Foreign policy in the time of coronavirus
The year so far has not boded well for the government. Coming on top of the sugar scandal and the Geneva debacle, not to mention escalating food prices, it now faces the prospect of a third coronavirus wave, depending on how well people adhered to health guidelines during Avurudu.
If press photographs from Pettah, Nugegoda, and Maharagama are anything to go by, it’s clear not a few of those guidelines have been transgressed: regrettable, given how case numbers were coming down in recent weeks. The government can’t be blamed for such transgressions, to be sure, yet for me they are symptomatic of its failures on other fronts: largely failures of inaction, like the Atafloxin issue, but also of commission, like the sugar fiasco. None of them does those in power any credit.
What’s confusing isn’t the breakneck speed at which these failures seem to be unfolding, but the inadequacy of the responses from those holding office. These responses are of two kinds: outright denial and vague obfuscation. The burial issue unearthed both: months were spent forming committees and coming up with recommendations, yet not even the Prime Minister’s announcement in parliament could resolve it.
Indeed, the delay in coming up with a solution probably had a bigger say in OIC countries (including Indonesia) abstaining on the Geneva vote, than even the racialist sentiments that went into support for the delay over granting permission. Months of denial and obfuscation later, it would seem that the almost never-ending saga of COVID-19 burials has dragged the country into — the unhappy prospect of international humiliation.
But then this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. On foreign affairs we seem to have caved into “policy inversions”, where how we deal with the rest of the world runs counter with how we deal with ourselves. We seem to be rebelling against no less than common sense here: domestic politics and foreign policies are intertwined, and the link between the two is the premise on which nations conduct their relations with other nations. Be it neutral, nonaligned, India First, or Kalyana Mitra, this is the principle that should guide our dealings with the world.
Yet that truism does not appear to have gone into the heads of the government’s most fervent advocates. Sure, our Foreign Ministry was never at the top of the league, but we have Dinesh Gunawardena as Minister today, and he is, I daresay, the best we’ve had in years, easily the best since Lakshman Kadirgamar. Such credentials can only bring in a breath of much needed fresh air to policy formulation and implementation.
Obviously, any rational administration would have tapped into the kind of experience which Mr Gunawardena has and the principled base he represents. However, as Professor Rajiva Wijesinghe noted only too correctly, high level officials seem to be both promoting ineptitude among incompetents, and marginalising what little competence we have. Mr Gunawardena’s tragedy therefore is to be regretted: he continues to be curtailed, a fate he did not suffer even as leader of the parliamentary group of the much maligned Joint Opposition.
That brings us to another problem. Ideological splits are, as we know only too well, inevitable in large coalitions. Indeed, given the magnitude of the current pandemic, it would have been surprising if such splits, intensely polarising as they are, didn’t emerge sooner.
The problem with the splits we’re seeing in the present regime is that they have led it to hang, draw, and quarter itself, to tie itself to three or four horses and crack the whip on them. The dilemma it faces is not so much a lack of focus, as a confusion of where the focus ought to be. In such a state of affairs, it’s ended up achieving the worst of both worlds: policies that go too far, and policies that don’t go far enough.
Hence while engaging in rhetoric that does little to nothing to win over potential allies, it has, concurrently, managed to overreach itself in pursuit of the latter. The muddle over the ECT-Adani Deal is symptomatic of this Janus-faced approach: while one half of the government proceeded to ink it, another protested it to the point of bringing about its annulment.
Again, what we come across here is a case of policy inversion, though of a different sort. If in Geneva we saw how the pressures of domestic politics contradict the imperatives of foreign relations, in the storm over the ECT-Adani Deal we saw how hastily rushed foreign policies contradict domestic imperatives. As Dr Dayan Jayatilleka has perceptibly observed, the deal unleashed not one genie, but two: it violated the rule against handing over strategic national assets to non-nationals, and it aggravated China by handing over such an asset to its Enemy Number One, emboldening it to claim a bigger piece of the pie here in the future.
In other words, while doing little in Geneva, we went overboard appeasing India, which in turn led us to retreat in the face of domestic convulsions and upset already strained relations with that country. Such inexorable declines of fortune take one’s breath away.
What interests me is how far these dissensions and contradictions have spread. If they remained in the government, where they usually do, that would have been the end of the story. But then the end of the story is far, far away: those contradictions, and dissensions, have made their way elsewhere too, above all to the Opposition.
The Samagi Jana Balavegaya is now more than a year old. In August last year, it managed to complete the hatchet job begun by the SLPP, reducing the United National Party to one seat in parliament.
The SJB won across predominantly minority and upper middle-class Colombo constituencies. Having summoned the father of its founder, at present it ostensibly stands for a moderate populist base. Given its past, however, whatever ideological stance it adheres to today will continue to be dictated by two conflicts: between its need to strike new ground and its associations with the UNP on the one hand, and between the electorates through which it entered parliament (minority plus Colombo) and the electorate it is wooing (Sinhala Buddhist) on the other.
In other words the Opposition has become a microcosm of the government, lacking a sense of direction and canvassing support from everywhere. To escape the kind of past the UNP was associated with is not easy, since a considerable section of the SJB continues to espouse the parent party’s line. On domestic issues as on foreign ones, the SJB hence has had to balance two constraints: the votes that got it into parliament, and the party it hails from. Its response to the Geneva defeat confirms this turnaround.
The SJB’s take on Geneva 2021 is that the government could have done better. In a carefully worded communiqué that remains a far cry from the press despatches we got from the UNP-led yahapalana administration, it underscores two points: the need for accountability through local mechanisms (the LLRC and the Paranagama Commission) and the need for devolution in line with, but not beyond, the 13th Amendment.
In all fairness to those who drafted it, both these recommendations signify a departure from previous policy, as epitomised by Mangala Samaraweera’s co-sponsored resolution. Gone is the sense of self-deprecation that so marked foreign policy in the previous administration; what the party is targeting now is a domestic mechanism, based on Commissions tabled in Mahinda Rajapaksa’s second term.
The SJB will find it difficult to reconcile these policy U-turns, promising as they are, due to those two constraining factors: in particular, the constituencies that got it into parliament. Already the TNA and other Tamil parties, including C. V. Wigneswaran’s Tamil People’s National Alliance, have aired their views on the matter: that domestic mechanisms are inadequate, and that they prefer 13-plus. This can only take the Opposition to a collision course with hardliners opposed to home-grown solutions.
Interestingly enough, not a few discussions of Geneva 2021 have revolved around the SJB’s response, with foreign and expatriate academics (including those from the Tamil Diaspora) accusing the SJB and Sajith Premadasa of betrayal, and the liberal intelligentsia reluctantly endorsing the SJB’s communiqué. What we’re seeing here, simply put, is a paradigm shift in an Opposition hailing from a party associated for 25 years with the politics of appeasement. No doubt this is a welcome change, yet for the SJB, it is not going to come easy.
The government’s policy inversions seem to have infected the SJB. The latter is now caving into inversions of its own, propounding stances that depart considerably, if not significantly, from those it took while in the UNP. The question as to how long the government will stand is thus inextricably linked to the question as to how long the SJB will be able to survive what I suspect to be the most challenging balancing act an Opposition here has engaged in, since J. R. Jayewardene remoulded the UNP in 1977.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
