NEW DELHI, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's president assured giant neighbour India on Wednesday that he was pushing for a power-sharing deal with the Tamil Tigers to help bring peace to the island despite signs of an escalating civil war. President Mahinda Rajapakse's attempt to allay New Delhi's concerns over the worsening ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka came during talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the last day of a five-day visit to India. "We have conveyed our longstanding position on the need for a negotiated political settlement that is acceptable to all sections of Sri Lankan society," Indian foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters. "In response, the Sri Lankan president has explained the steps that he is taking through the all-party representatives committee for arriving at a devolution package which could then lead to a political settlement of the ethnic problem," he said. Rajapakse's government has been seeking to forge unity in the Sinhala-majority south of the island to push for peace with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and end a civil war that has killed more than 67,000 people since 1983. About 3,000 of those deaths have come this year alone as a rash of military clashes, aerial bombings and ambushes have left a 2002 truce in tatters. Last month, Sri Lanka's ruling and main opposition parties signed a pact that envisaged arriving at a joint approach to dealing with the rebels politically. But increased violence and failed peace talks with the Tigers in Geneva have undermined their push for peace. Those efforts suffered a fresh blow this week when LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran said he had no option but to return to war to seek an independent ethnic homeland. The Indian government has been facing protests and pressure from its own Tamil population in the south of the country to do more for the mainly Hindu Tamils in neighbouring Sri Lanka. But New Delhi has remained largely silent, wary of involvement in a messy conflict and mindful of a disastrous experience when it last got involved nearly two decades ago.
