Sri Lanka: The implosion and beyond

India and the international community have the opportunity to ensure that the current turbulence is not allowed to result in anything that will adversely affect regional security.by Lt Gen (Retd) Syed Ata HasnainFor a long time, among the many contenders for the title 'Singapore of South Asia', Sri Lanka stood out as the most likely.

A nation of 20 million people, strategically located in the Indian Ocean right next to a huge neighbour, from where it could draw tremendous support, it also had everything that promoted high footprint international tourism. Lanka should have been the world's envy but for its intense ethnic rivalries, lack of political maturity of its leadership and refusal to learn from mistakes.

The number of times it has imploded due to one cause or the other was for many of the reasons mentioned above, but the ethnic and the religious domains stand out for the havoc that they have caused and held Lanka back from what it could have been. It's again imploding.

This time the reasons for the meltdown are so brazenly obvious that it's a wonder that the nation allowed the situation to reach such a nadir. From 2009 till 2022, serious mismanagement of governance, wrong choices in foreign relations and sheer corruption have all added to the ethnic and religious issues, making Lanka a basket case.

table " " 0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto class="tr-caption" Police officers clashed with government supporters in ColomboLanka's problem starts from its ethnic divide. A longstanding brutal, internal ethnic war between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority refused to allow the nation to progress.

It gave birth to one of the world's most vicious terror groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The turbulence created by the civil war did not allow the nation's progress.

The huge potential for tourism remained stymied due to the intermittent bouts of violence. International efforts to broker a peace deal flattered to deceive.

Many say that its location midway between the Suez Canal and the Straits of Malacca gave it tremendous potential for promotion of goodwill and cultivation of its strategic importance. It failed to do either and actually created a blunder by climbing the Chinese bandwagon in linking with it to build the Hambantota port and Matalla international airport, the biggest economic white elephants that have helped drag the nation down.

Mahinda Rajapaksa (the deposed PM) became President...