September 13, 2002	Friday	Rajab 5, 1423

NEW DELHI: When separatist Tamil Tigers rebels sit down to talk peace with the Sri Lankan government in Thailand next week, there will be no Indian representative around — a reflection of the country’s studied aloofness to the 19-year-old ethnic conflict on the island nation off its southern tip.

“There is no change in our position — it’s between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE,” Indian foreign ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao says. Her comments underscore India’s hands-off policy toward the conflict since the 1991 assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi by a Tiger suicide bomber.

New Delhi had found the ethnic conflict a convenient bargaining chip for furthering its strategic interests in the Indian Ocean, where it saw itself as a major sea power.

There is a sense that any direct intervention by India in the current peace initiative could prove counter-productive.

India’s military intervention in Jaffna in 1987 not only earned it the wrath of the LTTE, but gained it no friends in Colombo.

It also proved to be a military disaster — more than a thousand men of the specially constituted Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) lost their lives in a guerrilla war with the Tigers between 1987 and 1990.

It seemed that India could please nobody and Gandhi was himself was clubbed with a rifle by a Sinhalese member of a Sri Lankan naval guard of honour soon after he formally signed the accord in July 1987.

Gandhi was to meet his death in 1991 at the hands of a woman member of the LTTE’s suicide squad, who garlanded him at an election rally in southern Tamil Nadu state in 1991 before setting off an explosive strapped to her body.

That assassination was to cost the Tigers dearly not only in terms of the bases it had in Tamil Nadu, but also popular support among the 60 million Tamil ethnic kin who live across the narrow Palk Straits between India and Sri Lanka.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.