Columns

So now some political card readers or whatever they read seem convinced that they know where this country is heading. Maybe they have been communicating with Mr Trump. Just the other day he sent a torpedo into the belly of a passing Iranian ship not too far from our waters, without even a by-your-leave.

And a couple of days earlier America’s big chief of the navy, Admiral Stephen Koehler, was in Colombo hobnobbing with our own big chief about maritime security and defence cooperation. What Aristotelian matters there are to discuss, but not even a whisper in the ear about torpedoes being released to test the temperature of Indian Ocean water just in case the admiral needed to carry a flask of ice to keep him nice and cosy.

But then you don’t expect Trump, whose background is etched in dubious acts ending up as judicial records that spell trouble, coming closer to our perimeters unless he hears underwater minerals rattling now that Mike Carney has read the riot act.

One of America’s astute foreign affairs thinkers, if not the best, Henry Kissinger had this to say about America. “It is dangerous to be America’s enemy and fatal to be its friend.”

Now that we got that little piece of advice hopefully instilled in their minds and other useless pieces of the body hanging about like the appendix, one might turn to our original interest in monitoring the NPP’s foreign policy ventures from the election campaigns to today’s ’zigzagging trajectories’ which have still not settled Sri Lanka’s foreign policy more firmly.

While I had read and listened as much as I could to NPP pre- and post-election perorations, I hardly heard any reference to foreign policy – least of all non-alignment – and where it would head as the new political alliance stepped into the battlefield like Mark Antony in Philippi.

As one who had taken a keen interest in the country’s foreign affairs from the time of joining Lake House in 1962, immediately after university, it was an extremely interesting period for Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike, who had picked up the mantle from her assassinated husband, SWRD Bandaranaike, whose active interest in foreign affairs needs no mention. In the few years he led the country, he steered the nation in the direction of Third World politics. Broadly speaking, it paved the way for non-alignment.

Those interested in the emergence of a new party were keen to see whether anything of the old JVP remained with the newly branded NPP or whether Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who happens to head both the old and the new, would send his former Marxist gurus into retirement and search for some new mentors who would be less Kim Jong-il and more Narendra Modi, the prime minister who readily tapped Mr Dissanayake on the back in a fatherly gesture long before he could make it to the starting blocks.

Following his good neighbourly policies, the thoughtful Mr Modi had Comrade (or was it?) Anura Kumara provided a free flight to Bharat and all its wonders well before the elections, showing the Indian chief’s (brown by the way, not red) political acumen, adding more confusion in the minds of those desirous of knowing where Das Capital would end up and what AKD – as popularly known – would tell President Xi in his next stop, Beijing. President Xi was probably ready to present him a gift of Mao’s worthy sayings. But Mao was old hat, like the words of Sirimao, to the newly emerging NPP.

Though I waited with bated breath, all I learnt of foreign policy was when President Dissanayake mentioned with great firmness after his two visits to our friends near and far that Sri Lanka would follow a “balanced” policy, which obviously was referring to India and China.

So I’m wondering whether the rest of the world would be in a state of imbalance if they stepped into the foreign ministry where resides the foreign minister who was in some sort of imbalance when our long-standing policy of non-alignment appeared too complicated for our minister to deal with when he ran into trouble in Geneva and quickly headed home to save people’s money.

So Marx-Lenin of the past seemed kaput, enlivening the thinking of the new-fangled smart alecs of the NPP, some hardly knowing that a little Lenin is a dangerous thing, if one might be pardoned for throwing Alexander Pope among the neoliberal IMF pigeons who only a few months earlier had been discarded as new western imperialism ready to drag this country into a former Greco-Roman amphitheatre where our new NPP gladiators could display their intellectual prowess.

But there still are those hard heads from yesteryear claiming that something of the old order that brought village peasantry and the proletariat to the fore—ahead of Sri Lanka’s long-serving left that preceded the country’s independence—deserves recognition for their achievements.

One could foresee from the early days of the NPP’s emergence that a clash of political differences would surface. Some readers of the political horoscope thought that something strange was afoot between two sides of the same coin – so to say – between Anura Kumara Dissanayake at the presidential secretariat and Tilvin Silva at the JVP’s powerful Pelawatte Party office, where the party general secretary Tilvin Silva calls the tune.

While the Presidential Secretariat shows a pro-Indian and pro-western commitment, judging by the MoUs signed with India, the United States and the once-despised IMF, now a close companion, and more than an inclination to tilt to India and the west where the sun sets (and seems to be setting faster than usual), Tilvin Silva’s recent visit to China showed that another thought process is beginning to flower, where the JVP’s centre of gravity is beginning to function after a couple of years in seeming hibernation.

Even before Tilvin Silva’s China visit left a suggestive sign of what was brewing in this 20-odd conglomeration called an alliance, some were said to be contemplating a clash between two schools of Marxist thought – the old and new schools.

Nothing else in the foreign relations seemed to happen except booking a quick departure from Geneva and shaking hands after signing MoUs with nearly half the globe but not disclosing vital sections of the treaties – such as those with India and the US. More recently, of course, the foreign minister had a more difficult task trying to answer an Indian journalist about what it would be with some stranded Iranian sailors isolated after Trump made soldiers in their transport.

But then answering journalists’ questions is sometimes like facing Muralidaran. Anyway, quite a long time before Trump opened his dirty tricks department, this column had pointed to the governing NPP’s diplomatic driving.

It is because of this sleight of hand that this column on October 26 last year was headlined “Signalling left and going right is the new turn in politics” and later in late December picked on the same theme with a column headed “Where do we go from here – left, right or who knows”.

While military clashes promoted by the Trump administration and Israel’s killers let loose the dogs of war, Sri Lanka was still playing it cool.

But then Trump’s Indian Ocean adventure exploding torpedoes close to comfort and those who acted in the last couple of years as there was foreign policy but balancing pots and pans suddenly and unexpectedly broke into loud announcements and other JVP style slogans declaring that Sri Lanka is non-aligned and it follows a non-aligned policy.

Now where did that come from? After all this time when non-alignment had suffered rigour mortis, there it arose like Lazarus. Great deeds indeed.

If Trump cannot have a Nobel Prize, then surely Sri Lanka deserves it.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London, where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief of Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)