Sri Lanka's Prime minister-elect Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Saturday that he will travel to neighbouring India this month for talks with Indian leaders.
Wickremesinghe gave no details of his travel plans, but indicated he will discuss Sri Lanka's long-running ethnic conflict with Indian leaders who had supported Norway's attempts to broker peace in the island.
Addressing members of his United National Party (UNP) Saturday, Wickremesinghe said there were pressing economic problems to be tackled to provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of young people.
"This month I will go to India and get their support to solve our immediate problems," Wickremesinghe said.
It was Kumaratunga's main political rival, President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who invited Norway to help bring rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to the negotiating table some time in 1999.
However, Kumaratunga's government sidelined Oslo's special peace envoy Erik Solheim in June, placing the peace process on hold.
Wickremesinghe vowed during his election campaign to revive the moribund peace process and move towards a political settlement to the long-running conflict which has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 1972.
India had supported the idea of peace talks with the rebels to resolve the conflict without allowing the island to break up on ethnic lines.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is known to be a personal friend of Wickremesinghe and the two were known to have maintained closed relations while they were in and out of power. Bureau Report