By Lindsay Beck
COLOMBO, April 27 (Reuters) - No country distrusts the Tamil Tigers more than India but when Sri Lanka began bombing rebel positions this week its giant neighbour got nervous.
The air and artillery strikes, which followed a suspected Tiger suicide bomb attack that killed 10 and wounded the army commander, halted on Thursday, with the government under international pressure -- not least from New Delhi -- to stop.
"It's very complicated in the sense that the LTTE continues to be an organisation India would like to be banned worldwide," said Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, a South Asia specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
"But there is a sense that because of the volatile politics in South India there is no choice but to tell the government to stop the strikes," he said.
India, home to more than 60 million Tamils in its southern state of Tamil Nadu, armed and trained Tamil guerrillas, including members of what was to become the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), for much of the 1980s.
But when the Sri Lankan government invited Indian troops to enforce a 1987 peace pact, the Tigers turned on the Indian army, killing more than 1,100 soldiers.
When they were blamed for the suicide bomb attack that killed former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose widow Sonia now heads the ruling Congress party, they became truly hated.
Yet India has been among those urging restraint from Colombo since the strikes began on Tuesday night and continued into Wednesday, and raised fears that a 2002 ceasefire had collapsed and the island could return to civil war.
Its main donor countries met President Mahinda Rajapakse on Thursday to express concern, a meeting that was followed immediately by talks between Rajapakse and the Indian high commissioner, a senior official at the president's office said.
Even before this week's violence, India was said to have expressed concern over ethnic riots in the northeastern district of Trincomalee, in which majority Sinhalese attacked Tamil villages in anger after mine blasts they blamed on the Tigers.
"Our sense of sympathy and our sense of rights of the Tamil community are not affected by our feelings toward the LTTE," said an official at the Indian High Commission in Colombo. "There is a distinction we draw between the two."
At one time there were more than 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils in camps in Tamil Nadu, some of whom remain.
India also has economic interests in Trincomalee, home to a strategic deep-water port, not least in the form of oil storage tanks leased by Indian Oil Corporation, India's largest refiner.
"India is worried, undoubtedly. Especially with large volumes of investment in Trincomalee, they wouldn't want their economic interests to be hurt," said Iqbal Athas, an analyst at Jane's Defence Weekly.
But with local elections under way in India, its bigger fear is the possible destabilising impact another Sri Lankan war could have.
"A fragmented Sri Lanka is the worst case scenario for India," said Roy-Chaudhury.
