India Armed Forces

Indian troops seized a major road in the city of Jaffna in Sri Lanka and cut escape routes of Tamil rebels from their last major stronghold, an Indian official said. Sri Lankan military sources said the separatists continued fierce resistance, but the Indians controlled strategic positions throughout the embattled city in the heart of the island's Tamil-dominated northern region.

Indian peacekeeping troops have told women in Sri Lanka's northern city of Jaffna to keep their skirts down while cycling, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. "They want Jaffna girls to follow the example of their modest counterparts across the Palk Strait (in India) where girls do not expose their knees in public," the Sun newspaper said.

Reinforced Indian troops, stepping up their peacekeeping role in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, set up roadblocks and arrested several Tamil guerrillas Thursday as violence continued to mount in the volatile Eastern province of this island nation. Twelve people, including a popular Tamil government agent from Batticaloa, the provincial capital, were killed in a precisely timed, remote-controlled explosion Thursday morning.

It was with deliberate drama and flourish that then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stood atop the conning tower of a Soviet-built nuclear submarine on the morning of Feb. 3, 1988, and proclaimed to the region and the world that India's military might was finally coming of age. "Those who conquered us from the sea ruled us as alien masters," he declared that day to the applause of India's senior naval officers.

Indian troops killed 66 Muslim militants in a weekend ambush in Jammu and Kashmir state near the border with Pakistan, the government said Monday. It was the biggest frontier clash in the 15-month separatist uprising. Three militants were captured in the three-hour battle and others fled to Pakistan, government spokesman Ramamohan Rao reported. He said the militants carried automatic rifles and had been trained in guerrilla warfare in Pakistan.

The Indian government Friday announced a 48-hour cease-fire in fighting with Sri Lankan Tamil rebels, acting a day after the militant separatists freed 18 Indian soldiers and urged a break in hostilities. K. Natwar Singh, minister of state for external affairs, told Parliament that beginning at 7 a.m. today, the Indian peacekeeping force in Sri Lanka "will not fire on its own initiative."

Several thousand Indian troops will remain in Sri Lanka territory until Tamil rebels surrender their weapons and a cease-fire has been sustained in the ethnic civil war between the Tamil rebels and Sri Lanka government forces, a senior Indian diplomat said here Thursday. Shortly after dawn Thursday, a brigade of 3,000 Indian infantry was flown into the Jaffna Peninsula at the northern tip of this island nation.