The Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s parleys with Sri Lanka’s new left-nationalist leaders on October 4 were cordial. But India-Lanka relations will still be troubled by the looming Sino-Indian conflict.
Jaishankar had a single-point agenda in Colombo – to convince a skeptical Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake about India’s capabilities and what it could do for Sri Lanka’s economic growth and prosperity without asking it to compromise its sovereignty. It was a difficult task given the latent and long-standing distrust in the relationship.
The visit took place in the immediate aftermath of the September 21 Sri Lankan Presidential election in which the radical leftist and pro-China underdog, Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the National Peoples’ Power (NPP), beat stalwarts like incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa, leader of the large Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party.
Unlike Wickremesinghe and Premadasa, who had no ideological angularities either in their domestic or foreign policy, Dissanayake’s has been dyed-in-the-wool ideological politics. He has been a longstanding campaigner against “Indian domination”.
The NPP, a 21-party alliance, is avowedly moderate. But its core is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) which has had a strong and anti-Indian strand since its founding in 1965. Dissanayake is the current JVP Supremo.
Articulating the NPP’s policies ahead of the Presidential election, its spokesman (and the present Foreign Minister) Vijitha Herath said that a JVP delegation had told Jaishankar early this year that under an NPP government, foreign-funded or foreign-executed projects would have to go through a transparent and public tendering process.
Herath was decrying past projects that were farmed out to foreign parties with nothing more than a cabinet decision under the category of “Strategic Projects”. Herath said such handing out of projects was a source of huge corruption.