WASHINGTON DC, Mar 27 (IPS) – Following independence from Britain, each India and Sri Lanka emerged as leaders of the Non-Aligned Motion, which sought to advance creating nations’ pursuits through the Chilly Struggle. Certainly, the time period “non-alignment” was itself coined by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru throughout his 1954 speech in Colombo.
The 5 rules of the Non-Aligned Motion are: “mutual respect for one another’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in home affairs; equality and mutual profit; and peaceable co-existence.”
Later, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi performed a key function in supporting Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s 1971 proposal to declare the Indian Ocean a Zone of Peace on the United Nations.
Such progressive beliefs are in stark distinction to the present neocolonial negotiations between the 2 nations.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s forthcoming go to to Sri Lanka on April 4, 2025, is offered as representing a mutually helpful partnership that can convey financial improvement to debt-burdened Sri Lanka. Nevertheless, the small print of the strategic agreements to be signed throughout Modi’s go to stay undisclosed to the general public. This opacity can’t be a very good signal and shouldn’t be accepted uncritically by the media or the individuals of both nation.
The Indo-Lanka Settlement of July 29, 1987, was additionally crafted with out session with the Sri Lankan individuals or its parliament. It was signed throughout a 48-hour curfew when former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi arrived in Sri Lanka. This settlement led to the imposition of the thirteenth Modification to the Sri Lankan Structure and established the Provincial Council system.
The political framework it created continues to problem Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Fairly than bringing peace, India’s 1987 intervention resulted in one of the vital violent and chaotic durations within the island’s latest historical past.
Will these agreements being finalized with Prime Minister Modi additionally result in a interval of pillage and plunder of the island’s sources and worsening circumstances for its individuals, fairly than delivering the promised financial advantages?
It’s essential that any bilateral agreements embrace enforceable measures to cease Indian backside trawlers from illegally fishing in Sri Lankan territorial waters. This decades-long observe has brought about extreme harm to Sri Lanka’s marine sources and inflicted important financial losses on its fishing communities.
Dealing with an growing Chinese language presence in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean, India has sought to strengthen its political, financial, strategic and cultural affect over Sri Lanka by means of numerous overt and covert means. Throughout Sri Lanka’s 2022 financial disaster, for instance, India supplied $4 billion in monetary help by means of foreign money swaps, credit score traces, and mortgage deferrals that enabled Sri Lanka to import important items from India.
Whereas this support has helped Sri Lanka, it has additionally served India’s pursuits by countering China’s affect and defending Indian enterprise in Sri Lanka.
Prime Minister Modi’s upcoming go to represents the fruits of years of Indian initiatives in Sri Lanka spanning maritime safety, aviation, vitality, energy era, commerce, finance, and cultural exchanges. For instance, India’s Unified Cost Interface (UPI) for digital funds was launched in Sri Lanka in February 2024, and in October 2023 India supplied funds to develop a digital nationwide id card for Sri Lanka elevating issues about India’s entry to Sri Lanka’s nationwide biometric identification knowledge.
Indian buyers have been given preferential entry within the privatization of Sri Lanka’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in key sectors like telecommunications, monetary providers, and vitality. The Adani Group’s West Terminal challenge in Colombo Port is explicitly designed to counter China’s management over Sri Lanka’s port infrastructure, together with the Colombo Worldwide Container Terminal, Hambantota Port, and Port Metropolis Colombo.
India and Sri Lanka have lately agreed to renew negotiations on the Financial and Expertise Cooperation Settlement (ECTA), which focuses totally on the service sector and goals to create a unified labor market.
Nevertheless, Sri Lankan skilled associations have raised issues that ECTA might give unemployed and lower-paid Indian employees a aggressive benefit over their Sri Lankan counterparts. These issues should be correctly addressed earlier than any settlement is finalized.
On December 16, 2024, India and Sri Lanka signed a number of Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) in New Delhi to boost cooperation in protection, vitality, and infrastructure improvement. These embrace plans for electrical energy grid interconnection and a multi-product petroleum pipeline between the 2 nations. Constructing on these agreements, building of the Sampur energy plant in Trincomalee is anticipated to start throughout Prime Minister Modi’s April go to.
The Sampur energy plant challenge, mixed with India’s takeover of the Trincomalee Oil Tank Farm, represents a big step towards integrating Sri Lanka into India’s nationwide vitality grid. This improvement successfully brings Trincomalee’s strategic pure harbor – typically known as the “crown jewel” of Sri Lanka’s belongings – underneath Indian management, remodeling it right into a regional vitality hub. In 1987, throughout India’s navy intervention in Sri Lanka, New Delhi pressured Colombo into signing a secret settlement stipulating that the British-era Trincomalee oil tank farm can be collectively developed with India and couldn’t be utilized by another nation.
Whereas India promotes its vitality interconnection tasks as enhancing regional vitality safety, latest experiences in Nepal show how electrical energy grid integration with India has made Nepal depending on and subordinate to India for its fundamental vitality wants. Equally, Bangladesh’s electrical energy settlement with the Adani Group has created an imbalanced state of affairs favoring Adani over Bangladeshi energy shoppers. What collective actions might Sri Lanka and different small nations take to keep away from such unequal “vitality colonialism” and shield their nationwide safety and sovereignty?
India’s emergence as a superpower and its expansionist insurance policies are regularly remodeling neighboring South Asian and Indian Ocean states into economically and politically subordinate entities. Each Sri Lanka and the Maldives have adopted “India First” overseas insurance policies lately, with the Maldives abandoning its “India Out” marketing campaign in October 2024 in change for Indian financial help.
India’s “Neighborhood First Coverage” has led to deep involvement within the inner affairs of neighboring nations together with Sri Lanka. This involvement typically takes the type of manipulating political events, exploiting ethnic and spiritual divisions, and engineering political instability and regime modifications – techniques harking back to colonial practices. It’s properly documented that India supplied coaching to the LTTE and different terrorist teams opposing the Sri Lankan authorities through the civil battle.
Many in Sri Lanka additionally suspect, although with out conclusive proof, that India’s Analysis and Evaluation Wing (RAW) was concerned in each the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings and the 2022 Aragalaya protest motion throughout Sri Lanka’s financial disaster.
Up to date Indian expansionism should be seen throughout the broader context of the New Chilly Struggle and intensifying geopolitical competitors between the US and China. Given its strategic location alongside the important east-west transport routes within the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka has grow to be a pawn on this nice energy rivalry.
Along with granting China in depth management over key infrastructure, Sri Lanka has signed the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Settlement (ACSA) and Standing of Forces Settlement (SOFA) with the US, successfully permitting the usage of Sri Lanka as a U.S. navy logistics hub.
It was reported that in a go to to Sri Lanka in February 2023, Victoria Nuland, former Underneath Secretary of State for Political Affairs of the US strongly advised the institution of a joint US-Indian navy base in Trincomalee to counter Chinese language actions within the area.
As a member of the Quadrilateral Safety Dialogue (QUAD) – a strategic alliance towards Chinese language enlargement that features the US, Australia and Japan – India participates in in depth QUAD navy workout routines just like the Malabar workout routines within the Indian Ocean.
Nevertheless, India’s function in QUAD seems inconsistent with its place as a founding member of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which was established to advertise the pursuits of rising economies and a multipolar world order.
Sadly, BRICS seems to be replicating the identical patterns of domination and subordination in its relations with smaller nations like Sri Lanka that characterize conventional imperial powers.
India presents itself because the guardian of Buddhism, notably in its relations with Sri Lanka, to foster a way of shared cultural heritage. Nevertheless, it was Sri Lanka – not India – that preserved the Buddha’s teachings as they declined and finally disappeared from India. Sri Lanka maintained the Buddhist custom regardless of seventeen main invasions from India geared toward destroying the island’s Buddhist civilization.
Even immediately, regardless of its in depth affect, India has not taken significant steps to guard Buddhist temples and archaeological websites in Sri Lanka’s north and east from assaults by Tamil separatist teams. As a substitute, India seems centered on advancing the idea of Akhand Bharat (Undivided India) and Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), which seeks to include neighboring nations like Sri Lanka right into a “Better India.” The promotion of the bogus Ramayana Path in Sri Lanka and the accompanying Hinduization pose a severe menace to preserving Sri Lanka’s distinct Buddhist id and heritage.
Indian neocolonialism in Sri Lanka displays a world phenomenon the place highly effective nations and their native collaborators – together with political, financial, tutorial, media and NGO elites – prioritize short-term income and self-interest over nationwide and collective welfare, resulting in environmental destruction and cultural erosion. Breaking free from this exploitative world order requires essentially reimagining international financial and social methods to uphold concord and equality.
On this international transformation, India has a big function to play. As a nation that endured centuries of Western imperial domination, India’s historic mission needs to be to proceed to steer the battle for decolonization and non-alignment, fairly than serving as a junior companion in superpower rivalries. Underneath Mahatma Gandhi’s management, India championed the worldwide motion for decolonization and independence within the fashionable period.
Upholding the rules of the Non-Aligned Motion might forge a partnership benefiting each nations whereas preserving Sri Lanka’s independence and Buddhist id. In any other case, the New Chilly Struggle will proceed to trample native sovereignty, the place overseas powers vie to take advantage of the island’s sources, subjugate native communities and speed up environmental and cultural destruction.
Dr Asoka Bandarage has served on the colleges of Brandeis, Georgetown and Mount Holyoke and is the writer of a number of books, together with Colonialism in Sri Lanka.; The Separatist Battle in Sri Lanka and Disaster in Sri Lanka and the World and quite a few different publications on international political financial system and associated topics.
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