Financial Times

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist consensus, civilized men began to view India as a regional hegemon with the potential to exercise a civilizing influence in the region. However, the Indian government’s brazen intervention in the takeover bid of Apollo’s local operation puts paid to India’s claims to modernity.

Notwithstanding the modernisation of Indian industry, to all intents and purposes, it looks as if, Indian governance and much of the Indian mind remain stuck in the civilization’s stagnant, corrupt and putrid soil. The persistence of Indian traditions in India does not bode well for the future of a region that is struggling with both material and spiritual progress.

A thug is a physically dominant primitive mind. India’s readiness to abuse its power for something as trivial as the right to retain the Indian control of a subsidiary hospital largely financed by local institutions strikes many of us as a clear measure of India’s backwardness.

Interestingly, India acted as the midwife in the birth of the LTTE, when our nation was regionally in the forefront of economic liberalisation. Today, just when the ideal of transparent financial transactions is becoming the key to the development of our market economy, India has found a compelling reason or an excuse to subvert the rule of law in our economy.

There is, for sure, more superstition than science in the suggestion that India is keen to see us mired in poverty and degradation. Nevertheless, when India acts to protect its own interests in relation to us, they appear to have a ruinous effect on us, for the most part.

This is not to deny India’s right to intervene here or to act violently towards us when our actions pose a national security threat to India.

However, in that case, has India construed Harry Jayewardene’s takeover of Apollo’s local operation to be a national security threat? To do that India would have to deem, in a rather backwardly fashion, that competition is a menace.

In no other sense could India have arrived at such a construal – unless of course Harry Jayewardene is deemed by the Indian government to have financial ties to extremists, particularly to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET, or Army of the Righteous). Yet, of such ties, even Harry Jayewardene seems utterly innocent.

Short of such a consideration, India had no excuse for intervening in the Apollo takeover bid, and its intervention could be seen as a rotten thing that was done to Harry J. and once again to our nation.

Needless to say, in acceding to the Indian demand to suppress a legitimate business transaction from taking place, the government of Sri Lanka has acted with contemptuous disregard for the principles of economic liberty. This, however, is hardly a cause for surprise for Sri Lankans.

The contempt for principles is the hallmark of governance in Sri Lanka. And when those principles have to do with individual liberty and distributive justice, our officialdom overcomes them with a contempt that is indistinguishable from disgust. After all, this is our heritage. Our own moribund traditions find the essence of liberty – the feeling of personality – an illusion.

Moreover, our officialdom is also burdened with the task of nurturing the goodwill of India to deal with the LTTE terrorist menace. Thus burdened by terrorism and disposed by tradition to feel disgust towards the principles of liberty, it becomes a Herculean task to confront a touchy regional hegemon to bring about a just outcome.

Yet our nation cannot be absolved of culpability in this issue. Better leaders and less sycophantic public officials would have at least attempted to uphold the rule of law.

However, in the final analysis, we disintegrated morally because of the Indian bullying. And the interesting question is, would India have bullied a weak nation into moral disintegration on a trivial issue, if it had been an advanced civilization that had consecrated the humanistic awareness of the dignity of being a man?

There is no doubt that a new India is struggling to break out of the old and familiar India.

When it does, the dominant power in our region would be a modernizer. In the meantime, we are condemned to suffer the ill effects of much of what the old India cherishes, from mysticism, pantheism and rhythmic logic to statism, caste-feelings and luridness.