By Easwaran Rutnam The recent visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Sri Lanka has reignited the China factor. While showing solidarity with Sri Lanka following the Easter Sunday attacks, Modi’s visit was also seen as an attempt to ensure Sri Lanka gives India a bigger stake than China on development projects. Indian diplomatic sources told The Sunday Morning that following repeated concerns raised by India on the delay to implement some Indian funded projects in Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe had assured during Modi’s visit that Sri Lanka will expedite the projects. Like the US, India is also concerned over the number of projects given to China by Sri Lanka, especially when Mahinda Rajapaksa was president. There are concerns in India that if a new government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa or his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa was to come to power in the next election, Sri Lanka will once again shift towards a policy which gives China a bigger stake in Sri Lanka, Indian diplomatic sources added. Former Foreign Secretary Dr. Palitha Kohona told The Sunday Morning that China’s links with Sri Lanka, though not as comprehensive as those with India, are nevertheless historic and substantial and cannot be so flippantly dismissed as was done in 2015. Indian-Chinese rivalry “India has harboured serious reservations about China’s outreach in the Indian Ocean which India considers its backyard. Sri Lanka's growing economic connections with China have caused discomfort in New Delhi; that is natural. Its southern neighbours should take note of it. The Indian Prime Minister probably wished to underline these concerns in a manner as non-confrontational as possible while emphasising the historic, warm links that bind its southern neighbours to India,” he said. However, the former diplomat said that China’s growing global economic clout, including its Belt and Road Initiative, will provide Sri Lanka the opportunity to make rapid advances in the economic sphere. He noted that it would be Sri Lanka's policy challenge to balance India's sensitivities and China's benevolence for national advantage. “A strong leader at the helm in New Delhi, not dependent on regional support, especially on Tamil Nadu, would provide the ideal opportunity to develop this balance. China, it is recalled, is rapidly becoming India's main trading partner,” he added. Modi arrived in Sri Lanka last Sunday (9) after a visit to the Maldives, which also had close dealings with China before the current administration took over. The policy of the Maldivian Government led by President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih has been mending ties with India. Solih, who took office in November last year, has shifted away from a pro-China policy and is moving towards a pro-Indian and pro-Western policy. “The fact that newly-elected PM Modi chose the Maldives as the destination for his first visit abroad in his new term of office is highly significant in the context of the race for control over the Indian Ocean by India and rival China. PM Modi did not even once visit the Maldives during the tenure of pro-Chinese President Yameen, when the India-Maldives relationship was strained. The strain in the relationship had originally surfaced after the Maldivian people chose to push out GMR from the airport project in the Maldives following the resignation of President Nasheed,” former Maldivian Foreign Minister Dunya Maumoon told The Sunday Morning. Dunya Maumoon was the Foreign Minister under former President Yameen, but later resigned after Yameen began to hunt her father, former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. “My personal view has been that the Maldives should maintain a balanced foreign policy as we did during President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s tenure, and not get drawn into the tensions and rivalries of others. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Bilateral foreign aid will not come for free. Whether the donor is China, India, or the US, they will demand payback. The danger is, when payback time comes, we might be asked to compromise our core values. Are we prepared to do that? Building resilience is a far better strategy than increasing dependence,” Maumoon said. Both the Maldives and Sri Lanka were seen as countries which fell into a Chinese “debt trap”, and the Sirisena administration as well as President Solih have looked to reverse that. India’s concern, like that of the US, has been that through debt diplomacy, China was establishing military bases in South Asia. The bigger picture However, Dr. Kohona was of the opinion that India has nothing to worry about considering its military strength in the Indian Ocean region. “India is reportedly maintaining a base in the Seychelles, and has concluded an agreement to build an airstrip and a sophisticated ‘monitoring station’ at a cost of $ 45 million. It has also signed a bilateral agreement for Navy cooperation with Singapore that provides Indian Navy ships temporary deployment facilities and logistics support at Singapore’s Changi naval base which is near the disputed South China Sea. Indian military strength in the Indian Ocean region is unquestionably formidable. The US has recently agreed to sell guardian drones to India for maritime surveillance. India, while strengthening its naval capabilities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has also quietly developed strategic relations with Australia and Japan, participating in regular joint naval exercises,” he said. Dr. Kohona noted that it seems unlikely that China, even if it wished, would be rash enough to challenge nuclear-armed India in the Indian Ocean for decades to come. He was of the opinion that India enjoys overwhelming military superiority in the Indian Ocean and is likely to consolidate this position even further in the future. Additionally, he says the US maintains a mammoth base in Diego Garcia to the south of Sri Lanka and in the circumstances, it is highly improbable that Chinese policymakers would consider challenging the existing power arrangements in the Indian Ocean any time soon, if ever. “They have not done so since Admiral Zheng. He’s flotilla entered the Indian Ocean in 1405 and dominated the region till 1433. To overextend in order to meet a possible challenge from China would only result in expending scarce resources for a scenario that is unlikely to eventuate,” he said. Dr. Kohona said that India would be better advised to devote less energies building up a muscular military to counter an unlikely threat from China and focus on economic development which will benefit not only its own citizens but also the region as a whole. He says India could again take the moral leadership of a region which is increasingly threatened by militant Islamic terrorism. “India’s ruling elite appear to be conscious of this threat. India must work with the countries of the region to counter this immediate threat and provide leadership,” he said. Meanwhile, concerns have been raised in the Maldives that the country is now shifting too close to India and in the process is surrendering to a foreign government. Dunya Maumoon said when she was foreign minister, she objected to a hydrographical survey MoU when it was proposed in February 2015. Since then, the Maldives Foreign Ministry has been objecting to that, until now. During Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the Maldives, a MoU for cooperation in the field of hydrography was signed. Maumoon said that she had objected to the MoU because she felt the Maldives should not surrender to a foreign government the ownership of data about underwater resources in the Maldives. The former ruling party also raised national security concerns over the MoU on cooperation in hydrography signed by the Maldives and India. Former Maldives Defence Minister Adam Shareef told the Maldives media last week that allowing India to know everything there is to know about the Maldivian waters was tantamount to sharing state secrets with India.