The great nobles of Bengal lined up under the August sun in 1420CE, awaiting the arrival of naval commander Hong Xiang. For each of the soldiers who marched with him under the mustard-yellow banners of Imperial China, the historian Tansen Sen tells us, there was a silver coin; a grand reception then followed. The warlords Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah and Ibrahim Shah had been raiding each other; Hong had arrived with “Imperial orders of instruction” for the warring kingdoms: they were to “cultivate good relations with their neighbours and would each protect their own territory”.
Advice like this was best listened to. In 1407, Admiral Zheng He—at the head of colossal fleets that greatly outnumbered those of imperial Portugal—had defeated the great pirate king Chen Zuyi in the straits of Malacca; four years later, he had captured the Ceylon ruler Vijaya Bahu VI and brought him a prisoner to China; in 1414, the usurper Sekender had been put down, and order restored in Sumatra.
The runaway success of the Amazon espionage thriller The Family Man—built around Indian secret agents battling jihadist terrorism, Tamil insurgents in Sri Lanka, all under the rising sun of Chinese power—is remarkable not just as a show, but what it tells us about Indian middle-class anxieties about the new geopolitical order rising around us.
Is Sri Lanka going to prove the base for a new, China-led order in the oceanic routes India depends on to fuel its trade, and feed its need for energy? Will China back challenges from countries in the near-neighbourhood, like Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan? Put simply, what will this second high noon of Chinese imperial power in the Indo-Pacific mean for all our lives?
Less than a generation has passed since similar fears led India to war in Sri Lanka—though the superpower, then, was different. The deep suspicions about the United States of America that underpinned Indian involvement in Sri Lanka may now seem somewhat silly. Indeed, Washington refused to even provide weapons to President J.R. Jayewardene’s government in 1984, as it battled Tamil insurgents. To contemporaries in India’s intelligence and strategic establishment, though, the danger that the islands might end up a Cold War base for use against India was real.
“Ensuring peace and stability within the Indian Ocean region has been a major objective of India's foreign policy”, scholar P. Venkateshwar Rao noted. “Geopolitics and the sociocultural composition of the region, therefore, compel India to conceive of itself as the ‘security manager of South Asia’. India's role in Sri Lanka's four- year-old ethnic conflict needs to be understood in this perspective”.
From 1983, the involvement of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in training up to 20,000 Tamil insurgents, seeing them as an asset to push back against the use of Sri Lanka as a tool in the Cold War—the fears behind that decision, we now know, were misplaced; there’s isn’t a hint in the archives that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) wanted to use Sri Lanka as a tool to wage war across the Palk Strait.
Like so much else in strategic history, though, the policy had unintended consequences. The insurgents, as is well known, turned rogue; the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), hostile to Indian control, emerged as the preeminent faction. The Indian Army was forced into an ill-planned, and ill-executed anti-guerilla campaign in 1987, which ended in 1990 without any of its strategic objectives secured.
Lieutenant-General Amarjeet Kalkat, who commanded that ill-fated war, later noted that force was a seductive, but insufficient, tool to secure strategic ends: instead, leaders needed to carefully think-through “the combination of force, intervention and political goals you set yourself and how those goals apply to the use of force”.
The lessons General Kalkat drew are relevant, irrespective of whether the means of securing India’s objectives are armies, covert means like the intelligence services, or political influence. There are credible claims that RAW brought about the election of President Maithripala Sirisena in 2015, punishing President Mahinda Rajapaksa for his pro-China tilt. The operation, alleged to have been led by former RAW officer K. Ilango, would have been a stellar intelligence success, if true.
Yet, Beijing is just as deeply embedded in Sri Lanka as it was then—arguably more so. There is, clearly, a need for more sophisticated means than power, whether exercised through military or covert means.
For New Delhi to find a solution to the problem, there first needs to be a clear understanding of what the issue in fact is. At first glance, the problem seems simple enough. Large numbers of critical infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka, ranging from Hambantota Port, the Mattala airport and the Colombo-Katunayake Expressway are funded by Chinese loans. Adani Ports’ efforts to bring about the development of the East Container Terminal in Colombo Port, which handles a significant fraction of containers being trans-shipped to India, became mired in controversies and delays, some less-than-subtly engineered by China.
In some of these cases, moreover, there’s good reason to believe the real intention of China was not economic; instead, it seems to have bought strategic assets through pushing its partner into debt. Hambantota—built around grandiose projections of freight traffic—has had to be leased to a Chinese firm after the government failed to meet its obligations; in the future, it could potentially serve as a military asset.
Yet, it’s important to understand what has put Sri Lanka in this position in the first place. At the end of 2019, scholar Umesh Moramudali has pointed out, China held only about 10% of Sri Lanka’s external debt. The country’s chronic balance-of-payments problem is the consequence of economic mismanagement—mismanagement which, in turn, makes it willing to accept investment on bad terms.
The scholar Sanjay Kathuria has noted that, unlike Bangladesh, Sri Lanka began to impose policies increasingly hostile to trade since the 2000s. Levies at airports and ports, as well as cess—import duties in all but name—pushed up tariffs over 26%. The consequences were predictable. The trade-to-GDP ratio declined from 89% in 2000 to 52% in 2019. Exports, measured as a share of GDP declined from 39% to 23% by 2019. This decline, Kathuria writes, is “possibly without precedent in a small, modern economy”.
In essence, protectionist policies intended to protect small and medium enterprises in Sri Lanka had ended up making domestic manufacturing too inefficient to export—and the failure to export has meant Sri Lanka has had a persistent problem paying its import bills.
A second major avenue for Chinese engagement is trade. Sri Lanka’s textiles industry, for example, once relied on yarn and fabric imported from India and Pakistan. Today, however, Chinese firms are able to supply these at lower prices.
For three reasons, New Delhi would do well to step back and reflect on the path forward. First, it’s far from clear that organisations like the Quad will provide an effective counterweight to Chinese naval power, at least in the short term. By 2030, the scholar James Fannel notes, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) will consist of some 550 ships: 450 surface ships and ninety-nine submarines. The United States’ latest budget figures show, however, that it has no interest in matching this growth; plans to raise the United States Navy’s fleet to 350-plus ships appear off the table.
Even though the United States will continue to maintain significant technological superiority, the sheer size of the PLAN will give it the ability to project naval power across the Indian Ocean—posing, in particular, a threat to contested islands and reefs. New Delhi, with its own modest Naval resources and funding, cannot interject itself into these conflicts without risking retaliation in the Himalayas. Even leaving aside other considerations, friction and uncertainty will have asymmetric economic costs for India.
Second, India simply cannot engage in a head-on confrontation with an economy five times its size, and hope to win: punching above your weight, it should be clear to anyone older than a hormone-fuelled teenager, is a strategy replete with risk. Instead, New Delhi should work to its own strengths, and craft economic strategies which address the needs of countries like Sri Lanka, which support its industrial base and expand region-wide trade flows.
Third, history shows us panic isn’t necessary. The great naval expeditions Admiral Zheng’s fleet carried out served no real purpose. Chinese traders and trade-networks were already well-established; no hard power was actually needed to protect them. The Chinese had no means—nor need—to establish colonies or bases across the Indian Ocean. Under the Emperor Zhu Gaochi, the great missions Zheng led were wound down; the animals brought to his zoos from West Asia were, it is said, left to starve as an economy measure.
Even though China may appear a gorilla-like enemy, it suffers from adverse demographic trends, a slowing economy, and multiple foreign policy conflicts of its own making. Though Beijing is likely to growl and intimidate its neighbours, it cannot go to war without risking its own economic growth and survival, both of which are inextricably entwined with the global economy.
Fighting pigs to the ground is an inefficient way to start preparing pork chops for dinner. Family Man-style foreign policy is seductive, but flawed; displays of power, appealing as they are to patriotic audiences, usually serve no clear strategic ends. The time for India to show muscle may yet emerge—and it should be prepared. For now, though, there are more prudent, if less dramatic, tools to hand.
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