The World Bank calls it #OneSouthAsia, India’s less dramatic description has been framed as its “neighbourhood first” policy and the US-led Western world has visibly agreed to back India’s premium positioning in the subcontinent.
Welcome to a new regional order-in-the-making that is powered by the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Sri Lanka, where private enterprise such as the Adani Group or, HCL or budget airlines Indigo and SpiceJet are riding on India’s massive power projection across the island nation — that is manifesting in the creation of an energy hub in eastern Trincomalee, in the development of hybrid power projects in islands off Jaffna in the north, while Colombo agrees to share exclusive space in its port terminal in the capital.
Let’s be clear. This leveraging of a country’s national power by private capital is not a new idea. What is new is that the idea has expanded enormously from the corridors of power in South Block and North Block in Delhi and caught root in large parts of South Asia. Everyone understands that the Adani Group, for example, may not have as easily won the bid for developing the west container terminal in Colombo’s port – in partnership with Sri Lanka’s largest private and highly respected company, the John Keells group – or solar farms in Mannar and Pooneryn, if the Narendra Modi government had not, allegedly, nodded in its favour.
Or that the unelected President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is often seen as a cat’s paw for the still-powerful and pro-China Rajapaksas, had not, allegedly, agreed to a lip-teeth partnership (the Chinese phrase, “chun wang chi han” literally means that the teeth feel cold without lips), when he saw the Indian readiness to bail out his economically devastated nation last year. (India has so far given $4 billion in aid and credit lines.)
Two other facts are apparent after travelling through paradise for a full week — not including the special feeling that comes from the Indian Ocean washing your feet in Mannar, or eating a five hopper-fish curry lunch in an amazingly clean dhaba in Nalanda Gedige for only Rs 150 and travelling on a third-class train ticket from Kandy to Colombo as the countryside unspools in front of you.
First, the SAARC regional grouping launched in Dhaka in 1985 – a mouthful known as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation – is comatose, if not dead. Equally, SAARC can only be revived if India is interested, because it is only the Indian economy that can inject the desperately-needed cash into the regional bloodstream. (The World Bank and the ADB would happily fund the revival, but only if India gives the green signal.)
For now, though, the Modi government has decided it will do as much as it can to weaken Pakistan – save a cricket match or two at the Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad – and at the same time, try and integrate the other nations into its own economy. Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh are on top of that list.
Clearly, a historical moment is at hand and Modi, as he winds down his second term in power in Delhi, seems to have grasped it. Modi is also smart enough to realise that the knotty political problems in each of these countries have to be smoothened out – in Sri Lanka it is the refusal of the Sinhala elite, as manifested in Wickremesinghe’s indifference to implementing the 13th Amendment in the Constitution that gives equal rights to the Tamil minority – if the profit-making has to be taken to its logical conclusion.
This means that Modi is willing to accept Wickremesinghe’s empty promises on the 13th Amendment, because he knows the unelected Sri Lankan politician is his best bet in letting Indian business expand their footprint in the island.The Sri Lankan private sector is equally amenable to deepening ties. Connectivity is the name of the game. It’s a perfect win-win for both sides.
Imagine how things have changed since 1987, when the India-Sri Lanka Accord was signed and Indian troops were brought in to keep the peace. To be fair to the Accord, the Trincomalee transformation was a part of it. Forty years and a civil war later, the first steps of bridging the Palk Straits are finally underway.
That’s why Wickremesinghe’s recent visit to India, even if it lasted a mere 27 hours, is so important. It reconfirmed the Trincomalee energy hub idea and unveiled a set of connectivity measures for all classes — ferry for the poor, air-services for the rich and possibly a road causeway for both.
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IOC’s support
It is the Trincomalee energy hub, led by the Sri Lanka branch of Indian Oil Corporation, that will be the real game-changer. Lanka IOC led from the front in helping defuse Sri Lanka’s economic crisis last year, operating the Trincomalee oil terminal to full capacity, mobilising bowsers, operating each of its 250 petrol pumps across the island – India’s $500 million credit line was fully useful in maintaining LIOC’s liquidity, when its Sri Lankan partner ran out of cash, in fact, when the country ran out of cash. (Remember that it was the rank mismanagement of the economy that precipitated the anger of the people, causing an upset on the political front.)
Not just this. Sri Lanka’s diplomatic corps, its many security agencies, its essential services like hospitals and ambulances, its hospitality industry – Lanka IOC kept its head down and worked round the clock in keeping the country going last year. At the risk of applauding an Indian PSU’s work in a country that has been infamously critical of India, Lanka IOC’s work went a long way in assuaging Colombo’s fears and letting Wickremesinghe sign off on the energy hub idea in Delhi last month.
IOC will, of course, order a feasibility study, but here is how the broad idea is expected to unfold: IOC’s oil refinery in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, will connect with the shortest point across the Palk Straits in Sri Lanka (whether Jaffna, Mannar or elsewhere, where a terminal will be built) with a multi-product oil pipeline (both black oil and white oil) that will wind its way toward Trincomalee.
Just before the economic crisis hit the island nation, Lanka IOC had signed the lease with its Sri Lankan partner to operate the British-era lower and upper oil tank farms it has since partially refurbished – a lease that had been pending since the 1987 accord. The large storage facilities are expected to become the linchpin in Sri Lanka’s energy security and help stabilise India’s neighbourhood.
It will replace the Iran-built storage facilities built in the 1960s in Sapugaskanda just outside Colombo, which is so old it is constantly shutting down. As for the Chinese-built Hambantota oil refinery expected to come up near the Chinese-built Hambantota port in the deep Sri Lankan south, that is fully for export purposes.
The second leg of the India-Sri Lanka economic transformation is to bridge the yawning gulf between Indian Tamil and Sri Lankan Tamil, which over the decades has been a key reason for the deepest misunderstanding between the two nations.
What better way to do that than to revive the ferry-cum-train services that ran from Nagapattinam to Kankesanthurai till 1964 when a super-cyclone hit the India-Ceylon coast and succeeded in swallowing a passenger train that had set off from Pamban Island (between Ceylon and the coast of Tamil Nadu) for Dhanushkodi, full of people that had disembarked from the ferry from Talaimannar. Dhanushkodi, once bustling with a customs house, hotels and markets, has never been rebuilt. A thin strip of road ends in the sea.
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So Rameswaram it will be, next door, complete with a Navy pier and a berthing facility and the proposal of constructing another jetty – will you need a 2.5 m deep jetty to carry a RORO (roll on, roll off vehicle, which can carry about 250 passengers plus cars), for which some dredging will be needed, or will a LOLO (Load on, Load off vehicle, which can carry about 150 passengers but no cars) do? A new bridge that can open up for larger vessels is being constructed on Pamban Island.
A few months ago, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) brought all the actors together – the Ministry of Shipping, the Tamil Nadu Maritime Board (which has asked IIT Madras to carry out a feasibility study) and sundry state bureaucrats – to push the ferry. The MEA promised to streamline certification. Seems the ball is rolling along nicely.
Significantly in Sri Lanka, the ferry idea is taking hold not just in the Tamil population, but also among the Sinhala Buddhist – the monk orders who travel in large numbers to India, because it is the land of the Buddha, and who cannot afford the expensive air fares are said to be especially keen.
Clearly, closer integration is an idea whose time has come. Everything else – including a certain insecurity about China expanding its footprint across the island – can wait.
Jyoti Malhotra is a senior consulting editor at ThePrint. She tweets @jomalhotra. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)