Singh, Rajapaksa to meet at G-20 summit

The Hindu: When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, it will be their first meeting after India voted against Sri Lanka at the United Nations Human Rights Council session in Geneva earlier this year.

Dr. Singh’s hectic schedule, and the fact that he is slated to meet almost all leaders at the G-20 summit, will not permit issues of significance to be taken up at length at this meeting, but it will provide an opportunity for both sides to flag the niggling problems that have come to dominate the India-Sri Lanka discourse in the past two years.  Dr. Singh met Rajapaksa on the sidelines of the 2011 SAARC summit at Addu City, and on the sidelines of the last session of the United Nations General Assembly. The last bilateral meeting between the two leaders was in New Delhi in June 2010. The Prime Minister has met all other south Asian leaders barring Pakistan  in bilateral fora in the past year.

With the perception in Colombo solidifying against India after the Geneva vote, Sri Lanka has embarked on a conscious effort to win friends across the world. Rajapaksa has been to Thailand, Qatar, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, apart from attending the Queen’s Diamond jubilee in England.

He is now in Cuba, will visit Brazil and attend the G-20 plus summit. He is scheduled to attend the coming NAM summit in Tehran, and also the next session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The President’s International spokesperson Bandula Jayasekara insists that the visits are about economics. “Sri Lanka has a story to tell the world,” he said. “The President is the biggest salesman of Sri Lanka. He is the President. He is also the CEO of our country,” he adds.