Ties with West to be renewed

Regarding Harsh V. Pant's Jan. 19 article, "Even with a change of regime in Colombo, China's sway will continue to grow in Sri Lanka": Pant is vaguely accurate in most of his analysis of Sri Lanka's recent history, but his description of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa's 2010 post-civil war election victory fails to mention that Rajapaksa's win was based entirely on his popularity with the country's majority ethnic Sinhalese.

The Sinhalese saw Rajapaksa as a war hero who had wreaked bloody revenge for a decades-long separatist insurgency by minority ethnic Tamil after government forces militarily defeated the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and physically wiped out their leadership. Tamils either boycotted the 2010 election or voted for rival candidates, as did the minority Muslims.

Rajapaksa's even greater electoral dependence on the Sinhalese community for his third presidential bid on Jan. 8 was his downfall. His declining popularity with the Sinhalese gave his main rival, Maithripala Sirisena, victory.

More important, Pant is quite wrong about his contention that Chinese sway will continue to grow under Sirisena, who heads a powerful center-right coalition that has firmly declared the opposite. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, well known for his Western leanings, has already stated categorically that the country will quickly move away from dependence on a single major power, China, and will return to its traditional close ties with India and renew ties with the West in a general return of a foreign policy that balances ties between East and West.

The new government has already stated that some major Chinese projects, including the new Port City in Colombo, may be curtailed, if not ended. The probes into massive corruption by the Rajapaksa family may also embarrass China if its projects are linked to large-scale bribery.

The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.