CHENNAI - The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Saturday distanced itself from the demand for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka and said instead that the Tamils needed ‘peaceful honourable existence through self rule’.

‘Both AIADMK and DMK have wrongly backed the formation of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. We believe in focussing on the relief for the suffering Lankan Tamils as that is what the people of Tamil Nadu want,’ senior BJP leader M. Venkaiah Naidu told reporters.

‘After meeting the people in the length and breadth of Tamil Nadu, I have understood that the people here are angry with the Congress-DMK party combine for having failed to pressurise Sri Lanka to halt the war.

‘Instead of a separate homeland Eelam, Tamils have a crying need for a peaceful honourable existence through self rule,’ Naidu said.

‘Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi is unable to pressurise the central government to do something useful in the matter and on that count the people here are unhappy with DMK,’ he observed.

‘The so-called interventions by National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan, the shutdowns and the brief fast were ineffective and useless. Other Congress leaders like Rahul Gandhi are only paying lip sympathy to the Tamils,’ Naidu added.

In a separate interaction with journalists, Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Ashok Singhal endorsed the view and alleged that the Sri Lankan military had destroyed over a 1,000 Hindu temples in the island nation.