Self-congratulatory stardust ought to be little more than motes in the eyes of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the business of his inauguration as a third-term premier now done. There’s urgent foreign policy business at hand. And it’s going to be hard grind for him, and the country’s mandarins and establishment bandwagoners, to dial down their regional arrogance and policy brutalism, and make nice.
Really make nice.
A previous column discussed this Modi 3.0 reality while elaborating on aspects of India’s relationships with Pakistan and Bangladesh in the context of its much-touted but often tripped-up Neighbourhood First policy, with the ever-present overhang of China as a corollary. (See “India’s Neighbourhood First policy: More neighbourliness, less hoods,” published June 10, 2024). We now look at India’s attitudes and prospects with regard to some of its other South Asian neighbours.
Sri Lanka, a country with which Bangladesh is developing increasingly robust links, has after a couple of years of being bludgeoned by economic and political crises, entered the process of absolution -- as distinct from absolutism practiced by the Rajapaksa family enterprise -- and resurrection. The same as Bangladesh’s $200 million at a time of its South Asian partner’s crisis has earned for Bangladesh great goodwill, India too contributed handsomely with funds and consultancy to aid its neighbour’s recovery.
Indeed, India extended nearly $4 billion of emergency assistance, and later extended the tenure of a line of credit by a year. And it hasn’t gone unacknowledged. Neither has the generosity of both China and the United States, the former transparently a rival of India, the latter now expediently a friend to balance out that rival. Like all countries in South Asia -- including, as it happens, India -- Sri Lanka must dance the superpower tango while trying to not get its toes crushed.
Colombo port, for several years literally a Chinese hub a very short run across the Laccadive Sea from India’s southernmost point, has recently had a touch of the Quad, as it were. In November 2023, the US International Development Finance Corp, a government agency, committed $553m to a port container terminal project led by an arm of a Modi favourite, the Adani conglomerate. In early May the government of Sri Lanka announced it had signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Adani Green Energy for two large wind power projects to the country’s north.
This is being widely seen as a move to right an imbalance that in Sri Lanka is still overwhelmingly skewed towards China -- at least as far as strategically important infrastructure is concerned. China Merchants Port Holding Co is the majority owner in an international container terminal in Colombo, and in May 2023 earned a 50-year lease to run, through majority stake, a massive warehousing facility. Chinese government interests already own 99-year rights to several hundred acres of reclaimed land of Port City Colombo, funded with a billion-plus dollar as a part of China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative.
Meanwhile, China Merchants runs the Hambantota Port to the country’s south, the result of a BRI dud that Sri Lanka couldn’t ultimately afford, and which then passed into long-term Chinese control with a 99-year lease. Either way, China scored, and now holds, with Colombo port, another crucial hub along a strategic sea route in the Bay of Bengal-Indian Ocean-Arabian Sea arc that massively funnels for that country its lifelines: Fuel and trade. China matters in Sri Lanka are so sensitive for India that every twitch of policy, much like every visit of a Chinese vessel, freighter, warship, and even the odd “scientific research” or “fishing” vessel to Lankan shores, is seen as being of strategic import.
Mattala international airport, another BRI dud, slipped through China’s fingers when, in late-April, management of the facility located 30-odd kilometres north of Hambantota was given over in a 30-year lease to an Indo-Russian joint venture.
Sri Lanka, much like Bangladesh, must balance its own interests in the superpower tango
India has also for several years looked to Sri Lanka as both a market for its products and as a two-way economic umbilical for its southern states, in particular Tamil Nadu, with which several million Sri Lankan Tamils share a historical bond, and Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh.
Domestic political imperatives, in Tamil Nadu in particular, also led to India in the 1980s involving itself directly in Sri Lankan politics, first by offering explosively militant organizations such as the Tamil Tigers sanctuary and training in India; a position that was later reversed to deadly effect, with the so-called Indian Peace Keeping Force. IPKF, a dark chapter in India’s regional diplomacy earned little goodwill from both the government and the rebels, and numerous Indian soldiers died in Sri Lanka.
It has for long been a tightrope walk between balancing sentiment, particularly in Tamil Nadu, with India’s strategic national interest. It was articulated brilliantly by Shivshankar Menon, a former Indian foreign secretary and former national security advisor -- and a pre-eminent China hand in India -- during an interview with Siddharth Varadarajan of TheWire.in, a major independent news-and-views portal.
“We did have a strategic interest,” Menon said while discussing his 2016 book, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy. “That was the whole problem -- how to reconcile your strategic interest in what is essentially an unsinkable aircraft carrier 14 miles off your coast, and your humanitarian interest in the fate of people and also your domestic political interest and so on.”
“Whether we got it right or not, you know, frankly, history will say,” Menon mused, “And those who were involved, I think will always wonder could we have done more one way or the other.”
India has, of course, come a long way since the fraught decade of the 1980s. But so has China. It has growing dibs on that very “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that Menon so eloquently spoke of.
That necessitates a very delicate approach, an optics-positive approach as opposed to a passive-aggressive one, for India to not have the possibility of ensuring that aircraft carrier is not turned against its interests and its territory in a patch that is ironically called the Indian Ocean. This needs outright recognition: Sri Lanka, much like Bangladesh, must balance its own interests in the superpower tango even as it professes fidelity to one regional neighbour or another.
As a perceptive article in Foreign Policy noted this past April, Sri Lanka does not condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine and yet calls to end it. It announced a donation to aid children in Gaza and has expressed solidarity with Palestinians, and yet, has benefited greatly from Israeli weapons and logistics during its war against the Tamil Tigers, and has since October 2023 reached a deal that “enables Israel to hire Sri Lankan workers, and its diplomats in Israel have delivered assistance and donated blood.”
So, the fact that Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe “embraced” Beijing’s position on key issues, “including the AUKUS security alliance between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which he has labeled a ‘mistake,’ and the term 'Indo-Pacific,' which he has called an ‘artificial framework’” is hardly unexpected, the FP article maintained. Especially as it comes alongside permitting an Indo-US investment in a Colombo port project. Or the fact that, this past January Sri Lanka imposed a one-year ban on Chinese “research ships” entering its ports -- after India raised an alarm.
It’s far from serendipitous.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
