Former President Rajapaksa blames India, US and others for defeat

Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa has blamed India, the United States and European countries for his humiliating defeat in the January election. “It was very open, Americans, the Norwegians, Europeans were openly working against me. And India’s Research Analysis Wing,” Rajapaksa told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post in an interview. “Both the US and India openly used their embassies to bring me down,” Rajapaksa said ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s maiden visit to the country. In his interview to the Post on Friday, Rajapaksa said, “I asked the Indians, ‘Why are you doing this? It’s an open secret what you are doing’. I had assured them that I would never allow the Sri Lankan soil to be used against any friendly country, but they had other ideas,” he said. He also defended Chinese infrastructure projects which were started in the country during his regime. Asked if the docking of two Chinese submarines in Sri Lanka last year had raised India’s hackles, Rajapaksa said: “Whenever Chinese submarines come to this part of the world, they always inform India. “The Chinese president was here, so the subs were here. Find out how many Indian submarines and warships came to our waters when the Indian prime minister came for the SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit in 2008,” he said. During a visit to Beijing last month, Sri Lanka’s new Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera said the docking of a Chinese submarine at Colombo harbour coincided with the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the Sri Lankan capital and the new government will not allow foreign submarines to use the island’s ports. ______________________________________________