Image from article, with caption: Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for a meeting in New Delhi on April 26, 2017. The Sri Lanka Prime Minister is on five-day official visit to India.
Excerpt:
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s visit to India this week and the expected visit of Prime Minister Narenda Modi to Sri Lanka in May signal a fresh burst of activity in India- Sri Lanka relations. Since previous projects for joint cooperation like the “bridge” and Economic Trade and Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) have failed to get traction, new projects appear to have come on stream such as the joint development of the Trincomalee oil tank farm and the Colombo Port extension. However whatever the economic viability of the new projects, they are meeting with confrontation from the trade unions due to a singular lack of public diplomacy on the part of the Sri Lanka government officials who seem not to understand the growing public scepticism over this government’s ability to manage foreign investment especially in strategic assets like ports. ...
[C]an one ignore entirely the checkered history of Indian intervention in Sri Lanka in the 1980’s from the LTTE training camps in India to the arrival of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), which have left the general public in the island cautious about its dealings with the neighbourhood giant. There is also a gap in the traditional diplomacy practised by India which many have characterised as “arrogant” as opposed to China which in the past has been much more ready to “listen” to the smaller party. This may be changing with the advent of public diplomacy and the couching of Indian diplomatic communications in more gracious terms. Yet the truth is that Sri Lanka is strategically vital for India’s security interests and defence cooperation is growing by leaps and bounds since the end of the armed conflict in the country. On the economic side more and more Indian companies are setting up in Sri Lanka or taking over the management of large industries. No study has yet been done of this creeping integration of the two economies but Sri Lankan business people complain loudly of unfair treatment and non tariff barriers (NTBs) still clogging their efforts to trade with India. ...
Both in India and Sri Lanka, environmental NGOs are well organized with strong grass root constituencies and there should be much more networking across the Palk Strait on issues such as stopping the large scale raids by Indian fishing trawlers. Public Diplomacy case studies underline the example of Canada when seeking to curtail the acid rain coming from the US successfully drawing on the support of the American NGOs to push their cause through the US Congress. Trawler fishing has been banned in Tamil Nadu and there are many Indian NGOs and Tamil Nadu fishing experts who sympathise with Sri Lanka’s plight over the excesses of Indian trawling in Sri Lanka waters. We should draw on all these resources to stimulate a public campaign in India to put pressure on the trawler owners in Tamil Nadu to curtail what they well know are illegal activities in Sri Lankan waters. The Indian side is also playing for time as they anticipate the resources within the Palk Strait will be depleted beyond replacement in a few years…
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