Play all audios:
An Indian parliamentary delegation left for a five-day visit to Sri Lanka to assess the plight of Tamils displaced by the long drawn out ethnic war. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa
had the last laugh on Monday when the Indian parliamentary delegation led by leader of the opposition Sushama Swaraj left for a five-day visit to Sri Lanka to assess the plight of the Tamil
population displaced by the long drawn out ethnic war in the island nation. Jayalalithaa, who is also the general secretary of the AIADMK, withdrew her representative from the delegation
describing the visit as a conducted tour by the government of Sri Lanka. And when Jayalalithaa does something like this, the DMK patriarch Karunanidhi cannot sit idle. He too withdrew his
party representative from the delegation. On Monday, the Indian delegation left for Colombo without any major representation from Tamil Nadu. Though there are three Congress and one CPI(M)
representatives from Tamil Nadu in the delegation, the absence of the two Dravidian majors have taken the sheen out of the visit. None of the names in the delegation inspire confidence among
the people in Tamil Nadu. A visit in 2010 to the island nation by another parliament delegation which included DMK bigwigs like T R Baalu and Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi turned out to
be damp squib. “They attended a series of banquets hosted by the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and came back with handful of gifts Their visit did not make any impact on the sufferings of
the Tamils in Sri Lanka,” said Jayalalithaa in a statement. The Indian delegation will have a series of meeting with President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his brothers and cabinet colleagues Basil
and Chamal. They are also scheduled to meet leaders of the Tamil National Alliance, Sri Lankan Muslim Congress and Ceylon National Congress. But their itinerary does not include any visit to
regions in Northern Sri Lanka where hundreds of thousands of Tamils have been condemned to live in sub-human conditions in government camps. A senior government official told _DNA
_that though India voted to censure Sri Lanka for human right violations in the United Nations Human Right Council meeting at Geneva, it has only helped the Rajapakse government. “Our
foreign ministry is claiming that India voted against Sri Lanka after forcing the US to tone down the wording of the resolution. Now any intervention by the UN in the island nation is
possible only with the concurrence of the Sri Lankan government. The Tamils in the island nation are in for a major crisis. While Karunanidhi is continuing his support to the indifferent UPA
government, Jayalalithaa who described the trip as a junket sponsored by the Sri Lankan government is the real winner in this round of political game,” he said.