The end of the beginning of AKD-JVP-NPP rule

WE South Asians need to thank Great Power rivals USA and China. The USA has stopped the dangerously escalating Indo-Pak war. China manufactured the weapons that helped Pakistan create the stalemate that gave time and space for the American initiative.

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But the toughest issue remains: India's dangerous regional and global precedent of weaponising the waters of the Indus river which were shared with Pakistan since 1960 under an international agreement which includes the World Bank.

The world has many nuclear powers with far larger stockpiles than India-Pakistan, but nowhere are they face-to-face adversaries who have fought several hot wars. The systems of existing nuclear powers are more established, older, and more stable. However, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons stockpiles atop volatile polities. Nowhere else is the nuclear standoff between two states resting on volatile dominant ideologies fuelled by religion. The nuclear threshold is far less inelastic than it is anywhere else.

Those of us in the neighbourhood are more vulnerable than countries in any other part of the planet. Ceylon/Sri Lanka was never as silent and passive about an Indo-Pakistan clash as it has been under the administration of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. There was no initiative for a peaceful, negotiated solution; no effort to mobilise the South Asian region in support of such a call.

This is probably because Anura Dissanayake has, through his 10 agreements with India, the texts of which he has so far kept secret from Parliament and Sri Lanka’s citizens, tied this country to India’s tail, or if you prefer Mahabharata imagery, to Bharat’s chariot wheel.

President AKD got something else wrong. At an election meeting in Galle, he defended his ‘defence cooperation agreement’ with India, saying Sri Lanka needs to “keep the region secure” and to do so this country needs “military science” and the support of those who, unlike our country, have developed military science and technology.