As always, India-baiters in Sri Lanka’s strategic community and foreign policy commentators, missed the real significance of last week’s visit of External Affairs Minister
S. Jaishankar from the northern neighbourhood – still harping on Cold War era diatribes which have less relevance in a the twenty-first global village. This was the first such visit by an Indian dignitary after a long time, when the visitor found time to meet a host of domestic leaders – and also the business community – not stopping with governmental leadership. In doing so, Minister Jaishankar seemingly kept India’s China concerns of the past decade to the bare minimum, and possibly confined to his discussions with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, if at all, and possibly not even Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Instead, the visitor was talking more about domestic politics in Sri Lanka, and also bilateral economic relations, which had been deliberately encouraged to pick up a momentum of its own over the past years. When India has had economic ties with its Cold War era adversary in the US and also with the current adversary China – the latter scaled down in the light of border aggression over the past months – there is no reason why two traditional neighbours with historic trade and other economic relations should make that a hostage of something that is not pertinent to bilateral relations from a purely non-strategic construct.
It needs to be acknowledged that Minister Jaishankar’s is the fourth such contact between the two nations in the last five months, three of them at the highest levels of political administration. It began with the virtual summit between Prime Ministers Mahinda Rajapaksa and Narendra Modi on 26 September and was followed by the Colombo visit of India’s National Security Adviser, Ajit Kumar Doval, and now Minister Jaishankar’s long-duration visit. Between the last two, there was the fourth meeting of the Joint Working Group (JWG) on Fisheries, relating to an area of equal sensitivity and bilateral concern for both nations, compared to any other issue for common consideration.
Going by the Joint Statement on the virtual summit, which set off the tone for the subsequent meetings, so to say, the increased focus of the two nations now was on everything other than strategic security. That part of it seemed to have been settled first when President Gotabaya and his Defence Secretary, Adm Jayanth Colombage (retd) reiterated Sri Lanka’s commitment to an ‘India First’ foreign (and security) policy, just as India, especially under PM Modi, has been vocalising traditional commitment to a ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy.
Building social infrastructure
A new substantive turn seemed to have been reached, when at the NSA-level trilateral between India, Maldives and host Sri Lanka, in November, upgraded their earlier ‘maritime security agreement’ into ‘maritime and security agreement’. According to media reports, the Indian NSA also had a one-on-one meeting with President Gota, where substantive aspects of bilateral security and defence cooperation seemed to have been discussed.
It now looks as if New Delhi has designated the NSA and by extension the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with the task of handling the strategic security issues involving Sri Lanka while the MEA is tasked to take forward traditional aspects of bilateral relations. The distinction was being sought to be made almost after the end of the ethnic war, when India began investing more on building social infrastructure in the island-nation.
Critics of India in Sri Lanka needs to remember how at the end of the war, New Delhi set up ‘Jaipur foot clinics’ for those who had lost their legs especially in the war. It did not stop with the Tamil victims of war, as Sri Lankan critics would want to believe. It included the armed forces, as well. Then there was housing in war-torn areas, where the Armed Forces and taken up the rehabilitation work.
When the Government’s intention was to proceed in that direction, New Delhi funded the project with foresight. It has since gone beyond war areas, to cover the Upcountry Tamil areas, too. Under former Housing Minister, Sajith Premadasa, now SJP Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, India also took the housing scheme to Sinhala areas.
In between, at the end of the war, to help rebuild the war-torn economy in the North and the East, India supplied farm equipment, those those that wanted to returned to paddy fields from what were earlier minefield during the war. Then, there were also tractors. And at the height of the Covid, every Sri Lankan would recall how India-donated ambulances are being deployed across the country, to rush victims and suspected patients for screening and treatment.
These are not big-ticket projects in terms of funding, but, each one of them, and also more of the kind, that impact on the life of Tamil, Sinhala, Muslim or Burgher. The kind of thoughtfulness that has gone into the Indian officialdom coming up with ideas for Sri Lanka’s consent to take forward, for reaching out to Sri Lankans who could do with any or all of them, does not have any commercial or strategic intent or content to it.
Trust-deficit or what
Yes, some of it was as grants, and some others as loans. But no Sri Lankan, now or earlier, had complained that the Indian terms are usurious or that New Delhi would take back those ambulances or tractors or whatever, as China has taken away a part of the Sri Lankan territory in Hambantota, as its own, even if only for 99 (long) years.
Going by the Rajapaksa leaderships’ repeated re-assertion that they would not part with ownership or possession of ‘national assets’ to a foreign entity in terms of developmental funding, the question arises if the Sri Lankan State now feels cheated on the Hambantota deal, which is now a standing memorial to the kind of developmental funding that China indulges in, for all the world to see.
Maybe, the Government should consider coming up with a White Paper for future generations to know it all – and also for the current one to know the so-called compulsions under with the predecessor regime went for the debt-equity swap-deal or whatever that caused and facilitated the transfer of possession and enjoyment of the Hambantota real estate by China.
That is because the entire deal now smacks of trust-deficit with retrospective effect. The Rajapaksas were the ones who initiated and saw through the initial debt deal with China. The successor regime went through the swap-deal. Yet, as Candidate Rajapaksa, incumbent President Gotabaya went on to volunteer a public commitment to re-negotiate the swap deal if elected to power.
Fair enough, he got to study the deal documents only after assuming office, which he seemed to have done promptly. However, he could do nothing about his unilateral commitment to renegotiating the swap-deal, which the Rajapaksas had anyway protested when entered into. Instead, he got to know it was a commercial deal, obviously with no loopholes left. With the result, he did not shy away from conceding that he could do nothing about the promised renegotiation of the swap deal.
The 13th Parallel?
Then there is the question of the fishermen’s issue, between the two, over which the fourth meeting of the JWG was held recently on the virtual mode. Minister Jaishankar also met with Fisheries Minister Douglas Devananda, separately, for the purpose, apart from meeting with, of course, counterpart, Dinesh Gunawardena. The bilateral over the fishermen’s issue is sensitive even otherwise, but needs to be noted for a uniquely Indian commitment.
Through the past years, the Government of India has not ever claimed that the trespassing Indian fishers had a right to do so, and was not an infringement of any exclusive right of Sri Lankans. Nor has India ever wavered in its 1964 commitment under which Katchchativu islet was identified as a part of Sri Lankan territory. What transpires otherwise on this score, with pressure from inside southern Tamil Nadu is an internal affair of India – which New Delhi constitutionally well equipped to handle, internally.
The same, for instance, cannot be said of Colombo’s commitment under the bilateral Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. Despite the 13th Amendment and the Provincial Councils Act operationalising the Sri Lankan commitments, in 2006, citing a Supreme Court ruling, the Government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa de-merged the North and the East, though there are pending cases of the kind in the Indian Supreme Court on the Katchchativu-centric IMBL agreement, as well.
Then, there is the direct reference of some senior ruling party politicos in Colombo, who want the Provincial Councils abolished, going beyond the clipped wings viz the powers of the elected PCs through the past decades. It may be easy to argue for a section of the strategic community in Colombo to talk about India interfering in the internal affairs of the nation, or batting for the US or the rest of the international community, meaning the West.
It is a fallacious argument to begin with. India has enough concerns of its own in the Indian Ocean Region, and by extension individual nations in the region. Two, analysts in Sri Lanka also need to re-tune their thinking that are still set in a Cold War era mind-set. Today, in a globalised world, post-Cold War multilateralism provides as much for responsibilities as for opportunities.
International commitments too, cannot be withdrawn at will, whether on 13A or on the Eastern Container Terminal (ECT), with every change of Government. It can lead to situations in which no nation can trust another in terms of written commitments given by a sovereign State. What is at stake is the credibility of the sovereign, represented by elected Governments in the post-World War, post-colonial democracies.
If one nation goes back on its commitment to another, a third nation can cheat the first, and there may be no remedy for it. The international system runs more on mutual trust and credibility — and not through enforcement of any law by any court, including international legal and judicial fora, after a point. Multilateralism is the key, and in Sri Lanka’s India relations, credibility and trust-worthiness have remained the password and watch-word, all at once. That needs to be cherished, all the same!
