By IRNA
New Delhi : India has told a group of Tamil politicians from Sri Lanka that it hopes Colombo will not go for a unitary system of governance when it unveils a power sharing formula to end the ethnic conflict.
National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told the delegation here Thursday that India had repeatedly told Sri Lankan leaders that it was vital to grant substantial autonomy to the island’s Tamil areas, IANS reported here quoting sources.
Narayanan conveyed the Indian government views to V
Anandasangaree, D. Sitharthan and T. Sritharan just before they ended a six-day visit to New Delhi where they met senior officials and opinion makers.
Anandasangaree heads the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), Sitharthan the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOT) and Sritharan is from the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF-Varada group).
Among the others the three met included Finance Minister P Chidambaram and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon.
Amid a costly war that rages between the military and the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka has been battling within over how much autonomy it must grant to Tamils as well as Muslims to give them a sense of power sharing.
While most people among the minorities and sections of the Sinhalese majority are for a federal system of governance, influential groups in the government and in allied groups insist that Sri Lanka’s unitary system must stay.
Some in Sri Lanka fear that federalism or substantial autonomy may trigger separatist tendencies one day.
India does not share this view.
At their 40-minute meeting, Anandasangaree, Sitharthan and Sritharan gave a detailed assessment of the military and political situation in Sri Lanka, where government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) appear to be headed towards a decisive showdown in the island’s rebel-held north.
Violence raging since late 2005, primarily in the country’s northeast, has killed thousands and left many more homeless.
According to the sources, the Tamil leaders urged Narayanan to pressure Sri Lanka’s badly divided political establishment to come to a consensus on issues of governance.
Without this, they argued, there could be no peace.