GL due in India

As India and Sri Lanka further step up engagement over the issue of resettlement and political solution, Sri Lankan foreign minister G L Peiris will visit India next month. The visit will be followed by his counterpart S M Krishna’s visit to the island nation in the last week of October.

Peiris, who is slated to be in India for the R K Mishra memorial lecture on October 15, is likely to call on PM Manmohan Singh and also have a meeting with Krishna. Sources said that Krishna’s visit is likely to take place from October 27 to 31.

Peiris is expected to brief Singh over the issue of resettlement and the initiatives taken by Colombo to expedite a political settlement which would keep in mind the interest of minority communities. Sri Lanka has conveyed to India that only about 28,000 people remain to be resettled and that this process will definitely be completed by the end of this year.

“One of the points I sought to articulate in my meetings with the various representatives of the government and the people I met on my visit was that apart from pursuing the rehabilitation and resettlement of the IDPs, we would also have to move beyond to the political processes involved,’’ foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said during her recent visit to the country.

While India has been insisting that Colombo look beyond resettlement now, the government in Colombo has been constrained by many factors, one of them being lack of real and credible leadership among the Tamil community which the government can do business with.

Meanwhile, sources said that Indian agencies, including Maharashtra Police ATS, are in touch with the Sri Lankan security agencies to verify the claim made by 29-year-old Mirza Himayat Baig, an accused in the Pune German Bakery blast case that he got training in Colombo.

According to Indian agencies, Sri Lanka has maintained that there was no reason or evidence to believe that a LeT operative could have received training in Colombo, a place which is constantly under the scanner of security agencies. The Indian police is now learnt to be trying to get details from Baig about where in Colombo the training camp was held, Times of India reports.