By P.K. Balachandran
Colombo, March 24 (IANS) Nationalists among Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese community see India as a critical element in their country’s affairs. But they are divided on the desirability of allowing India to influence the island’s political and economic life.
Among the leading Sinhalese nationalist organisations, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) is the biggest, with 38 MPs. It is deeply suspicious of India’s intentions vis-à-vis Sri Lanka and makes no bones about it.
The smaller Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) is part of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s administration. It feels that New Delhi is not inherently against Sri Lanka, and so Sri Lanka should address India’s concerns for mutual benefit.
Both the JVP and the JHU are important in the current political context. The Rajapaksa government is a coalition of diverse parties and has only a razor thin majority in the 225-seat parliament.
The government had to take in the JHU because of the shortage of numbers and is critically dependent on the JVP to get the annual budget passed.
The Sinhalese constitute over 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s population. The majority of them vote for the secular or multi-ethnic national parties like the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the opposition United National Party (UNP).
However, both the parties are wary of the ginger groups among the Sinhalese majority and have had to be accommodative towards them from time to time.
It is groups like the JVP, JHU, the Patriotic National Movement and the National Bhikku Front which set the agenda for the majority community on all important national questions involving relations between the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims, particularly over emands for territorial autonomy.
This is the reason why the major political parties have balked at giving any autonomy to the Tamils or Muslims, or any of the provinces for that matter. Even a proposal to fully implement the devolution package already in the constitution in the form of the 13th amendment is opposed tooth and nail by Sinhalese groups. Successive governments have let it largely unimplemented.
The opposition is partly because India had once backed the Tamil demand for autonomy.
The JVP, which has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the Sinhalese ultras, has accused India of forcing President Rajapaksa to implement the 13th amendment. It feels that India desired an autonomous Tamil-speaking northeast to dominate it.
Mostly recently, the JVP said that India wants to install a puppet regime in the east through the eastern provincial council elections in May.
India has already infiltrated and taken over the key energy sector, the JVP has charged. It views the Sri Lanka-India cooperation in energy generation and distribution as the beginning of New Delhi’s economic enslavement of Colombo.
While the JHU may be with the JVP on the devolution or autonomy issue, it differs on the issue of India.
JHU spokesman Udaya Gammanpila is quoted by Sunday Observer as saying that Colombo must find ways of getting along with New Delhi for the simple reason that India is Sri Lanka’s only neighbour and is also a growing super power.
“If we have hostile relations with that neighbour, we will definitely have unnecessary problems,” Gammanpila said.
If the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was created by India in the 1980s, it was because the then Sri Lankan government had been hostile to India, the JHU leader recalled.
“Today we are suffering unnecessarily as a result,” he pointed out.
On the JVP’s call to oust India from Sri Lanka, Gammanpila said that the JVP was nothing but the “southern front of the LTTE”.
He argued that the LTTE would have been finished in the late 1980s had the JVP not campaigned to oust the Indian troops then battling the guerrillas in northeast Sri Lanka.
Gammanpila said that over the years India had become anti-LTTE but he warned that it might become anti-Sri Lanka and anti-Sinhalese if Colombo turned anti-India because of JVP prodding. “Then they will become the enemy’s friend,” he said.