Newly appointed Indian High Commissioner Asok K. Kantha in Sri Lanka (L) in discussion with Minister of Human Rights and Disaster Management Mahinda Samarasinghe yesterday.

The unstinted co-operation extended to Sri Lanka by India, in a number of spheres, in the course of the fourth Eelam War, which ended in the liquidation of the LTTE by the Lankan security forces, helped to underscore the importance of Sri Lanka continuously maintaining close, cordial ties with her powerful neighbour. Besides, these bourgeoning good relations are a veritable slap in the face of Sri Lanka’s narrow nationalists who have been baying for rigidly restricted and selective foreign relations, which if assiduously followed could lead to Sri Lanka’s isolation in the international system.

At the height of the final military action against the Tigers, it was habitual for some sections of the local public, including some mediamen, to question the wisdom of finding a political solution to the ethnic conflict, by labeling those who called for the latter as being on the ‘wrong side of history’. While only time would reveal the correctness of this assessment, it is with regard to some current regional policy initiatives by the Lankan state that the same poser could be raised: to what degree is it on ‘the right side of history’?

This query is prompted by the fact that while Indo –Lanka relations are currently evolving in the direction of what, by South Asian standards, could be described as good neighbourly ties, Sri Lanka is incurring the charge of courting the cordiality of some other states in the region whose democratic credentials are highly suspect, such as Myanmar.

While it goes without saying that ‘normal diplomatic ties’ should be maintained even with Myanmar, the markedly warm reception accorded to the Myanmarese military strongman by the Lankan state recently, gave the impression that the Lankan government was ‘going the extra mile’ to be on excessively cordial terms with this authoritarian state of the region which has currently put the democratic process in Myanmar on hold and not shown the least inclination to free iconic democratic activist, Aung San Suu Kyi.

The current state of the Lankan government’s relations with some Western states is no excuse for the former to conduct what may be seen as placatory ties with undemocratic regimes in the region. This could send the wrong signals to the world community and reflect not too well on the Lankan state’s democratic credentials.

However, it is also important that the Lankan state acquires a sound grasp of some emerging nuances in India’s foreign policy, lest the full import of these new dimensions is misunderstood.

The manner in which India handled her relations with Sri Lanka over the past months were, needless to say, a far cry from the approach adopted by her to Lankan issues in, for example, the mid-eighties when Indo-Lanka ties had all but crumbled in the teeth of accusations leveled at India by Sri Lanka on particularly the LTTE training camps question and connected contentious problems.

Over the past few months India has laid to rest suspicions in some quarters in Sri Lanka that she is not dealing even-handedly with questions emerging from the Lankan ethnic conflict. India not only helped Sri Lanka unstintedly in putting down the Tigers’ armed militancy, through intelligence sharing and co-operation in stymieing LTTE arms smuggling, for instance, but helped Sri Lanka with remarkable generosity in succouring the Northern IDPs.

However, India is insistent on Sri Lanka expeditiously evolving a political solution to the ethnic conflict and even on this score, this time around, interestingly, there are no rumblings so far from hard line nationalistic quarters in Sri Lanka, alleging Indian ‘interference’ in Sri Lanka’s ‘internal affairs’, for instance. The reason for this relative receptiveness to the Indian position, apparently, is the deft handling of the Lankan issue by the Indian centre. The cooperation extended to Sri Lanka in a number of areas of concern, has dispelled doubt that India is ill-intentioned towards Sri Lanka and this cooperative spirit has won the day.

Nevertheless, India has reformulated her foreign policy parameters and is today seeking to underscore her standing as a number one economic and political power. In the process of doing so, she intends taking the Asian region along with her and realizes fully well that she could not do so by acting in an antagonistic manner towards particularly her neighbours. The sources of these new thrusts in Indian foreign policy are the Gujral Doctrine of attaching primacy to the fostering of good neighbourly relations and the ‘Look East’ policy of the mid-nineties, which envisages, essentially, India forging cooperative ties with the foremost economic powers of Asia. All this is in anticipation by India of the ‘Asian Century’ which would see Asia coming back to its own as the economic growth centre of the world.

More recently, India lent its weight to the establishment of an EC-style economic union in East Asia. It is hoped that this Community would bring prosperity to the majority of Asians.

It could be seen, therefore, that India is operating within ‘forward thinking’ policy parameters which her neighbours would need to attune themselves to, if they hope to benefit from the cooperative spirit which is increasingly driving India and other economic giants, such as, China. There is no space here for narrow nationalistic dogmas which would act as barriers to the establishment of EC-style cooperative ties among Asia’s bourgeoning economic power centres.