Devolution and Sri Lanka’s defence

The commitment of President Kumaratunga to a political solution (however imprudently over-generous those packages were) and the promise to implement 13A repeatedly made by President Rajapaksa and his troika of top representatives (who included two of his siblings) to New Delhi, constituted an important factor – apart from the murder of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE – in keeping India ‘on side,’

when the Army under CBK liberated Jaffna and when President Rajapaksa finally crushed the LTTE despite Western moves for a ceasefire and Indian elections (including in Tamil Nadu).

This last factor explains why President Rajapaksa saw fit to reiterate the commitment to implement fully the 13th Amendment, in two summit level communiqués, issued just days AFTER the conclusion of the war, on 21 and 23 May 2009.

Opening for external intervention

The specific form that provincial devolution took in ’87-’88, that of coercive Indian diplomacy and the 13th Amendment, was due precisely to the decades-long delay in implementing such devolution domestically. Just as the blockage of a domestic process of devolution to the provinces resulted in or provided the opening for external intervention, an ethnically unilateral abolition or disembowelling of existing arrangements for devolution is likely to revive such external interference and intrusion, and do so in an external environment that is at least as unpropitious as that of the 1980s and arguably even more so. This may dovetail with the strategic designs of the global Tamil separatist network and result in jeopardising Sri Lanka’s military achievement and our strategic assets.

Therefore, though the implementation of provincial level devolution in the form of the existing 13th Amendment constitutes a risk, a significantly greater risk, on balance, would be posed to our sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity by the unilateral scrapping or permanent freezing of such devolution.

Balance of power and strategic vulnerability

My basic argument in favour of provincial rather than district level devolution is threefold: domestic geopolitics, politics, and regional geopolitics. Or, to reduce it a single factor, the realities of the balance of power and the island’s strategic vulnerability.

Firstly, it is not merely the Jaffna District or any single district in the north, but the Northern Province that has a Tamil majority. The Tamils of that province have evolved and crystallised a collective identity that the Sri Lankan State must accommodate, institutionally and structurally, if it is to remain as a single overarching entity over the very long duration. Military dominance alone cannot ensure this and in any case such dominance is both prohibitively expensive to sustain and easily neutralised by far stronger players over the horizon.

Secondly, it takes two to tango; this is all about dialogue and negotiation, and no administration has been able to persuade a Tamil party of any significance to accept the district as the main unit of devolution. It is a non-starter and the Government would have no representative Tamil partner for a process of political dialogue and reconciliation.

Thirdly, the vital strategic and security realities. The usually well-informed political column of The Sunday Times (Colombo) reported that “...These sources said India’s External Affairs Minister Khurshid ‘politely told’ Peiris that any such measures by the Government of Sri Lanka would be ‘at its own risk’ and would force the New Delhi Government to react with ‘firm measures’. He has also cautioned that Sri Lanka would be isolating itself in the international community.” (‘Storm Clouds Still Over CHOGM’ 19 May 2013)

That report (which pertained to 13A, as distinct from the one about the acquisition of 6,000 acres) has not been contradicted so far, by the Government. My collection of back issues of the Lanka Guardian is replete with such statements made in the years leading to the intervention of 1987 – accompanied by the accurate editorial reading of those (Indian) tea leaves.

Tamil secessionist network

The sophisticated and increasingly influential Tamil secessionist network (of which the Tigers are only a component) is attempting to widen the contradictions between Sri Lanka and India, Sri Lanka and the US, and Sri Lanka and the Indo-US axis.

Watching with pride the V-day march past on TV, I was struck by the crucial importance of protecting our superbly honed (and hopefully, not corrosively over-politicised) military machine from the trap that the Tamil secessionists are setting for it, namely to place it in the line of fire of Indian kinetic power, backstopped diplomatically and strategically by the US.

The unravelling of Yugoslavia – whose fine army, steeped in guerrilla fighting traditions had long deterred Stalin’s Russia – commenced precisely with the abolition of the autonomous status of the province of Kosovo. That unravelling was the result of political lobbying and argumentation by Serbian ultranationalists, along exactly the lines that the JHU, NFF and Bodu Bala Sena are engaging in today.

It is not that intervention is already planned or even considered. However, the atmosphere, diplomatic (Geneva, New York), conceptual (retroactive R2P) and world opinion, is building up – or being created — which is not unpropitious for such intervention and in which any intervention would be readily endorsed. It certainly went uncontested in 1987.

The last time Sri Lanka was able to roll back that intervention because the LTTE took on the IPKF, generating collective cognitive dissonance in Tamil Nadu which in turn led to VP Singh making and fulfilling an electoral promise to withdraw Indian troops. In any future scenario of intervention, this factor will not operate. There will be no Tamil army fighting the Indians or anyone else who may come along. There will also be no foreign troops in the Sinhala areas, and therefore no possibility of a heroic, protracted, patriotic guerrilla war of national liberation against them.

The Sri Lankan armed forces, being almost totally Sinhala, will find it impossible to wage guerrilla war in Tamil areas, with restive Tamil civilians in its rear, against a foreign interventionist force, which is in any case able to neutralise our most significant military assets not just in the north but all over the island, in a single strike wave. There will be an overwhelming force projection which cuts off the Tamil areas and imposes punitive strikes (as happened to Serbia) in case of massive Tamil civilian casualties due to reactive ‘ethnic cleansing’ (real or perceived) in the south.

Worst-case scenarios

Any lucid strategic thinking does not proceed from intention but capacity, and plans for worst case scenarios, not best case ones. Sri Lanka must make note of its security environment and its strategic vulnerabilities. Changes in that environment are, in all probability, not aimed at Sri Lanka and have nothing to do with us, but can also be used against us in a worst-case scenario. It is the stance of an ostrich to assume that Indian and US planners do not have Hambantota on their maps and have planned for neutralisation of a possible asset of their Asian rival. The dispositions that result from such planning can be used for other contingencies.

I would draw attention not only to the speculation about US military arrangements with the Maldives, but far more importantly, the supplementing of the existing Indian naval air base in the south (which has the longest airstrip in the region) with the brand new airbase in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, to which India plans to transfer its top-of-the line Sukhoi SU30MKI warplanes.

One notes that neither China nor Pakistan lie to the south of India. Sri Lanka does lie within the operational arc (and the intersecting Indo-US arcs) of such arrangements. Therefore, large security zones and military dispositions provide no real security beyond a limited point and may indeed prove excessively vulnerable (especially to stand-off weaponry).

The bottom line is that if Sri Lanka’s costly military victory which has given us back our natural borders is to be made permanent; if Sri Lanka’s fine military is to be ‘ target hardened’; if Sri Lanka’s security is to be truly assured, it cannot be done purely or primarily by hard power alone, but by restoring our soft power. Provincial devolution in the form of the 13th Amendment (perhaps with mutually-agreed-upon swaps in the concurrent list), is a political solution which lies at the cusp of acceptance, however grudging, by both Sinhalese and Tamils communities. It will help us to strategically re-stabilise our relations with India which (as Geneva 2012 and 2013 have shown) have deteriorated since 2009 and seem to be on a slippery slope. Moderate, prudently centripetal provincial devolution is an indispensable part of our national defence shield.