President pays homage to Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, currently on a visit to India, offered prayers at the famed Buddhist holy shrine of Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya in the eastern state of Bihar on Friday.

Incidentally, this visit also happens to be a sort of pilgrimage for the President since he has desired not to make this official as he would not be visiting India’s national capital New Delhi.

Earlier in the day, Rajapaksa met Chief Minister of the eastern state of Bihar Nitish Kumar and a host of other officials.

Apart from the Mahabodhi Temple, Rajapaksa’s two-day long visit also includes a visit to the famous Tirupati temple in southern India of Andhra Pradesh, before he leaves on Saturday.

The President’s visit witnessed protests by pro-Tamil outfits in Chennai.

The regional Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) party staged a mass rally in New Delhi to protest against the genocide of the minority Tamil population in the island nation during the civil war, which ended in 2009.

Sri Lanka has rejected a UN report that more than 70,000 civilians were unaccounted for when its war with Tamil Tiger rebels ended in 2009, calling its findings “erroneous and replete with conjecture and bias”.

Released on 14 November 2012, the report said the United Nations failed to call proper attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan civilians during the bloody final stage of the three-decade war.

The report cited an earlier estimate of 40,000 civilians killed in crossfire between Government and rebel forces after they were trapped on a sliver of coastline.

The UN report reinvigorated calls from human rights groups and expatriate ethnic Tamils for an international investigation into suspected war crimes towards the end of the conflict with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Sri Lanka’s Government has repeatedly rejected allegations that it committed war crimes and also rejected suggestions in the report that it had intimidated UN officials.

The war ended with the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009.

 – Pix by Sudath Silva