Editorial

The controversy surrounding the admission or non-admission of local students to the Kotelawala Defence University’s (KDU) Medical Faculty, while allowing fee-paying foreign students to enrol, emerged to public attention for a few days and then submerged quickly, with a final word on what the Government’s decision is given only on Friday, allowing local students to apply. Sanity has prevailed.

This vacillation all these weeks with an initial announcement that local students will be shut out has brought into focus the wider admission scheme to state universities in Sri Lanka. It is so skewed that 54,000 young people, mostly seeking first degrees, applied for higher studies visas to the United Kingdom alone last year, according to the British Council. With a population of 22 million, Sri Lanka came second in the world only to China with a population of 1.2 billion, beating even India. This dubious record has prompted the British government to put a lid on Sri Lankans applying for student visas, as it is also found that many of them overstay illegally. And this is only to the UK.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) data for 2024 reveal that only 7.4 percent of qualified applicants were admitted to the 12 state medical schools in Sri Lanka, leaving out as many as 92.6 percent who had made the grade. In the 7.4 percent are some who qualify under the outdated district quota system, and in the 92.6 percent are those who should enter on merit but are shut out due to the unavailability of places.

The ruling JVP/NPP election manifesto speaks of providing “quality education,” but it will not be able to provide either quantity or quality if the status quo remains.

The Government appeared trapped between the realities of the situation and its own conduct in opposing private medical colleges shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘Peratugaami’ student unions, which came to the forefront of mainstream politics through the Aragalaya of 2022.

The battle cry is that free education is at risk; that children of the rich will take the places of those from poorer backgrounds. It’s a class struggle the old socialists long abandoned the world over. The entire South Asian region has private, regulated medical colleges other than the Maldives and Bhutan. All Southeast Asian countries, including Communist Viet Nam, have several private medical education offerings even to foreign students along with their own youth. Sri Lanka, despite its long and much-vaunted history of medical education, is grappling with indecision to join the queue with no plans to increase the number of state colleges and disallowing private colleges.

Take the cases of secondary school education, hospitals and transport that have private participation. Why not then private medical colleges to cater to the growing needs of a growing population? Medical education is handled by the Health Ministry and the Higher Education Ministry, with the KDU coming under the Defence Ministry. Between 800 and 1000 Sri Lankan students who have gone abroad with the country’s foreign exchange sit for the Medical Council exam to register themselves in Sri Lanka every year. Many others who have taken foreign exchange and qualify as doctors abroad don’t return at all. There is a ‘medical mafia’ involved in sending youth out for studies. Yet, foreign students are allowed to come and do their medical studies and clinicals with local patients, while Sri Lankan students are left out of the system. That was apartheid.

Friend, foe or frenemy?

India’s External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar is acting more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when he speaks, especially on Sri Lanka.

He cannot be considered just another South Indian political hothead who uses Sri Lanka as a ‘whipping boy’ for political mileage given the high office he holds. On the one hand, he speaks eloquently of his government’s foreign policy charm offensive based on a ‘Neighbourhood First’ and SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) strategy—then, he beats the Kachchativu drum that is directly aimed at Sri Lanka.

Attacking India’s opposition Congress Party for what the BJP government calls ‘ceding’ the islet to Sri Lanka through agreements in 1974 and 1976, his latest outburst is based on the premise that they were signed during the first and only period in India of Emergency Rule—and therefore, he argues, when the Lok Sabha was a muzzled Parliament.

Marking the 50th anniversary of India’s Emergency rule, he was speaking to his BJP youth, indoctrinating them with this false narrative at the expense of good relations with Sri Lanka. In the process, he degrades India’s then-Opposition stalwarts, who included upright men of moral courage such as Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai—and also, later, BJP leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, who challenged then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and defeated her draconian government. They never challenged, as far as one knows, India’s sovereign agreement with Sri Lanka on Kachchativu.

This is the minister’s second shot at bringing up the Kachchativu bogey, where Indian fishermen are raping the marine resources in the seas around it at the expense of the northern Sri Lankan fishermen and the Sri Lankan economy.

These remarks should be taken serious note of by Colombo, which has rushed into signing MoUs with India and is keeping them secret from the Sri Lankan public at the behest of India.

It is also concerning that an important Indian Central Government minister can—50 years after a sovereign bilateral agreement—claim that its own Parliament was incapacitated at the time it signed an international treaty and question its validity.

Sri Lanka is still struggling to get a date from Dr. Jaishankar’s government for discussions on its application under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) for the exploitation of undersea mineral resources in the Bay of Bengal waters, as a spoiler application has been submitted by India. The fishermen poaching issue is being sidetracked. And there is a fresh controversy over the sale of shares at the Colombo Dockyard to an Indian company and if it is part of the top-secret MoU on Defence Cooperation with the JVP/NPP Government.

The Government need not bite the bait of reacting to the Indian minister’s contentious contentions on Kachchativu and make a non-issue an issue. However, it is crucial that the Government be mindful of the mindset of those VVIPs from across the Palk Strait in its dealings with them.