This Country Is Being Sold Out To …

This country is being sold out to ……..,’ is an old refrain which ‘baby boomers’ of the forties now long in the tooth with bald pates are well familiar with.

It was even worse soon after Independence when the claim was that Ceylon’s (Sri Lanka’s earlier name) claim of being an independent country was a fake. How could this country be truly free and independent when the King of Britain is still our head of state, pundits in red shirts and some black coated oracles of Hulftsdorp asked.

Yet, these Doubting Thomases were free and unrestrained in their actions not giving a damn which a colonial power would not have permitted such as threatening to throw out the remaining British from the island while also declaring their intentions to topple a freely elected government. The Dominion Status of Ceylon was distorted and misinterpreted to fool the masses like what their successors are trying to do now with the cry: ‘This country is being sold out to China. We are becoming a Chinese colony’.

Do Sri Lankans believe that their country can be sold to any foreign power by any politician or group however great they may consider themselves to be?

 

Beneficiaries

 

The historical record shows that the ‘fake Independence’ helped many things good and bad to happen down the years while the people were periodically told that, ‘the country was being sold out’ to one foreign power or another. Real Independence came, they assert, only when Sirima Bandaranaike with their Marxist comrades enacted their own constitution.

That was 44 years ago. Did it benefit Sri Lanka? Since then we had three insurrections – two by the Sinhalese and one by Tamils.

After Independence the first demon we faced was India. Thousands of impoverished Indians were coming across the Palk Strait – virtually swimming – to Sri Lanka seeking employment and to live in the plantations.

‘Lanka is being sold down the drain. India is trying to colonise us. Soon we will be a colony of India’, the Sinhala patriots, the progenitors of the likes of Weerawansas and Gammanpilas, berated. But their revered leader Sirima Bandaranaike settled the issue by absorbing a greater part of the immigrants and finally J. R. Jayewardene settled the Indo-Lanka problem for all time.

 

Military bases

 

Were the British military bases kept here after 1948 solely in British interests or for the island’s defence? Sri Lanka’s leader at that time, D. S. Senanayake had a canny insight into politics. Just as much he admired and was friendly with Indian leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, he was not certain of how post Independent India would act towards its neighbours. Nehru himself in his writings prior to Indian independence had mulled over the defence of India with Sri Lanka, and Burma and the Andaman Islands being a part of the Indian defence system. India’s geopolitical strategists at that time were thinking in terms of the Indian Ocean being India’s Ocean and visualizing a defence system ranging from the Horn of Africa to the Straits of Malacca, in as much India under Narendra Modi is doing now.

This fear of India was why Sri Lanka signed a defence treaty with Britain on gaining Independence, former President J. R. Jayewardene told this writer in an interview (published in The Sunday Island). Senanayake’s foresight was proved correct in 1987 when the ‘Indian Peace Keeping Force’ landed in Sri Lanka.

Jayewardene had no option but to sign the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord of 1987 with thousands of Indian troops on Sri Lankan soil, Indian war ships docked opposite Galle Face Green and Indian helicopters hovering over his Ward Place residence. And he was accused of bartering / selling out Sri Lanka!

Sold or bartered when President Ranasinghe Premadasa asked the Indian troops to quit Lanka, they did soon after and Sri Lanka remains free and independent, now to be told that it is being sold to China!

Many are the times Sri Lanka or parts of it have said to be sold to America by UNP regimes. Even the PL 480 wheat flour given under concessionary terms or grants to cash strapped Sri Lanka to feed impoverished people was considered an American strategy for buying over this country. Even now we hear some of our revolutionary thinkers pontificating that wheat flour was introduced to Sri Lanka to wean away people from rice, forgetting that Sri Lanka could not produce enough rice to feed its people till the late eighties.

 

Rubber-Rice Pact

 

In 1952 Sri Lanka was in dire straits when the world market price of rice shot up by almost 40 per cent with a world food shortage. The Dudley Senanayake government did not want to cut back the two measures of rice given at a subsidized rate to all people. It was also hit by an economic crisis with the end of the Korean boom and the drop in prices of its traditional exports. The prices of imports soared.

At that time China wanted rubber but rubber producing countries were forbidden by the United States to sell to China. Under the US Battle Act any country that sold strategic materials to Communist China had US aid to that country cut off. And the UNP government of Dudley Senanayake dared to do so while suffering the consequences.

Finance Minister J. R. Jayewardene aka Yankee Dicky opposed the move unsuccessfully. Pro American Sri Lankans said that the country was being sold to the Chinese Commies!

 

Danger of Saviours

 

During Lanka’s war against terrorism Pakistan and China were the two countries that stood by Sri Lanka. In the 1987 crisis of the Indian Intervention China was one major power that unequivocally declared: Hands off Sri Lanka. While the Western nations had arms embargoes placed against sales to Sri Lanka, China and Pakistan had no such restrictions and that helped Sri Lanka to win the war on terrorism.

After the end of the Terrorist War the Rajapaksa government went on a construction splurge under the cover of development for electioneering linked with perpetuating their family immortality. Land in the Port City of Colombo was sold to the Chinese and the UNP in Opposition ranks let out that familiar cry: The country is being sold to the Chinese.

Now the UNP-SLFP joint government is trying to pay back the billions owed by the Rajapaksa regime to the Chinese by forming a joint Sri Lanka – China company to give on long lease the Chinese built harbour, airport and other deserted Rajapaksa mausoleums in Hambantota to settle the debt. To the Rajapaksa gang, the annual billion dollar loss making ventures have now become ‘national treasures’ [Jatika Vastu] that have to be saved from their former benefactors and public protests have been called.

The history of Lanka commencing some 2500 ago is one beginning with subjugation through seduction followed by invasions, conquests, betrayals, etc. It reveals that this resplendent isle can survive on its own without Saviors of the present day who threaten to fast to death to prevent the sale of Lanka but give it up the next day. The history Sri Lanka shows that it cannot be sold by traitors, patriots or false Saviours.