Switzerland is famous for its neutrality through both World Wars. Despite being at the centre of deadly warfare between world powers, this landlocked central European State was never invaded by belligerents. 

During World War II, the Nazis planned an invasion of the Swiss nation. However, Operation Tannenbaum was aborted due to the geographical complexities of this region, which have for many centuries provided the region with immense natural protection. The mountainous terrain and narrow routes were obstacles that made potential invasions risky and the chances for success too slim given the certain costs to an invading force. 

Halford Mackinder was a British MP and geographer who many consider a founding father of geostrategy and geopolitics, developing the ‘Heartland Theory’ in his 1904 article ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’. 

Mackinder was among the first to consider the strategic implications of being an island nation from a defensive point of view and that being an island (insularity) provided a natural barrier against invasions. He used the example of the UK having benefited from its status as an island, able to develop a powerful naval fleet which formed the basis for its defensive capabilities and imperial ambitions. 

Sri Lanka exists in the Indian sphere of influence, and given the lack of symmetry in defensive and offensive capabilities between the Indian nation and all other nations in this immediate region, nations like Sri Lanka must act accordingly. 

As the State of Ukraine will no doubt testify, there are almost always limits to the concept of sovereignty and these limits are often brought into stark contrast when a state exists not just in the sphere of influence of a great power but has also shared a contentious history with that regional hegemon. 

Everybody needs good neighbours

Despite close cultural and economic ties that have existed for centuries, relations between India and Sri Lanka are complex, with India being a major trading partner having significant investments, partnerships, and development programmes; and most recently during the economic collapse of 2022, providing emergency credit lines and financial assistance. 

Indeed, Sri Lanka owes much to its illustrious neighbour, especially the speed with which the Indian credit lines were provided, giving the Sri Lankan Government and its people a much-needed lifeline. 

The necessary context for the current state of the Indo-Lanka relationship is the more recent Sri Lankan tilt towards the Chinese orbit, which has manifested itself in the form of commercial control over the Hambantota Port by a State-linked Chinese entity, the artificial islands of the Port City, and the economic entrenchment through various other investments and borrowings. 

The Indian political establishment has sought to walk back this Chinese entrenchment and the results are a spate of projects and agreements to increase connectivity between the two nations. 

Writing for the Colombo Telegraph during President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s August 2023 visit to India, Ameer Ali noted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to “strengthen the maritime, air, energy, and people-to-people connectivity,” part of his ‘Neighbourhood First’ mantra and what he called India’s “civilisational duty” towards Sri Lanka. Ali and many others noted that the commitments to greater connectivity also included the mention of a land bridge across the Palk Strait. 

More recently, reports from May quote Chief of Staff to the President Sagala Ratnayaka stating that the proposed land bridge with India will allow Indian shipping companies to unload India-bound containers and then transport them by road to their destinations: “It will reduce their costs. More than that, Sri Lanka will benefit in the whole economic process.” 

In April, Indian Ambassador to Sri Lanka Santosh Jha called the potential land bridge a “gamechanger” for Sri Lankan tourism: “Our effort to establish the land bridge, on which we have begun our joint work, promises to further provide fillip to our ongoing efforts to promote tourism between our two countries.”

As L.P. Suranga pointed out, writing in a national newspaper in April, the idea of physical connectivity to India was not new. He recalled that the 2001 proposal tabled by the United National Party (UNP) Government was “a priority project in the ‘Yali Pubudamu Sri Lanka’ (Re-Awakening) programme” of then Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, who had discussed the plan and reached a preliminary agreement with India’s then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

It might be reasonably assumed that this is the next stage of Sri Lanka’s realignment with India following the drift to China. Indeed, as Suranga notes, President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Modi have held discussions on 16 issues related to economic cooperation, which include:

• An economic land corridor
• Interconnection between the power grids 
• A fuel pipeline accommodating multiple products 
• Renewable energy projects
• Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) for the Trincomalee Economic Development Plan Initiative, renewable energy, and the Kankesanthurai (KKS) Port Redevelopment Project
• The development of the Upper Tank Farm (UTF) in Trincomalee

Oceans apart

It is important not to conflate physical, land-based connectivity with enhanced economic relationships. 

P.K. Balachandran published an excellent piece in February noting the major advantages: “Land connectivity will help India’s southern states as well as ports on India’s eastern seaboard like Visakhapatnam, Kolkata, and Chennai. Ships from these ports now have to go around Sri Lanka to reach Colombo, the only major commercial port in Sri Lanka.”

Even during the 2002 period, the Wickremesinghe Government “envisaged a four-lane highway with a parallel single rail track that was estimated to cost $ 1 billion”; a concept paper was also prepared. The ‘Yahapalana’ Government floated the Economic and Technology Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) to enhance trade and services between the nations, including free movement and a single market. 

While this initiative was sidelined in the aftermath of the collapse of the ‘Yahapalana’ Government, it should be noted that a proposal floated around the same time by Indian Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari proposed a 20 km bridge with Asian Development Bank (ADB) assistance.

In terms of making the financial and economic case for physical connectivity, articles by Prof. Rohan Samarajiva as well as Gayasha Samarakoon and Muttukrishna Sarvananthan are more than convincing. In separate articles they point to the following:

• A land bridge would bring down the transport cost in India-Sri Lanka trade by 50%
• It would also reduce time for transport and cut waiting times for customs clearance
• Lower transport costs would reduce prices for consumers in Sri Lanka
• Job creation, especially in Colombo and Trincomalee
• More opportunities to link with Global Production Networks (GPNs)

The geopolitics of the issue are barely concealed. India will continue to insist on the full implementation of the 13th Amendment while the Tamil nationalists in Sri Lanka push for a federal state, beyond the 13th Amendment’s framework of devolution. 

This is the bludgeon that the Chinese footprint was meant to shield any Government of the nationalist wing of Sri Lankan politics from. Instead, it seems that China’s entrenchment has perhaps made the matter even more complicated for policymakers. Not only does Delhi seek a political solution from Colombo, it is also now seemingly interested in competing with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, at least within Sri Lanka’s territorial boundaries. 

In a November 2021 article for the Lowy Institute, Chulanee Attanayake framed the issue in terms of the latest investments in ports by the Adani Group, a leading Indian conglomerate. “Commercially, more than 70% of the transshipment business from the Colombo Port is linked with the Indian market – much of it with Adani port terminals.” Given the links between the Modi Government and the Adani Group, its investments in Sri Lanka allows it to have a foothold in the Colombo Port alongside Chinese activity. 

Attanayake also noted that “ports are increasingly viewed more as strategic assets than mere commercial assets. Control over and easy access to essential ports allow countries to project their power, influence, and forward defence capabilities without owning and spending a fortune on an overseas military base.”

‘The South Indian Plain’

In an article I wrote for this column in March 2023 titled ‘The Indo-Lankan Confidential,’ I noted Indian concerns way back in 1977 over the possibility that Sri Lanka would stray from its ‘non-aligned’ principles and offer Trincomalee’s deep-water harbour to the US Navy. It was these security concerns that led to the ‘exchange of letters’ as an addendum to the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987, which included the clause that required the Government of Sri Lanka to ensure that neither Trincomalee nor any other ports would be “made available for military use by any country in a manner prejudicial to India’s interests”. 

India’s strategic interest in Sri Lanka is clear and the Chinese expansion on the island has only made matters more urgent, especially from an increasingly assertive India. 

Writing for The Diplomat in August 2023, Rathindra Kuruwita stated: “It is an open secret in Colombo’s political circles that India prefers Wickremesinghe over the other potential alternatives, Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Wickremesinghe is viewed as a pro-Indian politician… while Premadasa’s father was responsible for scrapping the India-Sri Lanka Agreement… As for Dissanayake, he is perceived as being close to China.”

Two articles by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka published six years apart provide fascinating commentary on the issues at play. The first, from May 2017, notes Prime Minister Modi’s visit that year to address the International Vesak Conference at the BMICH during which he “laid out the Modi doctrine for Indo-Lankan relations and more especially for Sri Lanka,” prescribing what Dr. Jayatilleka refers to “as limits of this country’s sovereign existence”. 

Modi called for greater connectivity, the “free flow of trade, investments, technology, and ideas… to our mutual benefit… Our development partnership stretches across nearly every sector of human activity such as agriculture, education, health, resettlement, transport, power, culture, water, shelter, sports, and human resources… The economic and social well-being of the people of Sri Lanka is linked with that of 1.25 billion Indians… Whether it is on land or in the waters of the Indian Ocean, the security of our societies is indivisible.”

Writing in July 2023, Dr. Jayatilleka noted the following salient points regarding the dangers of physical connectivity with India:

• The centre of economic gravity of Sri Lanka will shift; it will no longer be located in the strategically defensible southern two-thirds but in the strategically vulnerable north and east. 
• Plugging Sri Lanka’s north and east, i.e. the recently secessionist Tamil-majority cone of this small island with its Tamil minority into India’s massive south containing Tamil Nadu, an economic powerhouse with 80 million Tamils, will tilt the power balance of ‘domestic geopolitics’ on this small island. 
• Over time, the multi-dimensional integration of Sri Lanka with India cannot but be a channel for the projection of Indian power patterns and demographic configuration upon and within Sri Lanka itself. 
• Our entire character, the essence of our existence, evolved over millennia, will be transformed in a manner that diminishes rather than enhances our independence, sovereignty, and autonomy. We shall no longer be what we are or have been. We shall become a dependency; a peripheral unit of India’s economy. 

Ali questions the wisdom of physical connectivity with India, especially how it would be received by Sinhala Buddhist nationalists, stating: “The idea of this epochal connectivity is destined to rekindle the historic fear among the Sinhalese that India’s Tamil south and Sri Lanka’s Tamil north would be joined physically to pose a mortal threat to their dream of transforming this island into a one-and-only Sinhala Buddhist country in the world. It is on that dream that political Buddhism was born, a civil war was fought, and current developments are stamped.” 

Kuruwita interestingly notes the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the building of a bridge between mainland Russia and the peninsula for strategic purposes. In fact, the entire annexation of the Crimean Peninsula was an example of Russia understanding Mackinder’s geostrategic observations. 

As a peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea, Crimea provides a natural defensive barrier against land-based invasions and allows for control over crucial sea lanes that serve as supply lines. The mountainous southern part of the peninsula offers natural fortification. The Crimean Peninsula provides Russia with direct control over some two-thirds of Ukraine’s coastline and thereby a majority of its maritime exclusive economic zone as well as 80% of its potential offshore oil and gas reserves.

Russian nationalism itself is partly the result of the geography and topography of its western border, which includes the East European Plain, the chosen route for invasions of Russia for the last 500 years. Sri Lanka cannot allow its security and sovereignty to become captive to short-term or, for that matter, even longer-term economic imperatives. Whether physical connectivity with India becomes a reality or not is also beside the question, as it is possible to mitigate risks through planning and policy. 

The worrying trend is that despite a plethora of arguments for physical connectivity with India, spread over the last decade and more, there is hardly any security-focused analysis of the dangers of a potential land bridge. 

This is what Sri Lanka must avoid at all costs – what it failed to avoid throughout the last 10 years of misadventures with Chinese infrastructure investments and the geostrategic missteps it has led to, the consequences of which are still ongoing. There must be robust public debate and consultation with security experts and stakeholders before we embark on a project that has the scope to completely alter Sri Lanka’s security and defensive capabilities, probably permanently. 

Readers ought to be aware that, at the height of contestations between India and Sri Lanka in the 1980s, Indira Gandhi made secret plans for an invasion of Sri Lanka, with Indian paratroopers planning to capture crucial Sri Lankan air strips; the plan was ultimately scrapped. 

Against the backdrop of such recent history, should the Sri Lankan Government not be concerned about generating its own version of the East European Plain? Mackinder would be sounding the alarm. 

(The writer has 15 years of experience in the financial and corporate sectors after completing a Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent [UK] while also completing a Masters in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media resource person, presenter, political commentator, and foreign affairs analyst. He also presents an interview show that is available on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and is a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. He can be contacted via email: kusumw@gmail.com and X: @kusumw)