Sri Lanka, shaped like a tear drop at the base of India, is very similar to Kerala in many respects, viz. its landscape with hills sloping down to the seashore; its crops (paddy, rubber, tea); its high level of literacy; the status of women; and the level of urbanisation.
If one drives from Kandy (the old capital) to Colombo it is almost like going through Kerala, with a continuous stretch of small towns and no villages. Like people from Kerala, Sri Lankans have emigrated to West Asia, Europe and the US in large numbers. There is very little visible poverty.
Except when there is a cricket match, very few Indians think about Sri Lanka as a strategic neighbour. In the recent past, it has become a holiday destination for the discerning, as it is a beautiful country with very low costs.
But in terms of political awareness we are almost exclusively obsessed with Pakistan and Bangladesh. But an equally sensitive situation is likely to develop to our south if the turmoil in Sri Lanka continues. When the Jayawardene government was in power in Sri Lanka in the sixties, India had become a close ally of the Soviet Union.
As a counter to the Indo-Soviet axis, the Americans set up Pakistan as a counter base and encouraged a closer link between Sri Lanka and Pakistan, taking advantage of the suspicions of the Sinhalese people that India was aiding and abetting the Tamil separatist movement in Sri Lanka.
The naive and aborted intervention by Rajiv Gandhi
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