Shorn of frills, Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar’s maiden meeting with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, AKD, after Sri Lanka elected him to the high office last month, is all about re-energising crucial bilateral ties through renewed focus on jobs and revenue. Over the past one-plus-decades, the nation had lost out on both, thanks to the ‘jobless growth’ that had marked years of Chinese funding ‘white elephant’ projects that neither created jobs, nor family incomes, nor revenue for the government in scales that had marked the credit element in bilateral deals.
Jaishankar is the first foreign dignitary to meet President Dissanayake and his compact, two-member team after they took over and familiarised themselves in the new environment, responsibilities and commitments that were considered alien to their political ideology and electoral popularity. Going by what they had said during what should be considered a two-year-long presidential poll campaign since the Aragalaya mass-protests in 2022, it was becoming increasingly clear that Team AKD was serious about the business of governance, and had begun learning the ropes even before the latter became actually available to them.
Yet, the transition would not be easy for President Dissanayake, Prime Minister Harini Amarasooriya and Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath as they begin practising the theoretical briefings that might have learnt from domain experts while in the Opposition and put them into practice once in office. It will be more so if their JVP-NPP obtains the required majority in Parliament in elections that the new President has ordered for 14 November, as very few among them will have even limited parliamentary practice.
Past cohabitations
Should they fail to obtain a parliamentary majority, then it will be a ‘cohabitation government’ of some form. Sri Lanka’s two past experiences in recent times failed after the common element in Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (later President, 2022-04) provoked the President of the day enough. Of the two, President Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga (CBK) and PM Wickremesinghe belonged to two ideologically opposite political parties, namely the SLFP and the one-time parent UNP. Both political and personality differences had been built into the ‘cohabitation’ from day one.
That was not the case when Wickremesinghe assumed prime ministership under President Maithripala Sirisena (2015-19). Sirisena is his own choice and he and his undivided UNP of the time had made Sirisena’s presidential poll campaign against two-term incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa their own, and offered him the high office, as if on a platter. In the first case, President CBK dismissed the government and ordered fresh elections in 2004.
In the case of Sirisena, the cohabitation government headed by him had amended the Constitution to limit the President’s powers to dissolve Parliament and order fresh elections, from one year after the completion of the current term to six months before the completion of that term. Confused and confounded as he was by the smarter-than-thou attitude of an elitist and sophisticated Prime Minister, Sirisena chose not to exercise the presidential prerogative available to him when due.
By then he too had become more unpopular than his Prime Minister despite getting a mandate of a life-time for both. The rest is all history, leading up to the present, making a blue-blooded Marxist in Dissanayake President in a nation that is anything but Marxist. Right, liberal, the nation was, yes, under the UNP, Sri Lanka’s GoP. Socialist and yet democratic, the government was when the nation swung to the other end of the politico-ideological pendulum.
Re-adjustment time
Never in the past had Sri Lanka thought of a day when it would vote in a Marxist President, whose party had blood-stains and martyrdom in its hands at the same time. Both are products of the twin militant insurgencies the party had heralded in the early seventies and late eighties, and yet chose the democratic path in the intervening years, when JVP founder Rohana Wijeweera actually contested the maiden election for the Executive President in 1982, democratically, and came a distant third.
Critics of the JVP would thus have to read their contemporary history of Sri Lanka one more time before passing value judgements. In context, the readjustment with a Marxist President is not only for the latter and his ideological clan. Instead, Sri Lanka as a nation too has to make those adjustments, and learnt to do it, or re-do their electoral choice five years hence, independent of the incumbent government having a supportive Parliament for five years from November 2024.
All of it means that friends and neighbours of Sri Lanka should continue to have a lot more of patience, perseverance and commitment to the people and the nation, to see through five years that are not going to be easy for the nation and its rulers. India has understood it and has been cautious throughout the twin-elections just at present. Of course, this is going to be followed by long-delayed elections to the nine Provincial Councils, in whose creation New Delhi had played its part through the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987.
Then there are the nation-wide local government elections that the predecessor Wickremesinghe government had shied away from facing, for fear of losing as they did in the presidential poll. This, they did, by committing a contempt of the nation’s Supreme Court, which had upheld the Election Commission’s notification to conduct those polls forthwith. Whatever the outcome of the parliamentary polls, which the JVP-NPP strategists hope to win on the strength of the ‘support and sympathy wave’ felt in the presidential poll, they would still be keen on early elections to lower-level politico-administrative set-ups.
The reasons are not far to seek. One, those elections (alone) would introduce an element of a smooth transition from top to bottom without frequent ideological and personality clashes, this one, bottom-to-top, instead. Two and equally important, now is the time for the JVP-NPP as a political party with continuing electoral ambitions, to take deeper grass-roots all across the country, going beyond the traditional three per cent vote-bank.
The party should realise that the 40-extra per cent vote-share that came AKD’s way in the presidential poll was not theirs. In fact, it could have belonged to the Rajapaksas, especially the clan chieftain and two-term President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose socialist ideologies too met the JVP’s Marxist background somewhere in between. Or, at least that is a simple interpretation of the poll results, wherein Mahinda’s son Namal Rajapaksa, contesting the presidential poll, drew a pathetic blank.
Commitment to people
It is in this overall background, the India-Sri Lanka neighbourhood relations have to be primed and posited. As Minister Jaishankar and other Indian diplomats, including then foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, kept reiterating during the long run-up to Argalaya protests and afterwards, India’s commitment is to the people of Sri Lanka. New Delhi’s commitment was tested and certified, though not officially by any stake-holder, that India was playing neutral in the presidential poll, unlike the US and some other western nations and entities like the EU, who were constantly telling the Sri Lankan voters, as to what was expected of them.
The EU was relatively diplomatically, to the point of not being able to communicative enough for the man on the street to catch on. The US, on the other hand, was as abrasive as ever. Both should remember that this will not take them anywhere vis a vis the Sri Lankan people, and hence with the Sri Lankan government, which will be under groundswell pressure, if sought to be bent too much, too fast, and too early.
In these past months after Aragalaya in particular, India has been walking that extra mile or two to prove the point that it would continue to work with the leader and government that the people of Sri Lanka elected. So much so, the customary talk of India influencing Tamil voter decision, deriving from past contacts and commitments, too, was conspicuous by its absence in these times of twin-elections.
India’s contract is with the country, the community and the people, not individual governments and individualistic leaderships that however will require some tweaking but not wholesale re-doing. Hence, universal Sri Lankan concerns of job-creation and revenue-generation are also on the top of India’s agenda for the southern neighbours and each one of the other nations in the South Asian neighbourhood.
White, yellow angels
It is with the full realisation that none of them can be independent economic entities without external inputs in the form of aid, assistance and investments, the last being the most meaningful route to job-creation and revenue-generation, which go beyond the immediate. It is here India as a nation differs from China, which is interested in indebting nations forever and the US, which does the same thing in style and with sophistication.
Through all these processes, the AKD regime seems to have acknowledged that no nation and no investor other than those from the northern neighbour has put in their monies in big-ticket investments in Sri Lanka where white and yellow angels fear to tread. The fact still remains that it is the ‘brown pearl’ continues to prove its worth, time and again.
It is in this context that the Sri Lankan President possibly referred to ‘exporting’ green energy to India. There cannot be such exports without generated green energy in the first place. Looked in context, it is a continuation of past commitments for Sri Lanka to sell energy to India since the post-war era, consolidated into specific projects during the pre-and-post Aragalaya period, involving big-ticket energy investments in the North and the East, including those by India’s private sector Adani Group.
The icing on the cake of course was the high-cost restoration of the Second World War oil tanks farms in eastern Trincomalee, which too could go on to boost energy-related export earnings for the country. These in turn are aimed at finding a permanent solution to dollar-shortage that rocked the country two years back, leading all the way up to Aragalaya and consequent regime-change.
Insidious efforts
Interpreting and intimidating Indian investments and investors through public protests and court cases may be on somebody else’s agenda for India-Sri Lanka relations, but it cannot be so in Sri Lanka’s agenda for Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka-India relations. Such insidious efforts that had belonged to the socialist era in economic times and the liberal, capitalist times otherwise can only push the nation back to the pre-Aragalaya period of darkness and fear of the unknown.
If nothing else, New Delhi’s approach to other India-centric aspects of bilateral relations as highlighted during Jaishankar’s visit needs to be understood in a new and better perspective. On the one-time high-impact ethnic issue, Jaishankar reiterated the post-war Indian support for the ‘aspirations of all communities, including Tamils, for equality, justice, dignity, peace while maintaining the unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka’. It was also a polite, dignified and diplomatic way of acknowledging the deteriorating rights conditions long after the successful conclusion of the ethnic war.
Of course, the bilateral fishermen dispute continues to remain a thorn in the flesh for both governments, but finding a solution to the vexatious problem is not as easier as it seems difficult. There may have to be continuous engagement at the bilateral level, where there will have to be continuous high-level engagements for a time. A conducive atmosphere for this can be created only when the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) suspends its operations against the Indian fishers in Sri Lankan water for an indefinite period – and which as the Head of Government and Supreme Commander, President Dissanayake can and should initiate within his government and within his nation.
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
