The Foreign Office (FO) said on Tuesday that India was preventing humanitarian assistance from being sent to Sri Lanka, where severe flooding and landslides triggered by Cyclone Ditwah have claimed more than 400 lives.
In a post on X, the FO said: “India continues to block humanitarian assistance from Pakistan to Sri Lanka. The special aircraft carrying Pakistan’s humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka continues to face delay for over 60 hours now awaiting flight clearance from India.
“The partial flight clearance issued by India last night, after 48 hours, was operationally impractical: time-bound for just a few hours and without validity for the return flight, severely hindering this urgent relief mission for the brotherly people of Sri Lanka,” it said.
The development comes a day after diplomatic sources told Dawn that Pakistan had received permission from India to use its airspace for humanitarian aid flights to Sri Lanka to provide flood relief.
Sri Lanka President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared a state of emergency to deal with what he called the “most challenging natural disaster in our history”.
It should be mentioned that India and Pakistan have closed their airspaces to each other’s aircraft since tensions between them escalated in April in the wake of an attack in India-occupied Kashmir’s Pahalgam that killed 26 people and the subsequent four-day conflict. In October, Islamabad extended the airspace ban until November 24.
Sri Lanka flooding death toll hits 410
The death toll from flooding and landslides in Sri Lanka was now 410, the Disaster Management Centre said Tuesday, with another 336 people missing following a week of heavy rains.
It said over 1.5 million people were affected by the worst natural disaster to hit the country since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.
An official in the central town of Welimada told local reporters he expected the toll to rise, as his staff dug through the mud looking for victims buried by landslides.
In the capital Colombo, meanwhile, floodwaters were slowly subsiding on Tuesday.
The speed with which waters rose around the city surprised local residents used to seasonal flooding.
“Every year we experience minor floods, but this is something else,” delivery driver Dinusha Sanjaya told AFP.
Rains have eased across the country, but landslide alerts remain in force across most of the hardest-hit central region, officials said.
