New Delhi, May 17 (Inditop.com) India extended the ban on Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers because its cadres are regrouping in Tamil Nadu to take revenge against Indian leaders for not preventing its military rout last year, according to a home ministry notification.
Although the Sri Lankan military has decimated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), its surviving members are “regrouping in Tamil Nadu in pursuance of their avowed objective of establishing separate Tamil Eelam”, said the notification.
India, which first outlawed the LTTE in 1992 after the Tigers assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, extended the ban last week for another two years.
It said that through internet portals, the Tamil diaspora in the West was spreading “anti-India feeling among Sri Lankan Tamils by holding the top Indian political leders and bureaucrats responsible for the defeat of the LTTE”, it said.
“Such propaganda through internet … (is) likely to impact VVIP security adversely in India,” it added.
Sri Lankan armed forces crushed the LTTE in May last year, killing its top leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and all his top lieutenants, destroying a once feared insurgent group at one stroke.
The defeat ended a quarter century long conflict that claimed about 90,000 lives on all sides of the ethnic divide.
Noting that the LTTE has sympathisers, supporters and agents in India, the notification said that the LTTE’s objective of a separate homeland for all Tamils “threatens the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India”.
It said the activities of the LTTE cadres, dropouts and sympathisers who have been traced out in Tamil Nadu “suggest that the cadres sent to Tamil Nadu would ultimately be utilized by the LTTE for unlawful activities”.
It said the Indian government felt that LTTE activities “continue to pose a threat to India, and are detrimental to, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India”.
Therefore, it said, the LTTE needed to remain a banned organisation under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967.
