Dissanayake
N Sathiya Moorthy
23 September 2024
Shooting from the hip, Indian observers of the emerging Sri Lanka scene have to be told to stay off, and leave it to the government to handle the new Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna leader of that nation, whose current edition they have no knowledge about.
If nothing else, they should learn their lessons from India’s Maldives relations, and how New Delhi’s patience and pregnant silence have brought around the once errant and erratic President Mohamed Muizzu.
The Muizzu experience in Maldives showed how the new rulers of that country knew less about what awaited them in office.
It is the same with Sri Lanka’s new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD), as the centre-left political leadership has had only a short spell in governance in the company of Presidents Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga and her political and constitutional successor, Mahinda Rajapaksa.
All that ended over a decade-and-a-half ago, and what the JVP knows is what they have been saying and doing in the Opposition.
By the sheer pace and phase of bilateral relations spanning over decades and governments, India knows more about the problem areas in those two countries than their new rulers were willing to accept, or so it seemed.
They trusted their domestic political adversaries even less and felt comfortable to see India through their eyes than the other way round.
Once they were sure of their own place in their nation’s politico-electoral space, as with Muizzu after the sweeping parliamentary poll victory, months after his election as president, their new-found confidence gave them the time and space to re-work their perceptions of the Indian neighbour, for instance.
Nowhere else did silent Indian diplomacy get a shot-in-the-arm in Sri Lanka in recent times than in the way the government of recent president Ranil Wickremesinghe ordered a year-long moratorium on foreign research vessels undertaking their work in the nation’s waters. Or, that is the general perception.
Whether India, or the US, or both were involved, the moratorium applied to Chinese research/spy vessels visiting Sri Lanka one every year over the past three years.
What Indian strategic community shout-outs could not achieve, the government could do it, more gracefully and quietly — if that is what it was.
This one was akin to politically motivated and equally encouraged social media activists coming up with the ‘Boycott Maldives’ call after three of Muizzu’s junior ministers had defamed India and Prime Minister Narendra D Modi through their own posts.
This was after Muizzu had ordered their suspension before leaving for China on his first state visit in January.
Indian campaigners noted how their boycott call hurt Maldivian tourism and economy, which India had helped to prop up through the Covid months and beyond, both before and after.
It put friends of India in the Maldives on the defensive.
It is another matter that most of the Indian social media activists did not know much about the Maldives, the trajectory of the nation’s domestic politics and bilateral/multilateral relations.
The campaign stopped as suddenly as it had commenced — and that (alone) made the difference.
Now, in the Sri Lankan context, the Indian strategic community’s perception is that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s JVP has traditionally been anti-India, and hence pro-China.
There used to be a lot of evidence to support the JVP’s anti-India policy in the past, yes.
‘Indian Hegemony’ was the third of the ‘five classes’ that militant JVP founder Rohana Wijeweera conducted for his cadres.
Till date, the JVP, after mainstreaming in the 1990s, has not removed either the ‘five classes’, or certainly the chapter on ‘Indian Hegemony’.
Yet, post-tsunami, when the Indian forces returned home after helping out Sri Lanka (Maldives and Indonesia) in relief, rehabilitation and restoration, the JVP especially was convinced that the Wijeweera era’s belief that the IPKF was there to stay, was all wrong.
After all, the IPKF too had left as it came, on the specific initiative of the Sri Lankan presidents of the day.
That way, the JVP leaders, cadres and sympathisers were as alive to India’s helping hand at the height of their nation’s economic crisis two years back.
Leave aside the fact that to date India’s $4 billion assistance tops the list of overseas initiatives of the kind, India also rushed food, fuel and medicines that alone helped end the long queues for these and other essentials.
Hence, for Indians to view the new Sri Lankan leadership only through the prism of the past or through their narrow view on China, which is only India’s adversary and not that of any of its neighbours, is fraught with possibilities that should be avoided in the first place.
That can only belittle the government’s initiative for a smooth continuation of the existing bilateral relations just as they are going through a smooth transition in their country.
Like all previous presidents barring Ranasinghe Premadasa, slain by the LTTE, Anura Kumara Dissanayake also belongs to the upper caste Govigama community, which through different denominations, account for 50 per cent of the Sinhala-Buddhist population.
After Maithripala Sirisena, who is from the neighbouring Polonnaruwa district, Anura is from the religiously significant Anuradhapura district, both in the North Central Province.
For a party that has its traditional base in the deep South, Anura won his parliamentary seat from cosmopolitan Colombo district in 2019.
This time round, he tops the Colombo district list on vote share.
That the centre-left polity has a traditional base in urban areas is only one aspect of it.
This time around, the urban middle class, which was traditionally ill disposed towards the JVP on ideological grounds, swung to Anura’s side.
They too wanted ‘change’, and also an end to their daily miseries after the economic crisis two years back drained them of all earnings and savings.
That is going to be the new government’s biggest and immediate challenge — keeping every one of their voters contented, if not outright happy.
Already, the party and leader have promised early parliamentary elections for them to try and obtain the majority 113 seats in a total of 225, just as they had increased their traditional 3 to 4 per cent vote-share 10-fold, to touch the 43 per cent mark this time.
But that is going to be a tall task, especially if their top two adversaries decide to bury the hatchet and work together, maybe under runner-up Sajith Premadasa’s leadership.
As the presidential poll figures showed, Premadasa with his 32-plus per cent vote share and outgoing incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe, who scored 17 plus per cent votes, coming third, together have crossed the mandatory first-preference cut-off point of 50 per cent against Anura’s 42.
If he still won, it owed to the vagaries of the Sri Lankan presidential poll rules, where the untested institution of second and third preference votes did the trick for Anura and the JVP.
This is going to keep the rulers busy for the next couple of weeks/months, and they may have little time or energy for foreign policy issues, including India and India’s China-centric concerns.
As it turned out, Indian High Commissioner Santosh Jha became the first foreign envoy to call on the president-elect after the results rolled in.
It is customary for India to invite neighbouring heads of State/government on their assuming office.
Indications are that President Dissanayake of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka would follow the neighbourhood tradition of making New Delhi his first overseas stop.
If Muizzu in the Maldives did not do it, it also owed to mutual doubts and suspicions flowing from his poll-time ‘India Out’ campaign, which restrained New Delhi from extending that invitation.
It is thus not unlikely that External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar may visit Colombo, beforehand to lay the ground for bilateral talks in Delhi.
There are three major concerns for India viz Sri Lanka, AKD or not. One, of course, is China.
Then, there is the fishers dispute that has only escalated in recent months, also after Modi made the aligned Kachchatheevu issue a talking point in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, that too after polling had concluded in Tamil Nadu, where alone it mattered.
During the run-up to the presidential polls in Sri Lanka, both nations were discussing early dates for the meeting of the governmental-level Joint Working Group of officials, and also for reviving the fishermen-level talks.
Now that the presidential polls are behind the nation, it remains to be seen if the Sri Lankan government, navy and courts are going to go easy on Indian fishers, mostly from southern Rameswaram coast in Tamil Nadu.
The third issue could centre on Indian investments, both in the government and private sectors, to help the Sri Lankan economy to recover and grow, if only over the medium and long terms.
This is apart from the multiple initiatives that the two nations are committed to take forward, in terms of people-to-people contact, tourism, power generation and sale.
India will have to wait and watch how the new government in Colombo is going to view the multiple MoUs signed during president Wckremesinghe’s New Delhi visit last year.
The Dissanayake leadership can see it either as a launch pad for more things to come or as a stumbling block for Sri Lanka’s own growth and progress sans overseas commitments of the Indian kind.
The alternative will be the Chinese example in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
Yet, the fact remains that since the economic crisis of 2022, it is only India and Indians who have shown an inclination to invest big in that country with its inherent issues and difficulties, from which the nation will take years and decades to recover and grow fully.
The question arises just as after keeping silent for long months, following his maiden New Delhi visit in February 2024, AKD told one of his last campaign meetings that if elected president, he would cancel the green energy projects signed with India’s Adani group, just as the party had vowed to re-negotiate the bail-out package conditions with the IMF.
Over and above this, from a purely Sri Lankan concern that keeps cropping up every now and again is the US-led core group’s resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, on war-crimes and accountability issues.
The Geneva session is just on and in the first week of October, they will be voting on a new resolution as the old one has run its course.
Indications are that the US & Co will pass a short resolution for the continuance of the old terms of reference, maybe for a year or two, giving time for the new government to take stock — not that it will change the known position.
However, other voting members of the UNHRC council may not appreciate a new resolution that hangs like Damocles’ sword over a new government leadership.
India in particular may continue with its ‘abstention’ after making a customary strong statement, as much on the impossibilities of such a motion as on the call for an early resolution of the decades-old ethnic issue, post-war that ended in May 2009.
It is here that successive Sri Lankan governments, and not just that of the JVP, have a problem.
India supports them with an abstention in the UNHRC. China votes against it and campaigns for the same.
What more, as a veto power at the UN Security Council, China means something more whereas India as a friend and neighbour has not been seen as doing enough to persuade its US and other Western allies to get off Sri Lanka’s back, and early.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com
