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 term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
When a recall campaign targeting the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators was launched, something rather disturbing happened. According to reports, Hualien County Government officials visited several people to verify their signatures. Local authorities allegedly used routine or harmless reasons as an excuse to enter people’s house for investigation. The KMT launched its own recall campaigns, targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers, and began to collect signatures. It has been found that some of the KMT-headed counties and cities have allegedly been mobilizing municipal machinery. In Keelung, the director of the Department of Civil Affairs used the household registration system
RSS