By M.R. Narayan Swamy
New Delhi, Aug 19 (IANS) Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse’s elder son Namal has returned home after a brief visit to India during which he had a meeting with Congress MP Rahul Gandhi.
Rajapakse, heading a delegation of his NGO Tharunyata Hetak (Future for Youth), spent over 30 minutes with Gandhi on the evening of Aug 14, sources who interacted with the Sri Lankan youth told IANS.
“Meeting Rahul Gandhi was the main attraction of his visit,” said one source. “It was one of the main events. He wanted to meet a young leader of India and so he met Gandhi.
“He wanted to get a sense of how things are going for India. What better way to do than by meeting someone like Rahul Gandhi?”
It was Namal Rajapakse’s first visit to the Indian capital, and comes about three months before his father is expected to make his third trip to New Delhi since taking charge of Sri Lanka in November 2005.
Another source told IANS: “Rajapakse and Rahul Gandhi had a cordial meeting. Rajapakse also discussed the situation in his country.”
Rajapakse, who is studying law in London, has shown interest in areas of governance. Many believe that he is likely to take to active politics some day. A rugby player who also has interest in racing, the young Rajapakse is founder president of the Tharunyata Hetak group that seeks to unite youth for “national development”.
The Sri Lankan government is waging a bitter military campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has been blamed for the May 1991 assassination of Rahul’s father and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Rajiv Gandhi had ordered the deployment of Indian troops in Sri Lanka’s northeast in 1987 under a bilateral peace pact. The troops ended up fighting the LTTE and returned home in 1990 after losing nearly 1,200 men.
A New Delhi-based group played host to Namal Rajapakse, who flew into New Delhi Aug 13 and left after the midnight of Aug 14-15 as India prepared to mark 60 years of independence from Britain.
He was originally set to fly to Mumbai and spend a couple of days meeting some of India’s top industrialists. But the Mumbai leg of the programme was cancelled at the eleventh hour.
At a recent meeting in Sri Lanka’s south, home to the island’s majority Sinhalese community, the young Rajapakse said his group had succeeded in staying clear of politics and uniting and garnering the support of youth for public service.
He also declared that his endeavour was to build a healthy and environment-friendly young people “rich in social and cultural values by weaning them away from liquor, smoking and drug habits”.
Rajapakse’s visit came at a time when the Sri Lankan government is facing intense Western scrutiny over reports of human rights violations in the war-torn country, more so in the northeast.
The Rajapakse government has made it clear that it intends to take the war against the LTTE to the island’s rebel-controlled north after winning control of territory in the east that the Tigers have held on to for years.
Thousands have been killed and many more displaced in heavy fighting in Sri Lanka since December 2005.