India’s Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid, who will lead the Indian delegation to the Commonwealth meeting in Sri Lanka, has defended Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s decision to skip the event following intense pressure from Tamil politicians and ministers in the Union Cabinet.

“I don’t think we should look at any one single dimension to this decision. Let’s not forget that the Prime Minister doesn’t always go to Commonwealth (meetings),” Mr Khurshid said in an exclusive interview with NDTV.

The PM and the Congress had to cave in to the huge campaign that was mounted, not just by all major political players in Tamil Nadu, but its own ministers from Tamil Nadu, like P Chidambaram, Jayanthi Natarajan, GK Vasan and V Narayanasamy, asking the PM to boycott the event over Sri Lanka’s alleged war crimes against Lankan Tamils.

“The Prime Minister is campaigning and of course there are a lot of issues in Tamil Nadu and many other important things that are on the Prime Ministers plate right now. So there could be a lot of reasons that went into this decision,” Mr Khurshid said.

On being asked if domestic politics prevailed over India’s diplomatic and strategic interests, the 60-year-old minister said, “We have a very important relationship with Sri Lanka. I don’t think we should see this as a switch-on-switch-off affair.”

The government has reportedly been working to explain to the Sri Lankan government the circumstances and the pressures that have triggered the decision.

There has also been some concern that the PM skipping Colombo may also weaken the newly-installed chief minister of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, who had invited Dr Singh to visit the Tamil-dominated Jaffna.

But in an election year, neither the Congress nor the Prime Minister could have ignored the weight of political opinion and public sentiment in Tamil Nadu. - NDTV