvinism”, the DMK leader said people would understand it better if they came out of their “ivory tower” and took note of ground realities in Sri Lanka.

“There ought to be a distinction between those who talked of Sri Lanka’s unity sitting in air-conditioned comfort and pouring over a world map, and those who understood the ground realities,” Karunanidhi, whose DMK party is a constituent in the ruling NDA at the Centre, said in a five-page statement.

Karunanidhi asked his “hasty critics” to consider his stand as one that strengthened Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s position that the crisis should be solved peacefully and that the island government should shed its policies against “Eelam” – a separate state for Tamils.

“There is nothing wrong in my raising the question as to what sort of political solution should be found in Sri Lanka; whether it envisages a quasi-federal or confederational set-up or will it involve the Czech-Slovak type separation,” he said defending his suggestion.

Asserting that he mooted the idea for lasting peace in the country, Karunanidhi said “Nobody will oppose it if Tamils in Sri Lanka are given all rights and considered equal to Sinhala-speaking citizens. However, talking in terms of temporary solutions without conferring rights on Tamils amounts to postponing the problem.”