Indian minister visits Sri Lanka

Mr Singh will find Sri Lanka in mourning

Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has met Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga on the first day of his official visit to Sri Lanka.

Mr Singh arrived on Sunday for talks with Sri Lankan government and opposition leaders aimed at finding a solution to the country's long-running civil war.

He also held a round of talks with his Sri Lankan counterpart, Lakshman Kadirgamar.

"The two ministers had a one-to-one meeting lasting about 45 minutes," foreign ministry spokesman Ravinatha Aryasinha said, adding that they then continued the talks with the president.

The two-day visit comes just days after a row erupted over a suggestion by a key ethnic Tamil ally of the Indian coalition government that Sri Lanka should end the war by splitting in two along the lines of the Czech and Slovak republics.

Mr Singh: No breakthrough likely from his visit

The Sri Lankan Government responded sharply that such a move would lead to what it called the Balkanisation of India.

The government in Delhi, for its part, was quick to reaffirm its commitment to a negotiated political solution to the Tamil separatist rebellion within a united Sri Lanka.

Mourning

Mr Singh's visit coincides with a fresh upsurge of fighting in northern Sri Lanka, and mourning for a cabinet minister and 22 others who were killed in a suicide bomb attack last week blamed on the Tamil Tigers.

The state funeral of the minister, CV Gooneratne, took place in Colombo on Saturday amid tight security.

The army says it has kept up its assault on the rebels

The Indian news agency, PTI, said Mr Singh's meetings in Sri Lanka would include discussions about a revised devolution package.

It said Delhi wanted the new version to go beyond 1987 proposals, which offered a merger of the Tamil-dominated provinces in the north and east, and addressed what it called the legitimate aspirations of the Tamils there.

India's predicament

Analysts say that the latest row illustrates the delicacy of the Indian government's position on the Sri Lankan civil war.

It has offered to provide humanitarian assistance to Sri Lankan troops fighting the Tigers, but will not contribute troops to help the Sri Lankan army.

With a large and vocal ethnic Tamil minority in India, the government cannot afford to be seen to ignore the demands of their Sri Lankan cousins, yet it realises that any encouragement of separatism elsewhere in the region would set a dangerous precedent for restive ethnic minorities in India.

A controversial Indian peace-keeping mission to Sri Lanka in 1987 to help end the civil war was withdrawn three years later after sustaining heavy casualties.

The Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated a year later in an attack blamed on a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.

India supported recent efforts by Norway to bring the Sri Lankan government and rebels to the negotiating table.

However Norway's initiative came just before a rebel offensive in April, during which the Tigers overran several military camps.

There was a fresh upsurge of heavy fighting in the northern Jaffna peninsula on Friday, which the government said had left 25 soldiers dead and 50 wounded.