Sri Lanka’s foreign minister G.L. Peiris
will visit India next week
First Published: Tue, Jan 15 2013. 10 54 PM IST
| Live mint
Indian external affairs minister Salman Khurshid. India has been engaged in reconstruction and development projects in north and east of Sri Lanka. Photo: Priyanka Parashar
New Delhi: India and Sri Lanka are expected to
review the status of projects undertaken by the larger neighbour in the island
nation when Sri Lanka’s foreign minister G.L. Peiris visits next week, people
familiar with the matter on both sides said on Tuesday.
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. Peiris 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.
“This issue has not been discussed with
India as yet,” said a person close to the developments on the Sri Lankan side.
There were strains on the economic side as well last year when Sri Lanka
increased excise duty on imported cars. The move does not single out firms from
India—Sri Lanka’s largest trading partner—but affects them most because they
account for 95% of the auto market in the island nation.
An issue of worry for India has been the
increasing influence of China—India’s strategic and economic rival —in the
island nation. The world’s second largest economy has been involved in many
infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka, the most notable being the $1.5 billion
port at Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka.
First
Published: Tue, Jan 15 2013. 10 54 PM IST
