In a Sri Lankan House of 225 members, the cut-off figure comes to 113. With Wickremesinghe side touching 102 and Rajapaksa's team at 101, the three-party Tamil National Alliance with 16 members and the left-leaning Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna with 6 members hold the key. But with the latter declaring that they will not support either formation in a vote count,that leaves the TNA as the deciding factor, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
His debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage, set in the backdrop of the civil war.
After a high-level party meet in Chennai, Vaiko said his party has unanimously decided to support the DMK in the by-election.
The ATR 72-600 aircraft was accorded water salute as it landed at the Jaffna airport, about 400-km from capital Colombo.
Vaiko, who was present in the court, said he never sought any leniency.
SPG Act tweaked to ensure that commandoes accompany protectees overseas as well.
Sri Lanka, under global pressure over its human rights record, on Thursday launched a six-month census to count the number of casualties during the final phase of the brutal civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009.
Maithripala Sirisena, the Sri Lankan president-elect, will be sworn-in on Friday evening following his stunning victory in the tightest-ever presidential race that ended the 10-year-rule of Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The commander said that by looking at the pattern of operation and the places that the suspects travelled, there has to be some outside involvement of some leadership or instructions.
Ending months of speculation, Sri Lanka's vanquished former president Mahinda Rajapaksa on Wednesday announced his return to electoral politics, saying he will lead an opposition faction during the general elections in August.
Sri Lanka's embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, under immense pressure from the public and the Opposition to quit over the island nation's worst economic crisis, said on Thursday that the abolition of the executive presidency, a move that will curb his powers, will be considered by Parliament.
Political analysts said Sirisena's move to install Rajapaksa as the prime minister could lead to a constitutional crisis as the 19th amendment to the Constitution would not allow the sacking of Wickremesinghe as the premier without a majority.
Brushing aside opposition from the Dravida Munetra Kazhagam and other parties in Tamil Nadu, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday met Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa but did not give him any assurance on which way India will vote on a the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution for an independent international probe into rights abuses during the war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Sasikala may be set to take over the reins of Tamil Nadu, yet she faces a period of immense turbulence.
An internal communication of the home ministry states that the Naxal movement is fast spreading to the southern states, and if immediate action is not taken it could blow up into a full-fledged menace, reports Vicky Nanjappa.
The Supreme Court on Thursday extended the bail of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in a disproportionate assets case by four months and asked the Chief Justice of Karnataka high court to constitute a special bench to decide her plea expeditiously within three months.
Hindu American Foundation: 'As an organisation that works on issues affecting Hindu minorities... in the civil war although all groups were affected, Hindu temples and Hindu institutions were disproportionately affected, and Hindus continue to be affected.' Sri Lanka's Ambassador to the United States Prasad Kariyawasam: 'Assume that Sri Lanka is referred to the ICC through the UN Security Council -- which will never happen because Sri Lanka has enough clout to block it. But assume it is. Still, the ICC cannot handle it because retrospectively they don't have jurisdiction.'
The 74-year-old leader, who describe himself as "a rebel with a cause", earlier served as the country's president from 2005-2015, becoming South Asia's longest-serving leader. He was also prime minister for a brief period in 2018.
The UNHRC agreed to defer the report on Sri Lanka's alleged human rights violations.
The Congress president, who is on a two-day visit to the United Kingdom, told the audience of UK-based parliamentarians and local leaders on Friday that the incident was a tragedy and painful experiences, but disagreed with the view that the Congress was "involved".
The United Nations Human Rights Council has accused Sri Lanka of sabotaging a UN-mandated probe into the country's nearly three decades-long brutal civil war, drawing a sharp reaction from Colombo as it dismissed the charges.
Unnecessary songs mar the narrative flow.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, along with his wife and family, fled his official residence -- Temple Trees -- and took shelter at the naval base in Trincomalee.
Following the elimination of LTTE, Pakistan-based terror groups are leaving no stone unturned to take advantage of the vacuum, and slowly recruiting youth for terror activities from South India. Vicky Nanjappa reports.
One of the main missions of the key functionary of the banned LTTE, who was arrested along with seven Sri Lankan nationals in Chennai on Thursday, was to kidnap rival group member and Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) leader Varadaraja Perumal and his family next month.
Mahinda Rajapaksa completed 50 years of parliamentary politics in July this year. He was elected as a Member of Parliament at the young age of 24 in 1970. He has since been elected president twice and has been appointed prime minister thrice.
"It is very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people," said the Congress president.
'With Punjab and Kashmir in flames, it would not have been politically wise to alienate the West.' 'It would have inclined Western countries towards Pakistan.' 'It would have been a self-goal.'
Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka's president-elect, was a low-profile cabinet colleague of longtime president Mahinda Rajapaksa until he switched sides to become joint opposition candidate and emerge as the proverbial dark horse in the presidential polls.
Nalini had submitted that she had spent 25 years in jail though the legal requirement was only 20 years to be eligible for early release.
Dealing with the Sirisena government in Sri Lanka, says G Ganapathy Subramaniam, is a lot easier for India than engaging with the Rajapaksa regime.
In the endlessly entertaining and absorbing soap opera that is India-Sri Lanka relations, wait for the next episode, Aditi Phadnis reports.
Voters in Sri Lanka's Tamil majority Northern Province on Saturday began voting in the first local elections in 25 years to elect a council to govern the former war zone, four years after the military defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after decades of bloody civil war.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin on Thursday said he has requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to provide additional doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the state.
British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday made a historic visit to the former war zone of Jaffna to "shine a light on the chilling events" during the last phase of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, hours after Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa cautioned against turning the Commonwealth into a "punitive and judgemental body".
Gill was suffering from end-stage kidney failure and significant ischemic heart disease. He was recovering from peritonitis.
Sandhya Ravishankar describes the thorny relationship between the two political titans of Tamil Nadu, M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa, both now part of the ages.
Shrug off the yoke of the imperialism of Delhi. That is why the DMK manifesto offers what it offers: The promise that Tamil Nadu will, one day, become an independent republic, notes Aditi Phadnis.
Sri Lanka's newly elected president Mithripala Sirisena waves at media as he leaves the election commission in Colombo. Photograph: Dinuka Liyanawatte/ Reuters
'For the Tamil Nadu protestors to openly ask popular film actor Vijay Sethupathi not to don Murali in 800 is a travesty in every sense. It may have given them a cause to tell the world, and the governments in New Delhi, Colombo and Chennai, that the Sri Lankan ethnic issue was still alive in the state -- more so, during the current run-up to two major events in the first half of 2021,' says N Sathiya Moorthy.
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