Pax Indica: Indian elephant in Lankan room

On a visit to Islamabad when she was President of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK), in a veiled reference to India, spoke of her island nation’s concerns over being dominated by a bigger neighbour. India, was the obvious, unnamed elephant in the room. That remark found huge resonance within Pakistan, eager as always to score points off India, and assiduously court Colombo by supplying arms and intelligence to the Sri Lankan Army, which was in the throes of battling the gritty Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The Manmohan Singh government, caught between the perils of alienating the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, its pro-Lankan Tamil, southern ally, at the cost of pleasing Colombo, had turned foot-dragging into an art form. Most Sri Lankans — including CBK — saw Delhi’s reluctance to play military benefactor, while publicly airing concerns over the continued marginalisation of a Tamil populace, still in thrall to the idea of a Tamil homeland Eelam, as meddling in their internal affairs.

Ignored was Delhi’s munificence — foreign direct investment from India has been around $1 billion since 2003 with another billion in the pipeline, which together with investments and government to government assistance of $2.6 billion, 30 per cent grants and balance soft loans on easy terms is close to $4.6 billion. Roughly a decade after her Islamabad clanger, the hard-headed former President had this to say in New Delhi last week: “It’s clear that India is the region’s big power and no one can wish that away even if they want to… Rajapaksa was trying to do that. But even if Sri Lanka attempts it, the world recognises India as the leader in the region. We have to deal with the realities.”

Coming as it did, weeks after Ms Kumaratunga’s one-time protégé and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was roundly trounced in parliamentary polls, it must count as a turning point in India-Sri Lanka relations. The continued economic upsurge in a democratic India has made its emergence as the growing power in South Asia — with no hegemonic intent — virtually unstoppable. Countries in India’s near abroad, in the Gulf and as far afield as Australia and Japan see India as a key security partner in the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific. Colombo, clearly does not want to be left out of the strategic politico-economic calculus, or continue to alienate its biggest neighbour.

Ms Kumaratunga’s singular turnaround, the recognition and acknowledgement of India’s leadership role in the region has been a long time coming; both, for Ms Kumaratunga and the rest of the political class in Sri Lanka. There may have been a personal element to CBK’s journey from India-sceptic to India-supporter. In the run up to the electoral thunderstorm of January 2015 that drowned out Mr Rajapaksa and snapped his family’s stranglehold on the Sri Lankan polity, Ms Kumaratunga had worked quietly behind the scenes alongside long-time political rival Ranil Wickremesinghe in bringing their two opposing political forces together to end Mr Rajapaksa’s unchallenged nine-year run as President.

The Rajapaksa family’s efforts to relegate her to the margins of history, isolate her from her own party and erase and override the Bandaranaike family legacy, may have something to do with the former President’s change of heart. But it was more than personal. It marked a strategic course correction. It underscored the alarm within the Sri Lankan polity at the manner in which her hand-picked successor had jettisoned years of Colombo’s carefully crafted balancing act vis-à-vis India under her leadership, to cock a snook at Delhi and bring in the Chinese; who, with the aim of approximating the Indian Ocean had already acquired key port Hambantota in Sri Lanka and docked submarines off the coast.

In admitting she played a central role as the figure around whom groups opposed to Mr Rajapaksa coalesced — both from within her Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the Opposition United National Party, she cleared India of Mr Rajapaksa’s charge that its counter-intelligence Research and Analysis Wing had a direct role to play in his ouster in the January 2015 poll. It rid the incumbent Maithripala Sirisena government of the taint that he played footsie with Delhi to win in January. And in ending the canard that Lankan columnists and social media had circulated, that the “victory was not Mr Sirisena’s or Mr Wickremesinghe’s, but India’s, she sent a message to the Sri Lankan people, who have twice in the space of less than six months voted against Mr Rajapaksa, that it is they, and they alone who were responsible for seeing him to the door.

Ms Kumaratunga’s statement underscores India’s attempt, as much as that of the new power triumvirate in Sri Lanka of the need to re-invent ties between the two nations, and put the relationship back on even keel. Replicating the Sri Lankan President Sirisena, who also made India his first stop in March soon after the 2015 polls, the island nation’s newly elected Prime Minister Wickremesinghe arrives in Delhi, September 14, on his first foreign visit since he was elected Prime Minister on August 21 on the back of sustained diplomacy by India — and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and their respective foreign ministers — not to lose the momentum.

The remarkable turnaround has one more element that assuaged Indian concerns — the political accommodation of the Sri Lankan Tamils. With the election of R. Sampanthan, leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main constituent of the rainbow Tamil grouping Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi, as the head of the country’s Opposition, the first Tamil to be appointed to the post in the last 22 years, Sri Lanka, under its new leadership, may have just squared that circle. Ms Kumaratunga heads the Reconciliation Committee, made easier by the mood of reconciliation on the island where Tamil voters rejected extremist parties funded by the Tamil diaspora, and extremist candidates within the TNA.

How far India will work behind the scenes to help Sri Lanka shed the charge of alleged war crimes against the Tamils under Mr Rajapaksa will be the key test of this new-found bonhomie, when Lankan foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera, addresses the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, the opening day of its 30th session. Mr Rajapaksa’s China tilt may have run its course. But the Indian elephant is still in the room. This time though, it may have Sri Lanka’s permission to be there.