Stop the bloodbath

Dear Dr Manmohan Singh, Congratulations on becoming the first prime minister since Nehru to return to power for a second term after completing a full five year term

Stop the bloodbath

Dear Dr Manmohan Singh,

Congratulations on becoming the first prime minister since Nehru to return to power for a second term after completing a full five year term.

While you have a lot of work ahead of you concerning India and the international community, may I request you to look into one issue? I'm talking about the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Our biggest concern right now shouldn't be either the LTTE or the Sri Lankan Army. We need to focus on the plight of the civilian-Tamilians and non-Tamilians alike-who are unnecessarily getting caught in the fight.

And in recent times, since the Sri Lankan army is pursuing its dream of destroying the LTTE completely with monkish one-pointedness, the attacks on civilians is getting worse. Recently, while commenting on a particularly dastardly attack over the weekend that covered May 9th and 10th, UN spokesman in Sri Lanka Gordon Weiss was quoted in a PTI report as saying that "More than 100 children were killed in the attack."

Attacks on civilians have been rising slowly over the years and unicef.org says that "Civilian fatalities in wartime have climbed from 5 per cent at the turn of the centuryu00a0... to more than 90 per cent in the wars of the 1990s."

India, which has always claimed to be peaceful, must do something about this. Our dithering means that several NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, Amnesty International, and others, have ignored India and have asked Japan, Sri Lanka's largest aid donor, to do something.

Japan, like the rest of the international community, is always welcome to help. But does India have to sit back and do nothing? Can't we do something, something that goes beyond the politics of war and addresses the needs of the civilians who are caught in the conflict?

I urge you, sir, as a visionary and a statesman, to look into this issue at once. Your capabilities are well known and recognised in India, and this has been proved by the resounding victory you have tasted in the elections. Don't you think that it is now time that you looked at stopping international feuds?

I appeal to you, sir, not just because you are the Prime Minister, but because you are not a traditional politician. People have still not forgotten how, after 44 years of the licence raj (1947 to 1991), you helped reform India. The LTTE war has raged for 33 years (1976 to 2009). If you do not act decisively now, the war will stretch on for another decade and thousands more will die.

Do you really want this to happen?