India's covert role in Sri Lanka's ceasefire

Irish Sun (IANS) Sunday 17th February, 2008

Now that Sri Lanka has jettisoned the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with the Tamil Tigers, one of India's best kept secrets can be revealed: it was New Delhi that quietly authored the process that led to the Norway-brokered pact.

The dominant thinking in India and Sri Lanka, and even elsewhere, is that New Delhi has been a distant watcher to the goings on in the war-hit island barring its interactions with Colombo and countries like Norway as part of a 'hands off' policy sparked off by former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's 1991 assassination.

While it is true that India took a detached view of the ethnic conflict in the aftermath of Gandhi's killing, things changed shortly after Atal Bihari Vajpayee took office in 1998 at the head of a non-Congress coalition.

By 1999, the Indian state had concluded after years of study that there could never be a military winner in Sri Lanka: neither the government nor the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) would reign supreme although at that stage the rebels appeared to hold an upper hand.

The Indian government then took the view that it was time for a major peace push in Sri Lanka.

Supervised by National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra, the Indian establishment got into the act of ushering in peace in Sri Lanka, with just one rider: everything would be done away from media glare.

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