Sri Lanka should not get sandwiched between India and China, the island nation’s new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said in the September issue of Monocle.
It is unclear if his comments to the magazine were made before or after he won the Sri Lankan presidential election on Sunday.
The Leftist leader also told Monocle that Sri Lanka would not align itself with any “power camp” in a geopolitical contest.
“We don’t want to be sandwiched, especially between China and India,” the London-based magazine quoted him as saying. “Both countries are valued friends and, under an NPP [National People’s Power] government, we expect them to become close partners.”
Dissanayake also said he wanted to maintain relations with the European Union and countries in West Asia and Africa. He was sworn-in as the ninth executive president of Sri Lanka on Monday.
The leader of the National People’s Power alliance won 5.7 million votes, or 42.3% of the vote share. Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa secured 4.5 million votes or 32.8% of the vote share.
Dissanayake was declared the winner after a second round of counting. Under Sri Lanka’s electoral system, voters cast three preferential votes. A second round of counting is held to select a winner from among the top two candidates, if neither managed to secure 50% of the vote in the first count.
The election was closely watched in India as Sri Lanka is of strategic importance to New Delhi amid its geopolitical competition with Beijing in the Indian Ocean.
This was the first presidential election in Sri Lanka since its economic and political crisis in 2022. The country declared bankruptcy in July 2022.
New Delhi has provided Colombo with assistance worth $4 billion to help it weather the crisis.
A bailout programme by the International Monetary Fund had helped improve the economic situation in the country to a degree, but the high cost of living that Sri Lankans continue to face was among the key planks on which the election was fought.
Dissanayake has vowed to renegotiate the loan conditions of the International Monetary Fund’s $3 billion bailout programme that resulted in spending cuts and tax hikes in Sri Lanka.
Late on Sunday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Dissanayake on his victory. In a social media post, Modi said that Sri Lanka is important to India under New Delhi’s Neighbourhood First policy. He vowed to work with the new government to strengthen diplomatic ties between New Delhi and Colombo.
Dissanayake said he shares Modi’s commitment to strengthening ties between the two countries.
On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping also congratulated Dissanayake.
In a statement, the Chinese foreign ministry said that Xi had pledged to work alongside Dissanayake to “facilitate more fruitful high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, and make steady and long-term progress of China-Sri Lanka strategic cooperative partnership”.
The Belt and Road Initiative is a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure scheme launched by Xi in 2013, which envisions rebuilding the old Silk Road to mainly connect China with Asia and Europe.
India has been critical of the Belt and Road Initiative as one of its components, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. New Delhi has maintained that the corridor violates India’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Also read: Sri Lanka votes labourer’s son to presidency, chooses to revive democracy – just like India did
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