How Dissanayake’s JVP overcame decades of ideological animosity to embrace India

It can be called one of the greatest political ironies of Sri Lanka. A political party that, for decades, called India “expansionist” and spewed venom against it has green-lighted a defence pact with the very same country, saying both neighbours have common security interests.

The achievement is also no less than a feather in the cap for the Indian establishment, which for long years patiently cultivated the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) and finally invited its leader Anura Dissanayake to India in February 2024 when few thought he would take power only months later.

The violent insurrection

On its part, the JVP, whose leader is current President Anura Dissanayake, dropped some of its key ideological baggage to embrace the South Asian giant in a manner that has angered those Sri Lankans who view themselves as more radical.

And it peeved these elements that the defence MoU with India was being unveiled in Colombo on April 5 — the day in 1971 when the JVP unleashed its first violent insurrection in a bid to seize power, forcing a panicky Sri Lankan government then to seek India’s military help to sustain itself.

The insurrection was put down with a bloody vengeance, leaving thousands of people dead. The JVP, still anti-India, unleashed another but bloodier insurrection in 1987 against an India-Sri Lanka pact which led to Indian military deployment in the island’s north and east.

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A dramatic U-turn

It took some years of uneasy peace for Indian diplomats to make their first, quiet moves to befriend the post-insurrection JVP. It became known later that a top JVP leader escaped to the West while being hounded by security forces in Sri Lanka with the help of, believe it or not, the Indian security establishment.

This aspect of JVP-India history is relevant to understand how a Left outfit whose five lessons to its cadres in the 1960s and ’70s included one on “Indian expansionism” eventually made such a dramatic U-turn.

Behind the scenes

Just as it was said once in India that only the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would be able to sell a Kashmir peace proposal to Pakistan, the JVP alone can market the idea of India as a defence partner in a country where vast sections remain upset over New Delhi’s covert involvement with the former Tamil militants and the later military deployment in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Clearly, a lot of diligent persuasion and proposals and counter-proposals would have taken place before the MoU on defence was signed in Colombo on Saturday (April 5) during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-day state visit which ended on Sunday (April 6) morning.

But not wanting to take any chances, the Dissanayake government went out of its way to explain publicly, hours before India and Sri Lanka signed several MoUs, why the defence deal was important to Colombo and that it was no sell-out of national interests.

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Five-year deal

Defence Secretary Sampath Thuyacontha, who is not as high profile as some of his predecessors, said the MoU on defence cooperation was aimed at “continuing the defence partnership and engagements more efficiently and in a structured manner”.

According to him, the agreement will cover the exchange of military officers, training, staff talks between the forces, exchange of information, cooperation in defence industry, and in defence technology and research.

All this will be “carried out in a professional manner” under the deal, which would remain in force for five years and which either country could terminate with a three-month notice. It could also be extended for every three years.

“Any cooperation activities undertaken under the proposed MoU will be in accordance with international best practices and will not conflict with the domestic laws and national policies of either Sri Lanka or India,” he added.

History of defence deal

Some Sri Lankan officials pointed out that it was not a defence agreement but a MoU. For India, however, the nomenclature is less important.

The idea of a defence agreement was first born, courtesy India, way back in 2003 when the long-running war for a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka was still going strong.

Unfortunately, successive Indian governments did not pursue the matter. Once Sri Lanka crushed the Tamil Tigers in 2009, the idea practically went into cold-storage — until New Delhi revived it amid China’s rising influence in the Indian Ocean Region.

Also read: Modi seeks release of Indian fishermen, reconciliation in Sri Lanka

Upbeat India

In a sign that Dissanayake had preliminary discussion on the proposed MoU during his December 2024 visit to New Delhi, Modi said on Saturday in Colombo: “In the last four months, since Dissanayake’s visit, our cooperation has progressed significantly.”

Modi also added emphatically: “We believe our security interests are similar. The security of both countries is interlinked and dependent on each other. I am grateful to President Dissanayake for his sensitivity towards India’s interests. We welcome the important agreements concluded in defence cooperation.”

Dissanayake, a Marxist, reiterated his government’s resolve not to allow Sri Lankan territory to be used against India.

Leap from 1980s

The defence pact is also a major leap forward from the turbulent 1980s when India’s controversial military deployment in Sri Lanka triggered so much anti-India fury, with then President Ranasinghe Premadasa covertly arming the very Tamil Tigers which Indian troops were fighting.

Amid the deepening ties with Sri Lanka, Modi did not shy from demanding the release of Indian fishermen jailed in the island nation for intruding into its waters. But beyond urging Colombo to take a “humanist approach”, Modi and Dissanayake could not resolve the lingering issue of invasive fishermen from India’s Tamil Nadu state.

And despite knowing the sensitivity of the issue, Modi also called for a reconciliation in Sri Lanka, where a Tamil separatist war which raged for over a quarter century has fractured the country into “us” and “them”.

Also read: 4 decades after Lanka misadventure, India bolsters ties with defence deal

No sympathy for Tigers

At the same time, the Indian prime minister made it very clear that he had no sympathy for those Tamils in Sri Lanka or living in the West who keep mouthing slogans in support of the Tamil Tigers.

For a second time in a decade, Modi went to a memorial erected just outside Colombo for the nearly 1,200 Indian troops who died fighting the Tamil Tigers in 1987-90.

After placing a floral wreath. Modi wrote in the Visitors’ Book: “We remember the brave soldiers of the Indian Peace Keeping Force who laid down their lives in service of peace, unity and the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka. Their unwavering courage and commitment remain a source of inspiration for us all.”

Modi’s gesture is bound to unsettle the ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu whose then leader and chief minister M Karunanidhi, who was known to be sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers, refused to formally receive Indian soldiers returning by ship to Chennai from Sri Lanka in 1990, causing a national furore.

And nobody has forgotten that DMK supporters then used to derisively call the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) as the Innocent People Killing Force.