DHAKA: India prime minister Narendra Modi landed in Jaffna on Saturday, making a highly symbolic first visit by an Indian prime minister to Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged northern Tamil heartland after urging greater autonomy for the island’s largest minority.

The Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka’s far north was worst hit by the country’s 37-year civil war that killed at least 100,000 people, mostly Tamils, and remains heavily militarized.

Officially Modi is there to launch construction of a cultural centre funded by India and formally hand over 50,000 houses to families that lost their homes in the decades of fighting.

But his visit is also a demonstration of regional superpower India’s support for Sri Lanka’s Tamils, who share close cultural and religious ties with those in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

BDST: 1554 HRS, MAR 14, 2015