Sri Lanka coup, a concern for India

There has been an extraordinary turn of events, undesirable even, in Colombo where a political coup d’état staged by President Maithripala Sirisena has led to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa becoming the new Prime Minister. There are huge constitutional issues involved in the unseating of Ranil Wickremasinghe as a specific 19th Amendment brought in 2015 prohibits the dismissal of a Prime Minister unless he resigns or loses a trust vote. With the Supreme Court not due to meet till Monday, late Friday evening seemed to have been convenient for the coming together of old colleagues of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in Mr Sirisena, who served under him in the Cabinet, and Mr Rajapaksa. While the defiance of a scared democratic institution like Parliament by illegal means in changing PMs may be an internal matter, Mr Rajapaksa’s return represents India’s diplomatic failure as it was India that had brokered the alliance between Mr Sirisena and Mr Wickremasinghe after Mr Rajapaksa’s ouster in the 2014 general elections.

The change, which might be to India’s dislike unless there is something to be read in the frequency at which Mr Rajapaksa met PM Narendra Modi even when out of power, is detrimental to the balance India had been seeking to restore in ties with Sri Lanka, which had swung into China’s sphere of influence. He was once deemed a national hero for ending the war with the Tamils even if he did so through gross human right violations by the Army, which got rid of Velupillai Prabhakaran in a mysterious climax. Mr Rajapaksa lost power in 2014 in the wake of serious corruption charges. Being pro-India and pro-West as Mr Wickremasinghe was seen to be, he was always bound to be suspect in the eyes of Sinhala hardliners. What we have now is a leader back in the saddle who was pro-China and anti-India, much to the chagrin of the northern Tamil areas of the island nation that suffered destruction in the civil war.

The abrupt regime change would not only endanger the most recent negotiations Mr Wickremasinghe had with India on a number of infrastructure projects but also upset the strategic balance in a sudden pro-China twist. Having fallen out with him, President Sirisena is said to have backed the impeachment move last April against Mr Wickremasinghe and the relationship soured further after what was claimed to be a plot to assassinate the President surfaced. The coup may have a higher aim in controlling the outcome of the December 2019 elections in which

Mr Rajapaksa of SLPP, which is essentially a breakaway faction of SLFP, is not eligible to contest for President as the Constitution stands now. Much manoeuvring can be expected as the Sirisena-Rajapaksa alliance aims to knock Mr Wickremasinghe’s UNP out of the equation. India’s headaches in its immediate neighbourhood from north to south just got worse even as the West worries over violence and the cavalier treatment of the Constitution and Parliament (prorogued now by President Sirisena) in the country often described as a teardrop in the Indian Ocean.