Sri Lanka has a new president in nationalist outsider Anura Kumara Dissanayake. His victory is a testament to the vitality of the nation’s democracy: Two years after demonstrators forced the resignation of the island’s president and prime minister, protest leader Dissanayake prevailed against two well-connected centrists.
However, for regional behemoth India, the results cap a troubling trend. Dissanayake has New Delhi worried because his party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, made a name for itself in the 1980s with an anti-India terror campaign. While the new president has tried to mend fences, including during a visit earlier this year, India will consider him a poor exchange for his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was distrustful of China and supportive of Indian investment.
Similar political transitions have transformed South Asia. Last month, Bangladesh’s long-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was overthrown and fled to India for refuge. Earlier in the summer, K.P. Sharma Oli, who has always been close to Beijing, returned as Nepal’s prime minister.
An “India out” campaign in the Maldives swept its current president, Mohamed Muizzu, to power last year. Moreover, it is likely Indian officials would prefer that Imran Khan, who remains wildly popular with the Pakistani electorate, stays in the jail where most believe his country’s military has put him.
New Delhi began the year secure in its relationships with Kathmandu, Dhaka and Colombo; the only neighbor it can now mostly count on is the tiny monarchy of Bhutan — a decades-old treaty ally that manages its security and foreign policy in close cooperation with India.
While internal developments obviously drove most of these political transitions, Indian policy has done the country no favors. While Indians like to remind people that theirs is the world’s largest democracy, their neighbors complain that New Delhi does not always promote and support democratic values in the region.
Indeed, pro-government commentators openly boast that India’s foreign policy has succeeded by “shaping democratic verdicts” in its neighborhood and “turning a blind eye to democratic deficits.”
Sometimes, though, realpolitik is just short-sightedness. Hasina’s exit in Bangladesh followed elections a few months earlier that most — including the US — did not view as free and fair. India overlooked that and appeared taken by surprise when she turned out to be massively unpopular after all.
Similarly, New Delhi’s courting of the military junta in Myanmar — which memorably led then-US president Barack Obama to upbraid India’s parliament in 2010 for “shying away” from the defense of democracy — might soon turn sour. Indian officials were incensed at the time, insisting that the strong hand of the Burmese military was needed to manage the volatile border. Now anti-government rebels control large parts of that same frontier, making ties to the junta more of a liability than an asset.
It did not have to be this way. When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014, he invited leaders of neighboring nations to his swearing-in. He had an opportunity to reset relations with all of them, and to create new partnerships based on economic integration and mutual respect for democracy.
In the years since, diplomats ceded control of relations with those countries — and with China, with whom India shares the longest of its borders — to the security establishment. That has turned out to be a crucial mistake. If you see your neighbors primarily through a security lens, you risk picking allies and condoning behavior that together alienate large swathes of the electorate. When political winds shift, such bets can turn rapidly.
You might think that India’s extraordinary soft power would make up for some of these missteps. However, the influence of its movies and media, which are followed closely across South Asia, can be unhelpful. After the Maldives election, popular Bollywood stars said they would stop vacationing there. Moreover, hypernationalist news media focuses relentlessly on stories that citizens of these smaller neighbors feel portray their countries unfairly.
India would be wise to study China’s relations with its neighbors. That would give policymakers some idea of what not to do, as well as what might work. Economic integration is essential: As the region’s biggest market, India needs to be a source of prosperity for its denizens. On the other hand, expecting smaller nations to kowtow is a mistake. India’s rise might be as inevitable as China’s, but neither would-be superpower can afford to ignore the aspirations of its neighbors.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
The EU’s biggest banks have spent years quietly creating a new way to pay that could finally allow customers to ditch their Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc cards — the latest sign that the region is looking to dislodge two of the most valuable financial firms on the planet. Wero, as the project is known, is now rolling out across much of western Europe. Backed by 16 major banks and payment processors including BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG and Worldline SA, the platform would eventually allow a German customer to instantly settle up with, say, a hotel in France
On August 6, Ukraine crossed its northeastern border and invaded the Russian region of Kursk. After spending more than two years seeking to oust Russian forces from its own territory, Kiev turned the tables on Moscow. Vladimir Putin seemed thrown off guard. In a televised meeting about the incursion, Putin came across as patently not in control of events. The reasons for the Ukrainian offensive remain unclear. It could be an attempt to wear away at the morale of both Russia’s military and its populace, and to boost morale in Ukraine; to undermine popular and elite confidence in Putin’s rule; to
With escalating US-China competition and mutual distrust, the trend of supply chain “friend shoring” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fragmentation of the world into rival geopolitical blocs, many analysts and policymakers worry the world is retreating into a new cold war — a world of trade bifurcation, protectionism and deglobalization. The world is in a new cold war, said Robin Niblett, former director of the London-based think tank Chatham House. Niblett said he sees the US and China slowly reaching a modus vivendi, but it might take time. The two great powers appear to be “reversing carefully
A traffic accident in Taichung — a city bus on Sept. 22 hit two Tunghai University students on a pedestrian crossing, killing one and injuring the other — has once again brought up the issue of Taiwan being a “living hell for pedestrians” and large vehicle safety to public attention. A deadly traffic accident in Taichung on Dec. 27, 2022, when a city bus hit a foreign national, his Taiwanese wife and their one-year-old son in a stroller on a pedestrian crossing, killing the wife and son, had shocked the public, leading to discussions and traffic law amendments. However, just after the
RSS