Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president M Karunanidhi on Friday said Narendra Modi's invitation to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa for his swearing-in was "not acceptable and unwelcome" by Tamils all over the world and urged the BJP leader to drop the initiative.
Video footage from inside the building showed hundreds of protesters packing into rooms and corridors, while hundreds also milled around the grounds outside.
The ATR 72-600 aircraft was accorded water salute as it landed at the Jaffna airport, about 400-km from capital Colombo.
The 73-year-old former President who is presently in a hotel in Bangkok along with his wife will return to Sri Lanka on August 25, cancelling his initial plan to remain in Thailand at least till November, the report said.
The High Commission said it was striving to return to its normal functioning soon.
Nearly 200 people were feared to have been buried alive in Sri Lanka after a devastating landslide triggered by rains destroyed the homes of mostly Indian-origin plantation workers, as heavy machinery was deployed on Thursday in rescue operations involving the army.
The prime minister should have visited Sri Lanka, armed with a critique of the Rajapakse government based on nuance and fact, says Sreenivasan Jain
Sherine Xavier, a Sri Lankan Tamil filmmaker from Canada, is happy. After months of struggle with the Indian censor board, she has finally obtained approval to screen her film Muttrupullia?, which deals with the post-war situation in Sri Lanka's Tamil areas.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who is currently facing public demand for his resignation over his mishandling of the economic crisis, is the man who ruthlessly ended Sri Lanka's nearly 30-year civil war with the LTTE with the death of its supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran in 2009.
Speaker's media secretary Indunil Abeywardena said a resignation letter from President Rajapaksa has been received through the Sri Lanka high commission in Singapore.
Rescuers pulled out more bodies from the muddy debris of disastrous landslide taking the toll to over 80.
'That it was the LTTE was known in three weeks's time.'
The SHO said that Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act had been included in the FIR, adding that the Chinese national would be presented before a court in Abbottabad.
Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Thursday met Defence Minister A K Antony in New Delhi. Rajapaksa and his Indian counterpart Shashikant Sharma had discussed increasing the frequency of joint exercises, training of Lankan officers in Indian institutes, supply of non-lethal defence equipment and other issues.
Whether it is Sri Lanka, Maldives, or Nepal, quietly but steadily, India has been reclaiming some of the ground it had lost to China, observes Aditi Phadnis.
'We believe that one of the suicide bombers studied in the UK and maybe later on did his post-graduate in Australia, before coming back to settle in Sri Lanka'
-- Seven suicide bombers believed to be members of an Islamist extremist group carried out the series of explosions. -- Police have so far arrested 24 people - mostly members of an Islamist extremist group - in connection with the blasts
'As I went around Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Jaffna and Mannar, my mind went back to my visit in January 1990 at the fag end of the IPKFs mission in Sri Lanka,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
The 2016 SAARC Summit was originally planned to be held in Islamabad on November 15-19, 2016. But after a terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18 that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances". The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the Islamabad meet.
Over 15 million voters are eligible to vote in the election being held under electoral districts-based proportional representation system.
A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has sent a Chinese national to jail on 14-day judicial remand on blasphemy charges in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after he was arrested on Monday, according to media reports on Tuesday.
In the endlessly entertaining and absorbing soap opera that is India-Sri Lanka relations, wait for the next episode, Aditi Phadnis reports.
Though dubbed as the "war hero", the role of Rajapaksa in ending the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam with the death of its supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran in 2009 is quite divisive as he stands accused of violating human rights, a charge he vehemently denies.
Seven persons had been arrested in connection with the blasts.
Rajapaksa is the first president to be sworn in outside Colombo.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, along with his wife and family, fled his official residence -- Temple Trees -- and took shelter at the naval base in Trincomalee.
Any form of entanglement with India or the US on the strategic plane will be anathema to Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa rulers, observes Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
The Yuan Wang 5 can easily monitor the Indian coast while operating in international waters. She does not have to enter a port in Sri Lanka to fulfill this mission, points out Commodore Venugopal Menon (retd).
In a conversation with R Ramasubramanian, Xavier said, "My documentary attempts to find answers to those frequently asked questions from Tamil refugees who are still in India."
After nearly two days of political deadlock, the stakeholders are engaged in prolonged talks to try and appoint a successor to Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Advancing Sri Lankan troops today made further inroads into tiger strongholds capturing the strategic town of Mankulam just adjacent to their prized goal of Kilinochchi as reports said a worried LTTE was sending its top commanders to the battlefront.
Over 100 personnel from Sri Lanka's elite Special Task Force on Friday raided the office of former army chief and defeated opposition presidential candidate General Sarath Fonseka in Colombo."I don't know what they are looking for. They have also questioned the staff," said a close aide of Fonseka, who was trounced by incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa in the January 26 presidential polls.
The Tigers accused the military of 'insensitivity' in carrying out the attack on the day of Balasingham's funeral.
Mahinda Rajapaksa has been accused by the Opposition of inciting the ruling party mobs to attack peaceful protesters by making a defiant speech while addressing several thousands of his supporters to deflect calls for his resignation.
"One of the military outposts at Thalgasmankada, located about 50 km south of Pottuvil, guarding the Yala national park came under the LTTE attack on Monday night. Six soldiers were killed and one more wounded," military spokesman Udaya Nanayakkara told UNI over phone, adding that the military had repulsed the rebel attack.
The 225-member Parliament will elect the new president by a secret vote on July 20, Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena said on Friday.
Lankan Speaker told the party leaders that Parliament will meet on July 20 to elect a new president.
Rajapaksa, his wife Loma and their two security officers were expected to leave for Singapore on board SQ437 from Male on Wednesday night but did not board the aircraft due to security concerns, the Daily Mirror newspaper reported.
Sri Lanka on Tuesday dismissed as "fabricated lies", a report by a leading rights group alleging that its military used rape and other forms of sexual violence to torture suspected Tamil rebels since the end of the island's civil war in 2009.
Dealing with the Sirisena government in Sri Lanka, says G Ganapathy Subramaniam, is a lot easier for India than engaging with the Rajapaksa regime.
