Editorial

The Indian Government gave President Anura Kumara Disanayake a warm welcome on an otherwise chilly winter day in New Delhi last Monday. Commentators read both warmth and chill into the lingering image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi putting a friendly arm around the visiting dignitary’s shoulder as he was led inside for the bilateral talks.

Emerging from these talks, the two leaders held a media briefing and made public their Joint Statement (JS)—an unusually lengthy 34-clause action-oriented commentary on the current state of play of India-Sri Lanka relations.

It was well known before the summit that the Indian Government did not want Monday’s meeting to be mere optics, they wanted ‘substance’ as well. Most of the clauses in the Disanayake-Modi Joint Statement turned out to be what India wanted ‘actioned’ by Sri Lanka with very few requests from Sri Lanka. The earlier Wickremesinghe-Modi Vision Statement had been upgraded to agreed actions concluding with the sentence; ‘Accordingly, the leaders directed their officials to initiate necessary measures for implementation of the understandings’. Much of the substance of the JS, euphemistically described as ‘connectivity’ with India, had been vociferously opposed not so long ago by the President and his party.

As domestic criticism mounted at the change, Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath came before the media in Colombo to emphasise that only very little had been agreed and on most of the controversial topics (on economic cooperation—ETCA, wind power, LNG pipeline, oil tanks) Sri Lanka had only committed to continue discussions. It seemed the new Government was torn between owning and disowning, like in the case of the IMF programme that its predecessor had begun. Despite the ‘special place Sri Lanka occupies in India’s foreign policy framework’ that President Disanayake insisted on during the visit, Sri Lanka was unable to get a response to three requests reflected in the JS. There was no okay when it asked for support for its application for BRICS membership. A positive response ‘in principle’ should have been relatively easy—Russia and China have already indicated their support.

On the illegal ‘scorched ocean’ bottom-trawling fisheries issue, India reversed roles and played the injured party, slipping in a sentence about the need to ‘avoid any aggressive behaviour or violence’— a not-so-veiled reference to the Sri Lanka Navy’s actions to arrest Indian intruders in Sri Lanka’s territorial waters. Saying that a solution should be found in a ‘humanitarian manner’ is a diplomatic code for implying that irrespective of the maritime boundary and environmental violations, the burden of arriving at a just and fair solution lies somehow with Sri Lanka.

There was also no response to Sri Lanka’s request to commence bilateral discussions on the Indian objections to Sri Lanka’s claim at the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (UNCLCS) to define Sri Lanka’s extended continental shelf.

It is not to say the Sri Lankan side capitulated entirely. There was no mention in the JS of the 13th Amendment or the land bridge, both of which figured in previous bilateral discussions. However, India’s leverage on the Tamil issue is maintained by PM Modi referring to the ‘aspirations of the Tamil people’ and the hope Sri Lanka shall conduct Provincial Council elections etc. There are reasonable grounds to believe the Sri Lanka side ‘watered down’ these references in the JS.

The Indian External Affairs Minister and its spokesman did not hesitate to remind Sri Lankans, well-known to forget the immediate past and sometimes a good deed, that India was the ‘first responder’ when this country went bankrupt. Sri Lanka’s debt-defaulter vulnerability and dire financial straits not so long ago provided an opening for India to pursue ‘asymmetric connectivity’ as a strategy in the form of Indian projects which had a clear geopolitical game plan that fitted its emerging global role.

Some significant provisions came into the JS ‘to explore the possibility of concluding a framework on Defence Cooperation’. It referred to ‘traditional and non-traditional threats’ to security in the Indian Ocean as well as ‘recognising shared maritime security interests in the Indian Ocean Region’ as well as cooperation in hydrograpghy.

All that would not escape the elephant in the room—China, the aspiring superpower and India’s nemesis—in whose own geopolitical and strategic ‘connectivity’ blueprint the Indian Ocean is pivotal. A delegation from the Chinese Communist Party is already doing the rounds in Colombo and expressed keenness to resume maritime research visits. The Government will have to up its grasp and come to grips with these complex geopolitical realities behind the diplomatic niceties of a state visit as the President prepares, and proceeds with his next stop—China.

Doctoring qualifications

Academic qualifications; their authenticity; their use and misuse blew up in the very locality where the recently elected people’s representatives deliberate after an embarrassing moment for the Government when one of its disciples had difficulty in proving his educational qualifications. When criticism snowballed by asking the individual to prove his credentials or step down, he did the latter.

With such a campaign in full swing, candidates hopeful of entering Parliament from the now-ruling party could well have been victims of this campaign, under pressure to produce paper qualifications where there were none. When all hell broke loose, and the pre-election campaign boomeranged on it, the Government that reacted positively initially by asking the MP at the eye of the storm to resign took the wrong turn. They made a political meal of it by seeing a conspiracy behind the accusations that they had misled the voters and sung a different tune: that educational qualifications are not particularly the ultimate in a parliamentary seat.

Free education gave an opening for many young men and women in the post-Independence years to pursue higher education, which in turn gave them social recognition and a place in the sun in a world otherwise dominated by an English-educated elite. Unfortunately, over the years, with not just universities mushrooming (some just technical colleges upgraded), doctorates and professorships became a dime a dozen. From the sublime, it has even reached the ridiculous with cult leaders calling themselves doctors from God University, wherever that is. And nothing has been done about it.

The Sri Lanka Parliament is not alone in what has unfortunately become a farce about individual educational qualifications. In Britain, only last month, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has been accused in the House of Commons of embellishing her educational qualifications and career record as an economist. It is happening in the Mother of Parliaments too.