NEW DELHI, Dec 23: Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said here on Sunday he was urging India to play its “crucial role” in bringing peace to the island, where the government and Tamil rebels have declared a truce.

“India can definitely play a crucial role in bringing peace in Sri Lanka and that topic would be the main issue during my discussions with the president and the prime minister on Monday,” he told reporters in New Delhi.

“We have already taken some steps to initiate the peace negotiations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) but it is not that easy to solve,” he said.

Wickremesinghe, who arrived in New Delhi on Saturday, will meet with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, President K.R. Narayanan and other key officials on his three-day visit.

The Sri Lankan premier on Sunday met two former Indian prime ministers, P.V. Narasimha Rao and I.K. Gujral.

Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) came to power in Dec 5 elections in which one of his main election pledges was the peaceful settlement of decades of ethnic bloodshed.

The LTTE has since said it ordered its cadres not to carry out any attacks for one month from Dec 24.

During the election campaign the UNP said it wanted to open talks with the Tamil Tigers, who are waging a drawn out campaign for an independent homeland for minority Tamils in the island’s northeast.

The three decades of ethnic bloodshed have claimed more than 60,000 lives.

India has a large Tamil community but the government has blacklisted the LTTE since the assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi by a Tamil activist in 1991.

economic crisis: Sri Lanka’s economy is going into recession for the first time this year and the new government has been left with an empty war chest and piling unpaid bills, Finance Minister K. N. Choksy said on Sunday.

From a GDP expansion of 6.0 per cent last year, the economy has contracted by 0.6 per cent making 2001 the worst year for the country since independence from Britain in 1948.

“The economic growth is below zero,” Choksy told reporters here. “The entire economy is in paralysis due to the political mismanagement of the finances. We have a negative balance sheet.”—AFP