From The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/world/asia/sri-lanka-election-results.html?smid=em-share
Leftist Leader Elected President as Sri Lanka Rejects the Old Order.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s strong showing reveals voter weariness with leadership that has led to a national economic crisis and crushing hardship for many people.
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India now has new regimes ruling its immediate neighbourhood with whom it shares few common values, political ideology or weltanschaaung.
Here’s a roll-call of them :
— a military junta in Pakistan that is puppeteer of a so-called democratically elected civilian government that’s up to its neck in debt to China;
— an Islamist government in Bangladesh that’s headed by a “Made in America” puppet who is mere proxy for the White House;
— Maldives is headed by a Muslim regime whose puppet-strings can be traced all the way to Beijing;
— Myanmar whose military junta rule takes orders from China, the real HQ;
— Nepal whose ragged , higgledy-piggledy democracy is infested with Maoists;
— and now, here comes Sri Lanka that has just finished electing an avowedly Marxist-Leninist President who is, in fact, an ex-insurrectionist and who will most likely also soon become China’s pawn in the Indo-Pacific geopolitical chess-game between China and India … what with India now having become a fully paid-subscribed member of the QUAD gang. The Communist Party of India will also now get a fresh testosterone -surge shot in the veins from this friendly neighborhood tango-partner… And of course The Hindu newspaper of Mount Road, Chennai, can certainly hope to increase its circulation more than a bit now in Sri Lanka.
The Modi Government , on the other hand, will have to worry not so much about self-anointing itself Vishwabandhu in its foreign-policy dream-projects as it has to now start grappling with the challenge of “prativeshi Bandhu” (प्रतिवेशी) … i.e. how to turn unfriendly neighbours into friends…
Sudarshan Madabushi