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Indian
impact on Lanka The entry of Ms. Gandhi will see a new phase in Indo-Lanka relations. Though brother Mr. Anura Bandaranaike has already beaten her to it, President Chandrika Kumaratunga no doubt will re-kindle the flame of old family ties between the Gandhis and the Bandaranaikes and the similarities of two widows with two children, whose young husbands were assassinated by a Sri Lankan terror group should not be lost in the correspondence. There is a greater need for Sri Lankan political leaders to recognise that the new Indian Prime Minister will surely take a hardline on the LTTE, especially for killing her husband. This has been acknowledged to some extent by Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar's remarks in Washington this week that he expects the new Indian Government to press for the extradition of the elusive LTTE leader. At the moment, however, President Kumaratunga is blatantly placating the LTTE in a desperate bid to re-start peace talks and win international support before the June 3 Brussels donor conference. While not having to pay 'pooja' to India, as Sri Lankan leaders have been prone to do in recent years and weeks, there is equally a need to ensure that Sri Lanka is not out-of-step with India's justifiable concerns. A bi-partisan think-tank of India-watchers is a sine qua non for Sri Lanka that has long relied on individual preferences, family connections and knee-jerk reactions to relations with India. Mr. Bandaranaike in his letter dashed off to the new Indian leader talks of the great Gandhi-Bandaranaike ties. What use were these ties if Mrs. Indira Gandhi unleashed this bloody north-east separatist insurgency and her son Rajiv sent his Air Force to stop the Sri Lankan army from defeating the LTTE at Vadamaratchchi in 1987 when we may have seen an end to this brutish civil war. The vanquished Indian leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee has bowed out gracefully. Almost a carbon-copy to what happened here last month, the ruling party of India believed an unprecedented 7 per cent growth rate, proliferation of mobile phones and sleek super highways would carry them back to office on the shoulders of the cheering multitude. BJP’s ' India Shining ' slogan like, UNF's ' Regaining Sri Lanka , attracted only the urban economy, neglecting the rural folks. The lesson from both Sri Lanka and India is that the benefits of rapid economic development must have a human face. Fashionable terms like ' fast-tracking' etc., were seen- definitely in Sri Lanka - as excuses for a few rich kids to break the rules and become richer prostituting the name of development. To expect to have India's BJP have their economic reforms impact on the teeming millions of poverty-ridden Indians is more than a trifle unfair. To have expected economic benefits to flow to the poor in two years, in Sri Lanka, is more than unfair. Both, the BJP and the UNF adopted a pro-US stance to attract investment, struck peace deals with Pakistan and the LTTE respectively,and if there was a difference, it was in the area of world trade and subsidies for agriculture, where the BJP broke ranks with the US, but where the UNF slavishly followed the US. And yet, both these parties did raise the economies, placed as they are, among the poorest of the poor in the comity of nations on Planet Earth. Despite progressing instead of regressing, the rural poor have humbled them. The obvious issue for the new governments though would be how to retain or improve on the economic gains via growth rates and keep the peace with the poor in a uni-polar pro-US world. Clearly recognising this fact, Sri Lanka sent her Foreign Minister to Washington within the first month of assuming office, and in his words “to remind them (the US) that we are there". And the US, as all know, will not help without extracting its pound-of-flesh. But to the masses of India, must go the credit for their maturity to reject a virulent campaign against the Italian-born Ms. Gandhi. Even to the great pretenders to the great democratic ideals like the US, the remote possibility of electing a black President would be a long way off. And who knows, whether this could be the beginning of a trend for democracies around the world to elect, by popular vote, in time to come, a foreign CEO/Head of Government to efficiently manage countries ruined by its own sons and daughters of the soil. |
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