Monday 7th April, 2025

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Sri Lanka visit saw the signing of seven MoUs between New Delhi and Colombo. Prominent among them are the MoU on the implementation of HVDC Interconnection for import/export of power, the MoU on cooperation among the governments of India, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates on developing Trincomalee as an energy hub, and the MoU on defence cooperation between India and Sri Lanka.

The signing of those MoUs, especially the one on defence cooperation, on 05 April, is a textbook example of irony. The significance of that day may not have been lost on keen political observers. The JVP, which leads the ruling NPP coalition, launched its first abortive insurrection on 05 April 1971, and one of the five classes it held to indoctrinate its new recruits, before sending them on a suicidal mission, was on Indian expansionism.

There is no gainsaying that Sri Lanka must not allow its land, sea and airspace to be used against India in any manner—or against any other nation for that matter. President J. R. Jayewardene, in his wisdom, got too close to the US in a bipolar world, and antagonised India in the process. He had the scourge of separatist terror and the Indo-Lanka Accord to contend with. The JVP went all out to scuttle the implementation of that accord, albeit in vain. The US and India have closed ranks today in a bid to thwart China’s rise, and a government led by the JVP has signed an MoU with India on defence cooperation!

The NPP government has violated one of the fundamental tenets of good governance––transparency. There has been no transparency about the aforesaid MoUs, especially the one on defence cooperation.

When the JVP/NPP was in the Opposition, it would flay governments for signing vital MoUs and pacts without transparency. It has kept Parliament in the dark about the MoUs in question. It is apparently emulating its bete noire, Ranil Wickremesinghe, not only in managing the economy but also signing vital MoUs!

India has demonstrated its ability to render Sri Lankan political parties malleable. PM Modi can justifiably pat himself on the back for having tamed the once anti-Indian JVP, which unleashed brutal violence purportedly to extricate Sri Lanka from what it described as India’s tentacles, in the late 1980s.

In 2024, the Modi government gave a diplomatic leg-up to the JVP/NPP, enabling its rise in national politics as a political party with some international recognition, and boosting its chances of winning elections. There is reason to believe that the JVP-led NPP would not have been able to win any parliamentary seats in the North and the East if it had not been in the good books of India. Interestingly, in October 2015, Dissanayake himself stated in Parliament that Jaffna had become a den of RAW spies. “They attempt to create political instability in Jaffna and we should put a stop to it,” he said. Today, the JVP is at India’s beck and call! In 2021, the then former MP Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa, who had been a member of the Parliamentary Select Committee that probed the Eastern Sunday terror attacks (2019), told BBC that he believed India had been behind the carnage, and his conclusion was based on ‘investigative evidence’. Dr. Jayatissa is the incumbent Media Minister. The JVP/NPP no longer inveighs against India for what it accused the latter of, in the past. Worryingly, its government stands accused of having blocked local media out of some key events related to PM Modi’s Sri Lanka visit over the weekend.

It is toe-curling to see some JVP leaders who resorted to mindless terror in a bid to scuttle the signing of the Indo-Lanka Accord , in 1987, going all out to justify the inking of an MoU on defence cooperation between their government and India, more than three and a half decades later. The signing of that particular MoU marked the JVP’s biggest-ever Machiavellian U-turn. If it had refrained from unleashing terror in 1987, tens of thousands of lives and state assets worth billions of US dollars could have been saved. Most of all, how would the JVP have reacted if a previous government had entered into MoUs with India?