Indian don dismisses RAW involvement in regime change

By Manjula Fernando

Corruption, nepotism, lack of transparency and accountability in governance and authoritarian tendencies were the fundamental causes for the defeat of Mahinda Rajapaksa at the January 2015 elections’, an Indian Professor in International Relations Ashwani Sharma said dismissing any RAW involvement in the regime change in Sri Lanka.

In an interview with the Sunday Observer, the Short Term Chair of Colombo University’s Centre for Contemporary Indian Studies, Prof. Sharma said blaming RAW for political electoral engineering and bringing in a regime change was an ‘affront to the socio-political intelligence of Sri Lankan people’.

He was responding to a question if there was credibility to the theory that RAW engineered the ousting of former President Rajapaksa, an allegation whipped up by the defeated party.

He said, “These serious democratic deficits led to a silent and unspoken understanding between the vibrant middle-class, robust media, and civil society in Sri Lanka to change the regime for a more democratic, transparent, accountable, and corruption-free governance.”

Praising Sri Lanka for the establishment of strong democratic institutions, Prof. Sharma said it was more important that the spirit of democracy had been successfully inculcated among its people. ‘This indeed is not so common in South Asian countries,’ he said.

Prof Sharma also said that commercialised security ventures such as Avant Garde Maritime Security Service which maintained a floating armoury off the Galle coast, could be a potential threat to regional security.