By Kabir Taneja
India may be celebrating the election result in Sri Lanka, but China is in the region for the long haul.
On January 18, a Reuters reported claimed that Sri Lanka’s now former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had expelled the station chief of India’s intelligence agency in Colombo after accusing him of working against his government and supporting the opposition.
India denied the claim, but the report serves as an example of Rajapaksa’s thorny attitude towards New Delhi, irrespective of the face presented by public diplomacy.
The docking last September of a Chinese naval submarine in Colombo turned heads in New Delhi, just as the new government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was still getting up to speed. The event underlined the magnitude of Chinese influence in Sri Lanka under Rajapaksa, despite assurances from Beijing that the docking was a routine stopover to re-stock on supplies before heading to the Gulf of Aden to participate in anti-piracy operations.
A month later in October, the Indian government quietly launched an inter-ministerial review exercise to revisit India’s policies for the Indian Ocean. This followed on the heels of China’s proclaimed Maritime Silk Road, its growing influence around the Bay of Bengal, and the development of the Pakistani port of Gwadar, which is to be operated exclusively by Beijing. Glimpses of this exercise were seen the same month when Modi visited Myanmar, Australia and Fiji. China is the biggest foreign investor in Australia, and has liberally provided economic aid, loans and investments to Myanmar and Fiji. A few weeks later, China docked two of its submarines again in Sri Lanka.
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