Onboard IAF “Rajdoot”, Indian external affairs minister Inder Kumar Gujral Friday emphatically rejected the Sri Lankan charge that New Delhi was trying to thrust a friendship treaty on it, reports PTI.
In an unprecedented gesture, Gujral told a group of journalists traveling with him to Dhaka that he was “somewhat surprised and a little pained to find that instead of negotiating on a peace and friendship treaty, Colombo had chosen to give statements to create the impression that India was trying to thrust a treaty on an unwilling Sri Lanka”.
Gujral pointed out that the friendship treaty proposal came from Sri Lanka last year. India, he said, was quite happy with the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement of 1987 in its present form. It was only to accommodate Sri Lanka that India had given a draft of a treaty.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 23, 1990
