COLOMBO, September 12, 2012 | The Hindu
R. K. Radhakrishnan
Elected representatives from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry are
among those who did not make the trip for the annual Commonwealth Parliamentary
Association (CPA) meet that has opened here.
Though a majority of the 800-plus representatives from over 175 branches
were in town since September 7, the meet was declared open by President Mahinda
Rajapaksa on Tuesday.
While it was clear that Tamil Nadu Speaker D. Jaya Kumar will not be
attending, the case of Karnataka is curious. Recently, some MLAs from Karnataka
were embroiled in a controversy over a tour of Latin America. Last week, a tour
of Europe by a second batch of legislators and officials was called off.
The Colombo jaunt appears to have been a casualty to the controversy.
Pondicherry followed Tamil Nadu’s lead and has kept away. But the Indian
delegation is still the largest with over 50 elected representatives from
several States.
The conference will decide CPA’s strategic plan for the next four years.
Mr. Rajapaksa spoke of the lofty principles on which Sri Lankan
democracy was founded, how he had protected and nurtured it, and asked them to
explore the country and discover how free the people were.
“Your presence in Sri Lanka gives you a good opportunity to see for
yourselves the progress of democracy in our country, after the major threat it
faced under terrorism. This is important in the context of the barrage of lies
being spread about Sri Lanka today. As you will see, there is full freedom of
travel to any part of the country. You can also speak to anyone, from
government or the opposition and different communities.”
Indirectly hitting out at the U.S. and its allies, he said there was “an
unfortunate trend” to “impose democracy on people and states” and “bomb
democracy into place with a carpet of destruction”. Mr. Rajapaksa, who once
counted Libya’s Qadhafi among his friends, said there were those “who seem to
think of regime change as the necessary path to democracy, without seeing the
consequences of such action that stare at us today”. Sri Lanka — facing serious
charges of human rights abuses in the last stages of the war which, the U.N.
says, killed about 40,000 civilians — used the opportunity to flag the issue of
use and misuse of human rights. “We are also aware of how human rights can be
made a slogan by the worst violators of such rights, to threaten traditional
democracies,” said Mr. Rajapaksa.
