New Delhi: Finance Minister of Sri Lanka, Basil Rajapaksa is scheduled to visit India on Tuesday to strengthen the economic partnership between the two nations and seek more financial assistance as part of the island country's firefighting act to deal with the economic crisis.
This will be his second visit to New Delhi in the last three months, demonstrating the scale of the crisis Sri Lanka tries to keep itself afloat in. The country has already sought a 1-billion US dollar credit line from India.
In an exclusive interview with ETV Bharat, Kanwal Sibal, Former Foreign Secretary of India deciphered the Sri Lankan situation and suggested how India should deal with the situation. India, he said, has given a lot of financial assistance to Sri Lanka. "Just a few weeks back, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister G L Peiris visited India. India had also announced a USD 900 million loan for Sri Lanka to build up its depleted foreign reserves and offered other additional financial assistance to mitigate the economic crisis," Sibal said.
Asked if New Delhi should offer additional financial assistance to the struggling country, Sibal said, "Yes! We should because it's important to our overall security interests. China has made deep inroads in Sri Lanka by pouring huge amounts of capital and there's an issue of China's debt-trap too. But one should be aware that the relationship between China and Sri Lanka is based on money, it's just an 'economic relationship' and nothing beyond that. However, India-Sri Lanka relationship has wider dimensions, be that of culture, shared history and people to people interaction."
On the impact this timely assistance by India shall have on the bilateral relationship, the former Foreign Secretary said it was time Sri Lanka realised and acknowledged its 'real friends'. "The Chinese have themselves said that your friends in your neighborhood are far more important than the friends who are far away. So, I hope the way New Delhi has been responding to the economic crisis of Sri Lanka by financially assisting them whenever they need our help would change the thinking of the ruling government of Sri Lanka in terms of the future relationship," he said.
"There's an important issue of Sri Lankan Tamils as well. Because of this, there has been an undercurrent of tensions and that has not disappeared. We have been continuously advising them on the 13th Amendment to solve the Tamil issue," the former ambassador added.
To a question of China's investments in Sri Lanka and their covert strategy to dominate over the Indian Ocean, Sibal said that Sri Lanka has always pursued a policy similar to that of Nepal when it comes to India and China. "There are elements in the bureaucracy and in the ruling government of Sri Lanka who are not particularly friendly towards us. At the Colombo Security Conclave in the Maldives, India's NSA Ajit Doval laid the future prospect of tackling drug trafficking and cyber-security challenges and few even called it as Asia's QUAD. So, we are in constant touch with our partners and are enhancing our maritime cooperation," he said.
The former Ambassador said that at a time when Sri Lanka faces its biggest economic collapse, it was India and not China that came to the forefront with the intention to help. "In fact, the Sri Lankan government caved in to Beijing and had agreed to pay almost $6.9 million for a shipment of fertilizers that it had previously rejected as substandard," he said.
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