Sri Lanka: The lessons for India and the region

While watching newly appointed Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa step into the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy after his appointment, it was as clear as day that politics has come a full circle in an island nation where the wounds of a bitter and protracted fratricidal civil war have just begun to heal.

An astute Rajapaksa, who thrived on a Sinhalese-Buddhist supremacist narrative, chose to send a subtle message through his highly publicized visit to the sacred Buddhist religious shrine — an important symbol of Sinhala identity and pride.

Keeping in mind the horrendous anti-Muslim riots in Kandy this year, fanned by Buddhist fanatical groups, one can safely assume that Sri Lanka is likely to experience a resurgence of majoritarian Sinhala nationalism, even if Commerce Minister Rishard Badurdeen and the Northern Provincial Council’s former head, C.V. Wigneswaran, switch allegiance to Rajapaksa.

This ultra-nationalist surge benefits neighboring India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is known to exploit, with great finesse, the simmering embers of Hindu majoritarianism to polarize the electorate. The greater the degree to which ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka are pushed to the wall through a calibrated nationalist upsurge orchestrated by Rajapaksa’s followers, the greater the opportunity for the BJP to nurture Dravidian sentiments in southern India and consolidate its vote bank before the 2019 general elections. This explains how Rajapaksa perfectly fits into BJP scheme of things and why a senior parliamentarian from India’s Hindu right-wing ruling party feted the Sinhala leader during his India sojourn last month.

Evidently, the political compulsion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, more so than the strategic imperatives of the Indian nation state, has forced New Delhi to embrace a political personality who was, until recently, anathema to the establishment for his proximity to China. Besides, by making Rajapaksa a politico-strategic proxy, New Delhi retains the option of ousting Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena through impeachment in the near future, with the help of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party, the Tamil National Alliance, the left-wing Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, and dissident parliamentarians from the president’s own United People’s Freedom Alliance.

Indeed, Sri Lankan politics has taken a curious turn, with Sirisena pulling off a non-violent coup d’etat by way of dismissing Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, the politician who collaborated with him to defeat an apparently unassailable Rajapaksa in the 2015 elections. This dramatic event had its genesis when a Chinese submarine and a naval warship docked in Colombo port in the winter of 2014. A wire from the Colombo station chief of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, to his headquarters in New Delhi set the alarm bells ringing and led to frantic covert exchanges between like-minded international stakeholders in the Sri Lankan strategic space.

Consequently, a new government led by Sirisena took over following the 2015 elections, after the defeat of Rajapaksa, who had appeared almost invincible after demonstrating decisive leadership to put an end to the 26-year-old ethnic strife that had claimed about 100,000 lives. However, Sirisena’s warm relationship with the powers that be in New Delhi turned cold when he embraced Beijing in return for financial assistance, having recognized the limitations to India’s ability to pump in money for major infrastructure projects in the island nation.

A disillusioned Indian leadership, looking for alternatives to maintain the country’s strategic interests in the Indian Ocean region, courted a resurgent Rajapaksa, who cleverly tapped into mass disenchantment to win big in recent local polls. India had him rehabilitated as premier, even at the cost of getting stranded in a critical strategic arena without any influential political asset genuinely on their side.

Sri Lanka’s high-stakes political drama provides India and the South Asian region with two distinct lessons. Since India is perceived as an untamed aggressor, ever ready to intrude in the domestic affairs of neighbors to realize its strategic objectives, New Delhi should learn how to reconcile and work with elected leaderships in its neighborhood, however good or bad they are from an Indian perspective. Moreover, for a resource-deficit nation, embarking on regime change projects can backfire. Assets, lured by rich powers, can switch sides in no time, thus altering the complexion of the game completely.

On the other hand, for the collective population of South Asia it is important that democracy prevails. Though all the countries in the region have embraced democracy, the transition has been rather uncertain and fragile. The regional leadership, therefore, must take adequate measures to ingrain institution building and accountability in the democratic-governance process.

Even though the region boasts of a spectacular achievement in granting voting rights to women before many egalitarian European nations did so, electoral choices are, unfortunately, more often than not influenced by external actors. Hence, South Asian nations need to learn from each other’s democratic experiences and face the challenges concertedly to strengthen the roots of democracy.

• Seema Sengupta is a Calcutta-based journalist and columnist.