January 16, 2013 | Colombo Gazette
External Affairs Minister G.L Peiris is to visit India
next week to meet Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid, Live Mint reported.
India and Sri Lanka are expected to review the status
of projects undertaken by the larger neighbour in the island nation at the
meeting.
Peiris will be in New Delhi for the meeting of the
India-Sri Lanka Joint Commission, an umbrella body that looks at various areas
of bilateral cooperation from science and technology to agriculture.
He will head the Sri Lankan delegation while foreign
minister Salman Khurshid will lead the Indian side. The meeting will also mark
the first interaction between Peiris and Khurshid, after the latter was named
foreign minister in October last year replacing S.M. Krishna.
Since the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in May 2009,
India has been engaged in reconstruction and development projects in the north
and the east of the country—areas that were the main theatres of the
three-decade civil war that ravaged the country.
Among the projects undertaken by India are rebuilding
rail linkages in the north and the east, setting up several vocational training
centres, repair and construction of schools and houses and supplying inputs for
agricultural regeneration. One of the projects undertaken by India was the
construction of 50,000 houses for internally displaced persons —or refugees of
the civil war—in the Northern and Eastern Provinces.
Simultaneously, India has been nudging the Sri Lankan
administration to introduce political and democratic reforms to bring the
minority Tamil community into the national mainstream.
It was the feeling of alienation among the mainly
Hindu Tamil community that sparked the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka in the
1980s. Tamil separatist groups demanded the creation of a separate state carved
out of Sri Lanka’s north and eastern provinces that have traditionally had
Tamil majorities. The war officially ended in 2009 with the killing of
Velupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of the Tamil Tiger militant group, but the
Sri Lankan government has since then been accused of human rights violations,
especially during the last stages of the war.
The issue of the treatment of the minority Tamils in
Sri Lanka is a touchy issue in India as the community shares close cultural and
linguistic ties with India’s 62 million Tamils in southern Tamil Nadu.
Relations between Sri Lanka and India, which is the
island nation’s largest neighbour, have traditionally been close but there have
been strains recently over India voting in favour of a motion censuring Sri
Lanka at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. The vote took place
last year and a review of Sri Lanka’s record is expected in Geneva in March.
