Subramanian
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India Suddenly in Love with Sri Lanka
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so who is responsible for that?
ChinaRocks
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How Beijing won Sri Lanka's civil war
A year after the 27-year Tamil insurgency was brought to a decisive end, Peter Popham looks at how China triumphed where the West failed
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Sri Lankan soldiers waiting last week for a ceremony to mark the end of the war in Kilinochchi, where the final battle was fought. The plight of civilians caught in the crossfire was brushed aside at the time
A year ago, one of the world's most brutal and pitiless terrorist groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was hunted down and exterminated on a strip of beach in the far north-east of Sri Lanka.
In a war that had dragged on for 27 years, more than 80,000 on both sides had died, hundreds of thousands had lost their homes and the future of one of the most idyllic tropical islands in the world hung in the balance. Suddenly it was all over.
In defiance of all predictions, the war was brought to a swift and bloody end. The plight of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians caught in the middle was brushed aside: a Chinese veto prevented the UN Security Council from even debating the issue, let alone sending monitors to investigate. Foreign journalists were barred both from the conflict zone and the prison camps set up for Tamil survivors, as was David Miliband when the then foreign secretary flew in to try to find out what was going on. Local journalists critical of government action were terrorised into silence.
Then on the morning of 19 May, after a final gun battle lasting an hour, the bodies of 18 of the top Tiger leaders were found sprawled among the mangroves. Among them was the supreme leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. The war was over.
It was a great victory, the emphatic end of a terrorist gang whom no one in their right mind would mourn. But it was achieved in the teeth of opposition from the US and its allies, and at appalling human and moral cost. How had it been allowed to happen?
The answer, in one word, is "China". When the US ended direct military aid in 2007 over Sri Lanka's deteriorating human rights record, China leapt into the breach, increasing aid to nearly $1bn (£690m) to become the island's biggest donor, giving tens of millions of dollars' worth of sophisticated weapons, and making a free gift of six F7 fighter jets to the Sri Lankan air force. China encouraged its ally Pakistan to sell more arms and to train pilots to fly the new planes. And, crucially, China prevented the UN Security Council from putting Sri Lanka on its agenda.
Suddenly, thanks to China's diplomacy, the hectoring of the US and Europe didn't matter any more. After nearly 500 years under the thumb of the West, the immensely strategic little island in the Indian Ocean had a new sugar daddy one with a very different conception of its duties. Sri Lanka's "traditional donors" had "receded into a distant corner", the country's Foreign Secretary, Palitha Kohona, told The New York Times in 2008. "Asians don't go around teaching each other how to behave," he said. "There are ways we deal with each other perhaps a quiet word, but not wagging the finger."
Money, arms and diplomatic cover are necessary preconditions for taking a war to its logical conclusion, but they are not enough. Also required is ideological cover: a casus belli that must go beyond the thirst for revenge, communal hatred or the urge of the majority to impose its will permanently on the minority. It must be possible to sell it as a just war. For this purpose, as Bob Dylan recognised a long time back ("With God on our side"), religion comes in handy.
Enter the Sinhalese Buddhists.
We in the West by and large have a pretty foggy understanding of Buddhism, but one thing we know for certain is that Buddhists are for peace. So the idea that the war party in Sri Lanka not just in the past five years but throughout the years of independence was identifiable with Buddhist monks does not sound right. It's like finding Trappist monks engaged in a talk-athon or Orthodox Jews running a pork pie factory.
Buddhists don't do war. Look at the Dalai Lama: for 50 years he has strained every fibre to prevent Tibetan resistance to Chinese oppression turning violent. He has a great line on this challenge: "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher."
Up close, Sinhalese Buddhism looks as harmless and pacific as any other variety. Visit any temple in the country during Poya or full moon day, a monthly national religious holiday on the island, and you will find scenes of perfect serenity as families dressed all in white offer food to the monks in their saffron robes, then picnic under the trees or stroll around the whitewashed stupa.
By contrast, listen to the words of the Venerable Athuraliye Rathana in 2002: "There are two central concepts of Buddhism," the monk said, "compassion and wisdom. If compassion was a necessary and sufficient condition, then the Buddha would not have elaborated on wisdom or prajna. Hitler could not have been overcome by maitriya [compassion] alone. Today there is a discourse about peace in Sri Lanka. It is an extremely artificial exercise and one that is clearly being orchestrated under threat of terrorist attack."
Imagine those words coming from the mouth of the Dalai Lama and you get an idea of how sharply the views of some Sri Lankan monks diverge from the pacific Buddhist norm. He is not saying "bomb the hell out of the Tigers, as the Allies destroyed Hitler". But the implication is clear enough.
How did Sri Lankan Buddhism veer off so sharply from the other schools? Buddhism was born in northern India in the 6th century BC, and spread throughout the subcontinent and beyond. But eight or nine hundred years later it began to lose ground to new schools of devotional Hinduism, which steadily supplanted it. Eventually it disappeared from the Indian mainland altogether.
Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka watched this process with alarm, and hatched a way to stop it at the coast: they wrote a new book of scripture, the Mahavamsa, to establish indissoluble links between the historical Buddha and their island. The Mahavamsa claimed that the Buddha had visited Sri Lanka three times and had declared it "dhammadipa", "the island of righteousness" a sort of Buddhist Promised Land, where the Sinhalese should rule and Buddhism should be unchallenged. The Mahavamsa, although not accepted by scholars as a core teaching, helped to ensure that the island remained Buddhism's last remaining outpost in the subcontinent. But there was a price to pay: a vein of intolerant chauvinism, inimical to the religion elsewhere, became part of its permanent baggage.
After independence in 1948, Sri Lanka's Buddhists established themselves as a fierce, intimidating nationalist presence. Although the fourth prime minister, Solomon Bandaranaike, had done the Buddhists' bidding in making Sinhala the official language, he temporised over Buddhists taking over schools run by Christians. So in September 1959, a monk called Talduwe Somarama pulled a revolver out of his robes and shot him dead.
When Mahinda Rajapaksa won the general election of 2004 to become Prime Minister, the Norwegian-negotiated ceasefire of 2002 was already unravelling. One year later, he became President, but even though the island's peace was increasingly fragile, it was still unclear where his policy was headed. His party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (founded by Bandaranaike), was, like the opposition, still supposedly committed to the stuttering peace process. The champions of all-out war were limited to 10 newly elected monk MPs and another small extremist party.
Then, in August 2005, the Tigers assassinated Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka's highly regarded foreign secretary, himself a Tamil, and peace quite suddenly disappeared from the scene. The following April, the Tigers abruptly cancelled scheduled peace talks in Geneva, and six days later Rajapaksa's new army chief, General Sarath Fonseka, was nearly killed by a Tiger suicide bomb. As the war shadows deepened, monks were again on hand to hurry things along.
On 21 July, the Tigers shut off sluice gates to a reservoir near Trincomalee in the north-east, depriving nearly 30,000 people, many of them recent Sinhalese settlers, of drinking water and water for their fields. A group of politicised monks rushed to a temple near the reservoir and announced that they were going to march on the Tigers' lines and fight them to the death.
It was merely a stunt: as one Sri Lankan journalist who covered the event recalled, "they did not have the numbers or the public support to take on the LTTE during the march. As they were walking they were stopped by the military." But it succeeded in sparking the new war: the air force attacked Tiger positions on 26 July, after which ground troops began the operation to take charge of the gates. The war's final phase was under way.
Like it or not, the pax sinica is spreading across the world: in return for getting the West off Sri Lanka's back, the Chinese got to build a new port at Hambantota on the south coast, a vital link in the "string of pearls" they are constructing across the Indian Ocean, from Burma to Pakistan. But just as significant as the success of the Chinese is the failure of the Western model.
The annihilation of the Tigers took practically everybody by surprise. Sri Lanka had been battling it out against the improvised forces of the Tigers since 1983, but victory never seemed close. Under its charismatic founder and leader, the Tigers fought with fanatical zeal in jungle terrain that was ideal for guerrilla warfare, and the government troops, with their cautious, conventional tactics, were no match for them. Whenever victory seemed on the cards, heavy pressure from India and the West brought the two sides to the negotiating table. A ceasefire signed in 2002 was greeted by the outside world as a major step towards achieving a federal solution. That agreement slowly unravelled, but when the war restarted informally in July 2006, the Tigers still controlled nearly one-third of the island.
By spring last year, the Tigers had lost nearly all their territory and were boxed into 85 square kilometres of jungle but even then, outright government victory seemed improbable.
Why? Because however brutal their tactics, the Tigers had succeeded in establishing the idea that the Tamils, discriminated against for many years by the Sinhalese majority, were entitled to their own homeland. The conventional wisdom held that this war neither could nor should have a military outcome, but a diplomatic one. Like errant children, both sides would eventually come round: a ceasefire, peace talks, some kind of settlement imposed by pressure from the West and facilitated by the Norwegians was the only way out of the mess, however unsatisfactory. The Tamils would run their side of the island, the Sinhalese would run theirs.
There were plenty of arguments against such a resolution. For one thing, the island's Tamils are by no means confined to the north and the east. Under British rule, Tamils were favoured for government jobs; today Tamils constitute a majority of the population of the capital, Colombo. At the other end of the social scale, tens of thousands of poor Tamil peasants were brought in under the Raj as indentured labour to work on the tea estates. Both Colombo and the estates were well outside the region the Tigers wanted for its sovereign state. But in a small island polarised between warring ethnic groups, and with a history of ethnic cleansing on both sides, what sort of future could Tamils outside "Eelam" look forward to?
But the prospects for Tamils who found themselves inside the state that Prabhakaran wanted to carve out of the island were hardly more promising. During his 25 years in control, the guerrilla leader had been distinguished by one characteristic above all: utter ruthlessness. He had eliminated every possible rival for power, killing all moderate and pacific Tamil leaders as well as those who favoured the gun. He had subjected Tamils both inside the island and in the diaspora to punitive taxes to fund his war, and had forced thousands of families to give up their children to fight as soldiers. He had ordered pogroms against Muslims in the area he controlled, forcing thousands of them to flee, as well as massacring Sinhalese civilians.
Within the ranks of his guerrilla army he demanded total dedication, inventing the suicide bomb as a weapon of war and requiring his cadres to carry cyanide capsules so they could kill themselves rather than submit to enemy interrogation. On the rare occasions he appeared in public, including his one and only press conference in 2002, he always wore military fatigues, cultivating the image of the single-minded guerrilla leader but family snaps unearthed after his death showed him living in luxury.
His challenge in 2002 was to convince the world that the man who had ordered the assassinations of both the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, was capable of re-inventing himself, Sinn Fein-style, as a civilian leader worthy of international respect. But it was a transformation that proved well beyond him: his reflexive response to any crisis remained the same to murder the people he held responsible. The idea that a man of his kidney could run a plausible democratic state was one of the sicker jokes of the decadent period of US diplomatic hegemony.
But even if Prabhakaran had turned out to possess the political gifts of a Gerry Adams, there is a strong argument to be made that the West had no business trying to dictate peace terms to the legitimate government of the island, faced with an astonishingly brutal insurgency.
The reuniting of Sri Lanka under Sinhalese domination fills many in the minority community with foreboding: a Tamil businessman in Trincomalee told me that he fears the arrival of another wave of government-sponsored Sinhalese colonisation. He also talked of how the new arrivals impose their symbolic presence by installing Buddha statues.
There was plenty wrong with the Sri Lankan polity in the years after independence, and there is plenty still wrong with it today. In the words of the then UN high commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, now president of the International Crisis Group, after her visit in October 2007, it is a country where "the weakness of the rule of law and prevalence of impunity are alarming". But the idea that these wrongs could be righted by splitting this small island down the middle into two armed camps, and putting one of the halves in the pocket of a homicidal maniac, is one of the crazier ideas to have gained currency in our times.
.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/how-beijing-won-sri-lankas-civil-war-1980492.html
A year after the 27-year Tamil insurgency was brought to a decisive end, Peter Popham looks at how China triumphed where the West failed
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Sri Lankan soldiers waiting last week for a ceremony to mark the end of the war in Kilinochchi, where the final battle was fought. The plight of civilians caught in the crossfire was brushed aside at the time
A year ago, one of the world's most brutal and pitiless terrorist groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was hunted down and exterminated on a strip of beach in the far north-east of Sri Lanka.
In a war that had dragged on for 27 years, more than 80,000 on both sides had died, hundreds of thousands had lost their homes and the future of one of the most idyllic tropical islands in the world hung in the balance. Suddenly it was all over.
In defiance of all predictions, the war was brought to a swift and bloody end. The plight of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians caught in the middle was brushed aside: a Chinese veto prevented the UN Security Council from even debating the issue, let alone sending monitors to investigate. Foreign journalists were barred both from the conflict zone and the prison camps set up for Tamil survivors, as was David Miliband when the then foreign secretary flew in to try to find out what was going on. Local journalists critical of government action were terrorised into silence.
Then on the morning of 19 May, after a final gun battle lasting an hour, the bodies of 18 of the top Tiger leaders were found sprawled among the mangroves. Among them was the supreme leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. The war was over.
It was a great victory, the emphatic end of a terrorist gang whom no one in their right mind would mourn. But it was achieved in the teeth of opposition from the US and its allies, and at appalling human and moral cost. How had it been allowed to happen?
The answer, in one word, is "China". When the US ended direct military aid in 2007 over Sri Lanka's deteriorating human rights record, China leapt into the breach, increasing aid to nearly $1bn (£690m) to become the island's biggest donor, giving tens of millions of dollars' worth of sophisticated weapons, and making a free gift of six F7 fighter jets to the Sri Lankan air force. China encouraged its ally Pakistan to sell more arms and to train pilots to fly the new planes. And, crucially, China prevented the UN Security Council from putting Sri Lanka on its agenda.
Suddenly, thanks to China's diplomacy, the hectoring of the US and Europe didn't matter any more. After nearly 500 years under the thumb of the West, the immensely strategic little island in the Indian Ocean had a new sugar daddy one with a very different conception of its duties. Sri Lanka's "traditional donors" had "receded into a distant corner", the country's Foreign Secretary, Palitha Kohona, told The New York Times in 2008. "Asians don't go around teaching each other how to behave," he said. "There are ways we deal with each other perhaps a quiet word, but not wagging the finger."
Money, arms and diplomatic cover are necessary preconditions for taking a war to its logical conclusion, but they are not enough. Also required is ideological cover: a casus belli that must go beyond the thirst for revenge, communal hatred or the urge of the majority to impose its will permanently on the minority. It must be possible to sell it as a just war. For this purpose, as Bob Dylan recognised a long time back ("With God on our side"), religion comes in handy.
Enter the Sinhalese Buddhists.
We in the West by and large have a pretty foggy understanding of Buddhism, but one thing we know for certain is that Buddhists are for peace. So the idea that the war party in Sri Lanka not just in the past five years but throughout the years of independence was identifiable with Buddhist monks does not sound right. It's like finding Trappist monks engaged in a talk-athon or Orthodox Jews running a pork pie factory.
Buddhists don't do war. Look at the Dalai Lama: for 50 years he has strained every fibre to prevent Tibetan resistance to Chinese oppression turning violent. He has a great line on this challenge: "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher."
Up close, Sinhalese Buddhism looks as harmless and pacific as any other variety. Visit any temple in the country during Poya or full moon day, a monthly national religious holiday on the island, and you will find scenes of perfect serenity as families dressed all in white offer food to the monks in their saffron robes, then picnic under the trees or stroll around the whitewashed stupa.
By contrast, listen to the words of the Venerable Athuraliye Rathana in 2002: "There are two central concepts of Buddhism," the monk said, "compassion and wisdom. If compassion was a necessary and sufficient condition, then the Buddha would not have elaborated on wisdom or prajna. Hitler could not have been overcome by maitriya [compassion] alone. Today there is a discourse about peace in Sri Lanka. It is an extremely artificial exercise and one that is clearly being orchestrated under threat of terrorist attack."
Imagine those words coming from the mouth of the Dalai Lama and you get an idea of how sharply the views of some Sri Lankan monks diverge from the pacific Buddhist norm. He is not saying "bomb the hell out of the Tigers, as the Allies destroyed Hitler". But the implication is clear enough.
How did Sri Lankan Buddhism veer off so sharply from the other schools? Buddhism was born in northern India in the 6th century BC, and spread throughout the subcontinent and beyond. But eight or nine hundred years later it began to lose ground to new schools of devotional Hinduism, which steadily supplanted it. Eventually it disappeared from the Indian mainland altogether.
Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka watched this process with alarm, and hatched a way to stop it at the coast: they wrote a new book of scripture, the Mahavamsa, to establish indissoluble links between the historical Buddha and their island. The Mahavamsa claimed that the Buddha had visited Sri Lanka three times and had declared it "dhammadipa", "the island of righteousness" a sort of Buddhist Promised Land, where the Sinhalese should rule and Buddhism should be unchallenged. The Mahavamsa, although not accepted by scholars as a core teaching, helped to ensure that the island remained Buddhism's last remaining outpost in the subcontinent. But there was a price to pay: a vein of intolerant chauvinism, inimical to the religion elsewhere, became part of its permanent baggage.
After independence in 1948, Sri Lanka's Buddhists established themselves as a fierce, intimidating nationalist presence. Although the fourth prime minister, Solomon Bandaranaike, had done the Buddhists' bidding in making Sinhala the official language, he temporised over Buddhists taking over schools run by Christians. So in September 1959, a monk called Talduwe Somarama pulled a revolver out of his robes and shot him dead.
When Mahinda Rajapaksa won the general election of 2004 to become Prime Minister, the Norwegian-negotiated ceasefire of 2002 was already unravelling. One year later, he became President, but even though the island's peace was increasingly fragile, it was still unclear where his policy was headed. His party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (founded by Bandaranaike), was, like the opposition, still supposedly committed to the stuttering peace process. The champions of all-out war were limited to 10 newly elected monk MPs and another small extremist party.
Then, in August 2005, the Tigers assassinated Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka's highly regarded foreign secretary, himself a Tamil, and peace quite suddenly disappeared from the scene. The following April, the Tigers abruptly cancelled scheduled peace talks in Geneva, and six days later Rajapaksa's new army chief, General Sarath Fonseka, was nearly killed by a Tiger suicide bomb. As the war shadows deepened, monks were again on hand to hurry things along.
On 21 July, the Tigers shut off sluice gates to a reservoir near Trincomalee in the north-east, depriving nearly 30,000 people, many of them recent Sinhalese settlers, of drinking water and water for their fields. A group of politicised monks rushed to a temple near the reservoir and announced that they were going to march on the Tigers' lines and fight them to the death.
It was merely a stunt: as one Sri Lankan journalist who covered the event recalled, "they did not have the numbers or the public support to take on the LTTE during the march. As they were walking they were stopped by the military." But it succeeded in sparking the new war: the air force attacked Tiger positions on 26 July, after which ground troops began the operation to take charge of the gates. The war's final phase was under way.
Like it or not, the pax sinica is spreading across the world: in return for getting the West off Sri Lanka's back, the Chinese got to build a new port at Hambantota on the south coast, a vital link in the "string of pearls" they are constructing across the Indian Ocean, from Burma to Pakistan. But just as significant as the success of the Chinese is the failure of the Western model.
The annihilation of the Tigers took practically everybody by surprise. Sri Lanka had been battling it out against the improvised forces of the Tigers since 1983, but victory never seemed close. Under its charismatic founder and leader, the Tigers fought with fanatical zeal in jungle terrain that was ideal for guerrilla warfare, and the government troops, with their cautious, conventional tactics, were no match for them. Whenever victory seemed on the cards, heavy pressure from India and the West brought the two sides to the negotiating table. A ceasefire signed in 2002 was greeted by the outside world as a major step towards achieving a federal solution. That agreement slowly unravelled, but when the war restarted informally in July 2006, the Tigers still controlled nearly one-third of the island.
By spring last year, the Tigers had lost nearly all their territory and were boxed into 85 square kilometres of jungle but even then, outright government victory seemed improbable.
Why? Because however brutal their tactics, the Tigers had succeeded in establishing the idea that the Tamils, discriminated against for many years by the Sinhalese majority, were entitled to their own homeland. The conventional wisdom held that this war neither could nor should have a military outcome, but a diplomatic one. Like errant children, both sides would eventually come round: a ceasefire, peace talks, some kind of settlement imposed by pressure from the West and facilitated by the Norwegians was the only way out of the mess, however unsatisfactory. The Tamils would run their side of the island, the Sinhalese would run theirs.
There were plenty of arguments against such a resolution. For one thing, the island's Tamils are by no means confined to the north and the east. Under British rule, Tamils were favoured for government jobs; today Tamils constitute a majority of the population of the capital, Colombo. At the other end of the social scale, tens of thousands of poor Tamil peasants were brought in under the Raj as indentured labour to work on the tea estates. Both Colombo and the estates were well outside the region the Tigers wanted for its sovereign state. But in a small island polarised between warring ethnic groups, and with a history of ethnic cleansing on both sides, what sort of future could Tamils outside "Eelam" look forward to?
But the prospects for Tamils who found themselves inside the state that Prabhakaran wanted to carve out of the island were hardly more promising. During his 25 years in control, the guerrilla leader had been distinguished by one characteristic above all: utter ruthlessness. He had eliminated every possible rival for power, killing all moderate and pacific Tamil leaders as well as those who favoured the gun. He had subjected Tamils both inside the island and in the diaspora to punitive taxes to fund his war, and had forced thousands of families to give up their children to fight as soldiers. He had ordered pogroms against Muslims in the area he controlled, forcing thousands of them to flee, as well as massacring Sinhalese civilians.
Within the ranks of his guerrilla army he demanded total dedication, inventing the suicide bomb as a weapon of war and requiring his cadres to carry cyanide capsules so they could kill themselves rather than submit to enemy interrogation. On the rare occasions he appeared in public, including his one and only press conference in 2002, he always wore military fatigues, cultivating the image of the single-minded guerrilla leader but family snaps unearthed after his death showed him living in luxury.
His challenge in 2002 was to convince the world that the man who had ordered the assassinations of both the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, was capable of re-inventing himself, Sinn Fein-style, as a civilian leader worthy of international respect. But it was a transformation that proved well beyond him: his reflexive response to any crisis remained the same to murder the people he held responsible. The idea that a man of his kidney could run a plausible democratic state was one of the sicker jokes of the decadent period of US diplomatic hegemony.
But even if Prabhakaran had turned out to possess the political gifts of a Gerry Adams, there is a strong argument to be made that the West had no business trying to dictate peace terms to the legitimate government of the island, faced with an astonishingly brutal insurgency.
The reuniting of Sri Lanka under Sinhalese domination fills many in the minority community with foreboding: a Tamil businessman in Trincomalee told me that he fears the arrival of another wave of government-sponsored Sinhalese colonisation. He also talked of how the new arrivals impose their symbolic presence by installing Buddha statues.
There was plenty wrong with the Sri Lankan polity in the years after independence, and there is plenty still wrong with it today. In the words of the then UN high commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, now president of the International Crisis Group, after her visit in October 2007, it is a country where "the weakness of the rule of law and prevalence of impunity are alarming". But the idea that these wrongs could be righted by splitting this small island down the middle into two armed camps, and putting one of the halves in the pocket of a homicidal maniac, is one of the crazier ideas to have gained currency in our times.
.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/how-beijing-won-sri-lankas-civil-war-1980492.html
Kinetic
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That should not be one way business.
Talims will remember longer than Singhalese. Its India that sent solders to keep peace in SL and fought along with SL solders against LTTE. It will be better if you don't forget it as well.
IND151
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ndia-Sri Lanka | Changing Political Relationship: Post-1990 Phase
Gurnam Chand
The immediate threat to any country arises in its neighbourhood. That is why the maintenance of peace, stability and friendship with neighbouring states is considered basic to a nation’s foreign policy. India’s relations with its neighbours therefore constitute a critical component of its foreign policy. The specific geo-strategic location of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean and ethnic affinity of the Indian Tamils with the Sri Lankan Tamils have been the most important factor in their relationship. India is the closest neighbour of Sri Lanka, separated from it at its narrowest point by 22 miles of sea called the Palk Strait. The implication of such a close proximity is that developments in each country have affected the other. Sri Lanka’s strategic location caused concern to Indian security particularly because of the possibility of the involvement of external powers in the ethnic conflict. The presence of external powers there can possibly pose a serious threat to the security and unity and integrity of India as well as to regional stability.
India-Sri Lanka relations in the post-1990 period have undergone a contextual change together with changes in India’s foreign policy perceptions. After the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the US as the sole superpower, India’s foreign policy perceptions too have changed. In keeping with the changing global economic and trade scenario, India’s strategic priorities in the Indian Ocean region have also undergone a change during the last two decades. India’s national security perceptions have now been enlarged to include economic security, free trade and commerce, energy security, and social security of the population in addition to territorial integrity. The United States’ relations with India have become an important component of New Delhi’s strategic linkages to globally safeguard its interests
India-Sri Lanka relations are now also affected by the regional power dynamics, with external powers seeking to increase their own influence and counter those of others. India is the most important foreign supporter of Sri Lanka, and remains its largest trading partner. China is currently one of Sri Lanka’s major military suppliers, but also has a potential for economic investments and infrastructure projects. The Sri Lanka Government under President Mahinda Rajapakse is exploiting the geo-political struggle unfolding in the Indian Ocean between China and India, with the United States having its own agenda for retaining its influence. While Pakistan is playing for stakes in Sri Lanka with Chinese knowledge to queer the pitch for India, the Russians too are keeping a hawk eye on any activity in the Indian Ocean. Pakistan’s engagements in Sri Lanka are also strategically sensitive to India. Strategically, it is in India’s interest to keep its rivals out of its sphere of influence. India needs to invest more in Sri Lanka to keep China within its zone of influence. India sought (tried) to eliminate these threats through various bilateral agreements with Sri Lanka.
India-Sri Lanka relations are based on a deep and abiding friendship based on shared historical experience and common civilisation and cultural values sustained by geographical proximity and ethnic affinity. There have been shifts and changes in the pattern of the relationship marked by mutual differences, irritants, cooperation and friendship. But, both the countries have developed adequate strength to withstand the stresses and strains; this is a notable feature of their bilateral relationship. India-Sri Lanka relations are multifaceted and interconnected; invariably, therefore, they have implications for domestic politics and economy in the two countries. Nearly every bilateral issue between them is intertwined with some domestic issues and therefore become a matter of domestic political debate. There is interdependence but, at the same time, the smaller partner also complains of asymmetry in the relationship.
In the post-1990 phase, the sharply improving economic cooperation between India and Sri Lanka has its roots in the maturing political relationship. India’s clear, sincere and abiding commitment to the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka and its support for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict put hatred behind and sowed the seeds for eliminating all irritants in the political relations between the two countries. Keeping in view New Delhi’s changing foreign policy perceptions and India’s earlier experience of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement of July 29, 1987 and subsequent mission of the IPKF from 1987 to 1990, and particularly after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE, India has resisted the option of mediation or intervention in the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka. The events that unfolded between 1987 and 1990 imparted a new dimension to bilateral ties and these were the most troubled and by and large conflictual years in India-Sri Lanka relationship. India’s intervention in the island state had embittered both the government and people of Sri Lanka.
Realising the constraints and cost of its direct intervention in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka from 1987 to 1990, India adopted a new policy of non-intervention with active interest in the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka, the focus being on economic cooperation. India’s new Sri Lanka policy vis-à-vis the ethnic conflict combines its old stand with the new realities. At the core of India’s foreign policy is a reiteration of the Indian Government’s commitment to protect Sri Lanka’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. India’s pragmatic policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka’s commitment towards India’s security concerns created a credible atmosphere and consequently brought a new era in the relations between the two countries. India’s new policy has contributed to removing the cultivated fear complex of Sri Lanka. The leadership and the people in Sri Lanka have changed their mindset and thinking about India; for the first time, India is considered as an asset rather than a threat to Sri Lanka’s security. In the post-1990 phase, India and Sri Lanka have established a dense bilateral network of institutions and mechanisms so as to ensure sustained cooperation irrespective of domestic politics and changes in the external environment of the two countries.
A significant development in this period was that a large legal framework was provided by the Indo-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement (ISFTA), which was signed at the highest political level on December 28, 1998 with the overall objective of enhancing trade and economic relations between the two countries and promoting FDI. It was entered into force from March 1, 2000. Apart from the legal framework, during this period, the institutional framework for the relationship was provided by frequent contacts at the political level, including at the highest levels; the President, Prime Minister and Foreign Ministers of both the countries are engaged in threadbare discussions covering the entire scope of the bilateral relationship. In this new phase, both the nations realise that restrictions on trade between the two nations are detrimental to their economic growth and prosperity. Following the success of FTA, both the governments are ready to sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA).
In the post-LTTE era, Sri Lanka has become closer to China, Pakistan and Israel because of their political and military support to Colombo during the war. China has partly filled the vacuum created by India’s reluctance to actively participate in Sri Lanka’s war effort. While the Indian Government declined to provide military equipment, citing political compulsions and concern over the use of force against the LTTE, China filled in the gap with liberal supply of a wide variety of armaments. The timely help rendered during the war has enabled China to gain a lot of strategic space and credibility in Sri Lanka. The Chinese are constructing a commercial port in Hambantota in the South and thus their presence in Sri Lanka is likely to be firmed up. In the coming years, the Chinese influence in Sri Lanka can be expected to not only increase but become more assertive.
The USA has also been an active player in Sri Lanka both in promoting the peace process 2002 and later in supporting Sri Lanka’s war effort. However, on issues relating to Sri Lanka, the USA had been maintaining close contact with India. It is evident that the USA values India for its unique geographic and strategic advantage in Sri Lanka; this relationship is likely to be strengthened to balance the growing Chinese profile in the South Asian region.
Hence it is important that India looks at these developments with great caution and ensures a proper foreign policy towards Sri Lanka. India will have to safeguard its interests particularly in the Indian Ocean region. The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean have become vital for India’s expanding global trade. They carry fossil fuels so vital for India’s ever increasing energy needs. India needs to invest more in Sri Lanka to keep China within its zone of influence. India’s timely help during the Tsunami has proved to the world that India is capable of handling challenges facing the region.
India-Sri Lanka relations are now broadbased with the economic agenda being a priority followed by strategic considerations. India’s strategic interest in Sri Lanka has been enlarged to protect and project India’s strategic and economic interests by building strong bonds with Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was the first country with which India signed a Free Trade Agreement; the trade between the two countries is expected to grow to $ 4 billion by the end of this year. There is greater appreciation between the two countries of each other’s problems and perceptions.
Inevitably the changes in India’s strategic perception were reflected in its present approach to Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE, particularly after the failure of the peace process 2002. Its role had been limited as an advisor and counsellor not only to Sri Lanka but to the four co-chairs—the European Union, Japan, Norway and the USA which promoted the peace process. India scrupulously kept out of Sri Lanka’s war with the LTTE despite strong internal political pressures from the ruling Congress’ coalition partners in Tamil Nadu. India’s agenda for Sri Lanka had mainly focused on strategic security cooperation and the building of trade linkages.
Permanent peace in Sri Lanka requires institutional restructuring aimed at creating ethnic equality; a power sharing arrangement to satisfy the ‘aspirations of all the Sri Lankan communities, especially those of Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims’ is considered the most desirable democratic option. This pro-minority position underlines the need for devolution of powers to counter the majority community’s entrenched position on ethnic democratic centralism.
Changing Role of both Governments
A key reason for India-Sri Lanka relations to improve dramatically since the mid-1990s was the change of governments in both the countries As power moved from the hands of the UNP to the SLFP after 17 years in Sri Lanka, following the General Election in India the Congress party led by Rajiv Gandhi was replaced in New Delhi by the National Front Government headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh.
In the General Election of 1991, the Congress party came back to power and P. V. Narasimha Rao became the Prime Minister of India. After assuming power Rao declared his Sri Lankan policy. He said that India would not desire to take any active part in resolving the problems of Sri Lanka. These problems would have to be solved by the Sri Lankans themselves, regardless of whether they were Sinhalese or Tamils. At the bilateral level, India showed more interest in developing the framework for a working relationship with Sri Lanka, rather than identifying itself with the Sri Lankan Tamil cause.
An Agreement was signed between India and Sri Lanka in July 1991 to establish an Indo-Sri Lanka Joint Commission. Its sub-commissions included those on trade, investment and finance, science and technology. President Premasdasa visited India in October 1992 and discussed the bilateral relations of the two countries.
After being elected, President Chandrika Kumaratunga paid a significant visit to India in March 1995 and laid the basis for close relations with India. Later on I.K. Gujral became the Prime Minister in late 1997. He clearly understood the importance of maintaining friendly relations with the neighbours. He introduced the ‘Gujral Doctrine’.
After the midterm elections in 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party along with its alliance (National Democratic Alliance) came in to power at the Centre. As soon as Atal Behari Vajpayee became the Prime Minister of India, the Sri Lanka representative was among the first to reach India. India reassured Sri Lanka that it respected the sovereignty and integrity of Sri Lanka and it had no intention to intervene in its internal affairs.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Sri Lanka to attend the 10th SAARC Summit. He said that India would be willing to conclude bilateral Free Trade Agreements with the member countries. By the end of December 1998, President Kumaratunga’s visit to India resulted in the conclusion of the historic Indo-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement. The warm relations between the two countries continued ever since, and Colombo was determined to forge closer ties with New Delhi. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s concept of ties between the two countries extended to the extent of wanting both countries to partner each other in building a bridge across the Palk Strait. In February 2002, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, signed a Ceasefire Agreement and an MoU to take the peace process forward; India welcomed this Agreement.
In the November 2005 national elections Mahinda Rajapakse, the anti-LTTE hardliner of the SLFP, was elected President with the support of two staunch anti-LTTE political parties, the JVP and JHU, which demanded a military solution to the ethnic conflict. Like previous governments, the administration of President Mahinda Rajapakse devoted the highest priority to India-Sri Lanka relationship and the President visited India on four occasions since assuming the high office in November 2005.
In January 2006, the Sri Lankan Government launched a military campaign to root out the LTTE. When the Sri Lankan armed forces began to resort to savage bombing of the Tamil areas in the northern part of Sri Lanka, the political parties in Tamil Nadu started expressing deep concern. In August 2006 when news about the air attack on Sencholai orphanage and also a school meant for the internally displaced children reached Tamil Nadu there was righteous indignation. Almost all political parties came together and the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution. The resolution characterised the air attack as “barbaric, uncivilised and inhuman”. The resolution also requested New Delhi to step up pressure on Colombo for immediate ceasefire and try to arrive at a negotiated settlement.
After a 30-month long military campaign, the Sri Lankan armed forces ultimately militarily defeated the LTTE and freed the nation from the three decades of terror in May 2009. As many as 80,000 people were officially listed as killed during the three decades of ethnic conflict. The end of military conflict with the LTTE brought Sri Lanka to a major turning-point in its history and with the death of LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, the militant campaign for an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka seems to have come to an end.
Post-LTTE Era Relationship
In the post-LTTE era, a frictional chapter in India-Sri Lankan history has come to an end. It is time for India and Sri Lanka to start a new chapter with renewed vigour and vitality by rigorous cooperation in various fields. It is likely that this period would not see the policy of intervention but rather of mutual trust and harmony. In this period both countries have agreed that with the end of the military operations in Sri Lanka, the time is opportune to focus attention on issues of relief, rehabilitation, resettlement and reconciliation, as well as a permanent political solution of the ethnic conflict.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted in his reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address to the joint session of Parliament that the Tamils’ problem was much larger than the LTTE and hoped the Sri Lanka Government would show imagination and courage in meeting the legitimate concerns and aspirations of the Tamil people. The Prime Minister told Parliament that India has made it known that it has no intention of instructing Colombo on the political front but is ready to play an active part in the relief and rehabilitation of the IDPs and has earmarked Rs 500 crores for the purpose. The Prime Minister stated in Parliament:
We are willing to do more to restore normality and to help such people return to their rightful home and occupations.
India’s bilateral relationship with Sri Lanka could be strengthened even further with the end to the military conflict.
There is consensus within and outside Sri Lanka that with the LTTE out of the way, a golden opportunity has presented itself before the government to work towards a just, honourable and durable political settlement of the ethnic conflict. In the post-LTTE era without devolution the internal situation in Sri Lanka would continued to be restive. This could have an unforeseen effect on the Tamil Nadu situation. In the post-civil war period if the relationship between the Tamils of Tamil Nadu and the Tamils of Sri Lanka is turned into a positive and vibrant force, a previously constraining factor in India-Sri Lanka relations could transform into a promising connection drawing India and Sri Lanka closer to each other.
It is imperative that India adopts a pro-active policy towards Sri Lanka in order to not only save the Tamils but also for its own enlarged security reasons. Economic aid could be a big trump card in India’s foreign policy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has congratulated the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse, on his re-election as the President on January 26, 2010. The Prime Minister reiterated:
We have time tested ties of friendship and co-operation. I look forward to working closely with you to further strengthen our close and multidimensional bilateral relations in the coming years.
The author is an Associate Professor and the Head, Department of Political Science, M.R. Government College, Fazilka.
Gurnam Chand
The immediate threat to any country arises in its neighbourhood. That is why the maintenance of peace, stability and friendship with neighbouring states is considered basic to a nation’s foreign policy. India’s relations with its neighbours therefore constitute a critical component of its foreign policy. The specific geo-strategic location of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean and ethnic affinity of the Indian Tamils with the Sri Lankan Tamils have been the most important factor in their relationship. India is the closest neighbour of Sri Lanka, separated from it at its narrowest point by 22 miles of sea called the Palk Strait. The implication of such a close proximity is that developments in each country have affected the other. Sri Lanka’s strategic location caused concern to Indian security particularly because of the possibility of the involvement of external powers in the ethnic conflict. The presence of external powers there can possibly pose a serious threat to the security and unity and integrity of India as well as to regional stability.
India-Sri Lanka relations in the post-1990 period have undergone a contextual change together with changes in India’s foreign policy perceptions. After the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the US as the sole superpower, India’s foreign policy perceptions too have changed. In keeping with the changing global economic and trade scenario, India’s strategic priorities in the Indian Ocean region have also undergone a change during the last two decades. India’s national security perceptions have now been enlarged to include economic security, free trade and commerce, energy security, and social security of the population in addition to territorial integrity. The United States’ relations with India have become an important component of New Delhi’s strategic linkages to globally safeguard its interests
India-Sri Lanka relations are now also affected by the regional power dynamics, with external powers seeking to increase their own influence and counter those of others. India is the most important foreign supporter of Sri Lanka, and remains its largest trading partner. China is currently one of Sri Lanka’s major military suppliers, but also has a potential for economic investments and infrastructure projects. The Sri Lanka Government under President Mahinda Rajapakse is exploiting the geo-political struggle unfolding in the Indian Ocean between China and India, with the United States having its own agenda for retaining its influence. While Pakistan is playing for stakes in Sri Lanka with Chinese knowledge to queer the pitch for India, the Russians too are keeping a hawk eye on any activity in the Indian Ocean. Pakistan’s engagements in Sri Lanka are also strategically sensitive to India. Strategically, it is in India’s interest to keep its rivals out of its sphere of influence. India needs to invest more in Sri Lanka to keep China within its zone of influence. India sought (tried) to eliminate these threats through various bilateral agreements with Sri Lanka.
India-Sri Lanka relations are based on a deep and abiding friendship based on shared historical experience and common civilisation and cultural values sustained by geographical proximity and ethnic affinity. There have been shifts and changes in the pattern of the relationship marked by mutual differences, irritants, cooperation and friendship. But, both the countries have developed adequate strength to withstand the stresses and strains; this is a notable feature of their bilateral relationship. India-Sri Lanka relations are multifaceted and interconnected; invariably, therefore, they have implications for domestic politics and economy in the two countries. Nearly every bilateral issue between them is intertwined with some domestic issues and therefore become a matter of domestic political debate. There is interdependence but, at the same time, the smaller partner also complains of asymmetry in the relationship.
In the post-1990 phase, the sharply improving economic cooperation between India and Sri Lanka has its roots in the maturing political relationship. India’s clear, sincere and abiding commitment to the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka and its support for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict put hatred behind and sowed the seeds for eliminating all irritants in the political relations between the two countries. Keeping in view New Delhi’s changing foreign policy perceptions and India’s earlier experience of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement of July 29, 1987 and subsequent mission of the IPKF from 1987 to 1990, and particularly after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE, India has resisted the option of mediation or intervention in the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka. The events that unfolded between 1987 and 1990 imparted a new dimension to bilateral ties and these were the most troubled and by and large conflictual years in India-Sri Lanka relationship. India’s intervention in the island state had embittered both the government and people of Sri Lanka.
Realising the constraints and cost of its direct intervention in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka from 1987 to 1990, India adopted a new policy of non-intervention with active interest in the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka, the focus being on economic cooperation. India’s new Sri Lanka policy vis-à-vis the ethnic conflict combines its old stand with the new realities. At the core of India’s foreign policy is a reiteration of the Indian Government’s commitment to protect Sri Lanka’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. India’s pragmatic policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka’s commitment towards India’s security concerns created a credible atmosphere and consequently brought a new era in the relations between the two countries. India’s new policy has contributed to removing the cultivated fear complex of Sri Lanka. The leadership and the people in Sri Lanka have changed their mindset and thinking about India; for the first time, India is considered as an asset rather than a threat to Sri Lanka’s security. In the post-1990 phase, India and Sri Lanka have established a dense bilateral network of institutions and mechanisms so as to ensure sustained cooperation irrespective of domestic politics and changes in the external environment of the two countries.
A significant development in this period was that a large legal framework was provided by the Indo-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement (ISFTA), which was signed at the highest political level on December 28, 1998 with the overall objective of enhancing trade and economic relations between the two countries and promoting FDI. It was entered into force from March 1, 2000. Apart from the legal framework, during this period, the institutional framework for the relationship was provided by frequent contacts at the political level, including at the highest levels; the President, Prime Minister and Foreign Ministers of both the countries are engaged in threadbare discussions covering the entire scope of the bilateral relationship. In this new phase, both the nations realise that restrictions on trade between the two nations are detrimental to their economic growth and prosperity. Following the success of FTA, both the governments are ready to sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA).
In the post-LTTE era, Sri Lanka has become closer to China, Pakistan and Israel because of their political and military support to Colombo during the war. China has partly filled the vacuum created by India’s reluctance to actively participate in Sri Lanka’s war effort. While the Indian Government declined to provide military equipment, citing political compulsions and concern over the use of force against the LTTE, China filled in the gap with liberal supply of a wide variety of armaments. The timely help rendered during the war has enabled China to gain a lot of strategic space and credibility in Sri Lanka. The Chinese are constructing a commercial port in Hambantota in the South and thus their presence in Sri Lanka is likely to be firmed up. In the coming years, the Chinese influence in Sri Lanka can be expected to not only increase but become more assertive.
The USA has also been an active player in Sri Lanka both in promoting the peace process 2002 and later in supporting Sri Lanka’s war effort. However, on issues relating to Sri Lanka, the USA had been maintaining close contact with India. It is evident that the USA values India for its unique geographic and strategic advantage in Sri Lanka; this relationship is likely to be strengthened to balance the growing Chinese profile in the South Asian region.
Hence it is important that India looks at these developments with great caution and ensures a proper foreign policy towards Sri Lanka. India will have to safeguard its interests particularly in the Indian Ocean region. The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean have become vital for India’s expanding global trade. They carry fossil fuels so vital for India’s ever increasing energy needs. India needs to invest more in Sri Lanka to keep China within its zone of influence. India’s timely help during the Tsunami has proved to the world that India is capable of handling challenges facing the region.
India-Sri Lanka relations are now broadbased with the economic agenda being a priority followed by strategic considerations. India’s strategic interest in Sri Lanka has been enlarged to protect and project India’s strategic and economic interests by building strong bonds with Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was the first country with which India signed a Free Trade Agreement; the trade between the two countries is expected to grow to $ 4 billion by the end of this year. There is greater appreciation between the two countries of each other’s problems and perceptions.
Inevitably the changes in India’s strategic perception were reflected in its present approach to Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE, particularly after the failure of the peace process 2002. Its role had been limited as an advisor and counsellor not only to Sri Lanka but to the four co-chairs—the European Union, Japan, Norway and the USA which promoted the peace process. India scrupulously kept out of Sri Lanka’s war with the LTTE despite strong internal political pressures from the ruling Congress’ coalition partners in Tamil Nadu. India’s agenda for Sri Lanka had mainly focused on strategic security cooperation and the building of trade linkages.
Permanent peace in Sri Lanka requires institutional restructuring aimed at creating ethnic equality; a power sharing arrangement to satisfy the ‘aspirations of all the Sri Lankan communities, especially those of Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims’ is considered the most desirable democratic option. This pro-minority position underlines the need for devolution of powers to counter the majority community’s entrenched position on ethnic democratic centralism.
Changing Role of both Governments
A key reason for India-Sri Lanka relations to improve dramatically since the mid-1990s was the change of governments in both the countries As power moved from the hands of the UNP to the SLFP after 17 years in Sri Lanka, following the General Election in India the Congress party led by Rajiv Gandhi was replaced in New Delhi by the National Front Government headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh.
In the General Election of 1991, the Congress party came back to power and P. V. Narasimha Rao became the Prime Minister of India. After assuming power Rao declared his Sri Lankan policy. He said that India would not desire to take any active part in resolving the problems of Sri Lanka. These problems would have to be solved by the Sri Lankans themselves, regardless of whether they were Sinhalese or Tamils. At the bilateral level, India showed more interest in developing the framework for a working relationship with Sri Lanka, rather than identifying itself with the Sri Lankan Tamil cause.
An Agreement was signed between India and Sri Lanka in July 1991 to establish an Indo-Sri Lanka Joint Commission. Its sub-commissions included those on trade, investment and finance, science and technology. President Premasdasa visited India in October 1992 and discussed the bilateral relations of the two countries.
After being elected, President Chandrika Kumaratunga paid a significant visit to India in March 1995 and laid the basis for close relations with India. Later on I.K. Gujral became the Prime Minister in late 1997. He clearly understood the importance of maintaining friendly relations with the neighbours. He introduced the ‘Gujral Doctrine’.
After the midterm elections in 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party along with its alliance (National Democratic Alliance) came in to power at the Centre. As soon as Atal Behari Vajpayee became the Prime Minister of India, the Sri Lanka representative was among the first to reach India. India reassured Sri Lanka that it respected the sovereignty and integrity of Sri Lanka and it had no intention to intervene in its internal affairs.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Sri Lanka to attend the 10th SAARC Summit. He said that India would be willing to conclude bilateral Free Trade Agreements with the member countries. By the end of December 1998, President Kumaratunga’s visit to India resulted in the conclusion of the historic Indo-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement. The warm relations between the two countries continued ever since, and Colombo was determined to forge closer ties with New Delhi. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s concept of ties between the two countries extended to the extent of wanting both countries to partner each other in building a bridge across the Palk Strait. In February 2002, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, signed a Ceasefire Agreement and an MoU to take the peace process forward; India welcomed this Agreement.
In the November 2005 national elections Mahinda Rajapakse, the anti-LTTE hardliner of the SLFP, was elected President with the support of two staunch anti-LTTE political parties, the JVP and JHU, which demanded a military solution to the ethnic conflict. Like previous governments, the administration of President Mahinda Rajapakse devoted the highest priority to India-Sri Lanka relationship and the President visited India on four occasions since assuming the high office in November 2005.
In January 2006, the Sri Lankan Government launched a military campaign to root out the LTTE. When the Sri Lankan armed forces began to resort to savage bombing of the Tamil areas in the northern part of Sri Lanka, the political parties in Tamil Nadu started expressing deep concern. In August 2006 when news about the air attack on Sencholai orphanage and also a school meant for the internally displaced children reached Tamil Nadu there was righteous indignation. Almost all political parties came together and the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution. The resolution characterised the air attack as “barbaric, uncivilised and inhuman”. The resolution also requested New Delhi to step up pressure on Colombo for immediate ceasefire and try to arrive at a negotiated settlement.
After a 30-month long military campaign, the Sri Lankan armed forces ultimately militarily defeated the LTTE and freed the nation from the three decades of terror in May 2009. As many as 80,000 people were officially listed as killed during the three decades of ethnic conflict. The end of military conflict with the LTTE brought Sri Lanka to a major turning-point in its history and with the death of LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, the militant campaign for an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka seems to have come to an end.
Post-LTTE Era Relationship
In the post-LTTE era, a frictional chapter in India-Sri Lankan history has come to an end. It is time for India and Sri Lanka to start a new chapter with renewed vigour and vitality by rigorous cooperation in various fields. It is likely that this period would not see the policy of intervention but rather of mutual trust and harmony. In this period both countries have agreed that with the end of the military operations in Sri Lanka, the time is opportune to focus attention on issues of relief, rehabilitation, resettlement and reconciliation, as well as a permanent political solution of the ethnic conflict.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted in his reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address to the joint session of Parliament that the Tamils’ problem was much larger than the LTTE and hoped the Sri Lanka Government would show imagination and courage in meeting the legitimate concerns and aspirations of the Tamil people. The Prime Minister told Parliament that India has made it known that it has no intention of instructing Colombo on the political front but is ready to play an active part in the relief and rehabilitation of the IDPs and has earmarked Rs 500 crores for the purpose. The Prime Minister stated in Parliament:
We are willing to do more to restore normality and to help such people return to their rightful home and occupations.
India’s bilateral relationship with Sri Lanka could be strengthened even further with the end to the military conflict.
There is consensus within and outside Sri Lanka that with the LTTE out of the way, a golden opportunity has presented itself before the government to work towards a just, honourable and durable political settlement of the ethnic conflict. In the post-LTTE era without devolution the internal situation in Sri Lanka would continued to be restive. This could have an unforeseen effect on the Tamil Nadu situation. In the post-civil war period if the relationship between the Tamils of Tamil Nadu and the Tamils of Sri Lanka is turned into a positive and vibrant force, a previously constraining factor in India-Sri Lanka relations could transform into a promising connection drawing India and Sri Lanka closer to each other.
It is imperative that India adopts a pro-active policy towards Sri Lanka in order to not only save the Tamils but also for its own enlarged security reasons. Economic aid could be a big trump card in India’s foreign policy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has congratulated the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse, on his re-election as the President on January 26, 2010. The Prime Minister reiterated:
We have time tested ties of friendship and co-operation. I look forward to working closely with you to further strengthen our close and multidimensional bilateral relations in the coming years.
The author is an Associate Professor and the Head, Department of Political Science, M.R. Government College, Fazilka.
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Sri Lanka values Indian help in battle against LTTE
Tue Mar 25 2008 19:51:28 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) by admin ( Leave a comment )
Xinhua
Colombo, March 25 (Xinhua) The Sri Lankan government said Tuesday that India’s help was crucial in the island’s battle against Tamil Tiger rebels. “We appreciate the assistance of the Indian government in our battle to defeat terrorism,” Keheliya Rambukwella, the government’s defence spokesman and the minister of foreign employment, told reporters.
He said the Sri Lankan government was aware of the India’s domestic political compulsions of trying to look after the interests of the Tamil community.
Rambukwella’s remarks came after a visit by the Sri Lankan Army chief Sarath Fonseka to India, which has been urging Sri Lanka to end the island’s conflicts with a political solution.
India had sent its peacekeeping force to the island in 1987 as part of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord.
But since the mid-1990s the Indian government has adopted a hands-off policy in Sri Lanka’s conflict.
Xinhua
---------- Post added at 05:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:50 PM ----------
Sri Lanka values Indian help in battle against LTTE
Tue Mar 25 2008 19:51:28 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time) by admin ( Leave a comment )
Xinhua
Colombo, March 25 (Xinhua) The Sri Lankan government said Tuesday that India’s help was crucial in the island’s battle against Tamil Tiger rebels. “We appreciate the assistance of the Indian government in our battle to defeat terrorism,” Keheliya Rambukwella, the government’s defence spokesman and the minister of foreign employment, told reporters.
He said the Sri Lankan government was aware of the India’s domestic political compulsions of trying to look after the interests of the Tamil community.
Rambukwella’s remarks came after a visit by the Sri Lankan Army chief Sarath Fonseka to India, which has been urging Sri Lanka to end the island’s conflicts with a political solution.
India had sent its peacekeeping force to the island in 1987 as part of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord.
But since the mid-1990s the Indian government has adopted a hands-off policy in Sri Lanka’s conflict.
Xinhua
---------- Post added at 05:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:50 PM ----------
Sri Lanka values Indian help in battle against LTTE
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