Govt.’s games, world powers and Sri Lanka’s culture of resistance

China’s anchorage in Sri Lanka is not only economic. The economic relationship will inescapably remain whichever the administration in Colombo. What is qualitatively more serious is the strategic partnership between President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and President Xi Jinping, which is the apex of the altered, ‘target-hardened’ interlocking political relationship between the respective political regimes, militaries and states

If the Government agrees to international third-party testing of an imported fertiliser sample, overriding the evaluation of Sri Lanka’s relevant scientific authorities which had already tested the sample (twice), it would bolster the argument of international human rights organisations, the Tamil diaspora and the Office of the UN Human Rights High Commissioner that domestic authorities in Sri Lanka cannot be trusted and an international institutional process i.e., an “international third party,” is the only method to guarantee objectivity and fair play. 

Beijing’s battering-ram

The sovereignty of the Sri Lankan State cannot be defended by the Government—and China—only in the domain of human rights and humanitarian law, while subjecting Lankan State institutions, especially those staffed by specialists, to corrosive doubt, thereby undermining our State sovereignty in other domains. 

China may well be technically correct in its argumentation on the fertiliser issue, but the Sri Lankan public cannot “unsee” (as the buzzword goes) China’s brusque behaviour, hard-sell tactics and the blacklisting of a State bank, the People’s Bank no less, ignoring the fact that the bank was in compliance with an order of a Sri Lankan Court. If China can blatantly treat a friend, and a small Asian State at that, in this manner—with just a hint of its treatment of Australia—what does it say of the current foreign policy of China and how must it act in other places? 

China’s and Asia’s greatest diplomat, Zhou Enlai, a firm friend of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, would have been appalled. When Prime Minister John Kotelawala (whose Foreign Affairs Advisor was UNP Leader Wickremesinghe’s father) refused to shake his hand at the Bandung summit, Premier Zhou responded with silky civility. A great majority of Ceylonese supported him and excoriated Sir John as “Bandung Booruwa” (‘Bandung donkey’). Sir John lost the General Election the next year. When Zhou visited in 1957 and 1964, he won the hearts of the Lankan people. A militant of the Communist International (‘Comintern’), Zhou was a revolutionary warrior, not a “wolf warrior”.

Govt.’s game-plan

The incipient intra-Governmental rift manifested at Solis Hall, Pitakotte, reveals the bigger picture of the Government’s game-plan. 

There seem to be two variants of the game-plan. One is the oligarchic rip-off. Sell or lease anything and everything of any shape, size or setting, to anyone, so as to make money and spread some of it around to fertilise a rapidly dwindling support-base. 

The other is the strategic trade-off. The supposition is that if the US, India and China can be given sufficiently significant economic footprints, the big companies will ensure that their governments will go easy on the Rajapaksa regime. This semi-colonial carve-up of the island will also misdirect the gaze of the Quad from the strategic footprint of China and the Rajapaksas’ geopolitical axis with China, serving as insurance as well as camouflage. 

This is pretty much the playbook that the Myanmar junta has been using, not just after this latest coup but before the thaw, during its long despotic innings. The Myanmar junta has China, Russia and India as part of its umbrella. The junta buys weapons from Russia, has economic projects with China, tempts neighbouring India to keep its hand in the game to prevent a near-monopoly for China which is Myanmar’s major supporter and neighbour, and sells logging and gem-mining rights to anyone to exploit its forests and land, providing the junta with vast amounts of money for itself and to pay for the weapons.

Resistance culture

Sri Lanka certainly does have a military junta-in-waiting or in-the-making, but it is no Myanmar, mainly (but not only) because of the deep-rooted democratic political culture, which is rather remarkable. TV news showed a peasant hunger-striker urging President Gotabaya to come over for a dialogue so they could explain the realities of agriculture to him, because they elected him, believe he is misled, and do not trust the two Ministers involved with the issue. The republican instinct and popular sovereignty are rooted in the islanders’ spirit.  

Democracy and freedom of individual expression aren’t the only things rooted in the Sri Lankan political culture and psyche. As islanders and more particularly as citizens of a small island, Sri Lankans tend to be averse to selling or leasing important sites and facilities to foreign enterprises and interests, due to lack of space and an understandable sense of insecurity that the destiny of the island and its distinctive people, for instance its energy supply, will or can be determined directly by others, outsiders. 

In history, myth and legend, the Sinhalese culture of resistance was inextricably linked with space and the lack of defence-in-depth. Prince Dutugemunu rebelled against his father’s (Ranilian UNP-ish) policy of appeasement, conceding the Tamil King Elara a sphere of power while focusing on building irrigation and agriculture, because he, Dutugemunu, experienced existential dread at being sandwiched between the Indian Ocean at his back and the Tamil kingdom in the North, i.e., a lack of geostrategic and geopolitical space. 

I presented this parametric perspective to a scholarly audience in Paris in 2012 (The Geopolitical Matrix of Sri Lanka’s Conflict – Groundviews – https://groundviews.org/2012/03/14/the-geopolitical-matrix-of-sri-lankas-conflict/) and an expert conclave in Delhi in 2013 (Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka: A Perception from South Asia’s Far South: The Geopolitical Matrix of..... – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAaHdqR8bwo).

These factors in combination—the individualist compulsion to free expression, the democratic impulse, the drive for independence and sovereignty of the island—fuse into an amalgam: a culture of resistance.

It is the UNP’s inability to recognise the culture of resistance—ironic, since it was almost exterminated by the backlash against the IPKF presence, and later, electorally defeated while having signed the Solheim CFA—that made it co-sponsor the UNHRC-Geneva 2015 resolution with its provision for ‘foreign judges, prosecutors,’ etc. The UNP (and some ex-UNPers) still defends it as better than the 2021 Geneva resolution which may make for cases on foreign soil, but in any postcolonial context, cases prosecuted far from one’s borders (the neocolonial mode) is politically explosive than foreign judges sitting in judgment on native soil (the colonial mode), over a legitimate military that won a legitimate war.

It is the Lankan culture of resistance that is manifesting itself in various ways and through various vehicles, from the peasants to the teachers, the workers to the students; from the left (JVP, FSP) through the slightly centre-left (SJB), to the government and the Cabinet itself. When there is pressure from the Opposition outside, there are hairline fractures within the administration. When there’s pressure from below, there are cracks above. 

I’ve watched it up close in the 1970s during the years of the United Front Government, while in my teens, occasionally with my parents in the company of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. My batch-mate Weerasooriya in the First Year Arts 1976 intake at Peradeniya University was shot dead by the Police. It was our generation at university that kicked-off the nationwide students’ struggle of end-1976, which triggered the Railway Strike and the General Strike that shattered the two-thirds majority of the government. The Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime was socio-politically dead before the citizens buried it under an electoral landslide in 1977.  

Myanmar mode 

What makes the Myanmar scenario not too long a stretch is a new development I noted in a recent column. All the elite units and reserve strike forces of the Sri Lankan military were consolidated into a new formation, the 1 Corps, and based in Kilinochchi. If a strategically located small country intends to deter or resist possible external intervention from any quarter—adopting a doctrine of asymmetric deterrence—it decentralises its forces, uses natural defences or reinforces them, and digs in at various points which may be entry-points or of high-value as targets. What it does not do is to concentrate its elite forces in a single formation and base it in a single location, in which it is vulnerable to the stand-off weaponry of a superior force. This is what Sri Lanka has just done.

The new configuration (the raising of 1 Corps) and its concentrated/centralised deployment, (in Kilinochchi), indicates that the purpose is deployment not against external threats, but precisely against domestic threats, even at the high cost of vulnerability to external force. This seems a classic move at concentrating a reliable reserve strike-force for domestic deployment in a context where the normal infantry may prove permeable to social pressures such as from peasant demonstrators.

I have somewhere among my papers from my time in Moscow, a letter from the (then) newly-appointed Army Commander Gen. Shavendra Silva, thanking me profusely for my contribution to strengthening Sri Lanka-Russia military ties. I am glad to see the foundation laid on my watch as Ambassador, including with General Salyukov, Commander of Russian land forces (Army Commander meets Russia’s Commander of Land Forces – https://www.ft.lk/News/Army-Commander-meets-Russia-s-Commander-of-Land-Forces/56-683416) lead to the edifice I see while watching footage of the Army Commander’s visit to Russia. 

While an admirer of Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Ministry, diplomacy and foreign policy intelligentsia, I observe that in its Myanmar policy, which is itself but a symptom, Russia is slightly out of step with its own doctrine of sensitivity to the regional dynamics and consensus (ASEAN is shifting). More generally, it seems to lack the strategic ambidexterity of the USSR which was able to maintain its own political system while spearheading global solidarity campaigns against anti-democratic military takeovers, most famously in Spain and Chile, thereby accumulating “soft power” and benefiting from peace movements in the West—containing leading luminaries of Western society—which stood for friendship with Russia.  

There are none such today. That stems from the status-quoist, conservative stance, more redolent of tsarism than the Soviet Union, and the Ming-dynasty than Mao’s New China, that Russia and China have allowed themselves to slide into in the global struggle between democracy and autocracy. No great power can hold the moral high ground on sovereignty while being perceived as patronising military juntas. 

I wonder whether Army Chief Shavendra Silva’s extended visit may tempt Colombo to fully equip the newly raised 1 Corps with (Russian) heavy weaponry along the lines of the US Marine Corps—but for domestic deployment. 

Calculus for change

Whether the Myanmar endgame in Sri Lanka can be prevented may depend not only on the strength of the domestic democratic and social resistance but also on external factors. Can Colombo coopt or neutralise India and the USA while relying on China and Russia? 

That would depend on whether or not India regards Sri Lanka as it does Myanmar. India shares the diplomatic buffering of Myanmar with China, with the latter enjoying a much greater degree of preponderance. However, Myanmar is on the eastern rim of India while Sri Lanka is on its southern perimeter and is of far greater strategic sensitivity in—and to—the Indian Ocean. The US-India partnership, the Quad and AUKUS may regard Sri Lanka as less dispensable in strategic terms, than Myanmar.    

The US has defined the current historical moment as one characterised by two great contestations: firstly, the geopolitical contest between great powers, most especially the USA and China, and secondly, the normative-cum-systemic contest between democracy and autocracy. In some cases, the two coincide and are regarded as such, but in others, the normative dimension is set aside for the most part, as in the case of Saudi Arabia. The Sri Lankan regime hopes to pull off a small-scale version of the latter exemption.

President Gotabaya faces a potential problem in this regard. In the case of Sri Lanka, both categories used in the USA’s discourse, namely great power competition with China and the normative contest between democracy and autocracy, neatly converge. More: the dovetailing becomes conceptually and strategically imperative. 

Though there is an economic dimension in the competition in Sri Lanka between India and China, and less so between the USA and China, the main vector of the contest is the geostrategic one, with the economic contest a proxy for the strategic.

Sri Lanka is the main hub for China’s power projection on the southern flank of India, the pivotal partner of the US, Japan, Australia and the West, and into the ocean named after India. Sri Lanka is a key to dominance of the Indian Ocean, which in turn is key to the dominance of the Indo-Pacific. 

China’s anchorage in Sri Lanka is not only economic. The economic relationship will inescapably remain whichever the administration in Colombo. What is qualitatively more serious is the strategic partnership between President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and President Xi Jinping, which is the apex of the altered, ‘target-hardened’ interlocking political relationship between the respective political regimes, militaries and states. 

That swollen relationship is a function of the exceptional, aberrant character of the incumbent Rajapaksa regime with its autocratic, militarist, ultranationalist, oligarchic character. 

The hypertrophied Colombo-Beijing relationship can be reduced to its normal, natural economic dimension only by the neutralisation and displacement of the new variable, the politico-ideological dimension.

Democracy or despotism?

Thus, the geostrategic competition between the Quad and China in the Indian Ocean cannot avoid the political and normative ‘democracy vs. autocracy’ dimension. 

While Sri Lanka’s location in the Indian Ocean makes it grand-strategically irresponsible for those striving to counterbalance China’s power-projection, to treat it in the same residual category as Myanmar, the challenge of China’s preponderant political influence on and in Sri Lanka, is not as intractable to resolve as in the case of Myanmar. 

This is not only because Sri Lanka’s location is further from China than is Myanmar’s. It is also because Sri Lanka’s ethos has historically been closer, and remains intrinsically closer, to that of the world’s democracies than that of Confucian-Communist China.  

Unlike China’s staunch Asian allies with their entrenched authoritarian-militarist statism, the Sri Lankan people love their freedom as individuals; as a social collective and political community in the domain of governance; and as an island in relation to hegemonistic pressures and intrusive external presences. Sri Lanka’s national and popular culture of resistance make it possible to fully restore democracy to its historically consistent proportions. 

Given the UNP/ex-UNP mindset, there could be voices in the next administration which respond to China’s current strong-arming by urging a Taiwan-South Korea-Philippines-type military arrangement with the USA. Given this island’s culture of resistance, I regard any such diminution of sovereignty to supposedly protect sovereignty, as politically suicidal. 

Given the island’s resistance culture, the most prudent strategy for the major powers would not be one that covets real-estate but one of denial of advantage to their main rival.

In Sri Lanka, national/state sovereignty, popular sovereignty and individual freedom have always been organically intertwined.

Be it China’s Wang Hunin or Russia’s Vladislav Surkov, no intellectual however brilliant, no critique of liberal democracy however accurate, and no philosophy of history however erudite, can prevail in the final analysis while betting against the ontological: the existential need for freedom and striving for justice of the sovereign individual. The answer to the failings of liberal democracy is neither illiberal democracy nor autocracy but social democracy.