India Monday expressed a "desire" to assist Sri Lanka with efforts to end a deadlock in its peace efforts and prevent the situation on the island from degenerating into full-scale war, officials said.
India's Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran met with President Mahinda Rajapakse in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo and discussed the island's faltering peace efforts with Tamil Tiger rebels amid a mounting death toll.
"He reiterated India's support for the peace process and discussed India's desire to assist in finding a way out (of the deadlock)," a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Saran carried a message to Rajapakse from Indian Prime Minister Manhoman Singh, the official said without giving details. His visit came as peace broker Norway tried to salvage efforts to bring the ethnic Tamil rebels and the Colombo government to the negotiating table.
An upsurge of violence that claimed over 830 lives since December has strained a shakey truce put in place by Oslo in February 2002. India has previously refused to become too involved in the island's Tamil separatist conflict since attempts to interfere 20 years ago ended in disaster.
Former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi sent Indian troops to Sri Lanka in 1987 following a bilateral peace agreement with Colombo to help end Tamil separatism on the island.
Indian troops ended up fighting the Tigers, who initially accepted, but later rejected the peace pact. Some 1,200 Indian troops were killed in subsequent clashes with the rebels, forcing India's pullout in March 1990. The Tamil rebels were blames for Gandhi's 1991 assassination.
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