By IANS,
Kolkata: Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, whose party quit the ruling UPA last year, Wednesday extended support to it on any decision it took on the Sri Lankan issue at the UNHRC in Geneva, but said the concerns and sentiments of the people must be kept in view.
In a post on social networking site Facebook, Banerjee said while her party was “deeply concerned” over the atrocities meted out to Tamils in Sri Lanka, it did not wish to interfere in foreign policy.
“Our party supports the cause of the Tamil brothers and sisters. We are deeply concerned about the atrocities meted out to a section of Tamil population in a foreign country,” the post said.
“Local sentiments and their causes sometimes become very critical. We are supporting their cause. At the same time, our party follows a policy that we should not interfere into issues involving external relations with foreign countries,” she said.
“We leave it for the central government to decide on such issues. However, the concerns of the state and the sentiments of the people must be kept in view by the centre, before taking any decision pertaining to foreign country,” she added.
A vote on the US-sponsored motione is coming up at the 47-member United Nation Human Rights Council (UNHRC) pulling up Sri Lanka for military excesses during the final stages of the war that vanquished the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Banerjee’s Trinamool had walked out of the UPA coalition in September last year in protest against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh government’s decision to raise diesel and fertiliser prices, restrict per family supply of the number of subsidised cooking gas cylinders and allow FDI in multi-brand retail.