Annamalai wants TN govt to hand over Sri Lankan aid to Centre

Chennai, May 1

Tamil Nadu BJP president K.Annamalai has called upon the state government to hand over the aid announced for Sri Lanka to the Centre instead of handing it over directly.

Delivering the aid directly would mean politicising the standard protocols, he added.

In a statement on Sunday, the BJP leader said that the resolution passed by the Tamil Nadu Assembly urging the Centre to provide food and other essentials lacked the details regarding what Government of India had already provided to the island nation and continuing to provide to that country.

He said that the recent actions of the Tamil Nadu government, including 'Operation Ganga' (bringing back students from Ukraine) were only aimed at scoring political mileage.

Annamalai charged that during the 2009 civil war in Sri Lanka, the UPA government at the Centre and the DMK government in the state had watched a grave humanitarian crisis unfold without doing anything into rescuing Tamil people from the war zone.

He said: "Our concern is that this resolution passed by the Tamil Nadu assembly should not be another record -2 hour fast type situation orchestrated by the then Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi to create a mirage that the DMK government had worked hard for the ceasefire during the war".

The BJP leader said that the Narendra Modi government at the Centre had promised all help Sri Lanka needed to overcome the crisis and said that the central government had followed the "Neighbourhood first policy".

He said that as part of this policy the Union government was ready to walk the extra mile to help Sri Lanka out of this economic crisis well before the resolution was passed by the Tamil Nadu Assembly.