Chennai, January 5
Charging the Centre with ‘insulting the sentiments of Tamils’ on the Sri Lankan Tamils issue, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), having two members in the
Central government, today threatened to quit the UPA.
The PMK’s general council meeting would be convened within a month to discuss whether the party should continue in the UPA, since the Centre had ‘shown disrespect to the feelings of Tamils’ by continuously ignoring the pleas of the Tamil Nadu Assembly and several appeals by the state leaders to intervene in the island conflict and save the Tamil people, PMK leader Dr S Ramadoss told reporters here.
“The LTTE is not a terrorist outfit. It is only an organisation of freedom fighters,” he asserted and added that the Union government should understand this. The PMK leader also said, “Tamil Eelam (a separate nation for Sri Lankan Tamils) is the only solution to the conflict.”
Asserting that Tamil Eelam would be a reality, he said it would be a friendly nation to India, unlike Sri Lanka which had supported India’s enemies during the wars against Pakistan and China.
“People of Tamil Nadu are hanging their heads in shame, since they feel that the Centre had caused an affront to their dignity, by its callous attitude,” he said. Recalling that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had assured to send External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to Colombo to find a solution to the issue, the PMK leader said nothing had been done so far.
He also appealed to the Chief Minister to initiate steps to stop the war in the island nation and assured that the PMK would support him in this issue.
The PMK, which has six members in the Lok Sabha, is a party of the dominant Vanniyar community, in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu. No party had won Parliament or Assembly elections in the last decade, without the PMK’s support. The party has been a part of the winning front in the 1998, 1999 and 2004 Parliament elections and the Assembly elections in 2001 and 2006.
