By Gamini Seneviratne – 

Evidently, the High Commission for India in Sri Lanka has no comments to offer on my previous note on this subject. Hence it is to be hoped that the following particulars would jog its memory and dissuade India from its current efforts towards appropriating our riches under various guises. Any such exertions would certainly alienate us further and destroy what High Commissioner, Santosh Jha sought to portray as our ‘Civilisational Bonds’.

A recent example of the bonds he has in mind would be his pseudo complaint relating to a free trade agreement; the value of imports by India far exceeds the pittance that Sri Lanka has been permitted to import from India. He did not mention / list what India imported from here –surely, it wouldn’t have included the fob value of the tons of fish harvested from within our territorial waters by their thieving fishermen.

Let us go back, not all the way to the import of indentured labor by the British for the plantations they established on land stolen from our people, but to the Indo-Ceylon Pact of 1964. It was entered into by Lal Bahadur Shastri, the secular-oriented Prime Minister of India who succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, during her initial tenure as Prime Minister here. The discussions between them had evidently proceeded in a spirit of amity which the officials in the Indian delegation had set out to break. The talks which were scheduled to run for two days had been stretched – until Shirley Amerasinghe, who led our team of officials, had addressed P M Shastri direct and he had intervened.

The central part of the pact was the granting of Ceylonese citizenship to 300,000 of the Indian estate workers in Sri Lanka, while 525,000 of them would be repatriated to India.

In 1981, it was estimated that only 280,000 had been repatriated to India and India declared, in a move typical of their decision makers, that “it no longer considered the pact binding as its (non-existent) ‘implementation period’ had expired”.

The mendacity of those persons (politicians, public servants) who determine what the Indian state actually does bears comparison, not only to the practices of Europeans, ‘perfidious Albion’ being the standard case, but to the actions of the administration in the USA now brought to its abysmal depths by Donald Trump and his associates.

Not much further in time, India sheltered and trained groups of armed terrorists who sought to overthrow our government and establish a separate state within our country.  In order to jog memories, I give below a brief extract from my poem titled “Of Guilt” published in our Journal of Humanities in the late 1990s:

A week ago, the Freedom Fighters came

to the hamlet of Dutuwewa as it lay asleep,

and barred its doors ad set the huts ablaze.

Those who broke out were shot or hacked to death.

Tisawathie, her time come, her children

collapsing around her, was felled at her door,

her baby, half burnt, still slipping out of her womb.

In the legislatures of the world, in the foreign press,

the butchers are heard, over and over,

with concern, with respect, these days of Agni.

And, looking at yet more recent happenings, we should acknowledge that  what the rest of the world was made to recognize, ab initio, as the ‘aragalaya’, was far from being a popular uprising.

Among other unacceptable actions / policies by the government, it was a direct response to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa preventing the most influential businessman in India, Gautam Adani, gaining access to our north-western coastal lands for a project to generate power for supply to India.

The ‘aragalaya’ that came to be drummed up was fronted by young ‘Colombians’ for the US -Indian alliance’s goal of enforcing ‘regime change’. The object became clear quite quickly:  It was to install their friends, led by Ranil Wickremasinghe (who had lost his seat at the polls) and others (who had not contested any election in this country) being smuggled into parliament by US Ambassador Ms. Chung and associates.

Not too long thereafter, the same forces overthrew the duly elected government of Nepal. The respect for ‘Democracy’ or, indeed for legitimacy of any shape or kind, was demonstrated by those who carried out that coup d’etat by setting fire to the Parliament in Kathmandu.

As for us, you may be sure that the further elevation of politic-catchers such as Milinda Moragoda, the most disgraceful, is not accidental. Neither are the PR efforts now being made to boost the image and the political orientation of those who are yet in the Opposition but provably squat at the nether ends of the IMF / USA / India combine.

We, the citizens of Sri Lanka, have also been informed, with not a shred of detail, of an “Indo-Lanka Defense Pact”.

Defense for whom, from whom? With access to land, harbors, air-fields? Where – meaning In Sri Lanka or India?

If at all Sri Lanka needs a Defense Pact, it should be with Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Should anyone dispute that proposal, let them speak.

Related articles: 

Sri Lanka & India – Fact & Fiction: Part I