The DMK on Sunday openly wanted the Centre to back its demand for a UN intervention to hold a referendum in Sri Lanka and find a permanent political solution to the ethnic crisis that has devastated the island Tamils for over 50 years now.
In a strong message to the UPA ten days before Parliament’s winter session, DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi declared: “Unless India exerted enough pressure on the UN to take this step for a referendum in Sri Lanka in line with the resolutions of the DMK-sponsored Tamil Eelam Supporters Organisation (TESO) and stood by us firmly, it won’t be possible for us to firmly stand by them.”
The resolutions were adopted at a TESO global meet in August 2012.
The DMK chief made this declaration at a function to facilitate the party’s youth wing leader M K Stalin and DMK parliamentary party leader T R Baalu. The two had just returned from a trip to the UN headquarters in New York and the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where they handed over a copy of the TESO resolutions, urging intervention by the global body for a referendum in Sri Lanka.