Delhi or Beijing? Which of these two capitals is a newly elected president in India’s neighbourhood going to visit first is now a routine guessing game. Until 2010, it was taken for granted that a newly elected president in Colombo would fly to India first. The Sri Lankan media used to call it “paying puja to Delhi.” The guessing began only after the military rout of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009, when China began funding a confident President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s project to stay in office forever, without asking uncomfortable questions about civilian casualties, disappearances, and other alleged human rights violations during the war.
In 2019, India finessed this tradition of the “first visit” when a Rajapaksa was re-elected to office after a five year gap. The External Affairs Minister flew to Colombo with an invitation to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and ensured he came to Delhi first. After the election of Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD), Minister S. Jaishankar again made the first move to ensure that the new President, who also heads the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a party historically close to Beijing, and hostile to India, would visit Delhi first.
Recognising New Realities
As it rolled out the red carpet for AKD during his December 14-15 visit, Delhi was eager to make it clear that it was honouring the sweeping mandate for JVP-National People’s Power, that included a majority of the seats in Tamil areas – a first for any Sinhalese national party – in the mid-November parliamentary elections. It indicated a pragmatic coming to terms with the leadership change, unlike Delhi’s cold reaction to the change of leadership in Bangladesh through street protests that forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee and take refuge in India, and in Maldives, where the election of President Mohamed Muizzu, who was earlier part of the “India-Out” campaign, sent India into a tizzy. The absolute majority secured by the JVP/NPP also put to rest any doubts about AKD’s own mandate – he is the first president whose victory was secured in a second round counting after he failed to get over fifty percent of the votes in the direct election, in which he did not get Tamil votes either.