We have to thank a Sri Lankan scholar who must remain unnamed for reminding India that it has an unfinished task in Sri Lanka: That of helping the Tamils secure political devolution through a negotiated settlement for sustainable peace. It’s a position with which the Sri Lankan Government was always in accord. The civil war is over, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is no more, and yet a political solution to the national question appears only remotely possible.
Instead of devolution there is centralisation and the peace that came at a huge price seems illusory. For sound and irreversible relations between India and Sri Lanka, a political settlement on powersharing acceptable to all communities in a united Sri Lanka is indispensable. If India thinks it has a role in influencing this political outcome, it must act fast as it has already lost time and space to internal and external adversaries.
Despite referring to its neighbourhood as troubled, India has done little except in Bangladesh to shape it in tune with its national interest. On the contrary it has been made strategically irrelevant after the defeat of the LTTE, ironically, after helping Sri Lanka in its military victory, a fact which Colombo has not acknowledged appropriately. New Delhi has even lost the limited leverage it had before the war when it boasted that it exercised direct influence without direct involvement.
India’s confused policy during the war has been highlighted by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy. He has demanded an investigation into why India refused to supply weapons to Sri Lanka and, instead, opened the door further for China and Pakistan to deepen their footprints in India’s strategic backyard.
New Delhi made the strategic choice of going along with President Mahinda Rajapaksa in finishing off the LTTE militarily but restricted the supply of weapons to only defensive ones. Then National Security Advisor, MK Narayanan famously chided Colombo for going to Beijing and Islamabad for military hardware when New Delhi had itself refused to provide them. Fearing adverse reaction in Tamil Nadu, it made useless noises in asking Colombo to stop military operations just when its army was ready for the kill. India did not intervene as it had in 1987 because it was party to the Sri Lankan campaign for the elimination of the LTTE. Sri Lanka’s most-powerful Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has called this “good management of India”.
India’s half-cock yet highly significant support of the war without any <i>quid pro quo</i> is intriguing and also requires to be probed. At the very least, some assurances on settlement of the ethnic problem ought to have been taken. This time around Colombo appears to have taken New Delhi for a ride negating all past understandings on power-sharing though it recognises the importance of the Tamil question in India’s domestic political calculus.
Mr Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s voice is the most influential in Sri Lanka. His line is simple: Now that LTTE terrorists have been eliminated, there is no ethnic problem. His latest pronouncement is that there is little chance of moving beyond the current level of devolution.
It is instructive to study the shift in Colombo’s stand on devolution, commensurate with the success on the battlefield. In 2007, after Operation Eastern Awakening (the liberation of the East) Sri Lankan courts ordered the demerger of the North East. Since President Rajapaksa’s election in 2005 he has been dutifully voicing his intention of implementing the 13th Amendment and as late as mid-2010, he repeated his resolve by adding plus plus to 13A. In his numerous interviews, especially with <i>The Hindu</i> newspaper, he has mentioned his famous four Ds: Demilitarisation; Development; Democracy and Devolution. As the war progressed in his country’s favour, one of the key Ds, for devolution, went missing.
Then he did a U-turn saying Sri Lanka required a home grown solution and not one imposed from outside. In the pursuit of this goal, he appointed the futile All Party Representative Committee which had 100 meetings over two years without any outcome. Earlier this year, Foreign Minister GL Peiris observed that previous governments could not implement 13A as they did not enjoy a two thirds majority in Parliament.
Since then, the Tamil National Alliance has engaged in ten rounds of dialogue with a three-member political panel that included Mr Pieris and the President’s National Reconciliation Peace Unit advisor Rajiva Wijesinghe.
The latest effort is the Parliamentary Select Committee for which the Government has selected its members. But the TNA has sought clarifications. Like other past mechanisms experts believe it is another device to buy time and keep India and the international community happy. Union Minister for External Affairs SM Krishna, on a visit to Sri Lanka last year, said that a dialogue mechanism to settle the political question was welcome though no time limit could be laid down. For the first time, there was no mention of 13A, a shift noted again during the visit this year to Colombo of the Indian National Security Advisor.
India appears to have lowered its expectations on the devolution issue, systematically diluted with successes on the war front. <I>WikiLeaks</i> have revealed that New Delhi did not press Colombo on alleged human rights violations for fear it would push Sri Lanka further into the arms of China and Iran. India has accepted its strategic dimunition gracefully and is trying to compensate for the loss of political space by strengthening economic linkages — integrating the Sri Lankan economy through the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement which Colombo has resisted.
China is the net gainer from the India-Sri Lanka spat. Sri Lankans are happy that their strategic dependence on India has ended. Beijing whose military and diplomatic assistance in crushing the LTTE is widely acknowledged is reaping the rewards of massive economic investment and a strategic presence to balance India. The new Hambantota Port, modernisation of Colombo harbour, the first expressway from Colombo to Galle and numerous development projects reflect a Shining China. Still President Rajapaksa says that while China is a friend, India is a brother.
Another Sri Lankan scholar has noted that India has been fast asleep while others have plucked the fruits. It is bad enough that India not only acquiesced but supported Sri Lanka’s use of a military solution which it eschews at home: it would be unforgivable if New Delhi abandoned its quest for devolution of power to the Sri Lankan Tamils.
