‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ in Sri Lanka : India Flexing Its Muscle as Regional Power in Asia

Usually, from here in the Sri Lankan capital, the Indian Ocean horizon offers only magnificent sunsets and vistas of colorful wooden fishing craft, looking like painted boats upon a painted sea.

These days, however, the view is of two Indian warships--fully armed frigates--anchored just half a mile offshore, helping monitor an agreement designed to end the four-year warfare between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil guerrillas seeking a separate state.

For those on the Galle Face Green, the long dramatic park above Colombo’s sea wall, and in the foreign embassies and government offices along the coast, the gunships deliver a classic message:

India, birthplace of nonviolent civil disobedience, outspoken critic of military interventions around the globe, captain of the nonaligned movement, is flexing its muscle as the regional power for South Asia.

“Gunboat diplomacy, right out of the 19th Century,” one Western diplomat here said of India’s show of force.

After a decade of pursuing a passive foreign policy under Indira Gandhi and, for the last three years, under her son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, India is once again taking an activist stance in its region, which it feels it has a manifest destiny to lead.

“There has been a qualitative change in India’s role with regard to the problems of Sri Lanka,” said Neelan Tiruchelvam, a lawyer and moderate Tamil leader in Colombo.

“In 1983, Mrs. Gandhi offered the ‘good offices’ of India to help but stated that India would not be a party to the conflict,” Tiruchelvam said. “For her, it was Sri Lanka’s problem.

“Today India has not only become a party to solve the conflict but has also become a principal actor and assumed obligations of a direct nature.”

The twin frigates off Colombo--larger and more sophisticated than anything in the minuscule Sri Lankan navy--are only a physical representation of the new policy. So are the more than 3,000 infantry troops India moved into the Jaffna Peninsula of the island nation last Thursday.

The more subtle illustrations of the policy shift, and of Sri Lanka’s willingness to submit to it, are contained in an agreement of cooperation signed last week by Gandhi and Sri Lanka President Junius R. Jayewardene.

The agreement immediately opened the door for India’s first military intervention in a foreign country since it entered the Bangladesh war on the side of East Pakistan Bengali rebels against West Pakistan in 1971.

But it also established India as a guarantor and, in effect, the policeman of the agreement. At the same time, Sri Lanka yielded some of its sovereign authority to set its own course in foreign policy.

In a letter attached to the agreement, for example, Jayewardene agreed that Trincolamee, a magnificent natural harbor once coveted as a U.S. Navy base, and other Sri Lankan ports “will not be made available for military use by any country in a manner prejudicial to India’s interests.”

Treaty Review Due

Jayewardene also agreed to review a treaty with the United States to allow the construction of a new Voice of America broadcast facility that India finds objectionable.

The Sri Lankan president promised he would also discuss with Gandhi the hiring of foreign military and intelligence advisers “to ensure that such presences will not prejudice Indo-Sri Lankan relations.” For several years, India has strongly objected to the use of Pakistani and Israeli advisers by the Sri Lankan military in its battle against the Tamil separatists.

Jayewardene agreed that an oil tank farm slated for construction in Trincolamee would be built as a joint venture with India, not with foreign firms, including one American bidder, as had been originally planned.

In short, just about every complaint that India has had with its southern neighbor--a tear-drop shaped island, once known as Ceylon, just off the tip of India--has been resolved according to India’s wishes.

‘Proconsul Role’

“India’s role has so expanded it is really in a position to veto anything this government does,” said one astonished Western diplomat here. “No matter how you slice it, India is in a sort of proconsul role.”

The recent willingness to allow India (with a population of 780 million and a standing army of a million) to play big brother to tiny Sri Lanka (population 16 million and no more than 50,000 men under arms) is being described as a Finlandization of the island nation.

According to Roland Edirisinghe, a respected journalist and foreign policy expert, Sri Lanka decided to submit to India’s influence after several unsatisfying years of attempting to follow an independent, pro-Western course.

“We toyed with the idea of becoming pro-Western, like Singapore. Now we are giving away our flexibility in foreign policy,” Edirisinghe said.

The shift began as early as 1985, when Gamini Dissanayake, Cabinet minister for land in the Jayewardene government, wrote a memorandum to the president suggesting that Sri Lanka’s foreign policy be revamped “so that the irritants to India were removed.”

Sense of Humor

Dissanayake and Finance Minister R. J. G. De Mel, another advocate of the shift, were the main advisers to Jayewardene in the agreement signed with Gandhi.

Jayewardene, 80, a veteran politician with a playful sense of humor, had never been able to get along with the dour and reticent Indira Gandhi. In Rajiv Gandhi, some say, he found a young prince with a sense of humor to whom he could play an aging Merlin.

Under the terms of the joint agreement, India takes an extremely active role in internal matters on the island. Indian Red Cross officials are supposed to watch over the surrender of arms by Tamil militant groups, and an Indian election commission team will supervise a referendum in the island’s eastern province.

The enlargement of India’s influence has long been a dream of its elite diplomatic corps, which includes some of the ablest and most arrogant envoys in the world. After a joint press conference announcing the Colombo agreements last week, a young Indian diplomat all but thrust his fist into the air in triumph.

“How do you like Indian diplomacy in action?” he asked.

Food Distribution

The deputy chief of the Indian diplomatic mission in Sri Lanka, a high-energy young Sikh named Hardip Puri, personally went to the Jaffna Peninsula to supervise the distribution of Indian food relief supplies to the Tamil population when the area was under siege by Sri Lankan government forces.

Puri also is the man who convinced Tamil Tiger rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran to get on an Indian air force plane to go to New Delhi to negotiate a peace agreement.

At one point, Puri was carried through the streets of a Sri Lankan Tamil city on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd, heady stuff for any young diplomat. His wife, Laksmi Puri, an elegant woman who wears a diamond stud in her nose, deftly handles press relations in the small embassy.

J. N. Dixit, the Indian ambassador to Sri Lanka, also impresses and outrages nearly everyone he meets. A short, stocky man of seemingly boundless energy, Dixit conducts foreign policy from a small partitioned office in the India Bank Building here.

His bravado occasionally gets him in trouble. He has had to back off a statement that Indian troops on the island were under the exclusive command of himself and Indian officers, not Sri Lankan officials. In the process he had called Sri Lanka’s national security minister a liar.

At a recent press conference, Dixit dismissed a questioner who asked about the intentions of Indian troops to leave the island after they had finished their job:

“The tradition of Indian troops is an answer in itself: Wherever we have moved in with troops, we have always moved out.”

Actually, India’s record is mixed. In 1962, India captured the Portuguese colony of Goa, and in 1974, it annexed the Himalayan mountain kingdom of Sikkim. No one is talking about it now, but in 1971, the Indian navy blockaded Sri Lanka, and a small contingent of Indian troops entered the island to help the government battle a leftist insurgency, a campaign in which at least 10,000 people were killed.

In the course of the 20-minute press conference, Dixit was interrupted by phone calls from the island’s highest-ranking generals and senior ministers as well as the ambassador of the United States, James W. Spain, whom he invited over for a drink.

Then the Sri Lankan defense secretary telephoned. He asked if a Sri Lankan official could be present in the room when Indian officials interrogated the Sri Lankan sailor who assaulted Gandhi with a rifle during an honor guard review. “I would not find that acceptable,” Dixit announced, underlining India’s new role here. “He can wait in the room outside.”