NEW DELHI -- With Sri Lanka torn by renewed internal war, India has withstood the impulse to intervene once again in the ethnic conflict of its tiny neighbor to the south. Despite calls for Indian assistance by Sri Lanka's beleaguered president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, New Delhi has balked at sending troops or supplying arms, offering only humanitarian aid and a possible evacuation of 30,000 Sri Lankan troops encircled by rebels -- if both sides accepted a ceasefire. Humbled by its 1987 military intervention in Sri Lanka, the once-bitten, twice-shy India is resisting the macho urge to get involved again.

The present Sri Lankan crisis has been triggered by major military advances made by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are fighting for an independent homeland for their minority Tamil community in the north and east of the island. The crisis is only the latest chapter in an interminable ethnic conflict that has turned a self-advertised "island of paradise" into an island of bloodletting. The scale of violence in Sri Lanka since the 1983 anti-Tamil riots is truly astounding. The civil war there is unlikely to end even with outside military intervention.

India, despite its 60 million Tamils who sympathize with the Sri Lankan Tamil cause, has no major interest at stake in the Sri Lankan war. India's responsibility is to defend its vital interests, not to fight the dirty internal war of a neighbor, a mistake it made in 1987.