The recent suicide attack by a suspected LTTE member, which killed the Sri Lankan army deputy chief of staff, has put more pressure on India to become an active participant in the Sri Lankan peace process. The inexorable slide into a civil war highlights the failure of the Norwegian brokered talks of 2002 and the ineffectiveness of international mediation. Even the outlawing of the LTTE by Canada and the EU has not stemmed the violence, which has taken over 800 lives since December 2005. A viable peace in Sri Lanka has to be imposed, and only a strong regional power like India can do it.

The LTTE is fighting for a separate state for the Tamil minority in the northeast of the country, while the Sri Lankan government is trying to keep Sri Lanka whole without sharing power with minorities through devolution. To make matters worse, the current coalition government has two Sinhalese nationalist parties vehemently opposed to any devolution as long as an “untrustworthy” LTTE is the main interlocutor. The LTTE, on the other hand, has used suicide attacks to trigger an armed military response that led to hundreds of Tamil civilian deaths and made the state look like an aggressor.

The problem for India is that it has to shift from a passive to a more active role. Having been burnt once before in the late ’80s when over 1,200 Indian soldiers were killed in pitched battles with the LTTE, Indian foreign policy has privileged institutional and multilateral solutions to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict over the last decade. India played a behind-the- scenes role, remaining outside the Norwegian brokered peace process in 2002. The official stance was that India supported a negotiated political settlement based on devolution, openness, transparency and inclusiveness acceptable to all sections of Sri Lankan society (not just the Tamil minority) within an undivided Sri Lanka. Consequently, India’s strategy was three-fold: a track two political engagement with Sinhala and Tamil democratic parties (hence not LTTE) to strengthen acceptance of devolution of power and power-sharing, economic aid to all regions, and some security ties including giving defensive and ‘non-lethal equipment’ to Sri Lanka’s military.

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