AKD’s visit signals new diplomacy
THE December 15-17 visit of Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) to New Delhi is in keeping with a long-established practice of newly elected Sri Lankan presidents visiting India on their first official trip abroad. Ranil Wickremesinghe was the only exception. Delhi made him wait a year. Of late, a significant modification to this ritual points to how much has changed about India’s diplomacy in Sri Lanka. Now, the Indian External Affairs Minister goes to Colombo first to invite the new President.
AKD is no stranger to Delhi. India began wooing the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader months ahead of the presidential elections, when opinion polls showed him consistently leading the pack of possible contenders. In Sri Lanka, the visit will be seen as the new President’s, and the traditionally pro-China JVP’s, first big foreign policy test, loaded with geopolitical trick questions.
First up is the one-year moratorium on Chinese ‘research’ vessels docking at Colombo port and dropping anchor in Sri Lankan waters, introduced by the previous government of President Wickremesinghe in January this year after India’s vehement protests, which is set to end on December 31. India’s concerns were serious enough for a cool-off with Wickremesinghe soon after he became President in 2022. When Wickremesinghe was eventually accommodated by Delhi for a visit in July 2023, he and PM Modi signed an expansive ‘Vision Document’, which spoke of deepening economic ties, increasing connectivity, including a possible land bridge, and through maritime and air links. The document also spoke of accelerating cooperation in the energy, tourism, power, trade, higher education and skill development sectors. In India, on a recent visit shortly after losing to AKD in the presidential election, Wickremesinghe declared that AKD “should implement every word” of that document, as if daring him to defy an agreement, parts of which had raised concern in Sri Lanka that it would end up as another state of India.
As if underscoring the geopolitical test, AKD will be Beijing-bound days after his Delhi visit. Dissanayake stated recently that he does not wish Sri Lanka to be ‘sandwiched’ in the geopolitical rivalries of India and China. Both are ‘valued friends’, he said. But he also knows which valued friend was ready to the rescue at the height of the economic crisis. India pulled together $4 billion in short order to help Colombo avert a deterioration in what was already a bad situation, while China stood by with folded hands. He also knows there are no free lunches, so he will be prepared for Delhi’s asks.
One ask will be a firm commitment on projects that the disgraced Gotabaya Rajapaksa government had signed off on directly after India’s financial assistance. Among these are the Trincomalee oil tank development project, a joint venture between the Lanka IOC, an Indian Oil Corporation subsidiary, and Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, to refurbish 99 oil tanks built by the British.
India’s pact to develop the oil tank farm goes back to the 1987 India-Sri Lanka Accord. The path to the 2022 agreement was difficult. It finds mention in the Vision Document, but Sri Lanka has always been cold to the idea of handing over its most prized strategic asset, the Trincomalee harbour, one of a handful of natural harbours in the world of its size and depth, linked to the oil tank farm. For India, there can be no better riposte to China in the Bay of Bengal region.
The other contentious project is the Adani Green development of wind farms in North-Western Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan public opinion is set against it because of the lack of transparency in the agreement and allegations that Modi put pressure on Rajapaksa to accept the unsolicited bid. Environmental and citizens’ groups have petitioned the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka to stop the project. The Dissanayake government has told the court that it is ‘reconsidering’ it, playing this card close to the chest. But another Adani project, the West Container Terminal at Colombo Port, is likely to be inaugurated next June, unaffected by the US decision, following the Adani indictment, to review a $500-million loan announced earlier for the project and Adani’s decision thereafter to withdraw the loan application.
As Delhi seeks AKD’s hand, India must not lose sight of the fact that he is the first president to win an absolute majority in parliament, despite his own victory in the presidential election from a second round run-off, the first time a president won with less than 50 per cent votes. What is significant about the JVP-led National People’s Power parliamentary election sweep is that for the first time in Sri Lanka, a party based in southern Sri Lanka, that so far sought to speak only for the Sinhalese majority, won a plurality of the seats in the Tamil North and East. In Tamil areas, voters who earlier shunned non-Tamil parties, have reposed faith not just in a majority Sinhalese party, but also one that once referred to the Tamil minority as India’s fifth column.
The NPP also scored with the Malaiaha Tamil community in the Central Sri Lankan hills. This is the inauguration of a new politics, one that apparently wants to turn the chapter on the history of ethnic divisions and majority-minority conflicts. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. How it unfolds will become clear with time. As of now, there is no Sampanthan in the North or a Thondaman left in the Central hills to give India a semblance of political influence in the island nation.
In northern Sri Lanka, the main issue is that of livelihood. And it only brings Tamils of the region in conflict with Tamil fishers across the Palk Strait as bottom trawlers from Tamil Nadu trespass into Lankan waters brazenly, destroying nets and the seabed, too, in an unfair contest for scarce resources. After half-hearted attempts at weaning Tamil Nadu fishermen away to deep-sea fishing, both Delhi and Chennai appear to have given up the political will.
Sri Lanka is still in the grip of a severe economic crisis. The IMF conditions for its bailout package have imposed financial stress on the people for three years. Nutrition, education and health, once its strengths, have all been badly hit.
Dissanayake will be looking for more financial aid, perhaps budgetary support, and investments in key sectors such as IT and infrastructure that can increase Lanka’s capacity and generate jobs. As much as Sri Lanka will watch and judge AKD’s visit for what he manages to get from Delhi, and what he gives away, so will India be watched and judged for what it gives and what it demands in return.
