Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Sri Lanka this Friday in the shadow of a controversial statement by the country's prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on shooting Indian fishermen in Lankan waters.
"If we are going to resort to shooting then both the countries can keep shooting each other, because it's not just our fishermen who go there, their fishermen also come into our waters. We need to have an interim solution which is based on humanitarian grounds and not technicalities," Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said in Parliament today.
On Saturday, Mr Wickremesinghe told a Chennai based news channel Tanthi TV, "If someone tries to break into my house, I can shoot. If he gets killed, law allows me to do that."
Mr Modi is the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Lanka in 28 years. Rajiv Gandhi was the last prime minister to visit the country in 1987.
The prime minister will also address the Sri Lankan Parliament before traveling to Tamil-dominated Jaffna. He will pay homage to the soldiers of the Indian Peace Keeping Force or IPKF who died in Sri Lanka fighting the civil war. The IPKF was invited to Sri Lanka to enforce the India-Sri Lanka accord of 1987.
He said PM Modi should speak about demilitarisation and the return of land to the Tamils in his address to the Sri Lankan Parliament.
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