Navigating the New Year, geo-politically

The Aluth Avurudu or Sitthirai Puttthandu, was celebrated by Sri Lankans last week, just as much this same New Year festival - the transition to the new Year of Saka 1938 - is being observed and celebrated throughout the South Asian Sub-Continent during these few weeks, according to regional cultural calendars.

Since the earliest human civilisation in the South Asian Sub-Continent, this time of the year is the time of transition of monsoons, the movement of the sun at the start of the hot season and, the harvest of staple food grains. The symbolism of solar astrology and agricultural bounty marks the festivities taking place throughout this region. Even as we recover from festivities and get back into the rat race this week, let's think about the future ahead, as we tend to do during these times of transition.

For Buddhist pilgrims and also for holiday travellers, an additional moment for celebration will be the inaugural direct flight on April 12th from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Colombo by a Nepal-based private airline. The airline, a new Nepali joint venture with a Chinese company, offers the cheapest round trip from Colombo to Kathmandu. Colombo, along with Mumbai, India, is among the first routes to be operated by this airline. Destinations in China come next.

That a Chinese air industry investor in Nepal can prioritise Sri Lankan and Indian destinations before Chinese ones is testimony to the market-rationalism of Chinese overseas capital investment. As with capital investments originating from numerous other capital-rich countries, foreign investment are not necessarily narrowly subservient to nationalism, as some Sri Lankan nationalists tend to insist on.

Foreign investment can and do have over-arching 'national' interests: investments in the most profitable destinations, irrespective of the ideological or geo-political significance of those destinations, do finally bring profit (and value chain and market advantages) back home, to the investing nation. (Unless, those capitalists choose to divert such overseas profits to off-shore accounts!)

Some die-hard communal nationalists ranted against the current governing coalition as being 'Western-dependent' and anti-Chinese. But, last week, even as Sri Lankans celebrated Avurudu, some also celebrated the return, earlier, of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and delegation from a successful official visit to Beijing.

The way this government has set about continuing with Sri Lanka's intimate bilateral relationship with China, clearly demonstrates the pragmatic style of this government. The quick but smooth 're-set' of Colombo's international relations implemented without delay by the new Government in 2015 saw a shift firmly away from the singular dependence on a single country for everything ranging from geo-political support at global level to business investments, infra-structure development, international credit, etc. Instead, the necessary foreign policy course-correction brought Sri Lanka back to its long practised foreign policy of comprehensive, interest-based, multi-polar relations.

Our entire post-colonial history of foreign relations has been punctuated by a notably careful balancing of various bilateral ties that take into account other counter-interests impinging on such ties. For example, 'Yankee Dickie' may have been his hostile political nickname by the Sri Lankan Left, but despite his clear Western and Capitalist leanings, J. R. Jayewardene, in representing Sri Lanka in the post-World War 2 international conference in San Francisco, did not hesitate to support fellow-Asian country Japan in its moment of defeat by the Western powers.

Similarly, successive SLFP-led and UNP-led governments have consistently been 'non-aligned' despite pressures from major Western development donors. Sri Lanka, along with India, was among the earliest countries to recognise Communist China over and above Western-backed Taiwan (although Taiwan has its own right to exist as an island nation). Likewise, successive governments have seen the importance of maintaining our greater intimacy with the rest of the South Asian Sub-Continent which is, after all, our civilisational home region.

As we move into the new Saka year, we are still in a tortuous transition from the brink of national collapse due to the unintelligent, superstition-ridden, xeno-phobic, plundering and blundering mafia-type regime from which the current National Unity coalition took over last year. The damage to the national community due to the multiple ethnic enmities aroused by the previous regime through a brutal, militaristic end to the war and subsequently by further inflaming ultra-nationalist passions is on a scale that requires intricate inter-ethnic negotiations and complex constitutional reform to repair. Equally enormous is the damage to the national exchequer as recently exposed by the latest revelation that up to US $ 18 billion may have been spirited away from our national accounts during the previous regime.

A government that struggles with these multiple challenges needs all the help it can get from whatever sources - but without undermining the current, newly-won geo-political equilibrium. Thus, while Western help has been obtained by reasoned dealings with the Western powers and the UN system for a recovery on the international political plane, if Western capital investment is scarce due to the difficulties faced by Western capital, then Colombo did not hesitate to look East.

Again, Japan, as an older capitalist power, does not have too many new investors eagerly looking for markets. India, not being as capitalistically advanced as some East Asian economies and pre-occupied with internal investment needs, also does not easily send out capital - unless the market is big enough. The Indian government, nevertheless, has readily extended balance of payment support on an urgent basis.

But China, the newly rising global economic giant, has more than enough capital and enough eager new investors, big and small. Under the current government, however, the search for such investments and economic ties is not decided by kick-backs and financial advantages to a ruling family or political cabal. Rather, it is the pragmatics of financial stability, and urgent development needs.

Meanwhile, despite some ritualistic exhortations by ultra-nationalist ideologues, the government must proceed with its restoration of good relations with all the other friends we have had since we won nationhood - from India to Iran and West Asia, to Africa, Europe and the Americas.