Sri Lanka President Dissanayake’s will be more than fence-mending visit to India

Sri Lanka President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s three-day state visit to New Delhi from Sunday (December 15) will mark the first time the Indian leadership will deal with a Sri Lankan leadership not drawn from the traditional elites. Officials and pundits say both sides should make it a consensus-building exercise for a solid start.

Dissanayake did visit India in February heading a delegation of his leftwing Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, People’s Liberation Front) but he was far away from the corridors of power then. Although New Delhi realised there was every chance of his becoming the president, most people had their fingers crossed in Colombo.

But the 55-year-old Marxist stunned everyone by winning the presidential election in September and then went on to lead the JVP-led National People’s Power (NPP) to a landslide in the parliamentary battle in November, heralding a new political wave in Sri Lanka.

Officials in both countries say there will be a lot to discuss when Dissanayake, accompanied by his confidant and foreign minister Vijitha Herath, holds talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior government officials. And one should expect hiccups too considering the dragging suspicions the JVP has had about India for decades.

Already, there are contradictory voices emerging from within the JVP leadership that could spark anxious questions in New Delhi even if India’s own approach towards Sri Lanka has undergone major changes over the long years of its ups-and-down involvement in the island nation.

There is a general but not universal consensus in Sri Lanka that India proved itself as a reliable partner when it responded with $4 billion after an economic crisis and sovereign default destabilised the country. The timely Indian support helped Sri Lanka to sustain essential imports and maintain sufficient foreign currency reserves to avoid defaulting on multilateral creditors.

Economically, Sri Lanka is nowhere out of the woods. This is one reason Dissanayake, desperate to overcome mammoth fiscal problems created by his predecessors, would want to shake hands with India – and also China which he will visit soon after.

There are several issues which will dominate the bilateral agenda. These include areas with which the JVP is not very comfortable and on which it has spoken critically in the past.

There is the pending Economic and Technology Cooperation Agreement (ETCA), the much-discussed Free Trade Agreement (FTA), plans to build a land corridor between the two countries, the Adani contracts which have got mired in legal troubles, and plans to develop Trincomalee as a regional energy hub.

Another issue on which there is a lot of anger in Sri Lanka, both among the Tamils and the Sinhalese, is the unending onslaught by Indian fishermen and their use of bottom trawlers which end up destroying marine wealth even as the Indians take away sea resources which Sri Lankans say belongs to them.

While India and China may mend fences over their unsettled border, they don’t see eye to eye vis-a-vis Sri Lanka. India and the US oppose the visits to Sri Lanka by what they say are Chinese spy ships. On its part, China tells Sri Lanka not to bend to “foreign pressures” while building foreign relations.

On more than one occasion, Dissanayake has made it clear that Sri Lanka doesn’t want to get involved in the Sino-Indian rivalry. At the same time, JVP leaders have promised to be mindful of Indian security concerns, notwithstanding the long-standing ideological bonhomie between the JVP and Chinese communists.

All this doesn’t mean that Sri Lanka will want to keep away from China just to please India. In fact, Chinese involvement in development aid, including in the country’s Tamil-majority areas, is now much more than ever in the past.

It is widely seen in Sri Lanka that India is no more the undisputed power in South Asia even if it is the dominant one. Indeed, besides Bhutan, Sri Lanka remains among the few friends of India. New Delhi’s ties with Pakistan and Bangladesh are frosty and Nepal remains cold towards India. Afghanistan and the Maldives are not in the immediate vicinity.

Dissanayake will, however, not take it kindly if the Indian side tries to push a policy that is seen to be dictating how Colombo should devolve power to provinces. While the JVP is mindful of Tamil concerns, it wants to come up with something that will be seen as a home-grown answer to Tamil grievances.

In any case, many Sri Lankans feel that the current Indian government has no authority to speak for Tamil minorities considering how religious minorities are now treated in India.

India and Sri Lanka are also expected to talk trade as well as energy and health sectors. One Indian diplomat who was earlier based in Colombo says connectivity, cyber security and skill development will also be discussed.

Former Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Austin Fernando says that innovative approaches would be needed to revisit and review the past stances by both sides. “Both must approach the state visit as a consensus-building exercise.”

Fernando also underlines that Dissanayake’s trip should not lead to secondary conflicting issues and must on the other hand be conducted with friendly grace. The two countries, he says, have had centuries of friendly relations and this should continue.

As the JVP chief, Dissanayake would surely want to mend fences with India, a country his Marxist outfit has traditionally dubbed “expansionist”. In the late 1980s when Dissanayake joined the JVP, the group was engaged in vocal and bloody anti-India protests following India’s military deployment in the island.

That was a period when the JVP never hid its anti-India frenzy. It forced traders and shopkeepers not to sell Indian products. It shot dead a senior woman health official for importing cheaper but effective Indian medicines which were in high demand.

It was when Nirupam Sen was India’s envoy in Sri Lanka (2004-2009) that he first invited the then JVP chief to the Indian Independence Day function at the High Commission. It helped break the ice. But it took a long time for the JVP to start viewing India with friendly eyes.

India’s generosity after the 2022 economic collapse played a major role in winning friends with the JVP and a whole lot of others in Sri Lanka. But the JVP still has members who remain wary of ‘big brother’ New Delhi.