Jaya faults DMK for death of Lankan Tamils

CHENNAI: Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Wednesday charged that her predecessor M Karunanidhi had failed to protect the Lankan Tamils during the war in Sri Lanka. Instead of taking concrete steps to save the Tamils, Karunanidhi had enacted ‘dramas’, she said. Participating in the discussion on the resolution moved by her urging the Centre to impose economic sanctions against Sri Lanka until the country accorded equal rights to Tamils and resettled those internally displaced to their native places, the CM said attacks by the Lankan Army on Tamils intensified in the fag end of 2008 and in 2009 when Mahinda Rajapakse was President of Sri Lanka and the UPA government at the Centre in India.  There were reports that the Indian Army had trained 100 personnel from the Lankan Army in 2008 and provided them with sophisticated equipment and weapons. These reports must have come to the attention of then CM Karunanidhi, she said.The Lankan Army then started attacking the Tamils viciously, she said, recalling how she had urged the DMK to withdraw support to the UPA government to halt the attack on Tamils. Instead, Karunanidhi had wasted time adopting resolutions in the Assembly, organising human chain demonstrations and sending telegrams to the Prime Minister.Karunanidhi also undertook a ‘fast’ on Marina Beach for a couple of hours and ended it falsely promising that Lanka had stopped its attack on Tamils. “The selfish attitude and haplessness of the DMK regime had caused the death of thousands of Lankan Tamils,” Jayalalithaa said.Speaking on the resolution, Leader of Opposition, Vijaykanth sarcastically said that “the credit for eliminating the Tamil race in Sri Lanka went to the DMK.” Referring to a remark of a Congress member that the party could not be blamed for the Tamils’ plight, Vijaykanth said, “Tamil Nadu has been subjected to betrayal for a long time on various issues including on the Cauvery water disputes”.This sparked a row between DMK and DMDK MLAs. Speaker D Jayakumar refused DMK leader Durai Murugan permission to respond to Vijaykanth’s remarks. In protest, Durai Murugan led the DMK MLAs in a walkout.