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Great game on in Sri Lanka

The landslide victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the Sri Lankan presidential election on November 16 poses a serious challenge to India’s neighbourhood policy.

Great game on in Sri Lanka

The shift: Gotabaya has made it clear that his country won’t get involved in power struggles among powerful nations. New Delhi, too, will have to rethink its strategy.



MK Bhadrakumar 
Former ambassador

The landslide victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the Sri Lankan presidential election on November 16 poses a serious challenge to India’s neighbourhood policy. But the Sri Lankan scenario is yet another manifestation of the geopolitical shift in the South Asian region in the recent years. 

Gotabaya’s choice of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka as the venue for his swearing-in ceremony on November 18 was a premeditated plan pandering to the Sinhala Buddhist collective consciousness and racial memory, but with a sub-text that Delhi couldn’t have missed. Anuradhapura is the sacred ground of resistance against Indian hegemony, where Sinhalese kings valiantly fought off waves of invading armies from South India through centuries and defended the faith. In his inaugural address from the Ruwanweliseya Stupa in Anuradhapura — the most adored and venerated amongst the ancient living monuments of Sinhalese Buddhist heritage — Gotabaya stated his foreign policy outlook in these austere words: ‘Our administration will maintain friendly relations with all countries. We don’t want to get involved in power struggles among powerful nations. We want to remain neutral in our foreign relations and stay out of conflicts among the world powers. We request all nations to respect the unitary nature and sovereignty of the country.’ 

These are indeed acceptable norms of inter-state conduct. But Gotabaya made three things clear — one, he will make available a level playing field for all friendly countries (including China); two, he will steer clear of geopolitical rivalries centred on Washington’s ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’ (which is a hedge against China’s rise); and, three, he won’t brook prescriptive approaches by outside powers. Sri Lanka is choosing the path of other two major South Asian states that border India — Bangladesh and Nepal, where also nationalism is the mainspring of national policies and sovereignty and strategic autonomy are the bedrock of foreign policy. 

These three countries are being called upon currently to make choices vis-a-vis the Indo-Pacific strategy, but none of them wants to get entangled in the US-China rivalry. All three regard China’s rise in favourable light and respond positively to the Belt and Road Initiative. Their comfort level vis-a-vis China is appreciable, whereas Washington is intrusive about their internal matters with a view to leveraging their policies and frogmarch them into its Indo-Pacific strategy. Nepal is hesitating to even accept the $500 million grant from the US Millennium Challenge Corporation because it is tied to the Indo-Pacific strategy.

Quite obviously, Delhi’s preoccupation with the Indo-Pacific strategy sets it apart from its neighbours. Non-aligned India used to be the role model for South Asian countries, but India’s de facto alignment with the US today creates a gulf between Delhi and the neighbouring capitals, which could act as headwind complicating the pursuit of legitimate bilateral interests. The Sri Lankan developments severely put to test the wisdom of harmonising Delhi’s neighbourhood policies with Indo-Pacific strategy. Significantly, Washington has adopted an interventionist approach toward Sri Lanka from day one of the Gotabaya presidency. 

In his congratulatory message, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Gotabaya ‘to uphold Sri Lanka’s commitments to security sector reform, accountability, respect for human rights, and non-recurrence of violence’. He reminded Gotabaya that the US expects him to cooperate in ‘fostering a free and open Indo-Pacific region where all countries can prosper, deepening good governance, and promoting justice, reconciliation, and human rights’. ‘Free and open Indo-Pacific region’ is catch phrase for the US’ containment of China, and the concepts of ‘good governance’, promotion of ‘justice, reconciliation and human rights’ amount to an oblique reminder of the unresolved Tamil problem. Interestingly, Pompeo clubbed the two in a veiled threat that the human rights stick will be used against Gotabaya if he resists the Indo-Pacific strategy.  

During the past four years, Washington closely integrated the Sri Lankan navy with the US Indo-Pacific Command and sought to make Sri Lanka a ‘logistic hub’ for US operations in the Indian Ocean. In a testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip Davidson, expressed satisfaction that Sri Lanka ‘remains a significant strategic opportunity in the Indian Ocean’. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s stewardship as PM was most helpful. But an unfinished business remains — Status of Forces Agreement, which would allow free access of US military forces to the island. But the speed with which Gotabaya evicted Wickremesinghe from the corridors of power took Delhi and Washington by surprise.

Washington has made the Indo-Pacific strategy the centrepiece of its South Asia policies and the regional states are caught between the US and China. The ASEAN predicament is repeating in South Asia, where too regional states do not want to lose their share of the dividends of China’s economic development. Their democratically elected leaderships are acutely conscious that their ability to deliver on developmental agenda is the crucial template of their mandate to rule. Geoeconomics supersedes classical geopolitics in their foreign policy. 

The Sri Lankan developments underscore that the effectiveness of the Indo-Pacific strategy is uncertain. Gotabaya has said little on it, but believes that economic development would solve the problems of ethnic relationships. He will resist any linkage between the strategy and the Tamil problem — more so once the Rajapaksas consolidate their political power in the parliamentary poll in March. Delhi is skating on thin American ice.

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