On Collision Course With India?

By Izeth Hussain -June 6, 2014 

Izeth Hussain

Our Government could be entering into a collision course with India over the ethnic problem. This is a possibility, indeed a probability, but not a certainty, which is why I have placed a question mark in the title of this article. Before dealing with that question I must make some clarifications arising out of my article “BJP and the SL Ethnic Problem“. In that article I argued that we must begin our relations with the BJP Government on the assumption that the fundamentals of Indian policy towards Sri Lanka remain unchanged: Sri Lanka by itself can pose no threat to India, but it could if it gangs up with certain powers against India, and except for that eventuality nothing precludes excellent Indo-Sri Lankan relations. By way of illustration I pointed to the fact that our relations with India were in general excellent except for a period when India believed that the 1977 Government was ganging up with the US against her.

Probably most Sri Lankans, including those equipped to make informed judgments on international relations, will not agree with my position. They will point out that India has had consistently bad relations with all its neighbours to the north, that in pursuit of total dominance in South Asia it broke up Pakistan, that its refusal to allow self-determination for Kashmir is indefensible, that it showed an expansionist drive by gobbling up Sikkim, that it has kept Bhutan in a satellite status, and that its exceptional relations with Sri Lanka are postulated on the latter being completely at the mercy of India. It is a powerful indictment. Instead of going into details I will point out certain factors that we must take into account if we are to formulate a fair-minded judgment on India’s foreign relations.

India has several neighbours. It is pertinent to recall Kautilya’s definition of enemies and friends. Who is your enemy? The country that is at your frontier. Who is your friend? The country that is at the frontier of the country that is at your frontier. That is not an invariant law, but it describes a disposition, a tendency to react in certain ways. Accordingly, we Sri Lankans tend to view India with suspicion, if not downright hostility, and we tend to regard with a kindly eye India’s northern neighbours, notably Pakistan and China. So if India has troubled relations with its neighbours, that is more or less in the natural order of things, and does not necessarily argue an innate aggressivity. If India has had on the whole better relations with Sri Lanka, perhaps part of the explanation is to be found in the Palk Straits. That narrow stretch of water serves the principle that Good fences make good neighbours. It is pertinent to recall that imperial powers usually sought to establish buffer zones, such as Afghanistan and Thailand, so as to avoid eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations with other imperial powers.                                                Read More