The ironies of history

In his tract on the ethnic conflict, written on the eve of the second Indian intervention, Rohana Wijeeweera framed Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka as part of a wider historical process, underscoring the island’s long history of occupation by foreign forces. Neither Wijeeweera nor the 1980s parrots advocated for or justified violence against the Sri Lankan Tamil community, even those who were wrongly viewed as “fifth columns.” Yet in making such observations, Wijeeweera trivialised both the structural causes of the civil war and the geopolitics of Indian Intervention in the region.

- By UDITHA DEVAPRIYA

The JVP is currently the dominant party in the NPP alliance, which a fortnight ago hosted the Indian Prime Minister, bestowed on him an award described as the “highest honour” reserved only foreign leaders. Look him around Colombo and then Anuradhapura, and signed around, if not more than, six agreements, one of them to do with defence and another on power and energy. On the day of his arrival, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya was in Paris, participating at a conference on the preservation of the “Sacred City of Anuradhapura.” The visit transpires certainly against the backdrop of rising global tensions, and if the press releases are right, the JVP appears to have turned pragmatic. Certainly, the irony of an Indian Prime Minister being taken to Anuradhapura by the NPP should not be lost sight of: In his tract, Wijeeweera traced the origins of Indian intervention in the traced the origins of Indian intervention in the country to the invasion of the Anuradhapura kingdom in the 11th century AD.

For Sri Lanka remains a mixed bag. Some advocate for closer integration, economic and even physical, others caution against it, and still others – including the JVP in 30 years ago, and countless nationalist outfits today – perceive it as an imperialist power. As Krishantha Cooray has put it in a recent op-ed, while India-Sri Lanka relations have been described as one of “irreversible excellence” under certain administrations, they have been neither irreversible nor excellent.”