India urged Sri Lanka's visiting president on Tuesday to push for peace and ethnic harmony in his island nation, amid an escalation of a two-decade-long civil war.
President Mahinda Rajapakse reiterated his commitment to a negotiated settlement, a day after Tamil Tiger rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran said he said no option but to return to war for an independent ethnic homeland. On Tuesday, Rajapakse met Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee during a five-day visit to his giant neighbour.
A brief Indian foreign ministry statement said Mukherjee had "conveyed the hope that there would be early progress in the peace process so that all ethnic communities in Sri Lanka can live harmoniously and are able to achieve their aspirations".
The Indian government has been facing protests and pressure from its own Tamil population in the south of the country to do more about the fate of the mainly Hindu Tamils in neighbouring Sri Lanka. The protesters, several thousand of whom took to the streets of Chennai on Monday, say Tamils fighting for an independent homeland in Sri Lanka are facing a humanitarian and human rights crisis at the hands of the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese majority.
But New Delhi has remained largely silent, wary of involvement in a messy conflict and mindful of a disastrous experience when it last got involved nearly two decades ago. Known to have armed and trained Tamil militant groups in the 1980s, New Delhi turned peacemaker and sent thousands of peacekeeping troops across the waters in 1987.
The force found itself dragged directly into the conflict when it tried to disarm the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and about 1,200 Indian troops were killed. The troops withdrew in 1990. The following year a Tiger suicide bomber killed India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. While repeating his desire for a negotiated settlement, Rajapakse has flatly rejected rebel demands for a separate homeland for the Tamils.
"I want peace. I want to negotiate with them," Rajapakse told India's NDTV news channel, but added that he did not believe that Prabhakaran represented the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Rajapakse is due to meet Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday.