(Daily Mirror – by N. Sathiyamoorthy) President Mahinda Rajapaksa could not have put it better. On earlier occasions, he had repeated ad infinitum that India was Sri Lanka’s relative. Now, he has defined it in clearer terms by declaring that it was not a ‘Big Brother’ relationship and that Sri Lanka was a ‘Little Sister’ to India. Read in the context of his earlier description of all other nations that had helped Sri Lanka defeat LTTE terrorism as ‘friends’, President’s Rajapaksa’s latest pronouncements is as sublime as it is succinct.
Unacknowledged by many, President Rajapaksa’s State visit to India this week will be a ‘defining moment’ of sorts in bilateral relationship. It is the first substantive bilateral at the conclusion of the ethnic war, which for decades had become a part thereof. Issues that had remained unaddressed substantially and adequately will now have to be taken up, and solutions found. The presidential visit is expected to set the tone for the same, if not find instant solutions to individual issues, here and now.
Four or five issues seem to have been thrown up and around. CEPA seems to be on the top of the Sri Lankan mind – at least of a few on the streets of Colombo, if not at the Government-level. However, it is a political solution to the ‘ethnic issue’ that seems to be bothering many others, including India. Attached to this are issues of rehabilitation of the war victims and reconstruction of the war-affected areas.
There are other interlinked and/or independent concerns, as well. They include rehabilitation of refugees and the reconstruction of the war-affected areas, India’s participation in Sri Lanka’s development, with or without the war, and strategic security concerns of both nations. The fishing issue is another sensitive concern to both nations, particularly in the post-war scenario.
For the sibling ties to be strengthened further, these issues need to be addressed squarely. Side-stepping the issues or not standing by past commitments is not on. Likewise, addressing Indian or Sri Lankan concerns on one or more of the nagging issues, and seeking to dis-engage others of mutual or individual concerns from the bilateral sphere is fraught with doubts and mistrust of the kind that this one relationship can do without, post-war.
The ethnic issue, for instance, was, and continues to be a political issue. It needs a political solution. Reopening a discourse, decades after decisions were made – but implementation delayed – will only open old wounds and cause newer ones. The ‘healing touch’ that contemporary Sri Lanka needs badly and has been promised repeatedly, would then have to wait. .
If at the end of the past discourse, provincial devolution was accepted as the way out, it was not for administrative convenience. Instead, it sought to address the legitimate concerns and aspirations of the ethnic minorities. With democratised checks-and-balances in the post-colonial era, districts still do not have law-making or decision-making powers. The Provincial Councils were given those powers. Conferring those powers on the districts would mean 25 Provinces in the place of nine. Anything else would be a farce.
The case for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with India is no different. Unless the intention is to ‘kill’ CEPA on the streets of Colombo, differences could be sorted out at the implementation-level, where more of the kind could show up. That is how much of the differences over, and difficulties in the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) came to be sorted out. That is where also the seeds for CEPA were sown.
To the extent that the Sri Lankan Government has declared that it will address the concerns of the domestic industry and trade, labour and consumers, the effort should be welcome. To the extent, it is dragging its feet on summit-level attestation ,to the draft two years after it was cleared for signature ,ahead of the 2008 SAARC summit in Colombo, the processes have remained slow.
On the security front, there is a clear understanding that the fates of these two nations are linked together by geography and geo-political developments and events over which neither may have much control but cannot escape the consequences, all the same. Yet, if Sri Lankan apprehensions are still rooted in the interpretations from the past, there is need for addressing those concerns – and also the grounds for those concerns.
Otherwise, for someone in Colombo, or elsewhere, to throw the ‘China bogey’ now and again, and expect New Delhi to react as the respective sides may want to, that may not happen. To begin with, China did not react the way the anti-India forces wanted it to react, first, at the height of the ‘Bangladesh War’ (1971) and more recently, during the ‘Kargil War’ (1999). Iraq and North Korea should show where global adversity too ended, and ‘Big Brother’ bonhomie of the P-5 began.
India-Sri Lanka relations is on the threshold of a great new beginning. The way the leaders of the two nations guide them to greater heights will define not only bilateral relations in the years to come, but also the course that the emergence of a ‘Great, New South Asia’ takes. Sri Lanka needs to be a partner in the process than being a partner in any extra-regional arrangements, where it anyway does not belong.
Individuals do not often hold nations’ history at stake – but they do design it in ways, which at times become irreversible, for a long time to come. LTTE’s Prabhakaran did it all the wrong way. In President Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka has an elected leader with endorsement to put it all on the right track. Not just Sri Lanka, and/or India, South Asia as a whole beckons. The world may need to wait!
