Partition no solution: BJP

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JUNE 6. The BJP has reacted strongly to a warning by a Sri Lankan Minister that any partition of Sri Lanka will start a process of balkanisation of India. The strong roots of democracy in India will simply not allow that to happen, it says.

While the party has already rejected the suggestion made by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, Mr. M. Karunanidhi, that partition is the only long-lasting political solution to ethnic strife on the island, it has also condemned the idea that the Sri Lankan crisis could trigger a separatist demand in India.

``Yes, the solution in Sri Lanka has to be a political one,'' Mr. J.P. Mathur, vice-president, asserted today, ``but partition of the country is not the solution''. Over 50 years ago, India was partitioned but it did not bring peace to the subcontinent. At the same time, he pointed out, all those who had been predicting balkanisation of India for the last 50 years had been proved wrong.

Mr. Mathur said that under no circumstances would India fall apart. For years people in the West and elsewhere had been predicting its balkanisation. At the height of the naxal movement in the Sixties and Seventies, the West predicted India would break up into small pieces. But that did not happen. ``The strength lies in our vibrant democracy, and those who say that the crisis in Sri Lanka would trigger a problem of balkanisation here are wholly mistaken.''

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Section  : National
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