Playing India: a Beginner’s Guide?
By Susantha
Goonatilake
The successful test victory against India was a needed eye-opener in
that a country of 20 million could keep at bay a country with one billion, at
least in this narrow field of cricket.
It reminded me of the time when Sri Lanka with its back to the wall in
the awful days of Chandrika Kumaratunga won the World Series in 1996. I was in Cambodia and elated, feted the Sri
Lankans there at the then only five-star hotel.
It was still the more enjoyable in that I had tried in vain to alert the
then Sri Lankan Defence Ministry and
then Foreign Ministry about the details of the massive LTTE arms and people
smuggling going on from Cambodia
at that time but to no avail. The only
adjectives that I could use after discussions with them were "deaf and
dumb". Incompetence in both
ministries had reached a high point.
India
casts a huge shadow both positive and negative on Sri Lanka and the question is how
should we play her culturally, politically and economically if not to our
advantage, at least to the mutual advantage of both? First: no guts anti-Indianism or its opposite of blind trust
of Dambadiva. We should first recall
some basic facts that have been obfuscated not only by the foreign funded ‘piece’
(wrongly designated peace) industry and the ethnic studies industry but also
through the lack of studies in our universities.
Let us enumerate a
few.
Ethnically, meaning genetically, we share many common
threads as we do in the field of culture. The 19th century and the early 20th century
classifications into Aryans and Dravidians are not being taken seriously today
except perhaps for Tamil Nadu political parties with their racist Dravidian
appendage. Yet the Sinhalese speak a
North Indian dialect with some South Indian elements. South Indian languages like Tamil have also a
large input from Sanskrit especially in religious and technical matters. Sinhalese also probably share some genetic
and cultural traits with Southeast Asian island nations - even before the
transmission of Sinhalese Buddhist ideas into Southeast
Asia.
The first emergence of India as a major entity was at the
time of Asoka, precisely also at the time when Sinhalese as a cultural
force come into the scene. Current
archaeology though indicates that even before the emergence of Asokan
interactions, Anuradhapura
was a major urban centre with extensive trade links having the earliest
examples of the Brahmi script. In the
course of time, Sri Lanka
became a key cultural and trade centre with links across Asia including
Northwards into what is today India
itself. For example the world's first
foreign funded University complex was established by the Sinhalese in the 4th
century AD in Bodhgaya and lasted for nearly thousand years.
The relatively peaceful intra-Asian civilisational
interactions were disturbed in North India by Jihad like incursions into North India which laid waste through its intolerant
ideology, major centres of learning such as Taxila and Nalanda. However Muslims
came peacefully to Sri Lanka
as traders as they did to Southeast Asia. The real wars of cultural genocide arrived
only with the coming of the Portuguese to Goa in India
and with far greater devastation to Sri Lanka. The subsequent European colonialists in the
form of the Dutch and the British were in comparison relatively benign and the Independence that
followed World War II had strong implications for India-Sri Lankan relations.
“Discovery of India”
The 19th and
20th century "Discovery of
India" especially its history was enriched by a Sinhalese connection in that Indians unlike
the Sinhalese had no real tradition of history up to the Kashmir chronicles of
circa 10th century. In the 19th century
the Mahavamsa filled in key Indian events notably on early India’s
greatest figure Asoka. Nehru had a
fondness for Buddhism as did the “untouchable” Dalit leader Ambedkar the
principal author of the Indian Constitution.
And Buddhist symbols entered both the Indian flag and emblem. Ambedkar's
Dalit-based Buddhist movement had connections with the Sinhalese Buddhist
Renaissance. Indian independence leaders
had striking differences. The science
oriented Nehru’s vision wanting modern India
to go for the best technology and Ghandhi wanting India to return to a simple village
life. Anagarika Dharmapala had a telling comment on the backward looking
Gandhi: “India
cannot leap to modernity on the spinning wheel”. And Mukerji the founder of Jan
Sangh, the precursor of the BJP had been the Secretary of Dharmapala's Maha
Bodhi Society.
Significant Sri Lankan reverberations also occurred in South
Indian politics. Indian Tamil chauvinism
was stoked by a Christian dominated "Jaffna School". Tamil Nadu Dravidianism in rejecting
Brahmanism was in turn influenced by Buddhist ideas then emerging from Sri Lanka (the
yellow sataka of Tamil politicians reflects a Buddhist influence and is readily
acknowledged as such by them). Aspects
of Sinhalese nationalism, that of the populist Hela movement, also was stoked
by invented myths common to the Dravidian movement - both movements elevating
the mythical Ravana to both fact and hero. And more recently while the Indian
authorities on both the Ayodhya issue and the Sethu Samudra project have
declared Ramayana as mythology, our foolish Tourist Board is marketing Sri Lanka as
Ramayana territory. The buildup of
mythology-based sites like Sita Eliya pushed by the Tourist Board will only
create another traditional homelands front.
Before Independence, there
were views from Indian leaders which can only be described as territorial
designs on Sri Lanka. After Independence,
things somewhat stabilized. But the
growth of Tamil Nadu separatism fed Tamil racist and separatist feelings in Sri Lanka. After the Chinese defeated India in 1962, South Indian Tamil separatism
died leading to Sri Lanka
as the only place left for an independent Tamil state. By the early 1970s, large quantities of arms
were smuggled from South India to Sri Lanka
and by the early 1980s, official India got directly into the act by
creating and arming all the separatist groups for cross-border terrorism and an
indirect invasion of the country.
Local bully meets
regional bully
Poor JR adept at being a crude bully of the locals was
caught flat-footed. He had to sign a demeaning unequal treaty with the regional
bully, the so-called Indian Accord as Indian gun boats stood outside the
harbour. More recently, when Sri Lankan
troops in the Jaffna peninsula was about to be overrun and in spite of Indian
pretence at safeguarding Sri Lankan sovereignty India pointedly ignored our
desperate calls for help. And although the initial perception was that the
Norwegians were behind the infamous CFA which granted near sovereignty to the
LTTE, the Indian hand had again been manipulating. Over the last couple of years though, the
Indians seem to have ultimately accepted Sri Lankan sovereignty and co-operated
somewhat with Sri Lankan forces. There
is no doubt that this was because of military support given by Pakistan and China
to Sri Lanka
and the Indian fear of being left out. This in spite of M.K. Narayanan, the
head of Indian spy services in 1987 and so in the thick of planning anti-Sri
Lanka moves being today the National Security Advisor to the Indian Prime
Minister. In this latter post, he succeeded Dixit who implemented matters in Colombo. Narayanan is
still longing for a Lankan defeat. Read his statement this week in Singapore.
As we are now at the tail end of the proxy war against Sri Lanka started by official and unofficial India since the early 1970s, we should now ask
how we should play India. A repetition of the last 35 years must never
ever occur. Let us take an elementay page out of cricket or for that matter out
of any game. Know the background facts, assess them and act correctly. And
remember, large populations do not guarantee primacy in all fields; India is a Lilliput in the Olympic Games and in
many Quality of Life Indices, Sri Lanka
is way-ahead of India.
No correct facts
As for correct facts, these are not known or hardly properly
analyzed. India
has four universities that study Sri Lanka;
Sri Lankan academics who study India
or any foreign country in a serious manner are virtually non-existent. Those
that do, often bat for the opposite side(s). Over 30 years ago, I was involved
with the first foreign relations course in Colombo campus and was active with the
Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies at its founding. I cringe at what
these have now become.
A few brave commentators carry the Sri Lankan message in the
newspapers. But hovering over them are RAW agents and direct or indirect
foreign policy wonks of India
writing in Sri Lankan media. In
addition, there are the various piece agents throwing foreign money to buy
media influence for subversion. And
while the present defence leadership carries out a determined war effort
against the LTTE, no serious defence analyst among retired generals has yet
appeared as has among their Indian counterparts. In fact, some of the retired generals who
failed us are happily consorting with ‘piece’ merchants who plan to downsize
our armed forces! (For pieces of small silver - dollars to be exact.)
Yet key problems remain.
Even while winning the war, and especially afterwards, we must
strengthen our thinking capacities.
Collecting facts, study and analysis on strategic matters should spread
throughout the universities. Before that, we must first close down all those
university-based groups sponsored by funds from dubious organisations which
have been working for the enemy (even the Defence Academy
till recently was infiltrated by ‘piece’ merchants). The erosion of both truth and national will
by these insidious forces are a strong contrast to India where all political forces
join in on matters of perceived national security. Witness not only Tamil Nadu parties but also
the Communist Party of India clamouring last month to illegally annex
Nachhadivu from Sri Lanka.
In the meantime we should recall that there are examples of
smaller countries coexisting well with larger ones. Laos,
Myanmar and Vietnam on the Chinese border, Sweden and Norway
near to Russia, and Singapore next to Malaysia
and Indonesia
are examples for our two countries. But Sri Lanka can also play internal cultural
politics within India as India does on
us using Tamil Nadu cultural politics.
Only if our Foreign Ministry could think creatively we could play the
Buddhist Dalit card. In South India we could play the Karnataka and Andhra
Pradesh card, both these states being extremely wary of Tamilian politics. And in Tamil Nadu itself we could play the
Buddhist Dalit and Buddhist Tamil card while pointing out that although once
Sri Lankan Tamils were all Hindus it is the Christians among them who provide the
separatists’ ideological leadership - a clear parallel to the role of the
Church in India's
North East separatist movement.
Playing such cultural games should not necessarily be
considered as antagonistic to India
but as enriching our mutual relationships in different sectors. Just like we can play multi polar games
inside India, we can also
play multi polar games outside notably with the SAARC countries, with
South-East Asia and China
as indeed we have done in the last few years.
Win-win possibilities
But the more strategic interactions in the coming decades
are not those within Sri Lanka
or within India
or for that matter in the immediate SAARC neighborhood. The major historic – and tectonic - event is
the ongoing shift to Asia in the economic,
political and cultural spheres. The latter
is considered the “soft power” end in a world of coming geopolitical relations,
where massive military power becomes non-usable. Soft power has been used by Bush as foreign
policy in his alliance with Christian evangelists as has Islamic fundamentalists
in certain Muslim countries. China has
already projected her soft power by hosting a major global Buddhist conference.
A binding overlay of Asian culture has been Buddhism and in
addition in some parts of South East Asia,
Hinduism. In contrast to other world belief systems both these spread
peacefully in Asia as did mostly Confucianism.
A strategic partnership building on these earlier overlays could see both India and Sri Lanka coming together in
projecting a joint peaceful soft power.
That could be a win-win situation not only for India and Sri Lanka but also for the entire
Asian region.
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