India-Sri Lanka Relations (PSIR Optional)

No two capitals in South Asia sit closer together in civilisational terms and further apart in political comfort than New Delhi and Colombo. Twenty-five centuries of Buddhist, commercial and linguistic exchange across a strait barely thirty kilometres wide gave India an intimacy with Sri Lanka it has with no other neighbour except Nepal — and that same intimacy produced the one thing Colombo has consistently resisted, which is an Indian stake in how the island governs its own minorities.

The structural setting: thirty kilometres and 2,500 years

The civilisational base

• Contact predates the state on both sides, which is why the relationship is never purely diplomatic and always partly domestic.
  • The Mauryan transmission of Buddhism is the founding episode: Ashoka sent Mahinda and Sanghamitta to the island, and the Bodhi tree at Anuradhapura is treated as a living relic of that mission.
  • Sri Lanka is therefore one of the few countries where India’s cultural influence is Buddhist rather than Hindu, a fact that repeatedly cuts across the Tamil-centred reading of the relationship in Indian politics.
  • The Kapilavastu relics have been exhibited in Sri Lanka twice, in 1978 and 2012, drawing crowds in the millions — an instrument of state-to-state affection India has used deliberately.
• The Cultural Cooperation Agreement of 29 November 1977 remains the legal frame for exchange programmes, scholarships and archaeological collaboration.
  • India funds around 700 scholarship slots a year plus roughly 400 fully-funded training places for Sri Lankan officials, and Sri Lankan students sit Indian entrance examinations under a bilateral arrangement.
  • Ramayana-circuit and Buddhist-circuit tourism, temple restoration at Thiruketheeswaram and Trincomalee, and the Sita Amman sites are the soft-power scaffolding around which every visit is choreographed.

The asymmetry that defines everything else

• India is about fifty times Sri Lanka’s population and dwarfs it on every material index, so every Indian action is read in Colombo as weight rather than gesture.
  • Sri Lanka’s standard response has been the classic small-state hedge: cultivate extra-regional powers to raise the price of Indian pressure, then cash the resulting Indian anxiety as attention and investment.
  • The island’s location astride the east–west shipping lanes — with Colombo handling a large share of Indian transhipment cargo — means India is simultaneously Sri Lanka’s biggest customer and its biggest strategic worry.
• The Palk Strait is a boundary that does not separate anything. Fishing grounds, kinship, language and religion run straight across it.
  • This is why Tamil Nadu is a party to Indian foreign policy here in a way no Indian state is on any other border except West Bengal on the Teesta.
  • It is also why Sri Lanka experiences Indian concern for its Tamil citizens not as neighbourly interest but as an external constituency inside its own polity.

India’s Tamil Nadu constituency gives it a genuine interest in Sri Lanka’s internal settlement — and that interest is precisely what Colombo has always experienced as interference.

• That tension is the organising fact of the relationship and it survives every change of government in either capital.
  • When India ignores the Tamil question, Tamil Nadu punishes the Union government and the relationship loses its domestic base.
  • When India presses the Tamil question, Colombo reaches for a counterweight — the United States and Pakistan in the 1980s, China after 2005 — and the relationship loses its strategic base.
  • Every Indian government since 1987 has therefore looked for a formula that satisfies Tamil Nadu without appearing coercive in Colombo, and the Thirteenth Amendment is that formula.

Citizenship: the first bilateral dispute, 1948–1988

The statutes that created a stateless population

• The Indian-origin Tamils — “Up-country” or “Hill Country” Tamils — were brought from the Tamil districts of the Madras Presidency by British planters from the 1830s onward to work coffee, and then tea and rubber, estates.
  • They are a distinct community from the Sri Lankan Tamils of the north and east, who have been settled on the island for over a millennium and who dominate the Northern and Eastern Provinces.
  • At independence they were roughly eleven per cent of the population and held the balance in several central-province constituencies, which is precisely what made them a target.
• The Ceylon Citizenship Act No. 18 of 1948 made citizenship turn on descent or lengthy registration, conditions the estate population could rarely document.
  • The Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act 1949 offered a registration route so demanding that only a small fraction qualified.
  • The Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act, 1949 then struck the non-citizens off the electoral register, converting a legal disability into a political one.
  • The combined effect was to render close to a million people of Indian origin stateless and voteless — the largest single act of disenfranchisement in post-colonial South Asia.
• India’s position under Nehru was refusal. Colombo demanded that India take the population back; Nehru declined to accept them as Indian nationals.
  • His reasoning was precedential rather than sentimental: accepting responsibility for a settled overseas community would invite identical demands from Burma, Malaya, Fiji, East Africa and the Caribbean.
  • The corollary was Nehru’s standing advice to overseas Indians to identify with the country of residence, which is coherent as doctrine and cold as consolation for a stateless plantation worker.

The two pacts

• The Sirimavo–Shastri Pact of 30 October 1964 divided the then-stateless population by formula rather than by right.
  • 525,000 persons, with their natural increase, were to be repatriated to India; 300,000 were to be granted Ceylonese citizenship; the status of a residual 150,000 was left to later negotiation.
  • Implementation ran over fifteen years and fell short: by the early 1980s roughly 280,000 had actually been repatriated and about 160,000 naturalised.
  • The pact is the clearest case in Indian foreign policy of a settlement made over the heads of the people it disposed of — the plantation Tamils were consulted by nobody.
• The Sirimavo–Gandhi understanding of 1974 settled the residual 150,000, splitting them equally between the two states.
  • The same year’s maritime agreement placing Kachchatheevu on the Sri Lankan side was negotiated in the same climate of accommodation, and the two are politically inseparable in Tamil Nadu memory.
  • The DMK government of the day objected on both counts, which is the origin of the state’s continuous half-century of grievance against the Union on Sri Lanka policy.
• The question was closed by Sri Lankan legislation, not by Indian diplomacy.
  • The Grant of Citizenship to Stateless Persons Act of 1988 and the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act, 2003 finally conferred citizenship on the remainder.
  • The community today is Sri Lankan, poor, politically organised through its own parties, and no longer a bilateral issue — but the memory of how it was traded is permanent in Tamil Nadu.

Instrument	Year	What it did	What it left unresolved
Ceylon Citizenship Act	1948	Descent-based citizenship excluding estate Tamils	Statelessness for close to a million
Indian and Pakistani Residents Act	1949	Registration route with unmeetable conditions	Only a small fraction qualified
Parliamentary Elections Amendment	1949	Removed non-citizens from the electoral roll	Political voicelessness of the community
Sirimavo–Shastri Pact	1964	525,000 to India, 300,000 citizenship, 150,000 deferred	The deferred 150,000; poor implementation
Sirimavo–Gandhi understanding	1974	Split the residual 150,000 equally	Nothing on rights or livelihoods
Sri Lankan citizenship statutes	1988, 2003	Conferred citizenship on all remaining stateless	Socio-economic marginality on the estates

Sinhala majoritarianism and the making of the Tamil question

The Tamil question became an Indian foreign-policy problem only because a sequence of Sri Lankan domestic decisions turned a linguistic minority into an insurgent one, and because the refugees and the sympathy both flowed north across a thirty-kilometre strait. The analytics of ethnic mobilisation belong with the study of ethnic conflict as a regional impediment; what follows is the ladder of grievance as India encountered it.

The legislative and administrative ladder

• The Official Language Act No. 33 of 1956 — “Sinhala Only” — made Sinhala the sole official language and is the hinge of modern Sri Lankan politics.
  • Passed under S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, it converted a linguistic majority into an administrative monopoly, closing the public service to Tamil-speakers who could not function in Sinhala.
  • The Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957, which would have created regional councils and reasonable use of Tamil, was abrogated under Buddhist-nationalist pressure — the first demonstration that Sinhala politics could not sustain a compromise on devolution.
  • The Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act of 1958 and later the 1978 constitution’s “national language” status for Tamil conceded the form while leaving the substance of administrative exclusion intact.
• Standardisation in university admissions from 1971 closed the professional route out.
  • Entry marks were first weighted by medium of instruction and then by district quota, sharply reducing Tamil entry into medicine and engineering where Tamil students had been disproportionately successful.
  • The effect was to radicalise precisely the educated Tamil youth cohort that would otherwise have been absorbed into the state — a point on which almost every account of the insurgency agrees.
• State-sponsored colonisation schemes settled Sinhalese cultivators in the Eastern Province from the 1950s onward, altering the demography of the territory Tamil politics claimed as a traditional homeland.
  • This is what made the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces the single most contested item in every subsequent settlement, including the 1987 Accord.

The riots and the refugee flows

• 1958 — the first island-wide anti-Tamil violence, a direct sequel to the language act.
• 1977 — renewed violence after the Tamil United Liberation Front contested elections on an explicitly separatist mandate.
• July 1983 — “Black July” — is the rupture. Retaliation for an LTTE ambush that killed thirteen soldiers turned into organised anti-Tamil pogroms in Colombo and elsewhere.
  • Estimates of the dead run from several hundred to around 3,000; property destruction was systematic and the state’s response was, at best, passive.
  • Roughly 250,000 Tamils crossed into India as refugees, concentrating in Tamil Nadu camps and making the conflict a permanent fixture of Indian domestic politics.
  • Black July also destroyed the moderate Tamil political centre: after it, the militant groups had recruits, money and a diaspora, and the LTTE, founded in 1976 out of an earlier student formation, moved from one group among many to the dominant one.

India’s covert phase, 1983–1987

What India actually did

• India trained, armed and sheltered Tamil militant groups from the early 1980s, and this must be stated plainly because Indian official accounts elide it.
  • Training camps operated in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in India, run with the involvement of the external intelligence agency, and covered the LTTE, TELO, EPRLF, EROS and PLOTE — deliberately several groups rather than one.
  • The purpose was leverage, not liberation: multiple armed clients gave India the ability to raise the cost of Colombo’s military option while retaining a veto over any of them.
  • It is the clearest instance in Indian foreign policy of the instrument outrunning the intention — the LTTE consolidated by eliminating its rivals, and the leverage India had built became a force it could not control.

Why India did it — two readings that both hold

• The strategic reading: Colombo was internationalising the conflict in ways India read as hostile.
  • J.R. Jayewardene’s post-1977 turn was simultaneously toward economic liberalisation and toward Washington, at a moment when Indo-US relations were poor and the US had tilted to Pakistan.
  • Negotiations over American access at Trincomalee, Israeli and Pakistani training assistance, and a Voice of America transmitter were all read in New Delhi as third-party entrenchment on India’s southern flank.
  • Sri Lanka had already banked a grievance by letting Pakistani aircraft refuel on its territory during the 1971 war, and India did not forget it.
• The domestic reading: Tamil Nadu made non-intervention politically unavailable.
  • The refugee inflow after Black July, the sympathy of the Dravidian parties and the electoral arithmetic of a Congress government dependent on southern allies made visible Indian indifference impossible.
  • Shivshankar Menon, writing on the decision, argues the intervention was driven by strategic and domestic-political concerns together and that neither alone explains it.
• Mediation ran alongside coercion from 1983 to 1987 and failed.
  • The Thimphu talks of 1985 collapsed over the Tamil groups’ “four cardinal principles”, which included recognition of a Tamil nation and the right to self-determination.
  • Colombo hardened toward a military solution in 1986–87, culminating in Operation Liberation against Jaffna in May 1987.
• India applied economic and supply pressure alongside the diplomacy, restricting trade and moving food and medicine to the peninsula by sea and air as Colombo’s siege of Jaffna tightened.
• Operation Poomalai, 4 June 1987, was the turning point: Indian Air Force transports, escorted by fighters, airdropped relief supplies over the Jaffna peninsula in violation of Sri Lankan airspace after a naval relief attempt had been turned back.
  • It was coercive humanitarianism — the message was that India would not permit a purely military outcome — and it brought Jayewardene to the table within seven weeks.

The Indo–Sri Lanka Accord of 29 July 1987

What the Accord provided

• Signed in Colombo by Rajiv Gandhi and J.R. Jayewardene, the Accord was an inter-state agreement about Sri Lanka’s internal constitutional order — which is exactly why it was resented.
  • It affirmed Sri Lanka as a “multi-ethnic and multi-lingual plural society” while upholding its unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty.
  • It recognised the Northern and Eastern Provinces as areas of historical habitation of Tamil-speaking peoples, and provided for their temporary merger subject to a referendum in the East.
  • It provided for devolution of power to provincial councils, for Tamil and English as official languages alongside Sinhala, for a cessation of hostilities and surrender of arms within 72 hours, and for a general amnesty.
  • The LTTE was not a signatory. Prabhakaran was brought to Delhi and pressed into acquiescence he never accepted.
• The annexed exchange of letters is the security core of the Accord and remains live doctrine.
  • Sri Lanka undertook that Trincomalee or any other port would not be made available for military use by any country in a manner prejudicial to India’s interests, and that the oil tank farm at Trincomalee would be developed jointly.
  • Foreign military and intelligence personnel were to be reviewed and removed where they prejudiced Indo–Sri Lankan relations; foreign broadcasting facilities were not to be used for military purposes.
  • India for its part undertook to deny Indian territory to Tamil separatist activity and to cooperate in enforcing the settlement.
  • The assurance Sri Lanka gave Modi in April 2025 — that its territory would not be used against India’s security — is the lineal descendant of this 1987 language.

The Thirteenth Amendment: devolution inside a unitary state

• The Thirteenth Amendment to the 1978 constitution, passed in November 1987 with the Provincial Councils Act No. 42 of 1987, created nine provincial councils. It did not create a federation.
  • Sri Lanka remained, and remains, a unitary state under Article 2 of its constitution; the Amendment carved a devolved sphere out of that unitary order rather than dividing sovereignty between two constitutionally coordinate levels.
  • Powers were sorted into a Provincial List, a Reserved List and a Concurrent List, with the Concurrent List and the centre’s overriding legislative competence ensuring that Colombo could recover ground it had conceded.
  • The Governor is appointed by and holds office at the pleasure of the President, controls the provincial fund, and can withhold assent — which converts devolution into an executive licence.
  • The Supreme Court’s determination on the Bill upheld it only by a bare majority and read it as consistent with the unitary character of the state.
• This distinction is not pedantry; it is why the implementation dispute never ends.
  • India asks for “full implementation” of a settlement whose own text can be honoured formally while being emptied administratively.
  • Sinhala nationalists attack the Amendment as a federalising imposition extracted under duress; Tamil nationalists reject it as too little, and delivered by an outside power; both readings make it fragile.

The 1987 settlement	What was promised	What was actually delivered
Form of the state	Devolution to nine provincial councils	Devolution inside an unaltered unitary constitution
North–East merger	Merged province, referendum in the East	Merger effected 1988, de-merged by the Supreme Court in 2006
Land powers	Provincial competence over state land	Never operationalised; National Land Commission never constituted
Police powers	Provincial police under a provincial commission	Never devolved to any province
Language	Tamil an official language	Constitutionally granted; implementation patchy
Disarmament	LTTE surrender of arms in 72 hours	Refused; war with the IPKF within ten weeks
Indian security clause	No foreign military use of Sri Lankan ports	Restated in 2024–25; contested by Chinese port calls

The IPKF: India’s costliest foreign-policy failure

From peacekeeping to war in ten weeks

• The Indian Peace Keeping Force deployed from 30 July 1987 to supervise the ceasefire, receive the militants’ weapons and hold the ring while the Sri Lankan army returned to barracks.
  • It began as a guarantor force with no enemy, at an initial strength of a few thousand, and grew to a peak of the order of eighty thousand personnel across the north and east.
  • The mandate contained a contradiction no force could resolve: the IPKF was to disarm a group that had not agreed to be disarmed, on behalf of a government that did not want it there, to protect a community that had not asked for it.
• The break came in early October 1987, after the suicides of LTTE cadres detained by the Sri Lankan navy and the collapse of the surrender process.
  • Operation Pawan, launched on 10 October 1987, was the assault to take Jaffna. The Jaffna University helidrop of 12 October was a disaster — the LTTE had read Indian communications and the landing zone was an ambush.
  • Jaffna town fell by late October and the fort by the end of November, but the LTTE had exfiltrated into the Vanni jungles, converting a conventional operation into a three-year counter-insurgency.

The political and human cost

• Allegations of serious human-rights violations by the IPKF — including the killing of civilians and medical staff at the Jaffna teaching hospital in October 1987 — attached themselves permanently to the deployment.
  • The force that had gone in as the protector of Tamils ended up fighting Tamils, which is the single most damaging fact about the whole episode for Indian standing on the island.
  • Indian conduct of provincial council elections in 1988, boycotted by the LTTE and held with the EPRLF as India’s chosen partner, produced councils without the land, police or fiscal powers they were supposed to exercise.
• Sri Lankan politics repudiated the deployment from both ends.
  • The JVP’s second insurrection in the south, 1987–89, was fought explicitly against the Accord as a surrender of sovereignty, and it was crushed with enormous bloodshed.
  • Ranasinghe Premadasa, elected President in December 1988 on an anti-Accord platform, demanded Indian withdrawal in June 1989 — and, in the sharpest irony available, supplied arms to the LTTE to fight the IPKF.
• India withdrew under V.P. Singh, completing the pull-out on 24 March 1990.
  • Indian dead numbered around 1,200 — the army’s own figure is 1,155 killed, with over three thousand wounded.
  • Withdrawal was delinked from implementation: India left without securing the devolution the whole intervention had been about, and the provincial council in the north-east collapsed within weeks.

The verdict

• Shivshankar Menon frames the intervention as “anything but an inexorable tragedy” — a sequence of avoidable choices rather than a fated failure, driven by strategic and domestic considerations that were individually rational and jointly disastrous.
• The structural lesson was about instruments, not intentions.
  • India had no political strategy to match its military instrument: it acquired a partner it distrusted, an adversary it had armed, and a host that wanted it gone.
  • It took ownership of another state’s constitutional settlement without any means of enforcing it after withdrawal.
  • It converted a domestic constituency’s sympathy into an operational commitment, and then had to explain Indian body bags to that same constituency.
• The doctrinal consequence has lasted thirty-five years. India has since preferred non-intervention plus delivery in the neighbourhood — disaster relief, credit, fuel, vaccines — and has not deployed ground forces into a neighbour’s internal conflict again.
  • The contrast with Operation Cactus in the Maldives in 1988 is instructive: a short, invited, decisive operation with a defined end-state succeeded where an open-ended peace enforcement failed.

The IPKF is the case that taught Indian foreign policy the difference between having the capacity to intervene and having a theory of what intervention is for.

Disengagement, the war’s end, and the accountability question

May 1991 and the proscription of the LTTE

• Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at Sriperumbudur on 21 May 1991 by an LTTE suicide bomber, and the political meaning of Sri Lanka in India changed overnight.
  • The LTTE was banned in India in 1992 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and the ban has been renewed continuously since.
  • Sympathy for the LTTE evaporated in Tamil Nadu itself, which is why Indian policy after 1991 could distinguish between the Tamil cause and the Tamil Tigers in a way it had not managed before.
  • The Jain Commission inquiry into the assassination kept the episode politically alive through the 1990s and made any renewed Indian dealing with the LTTE unthinkable.
• India’s posture became studied distance with a stated benchmark.
  • Delhi supported Norwegian facilitation and the 2002 ceasefire without joining it, and stayed out of the Oslo process.
  • It repeated at every opportunity that the political settlement it wanted was devolution under the Thirteenth Amendment within a united Sri Lanka — a formula that rejects both Eelam and the status quo.

Eelam War IV and the endgame of 2009

• The war resumed in 2006 under Mahinda Rajapaksa and ended in the Mullaitivu pocket in May 2009 with the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran.
  • India adopted a hands-off posture with quiet material support — intelligence, radar and non-lethal supplies — while publicly urging restraint and humanitarian access.
  • Three reasons drove the restraint: the memory of the IPKF, the impossibility of dealing with an organisation that had killed a former Indian Prime Minister, and the calculation that the LTTE’s destruction was a precondition for any political settlement.
  • The cost was reputational and regional: the final months produced mass civilian casualties — a UN expert panel later put credible allegations at up to 40,000 deaths — and China, Pakistan and Iran supplied the arms and the diplomatic cover that India would not.
• India’s post-war offer was reconstruction rather than adjudication.
  • The 50,000-house project in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and the plantations is India’s largest grant-funded housing programme anywhere, alongside demining, railway reconstruction on the Omanthai–Pallai and Madhu Road lines, and the Kankesanthurai harbour.
  • The bet was that visible delivery in Tamil areas would buy influence over the political settlement. It bought goodwill; it has not yet bought devolution.
  • Heavy military occupation of land in the Northern and Eastern Provinces long outlasted the war, with cantonments, camps and high-security zones holding private and cultivable land; incremental releases have been among the current government’s few concrete steps.
• India’s cumulative development commitment is of the order of US$5 billion, of which roughly US$600 million is outright grant — the largest such portfolio India runs anywhere in South Asia after Bhutan and Nepal.

Three directions in four votes: India at the Human Rights Council

• India has voted in three different directions on Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council, and the pattern is the clearest available index of Tamil Nadu’s weight in Indian foreign policy.
  • In May 2009, at the special session immediately after the war, India supported Sri Lanka’s own resolution commending Colombo and rejecting external scrutiny.
  • In 2012 and 2013 India voted against Sri Lanka on successive US-sponsored accountability resolutions — the first time it had ever backed a country-specific human-rights resolution against a neighbour, and a reversal of its long-standing objection to country-specific resolutions in principle.
  • From 2014 onward India has abstained, including on the 2021 and 2022 resolutions that created and extended an external evidence-gathering mechanism in the Office of the High Commissioner.
• The drivers of each switch were domestic before they were diplomatic.
  • The 2012–13 votes came under direct pressure from DMK withdrawal threats and Tamil Nadu assembly resolutions during a coalition government’s final years.
  • The return to abstention after 2014 reflected both a change of government in Delhi with a different coalition arithmetic and a settled judgment that country-specific resolutions harden Colombo without helping Tamils.
  • India’s stated position throughout has been that accountability is best pursued through domestic Sri Lankan processes, with abstention signalling neither endorsement nor acquiescence.

Year	India’s vote	Resolution’s thrust	Proximate driver
2009	With Colombo	Sri Lanka’s own text commending the government	Non-interference doctrine; war just ended
2012	Against Colombo	Implementation of the reconciliation commission’s findings	DMK pressure on a coalition government
2013	Against Colombo	Independent investigation of violations	Tamil Nadu assembly and DMK exit from the coalition
2014	Abstained	International investigation by the High Commissioner	Objection to country-specific, externally-driven mechanisms
2021, 2022	Abstained	External evidence-gathering mechanism extended	Balancing accountability against Chinese influence in Colombo

The Thirteenth Amendment’s afterlife: India’s standing ask

What “full implementation” means in practice

• Land powers were listed as provincial but never operationalised; the National Land Commission contemplated by the Amendment has never been constituted, so land alienation in the north and east remains effectively central.
• Police powers have never been devolved to any province, in the north or elsewhere; the provisions on a provincial police service and a National Police Commission remain dormant.
• The merger of the North and East was undone. Effected in 1988 under the Accord, it was held invalid by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court in 2006, and the referendum in the East promised in 1987 was never held.
• Fiscal dependence is near-total: provinces raise a small fraction of what they spend, and the Finance Commission mechanism has not produced meaningful autonomy.
• The Governor’s office remains the choke point, appointed by the President and holding effective control over the provincial administration and its funds.

The elections that have not happened

• No provincial council elections have been held since 2017, and every council has been administered by its Governor since the last terms expired in 2018–19.
  • The proximate legal obstacle is that the 2017 delimitation report was never approved by Parliament, leaving no lawful basis on which to poll under the amended electoral law.
  • The deeper obstacle is that no Sri Lankan government has wanted the vote: successive administrations found the councils expensive, politically inconvenient and — in the north — likely to return a Tamil nationalist majority.
• The gap between rhetoric and practice runs across the whole spectrum in Colombo.
  • Rajapaksa-era governments treated the Amendment as an Indian imposition to be tolerated and starved.
  • The 2015–19 government promised a new constitution with enhanced devolution and delivered neither.
  • Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s administration openly canvassed repeal or dilution of the Amendment, particularly its police and land provisions.

Dissanayake, the NPP and the ambiguity of the 2024 mandate

• Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidency in September 2024 with 42.3% of the vote, and the National People’s Power took 159 of 225 seats — a two-thirds majority — at the parliamentary election of November 2024.
  • The NPP won in Jaffna and the Vanni, the first time a southern-based party has carried the Tamil-majority north, which gave it a mandate no previous government could claim to speak for both communities.
  • Its May 2025 local-election performance fell to around 43%, with Tamil parties recovering ground in the north and east — a signal that the northern vote was anti-establishment rather than pro-NPP.
• The NPP’s position on devolution is deliberately unresolved.
  • Its lineage is the JVP, which fought an armed insurrection in 1987–89 against the Accord and the Amendment as a betrayal of Sri Lankan sovereignty, and Sinhala-nationalist opinion inside the party has not disappeared.
  • The government’s stated preference is a new constitution in which provincial councils would be superseded, which allows it to defer elections indefinitely without formally repudiating the Amendment.
  • Its emphasis is economic development and anti-corruption as the answer to Tamil grievance, with symbolic steps — releases of military-held land, excavations at mass-grave sites — rather than structural devolution.
• India’s own formulation has quietly shifted, and the shift is significant.
  • The language used after Dissanayake’s Delhi visit in December 2024 was that Sri Lanka should “fully implement the Constitution of Sri Lanka and conduct the Provincial Council elections” — a formula that asks for the same outcome without naming the Thirteenth Amendment.
  • Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri’s visit in August 2026 repeated the call for provincial council elections “at the earliest”, again without the older formula.
  • The change lets India avoid the charge of dictating a constitutional provision it authored, and lets Colombo comply without conceding the premise. It also lowers the bar India is holding Sri Lanka to, which Tamil parties have noticed.

India has spent thirty-eight years asking Sri Lanka to implement an amendment India itself extracted — which is why the ask has weight in Tamil Nadu and no traction in Colombo.

Kachchatheevu

The islet

• Kachchatheevu is an uninhabited islet of roughly 285 acres in the Palk Strait, about 33 km from Rameswaram and 62 km from Jaffna, formed by volcanic activity and possessing no fresh water and no permanent population.
  • Its only structure is St Anthony’s Church, built in the early twentieth century, around which an annual festival draws thousands of pilgrims from both countries, Indian devotees crossing without visas.
  • Sovereignty over it was genuinely unsettled before 1974. The Raja of Ramnad’s zamindari had exercised rights over it and leased it out; Ceylon asserted its own claim; a 1921 conference of officials from Madras and Ceylon failed to resolve the boundary, and it was never adjudicated thereafter.
• Its economic value was never the islet but the water around it. The Palk Bay is a shallow, biologically rich, over-exploited fishery, and the islet sits close to the richest grounds.

The 1974 agreement

• The Agreement on the boundary in historic waters was signed in June 1974 by Indira Gandhi’s and Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s governments.
  • It drew a boundary through the historic waters of the Palk Bay and Palk Strait and placed Kachchatheevu on the Sri Lankan side of it.
  • Article 5 preserved access: Indian fishermen and pilgrims would “enjoy access to visit Kachchatheevu as hitherto” and would not be required to obtain travel documents or visas for that purpose.
  • Article 6 preserved traditional vessel rights: vessels of each country would enjoy in the other’s waters “such rights as they have traditionally enjoyed therein”.
  • In practice this meant Indian fishermen could continue to rest on the islet, dry their nets and attend the St Anthony’s festival. Whether it also preserved a right to fish around the islet was left ambiguous — and that ambiguity is the whole legal fight.

The 1976 agreement, which is what actually hurt

• The 1976 agreement extended the maritime boundary into the Gulf of Mannar and the Bay of Bengal and, critically, came with an exchange of letters barring fishermen of either country from fishing in the other’s exclusive economic zone, historic waters and territorial sea without express permission.
  • This was concluded in the post-UNCLOS-III climate of EEZ enclosure, when both states were converting open access into national jurisdiction — India’s own Maritime Zones Act came in 1976.
  • It is 1976, not 1974, that hollowed out Indian access. Whatever “traditional rights” survived 1974 were extinguished as a matter of treaty by the later instrument.
  • The same package settled the Wadge Bank off Kanniyakumari on India’s side, with a phased wind-down of Sri Lankan fishing there — which is why the Indian government’s account of the period is that India gained more than it gave.

	1974 agreement	1976 agreement
Subject	Boundary in the historic waters of Palk Bay and Palk Strait	Boundary in the Gulf of Mannar and Bay of Bengal
Effect on the islet	Placed Kachchatheevu on the Sri Lankan side	Not addressed
Access preserved	Visits, rest, net-drying, the St Anthony’s festival, no visas	—
Fishing	Ambiguous — “rights traditionally enjoyed”	Fishing in the other’s EEZ barred without express permission
Other gains	—	Wadge Bank secured for India
Political consequence	The symbolic grievance	The operative grievance

The constitutional argument and the courts

• The claim is that ceding territory requires a constitutional amendment, and that no amendment was ever passed.
  • The authority is the Supreme Court’s advisory opinion In Re Berubari Union, which held that cession of Indian territory requires an amendment under Article 368, since the First Schedule defining the territory of India would have to change.
  • Critics add that the agreements were executive acts not laid before Parliament for approval and not put to the Tamil Nadu legislature, whose territory the islet was said to fall within.
• The Union government’s answer has been consistent across administrations of both parties: there was no cession because there was no established title.
  • Its position on affidavit is that “no territory belonging to India was ceded nor sovereignty relinquished”, because the area had always been in dispute and had never been demarcated.
  • On this reading the 1974 instrument is a settlement of a disputed boundary, not a transfer of Indian soil — a category Berubari itself distinguishes, and one supported by the later line of cases on boundary settlements.
• The litigation has been continuous and inconclusive.
  • Jayalalithaa filed in the Supreme Court in 2008, and the State of Tamil Nadu filed in 2011, challenging both agreements as unconstitutional; the matters remain pending without substantive adjudication.
  • In 2014 the Attorney General told the Court that Kachchatheevu had gone to Sri Lanka by agreement and that getting it back would require war — the bluntest official statement of the Indian position ever made.
  • A 2024 disclosure under the Right to Information Act of the internal record of the 1974 negotiations reopened the issue politically, and the External Affairs Minister told a press conference on 1 April 2024 that 6,184 Indian fishermen had been detained and 1,175 vessels seized in twenty years.

Tamil Nadu’s politics of retrieval

• Every significant Tamil Nadu party is committed to retrieval, and the demand is bipartisan in the state and orphaned at the Union.
  • The Assembly has passed retrieval resolutions repeatedly, in 1991 under Jayalalithaa and most recently by unanimous resolution in March 2025 under M.K. Stalin.
  • The demand spikes with each cycle of arrests, and Sri Lankan naval action against Indian fishermen is what converts a dormant legal grievance into a live political one.
  • DMK and AIADMK positions are functionally identical, so the issue produces competitive escalation rather than a negotiating mandate.
• Colombo’s position has hardened, not softened.
  • Sri Lankan ministers have repeatedly said the matter was settled half a century ago and not open for renegotiation.
  • President Dissanayake’s own visit to Kachchatheevu, 2 September 2025, with a public statement that Sri Lanka would protect its territory, was a deliberate signal to both the Indian and the Sri Lankan Tamil audiences.

Is retrieval actually available?

• Legally, the route is narrow to the point of theoretical.
  • Even if the Supreme Court were to hold that the 1974 agreement required an amendment, a domestic constitutional defect does not void an international agreement on which the other state has relied for fifty years.
  • The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties admits internal-law objections to consent only in the narrowest circumstances — a manifest violation of a rule of fundamental importance — which a fifty-year-old, publicly registered boundary settlement does not satisfy.
  • Sri Lanka has no incentive whatsoever to reopen a settlement in which it holds the asset.
• Diplomatically, the ask is unavailable and the alternative is obvious.
  • No Sri Lankan government could survive ceding territory to India; retrieval is a demand that can be made forever and met never, which is part of its political utility.
  • What is negotiable is the thing fishermen actually need: licensed access, agreed seasons, an end to bottom trawling, and a durable arrangement on arrests.
  • The retrieval demand and the access demand pull against each other — insisting on sovereignty makes it harder for Colombo to concede access, because any concession then looks like a step toward the larger claim.

Kachchatheevu is intractable not because the law is unclear but because the demand is territorial while the injury is economic — and the two cannot be settled in the same conversation.

The fishermen: a resource problem misdescribed as a territorial one

What Sri Lanka is actually complaining about

• The substantive Sri Lankan grievance is bottom trawling by Indian mechanised vessels, not the location of a boundary line.
  • Trawlers drag weighted nets across the seabed, taking juveniles and non-target species and destroying the benthic habitat on which the fishery regenerates — in a bay shallow enough that the damage is quickly visible.
  • Sri Lanka banned bottom trawling outright in 2017, with heavy fines and imprisonment, and enforces it against its own fishermen as well.
  • Northern Province fishermen, rebuilding livelihoods destroyed by thirty years of war and wartime fishing bans, are the direct losers, and Colombo estimates annual losses running into tens of millions of dollars.
  • This makes the dispute Tamil against Tamil, which is why Sri Lankan Tamil parties side with Colombo on it and why the issue cannot be framed as majoritarian persecution.
• The Indian driver is overcapacity in a collapsed fishery.
  • Tamil Nadu’s Palk Bay fleet includes several thousand mechanised trawlers chasing a stock that has been fished down for decades, so the incentive to cross the boundary line is economic compulsion, not adventurism.
  • The Tamil Nadu Marine Fishing Regulation Act of 1983 reserves inshore waters for artisanal craft, pushing mechanised boats outward toward — and across — the maritime boundary.

Arrests, seizures and the mechanism

• Detentions run in the hundreds every year and spike whenever the political temperature rises.
  • Official figures given in April 2024 covered 6,184 fishermen detained and 1,175 vessels seized over twenty years.
  • The recent pattern is 317 arrests in 2024, 526 in 2025, and 119 with 17 boats seized in the first part of 2026 — an escalation, and one driven by boat seizure rather than by detention, since a confiscated trawler is a permanent loss to an owner.
  • Boat confiscation, not detention, is the real penalty: fishermen are usually repatriated within weeks through consular intervention, but vessels are forfeited on conviction.
• The bilateral architecture is humanitarian rather than substantive.
  • The 2008 “practical arrangements” understanding governs the treatment of bona fide fishermen who inadvertently cross the boundary, and produces periodic reciprocal releases around festivals.
  • The Joint Working Group on Fisheries, established in 2016 and including Tamil Nadu representation, was intended to meet regularly and has met only a handful of times; a fishermen-level dialogue between the two industries has repeatedly convened and repeatedly deadlocked.
  • The deadlock is structural: Sri Lanka wants trawling stopped, India wants access preserved, and neither side’s fishing community will accept the other’s precondition.

The transition that would actually solve it

• India has funded a shift out of trawling, and the shift is slower than the politics.
  • Schemes under the Palk Bay deep-sea fishing package and the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana subsidise conversion of trawlers into deep-sea tuna longliners, together with seaweed cultivation, cage culture and sea ranching as alternative livelihoods.
  • Uptake has been limited by cost-sharing terms, crew skill requirements, the absence of deep-sea landing and cold-chain infrastructure, and the reluctance of owners to write off a working asset.
• This is a fisheries-management problem wearing a territorial costume.
  • Retrieving Kachchatheevu would not add a single fish, because the 1976 EEZ bar — not the islet’s ownership — is what excludes Indian boats.
  • A joint management regime for the Palk Bay — closed seasons, gear restrictions, licensed reciprocal access, satellite monitoring, and a phased trawling ban on the Indian side — is the only settlement that addresses the injury rather than the symbol.

	Territorial framing	Resource framing
The problem is	Kachchatheevu was given away in 1974	The Palk Bay fishery has collapsed
The remedy is	Retrieval of the islet	Gear reform, licensed access, joint management
Who it serves	Tamil Nadu electoral politics	Fishing households on both coasts
Sri Lanka’s response	Non-negotiable; sovereignty	Negotiable, if trawling stops
Feasibility	Effectively nil	Difficult but available

The economic relationship

The India–Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement

• The ISFTA was signed in December 1998 and entered into force in March 2000 — India’s first bilateral free trade agreement anywhere. Sri Lanka was the laboratory in which India learned to do trade agreements at all.
  • It was deliberately asymmetric in Sri Lanka’s favour: India phased out tariffs faster, kept a shorter negative list of 429 items against Sri Lanka’s 1,180, and offered concessions on textiles, garments and tea.
  • Roughly 4,150 Indian tariff lines carry zero duty for Sri Lankan exports and about 3,932 Sri Lankan lines for Indian exports.
  • Bilateral trade rose from around US$560 million in 1999 to multiples of that within a decade, and Sri Lanka’s exports to India rose faster than its exports to the world in the early years.
• The record is genuinely mixed and both criticisms are fair.
  • The utilisation rate has been low, with a large share of trade still moving outside preferences because of rules-of-origin compliance costs, para-tariffs and non-tariff barriers — quotas, port-of-entry restrictions, standards and testing.
  • Sri Lankan gains concentrated in a few products — at one point vanaspati and copper, exploiting quota arbitrage — which fed the domestic argument that the agreement benefited rent-seekers rather than exporters.
  • The trade balance remains overwhelmingly in India’s favour, which is politically corrosive in Colombo whatever the causes.

CEPA, ETCA and the services blockage

• The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement was negotiated to completion and never signed. Talks began in 2003, texts were ready by 2008, and Colombo walked away.
  • The blocking issue was services and the movement of natural persons — the fear that Indian professionals, particularly in IT, health and construction, would displace Sri Lankan ones in a far smaller labour market.
  • Sri Lankan professional associations, chambers and nationalist parties framed CEPA as economic absorption by a fifty-times-larger neighbour, and no government has found it worth the domestic cost.
• The successor Economic and Technology Cooperation Agreement has followed the same pattern, with eleven rounds of negotiation and no signature; talks lapsed after 2018 and resumed only in the current phase.
  • The August 2026 understanding to resume finalising the ETCA is the first real movement in years, alongside a commitment to upgrade the existing FTA and an imminent social-security agreement.
  • The lesson is general to Indian trade diplomacy: goods agreements are signable, services agreements are not, because services touch employment and employment touches sovereignty anxieties.

The relationship as it stands

• India is Sri Lanka’s largest trading partner and among its largest investors.
  • Merchandise trade reached about US$7.18 billion in 2025–26, with Indian exports around US$5.52 billion and Sri Lankan exports around US$1.66 billion — the asymmetry that every Colombo negotiator raises.
  • Cumulative Indian FDI exceeds US$2.2 billion, concentrated in petroleum retail, hotels, telecommunications, manufacturing, real estate and financial services; the Colombo West terminal made India the single largest source of FDI in 2025.
  • India is Sri Lanka’s largest source market for tourists, at roughly 531,000 arrivals in 2025 — about 22.5% of the total — supported by free visa-on-arrival for Indians and the e-visa facility for Sri Lankans.

The 2022 collapse and India’s response

How Sri Lanka broke

• The crisis was made domestically and detonated by external shocks.
  • Deep tax cuts in late 2019 — VAT halved, income-tax thresholds raised — destroyed roughly a third of government revenue at a stroke and triggered rating downgrades that closed market access.
  • Monetary financing of the resulting deficit by the central bank inflated the money supply while the currency was held at an unsustainable peg.
  • COVID-19 destroyed tourism and remittances, the two largest sources of foreign exchange, at exactly the moment reserves were needed to service debt.
  • The abrupt, total ban on chemical fertiliser imports, April 2021, cut paddy and tea yields within a season, converting a self-sufficient rice producer into an importer and hitting the largest export earner.
  • The result was the classic twin deficit — fiscal and current account together — with reserves exhausted and debt service consuming the remainder.
• On 12 April 2022 Sri Lanka suspended external debt service — the first sovereign default in its history.
  • The aragalaya — the “struggle” — followed: sustained mass protests over fuel, cooking gas, medicine and power cuts, the occupation of the presidential secretariat in July 2022, and the flight and resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
  • The crisis, not any election, ended the Rajapaksa system and produced the political space that Dissanayake occupied in 2024.

India’s roughly US$4 billion

• India’s response was the largest bilateral assistance any country has given a neighbour in modern South Asian history, and it was delivered when nobody else moved.
  • A US$400 million currency swap under the SAARC framework in January 2022; deferral by the Reserve Bank of about US$2 billion in Asian Clearing Union liabilities.
  • A US$500 million line of credit for petroleum, February 2022, extended thereafter, which kept the island’s power stations and transport running.
  • A US$1 billion concessional credit facility in March 2022 for food, medicines and essential imports, and a US$55 million line for urea in June 2022 to rescue the planting season.
  • Physical supply followed the paper: fuel cargoes, rice, medicines, kerosene and 500 buses, moved with a speed no multilateral process could match.
• The strategic return has been large and is the single strongest piece of evidence in India’s favour anywhere in the neighbourhood.
  • It reversed a decade of Sri Lankan opinion that India talks and China builds, replacing it with the observation that China lent for assets and India paid for survival.
  • China’s response was comparatively slow, confined largely to rollovers and swap arrangements with restrictive usability conditions, which is the comparison Colombo drew at the time.

“It is natural for India to stand by Sri Lanka during its difficult time as ‘blood is thicker than water.'”

— S. Jaishankar

Debt restructuring and the first-mover advantage

• India was the first official bilateral creditor to convey financing assurances to the International Monetary Fund, in January 2023, which unlocked the Fund’s Extended Fund Facility approved in March 2023.
  • That single procedural act broke the deadlock created by the reluctance of China’s policy banks to accept comparable treatment, and it is the clearest case of India converting money into standing.
  • India then co-chaired the Official Creditor Committee alongside Japan and France and signed bilateral restructuring agreements with Colombo, with China negotiating separately outside the committee.
• The programme has held, but the recovery is fragile.
  • Sri Lanka returned to growth from 2024 and the Fund’s combined fifth and sixth reviews were completed in May 2026, with debt restructuring substantially concluded.
  • Debt remains around 110% of GDP, interest absorbs close to half of government revenue, and poverty is around a quarter of the population; the adjustment has leaned heavily on indirect taxes.
  • Cyclone Ditwah, late November 2025, caused losses estimated at over US$4 billion and hundreds of deaths — the largest single setback to the recovery.
  • India’s response was again immediate: Operation Sagar Bandhu delivered relief material, naval assets, engineering teams and road-restoration support, followed by a reconstruction package of about US$450 million, of which US$350 million took the form of rupee-denominated lines of credit exchanged during the Foreign Secretary’s visit in August 2026.

Connectivity and the current agenda

Ports and maritime links

• The Colombo West International Terminal, operational from April 2025, is the flagship Indian commercial presence on the island — a US$800 million, 1,400-metre, 20-metre-deep automated terminal on a 35-year build-operate-transfer concession, held by an Indian port operator with a Sri Lankan partner and the Sri Lanka Ports Authority.
  • It matters because roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of Colombo’s transhipment volume is Indian cargo, so the terminal aligns commercial logic with strategic presence in a way no grant project can.
  • Its financing history is itself a signal: it was structured as a Western-backed alternative to Chinese terminal capacity in the same harbour.
• The ferry service between Nagapattinam and Kankesanthurai, revived in October 2023 after four decades, has run intermittently, hostage to weather, vessel economics and passenger volumes — a reminder that connectivity announcements and connectivity operations are different things.
  • A Rameswaram–Talaimannar link and a longer-term land bridge proposal remain on the agenda as aspiration rather than project.

Energy

• The Trincomalee energy hub, agreed as a trilateral with the United Arab Emirates in April 2025, is the most consequential item on the current agenda.
  • It builds on the China Bay oil tank farm, whose joint development was written into the 1987 Accord’s exchange of letters and finally operationalised through a joint venture in 2022 — a thirty-five-year gap between undertaking and delivery.
  • Trincomalee is one of the finest deep-water natural harbours in the world, and who develops it has been an Indian security question since 1987.
• The Sampur solar project, a 120 MW India-assisted plant in Trincomalee district, was inaugurated in 2025 after years of stalled negotiation over an earlier coal proposal.
• A high-voltage grid interconnection across the Palk Strait and a multi-product petroleum pipeline were agreed in principle in 2024–25 and are being accelerated.
  • The grid link would give Sri Lanka access to the Indian power market and a route out of generation scarcity, and would tie the island into Indian infrastructure in a way ports cannot be reversed.

Digital, financial and defence

• India’s digital public infrastructure stack has been exported wholesale: a unique digital identity project, UPI acceptance in Sri Lanka from February 2024, and cooperation on digital government.
  • Payments and identity are influence instruments that cost India almost nothing and are extremely difficult for a rival to displace once embedded.
• The Memorandum of Understanding on defence cooperation, signed during Modi’s visit of 4–6 April 2025, was the first India–Sri Lanka defence agreement of its kind.
  • It provides an umbrella for training, exercises, port calls, defence-industry cooperation and maritime domain awareness, formalising what had been ad hoc since the IPKF withdrawal.
  • It was signed alongside agreements on energy, digital transformation, health, critical minerals and eastern-province development, and with India easing repayment terms on existing loans.
  • Sri Lanka’s assurance that its territory would not be used against India’s security is the operative political commitment, and the direct descendant of the 1987 exchange of letters.
  • Modi was conferred the Sri Lanka Mitra Vibhushana, the country’s highest honour for a foreign head of government — symbolism that mattered because it came from a JVP-descended presidency.

The China factor in the bilateral frame

Hambantota: correcting the standard story

• The 99-year lease of Hambantota port in 2017 was a commercial transaction, not a debt-for-equity swap, and the distinction matters.
  • A Chinese state port operator paid US$1.12 billion for a 70% stake in a joint venture on a 99-year concession, with the Sri Lanka Ports Authority retaining 30%.
  • The China Exim Bank construction loans were not cancelled, defaulted on or converted. They remained outstanding on their original terms; the lease proceeds went to shoring up foreign reserves and servicing short-term external liabilities, not to retiring the port debt.
  • Sri Lanka’s distress was owed substantially to international capital markets, not to Beijing: sovereign bond repayments dominated the debt-service profile in the years before default, while Hambantota-related instalments were a small fraction of total foreign debt service.
• The honest version is more damaging to Sri Lanka’s own governance than to China’s reputation — an economically unviable project pushed through for domestic political reasons, financed at commercial rates, and then monetised in a fire sale.
  • India’s own conduct is part of the story: Colombo offered the project to India first and India declined it on viability grounds, then objected when China took it.
  • Sri Lanka publicly undertook, with Indian concerns explicitly in mind, that the port would not be used by Chinese naval vessels and its security would remain with the Sri Lankan navy — an assurance whose value depends entirely on the government of the day.
  • The Mattala airport, likewise Chinese-financed and commercially dead, is the second half of the same lesson — and India and Russia later took a role in operating it.

What actually changed India’s threat perception

• The docking of a Chinese submarine and a warship at Colombo in 2014, without adequate notice, is the episode that changed Indian assessments — not the port lease three years later.
  • Ports are commercial until they carry warships; the 2014 calls demonstrated that Sri Lankan facilities could serve the PLA Navy and made every subsequent Chinese project a security question.
  • Colombo Port City, announced during Xi Jinping’s 2014 visit, added a reclaimed-land financial zone with its own legal regime on the doorstep of India’s busiest transhipment route.
• The research-vessel question is the live version of the same problem.
  • The Yuan Wang 5 call at Hambantota in 2022 and the Shi Yan 6 in 2023 produced sustained Indian and American objections over survey and tracking capability.
  • Sri Lanka imposed a one-year moratorium on foreign research vessels from January 2024; it expired at the end of 2024 and was replaced by a case-by-case standard operating procedure under Dissanayake, permitting berthing without research activity.
  • India has traded a blanket ban for a procedure it can influence — less absolute, more durable, and consistent with Sri Lanka’s refusal to grant any power exclusivity.
• India’s counter has been delivery, not capital matching, and the argument is that this is correct.
  • India cannot and should not try to outspend China on infrastructure; what it can do is be the first responder in a crisis, the supplier of fuel when the lights go out, the guarantor at the IMF, and the operator of the terminal that handles Indian cargo.
  • The regional analytics of Chinese strategy belong with the study of China’s South Asian footprint; the bilateral point is narrower and stronger — in 2022 the balance of usefulness shifted decisively toward India, and Sri Lankan policy has moved with it.

How the relationship has been read

• G. Parthasarathy argues India must stay continuously engaged and be alert to the naval dimension of Chinese and Pakistani presence, noting Pakistan’s offers of combat aircraft alongside Chinese port involvement, and favours financing sustainable infrastructure through vehicles such as the Asia Africa Growth Corridor and engagement through BIMSTEC where SAARC has stalled.
• Hardeep Puri makes the sharper political point: neighbours habitually play the China card, silent forbearance has not worked, and India should engage actively and not be deterred by the card being played.
• S.D. Muni locates the competition at the level of political financing and patronage rather than infrastructure, which is why Indian counter-offers of projects alone have limited purchase.

“China has perfected the art of buying elites in smaller countries.”

— S.D. Muni

• Harsh V. Pant identifies the asymmetry of constraint: India must balance domestic Tamil sensitivities against strategic interest, while China faces no such constraint, and the 2013 vote at the Human Rights Council — taken under DMK pressure, overturning a decades-old opposition to country-specific resolutions — is the demonstration.
• Shivshankar Menon offers the most sombre assessment of the post-war settlement: military victory ended the war in 2009, rehabilitation has progressed, but genuine reconciliation is missing and a political solution satisfying all parties looks less likely as time passes.
  • He also insists on realism about small-state behaviour: exclusivity is not something India can reasonably demand of Colombo, and using India to attract Chinese investment while using China to attract Indian attention is a strategy that has empirically worked.
• Rohan Mukherjee, assessing Chinese economic statecraft, concludes that Sri Lanka is not structurally vulnerable to Beijing in trade — India has consistently been its largest trading partner and its largest export market among the three big players, and Colombo’s transhipment volumes are dominated by Indian cargo.
• C. Raja Mohan situates Sri Lanka within India’s larger difficulty of converting geographic primacy into political influence, and argues that India’s advantage lies in economic integration and connectivity rather than in security guarantees.

The balance sheet

• What India has got right: crisis delivery in 2022 and 2025, the first-mover role at the IMF, the digital and payments stack, a commercially viable port presence, and the first formal defence framework in the relationship’s history.
• What remains unresolved: the Thirteenth Amendment, provincial council elections, the fishermen, Kachchatheevu as a permanent political demand, the services agreement, and a Sri Lankan hedge that no amount of Indian generosity will retire.
• The recurring structural fact is that Sri Lanka’s internal settlement is India’s business only because Indian domestic politics makes it so — which gives India a stake it cannot abandon and an instrument it cannot use.

India’s Sri Lanka policy has moved through three postures in seventy-five years: refusal of responsibility over citizenship, armed involvement in someone else’s civil war, and delivery without demands. The first was legally coherent and morally cold, the second catastrophic, and the third — the posture since 2022 — has done more for Indian influence than either. What has not changed is the underlying bargain: Colombo will take Indian money, Indian fuel and Indian guarantees, and will not take Indian instructions on how to govern its Tamils.