M A I N   N E W S

DMK letter to Prez closes options for UPA
Anita Katyal/TNS

New Delhi, March 19
The UPA government’s efforts to placate its ally DMK were thwarted tonight when its southern ally handed over a letter to President Pranab Mukherjee withdrawing support to the ruling coalition, closing all options of a possible rapprochement.

After it first heard about DMK chief M Karunanidhi’s decision to pull out from the UPA government this morning, the coalition’s crisis managers promptly went into a huddle and subsequently stepped up their efforts to mollify its southern partner.

Lawyers protest demanding the government to vote in favour of a US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka, in Coimbatore on Tuesday. — PTI

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held discussions with his senior ministers through the day and the Congress core group met twice to find a resolution to the current crisis. The government believed it had time on its hands as the DMK had not submitted a formal letter to the President withdrawing its support while Karunanidhi had initially set a two-day deadline for the party’s demands to be met.

The DMK patriarch had said his party could reconsider his decision if Parliament passed a resolution against Sri Lanka and introduced tougher language in the US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC in Geneva.

UPA sources had admitted that the government was giving serious thought to both these demands but the political narrative changed late tonight. Earlier, Congress president Sonia Gandhi had talked tough on the issue of Lankan Tamils in her address to party MPs to send out a signal to the DMK that the Congress was sensitive to its concerns, but to little avail.

Karunanidhi was said to be upset that India had worked with the US to dilute its resolution against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC. Even as the Congress was examining the DMK’s demands, several Congress leaders felt it was a futile exercise. For one, the BJP said it was not in favour of Parliament adopting a country-specific resolution as it was tantamount to interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation and would set a precedent for other countries to do the same against India. The government was finding it difficult to justify DMK’s demand as Parliament had passed a resolution against Pakistan only last week for its assembly’s resolution against Afzal Guru’s hanging.

There was also a problem with the content of the resolution as the DMK wanted Lanka to be condemned for “genocide and war crimes” and a time-bound international probe into the atrocities committed by the its army against Tamil civilians.