Sri Lanka’s No.1 ally – not out of sentiment, but out of geographic reality. Twenty-two miles of the Palk Strait separate the two countries. No treaty, no summit, and no partnership with a distant power can change that. Sri Lanka should never do anything that triggers India’s core security concerns, because India is the neighbour who will always be there, long after other powers have moved on to their next strategic priority.
The United States is now working hard to secure a permanent military foothold in Sri Lanka. Nearly every week brings another visiting delegation, another joint exercise, another statement about ‘mutual security’ and ‘partnership.’ That framing is disingenuous. What Washington actually wants is for Colombo to pull away from Beijing and fall in line with a broader US containment strategy in the Indian Ocean.
China, for its part, spent the last two decades embedding itself in Sri Lanka’s economy – Hambantota Port, Colombo Port City, and a string of loans and infrastructure projects that gave Beijing real leverage.
That closeness alarmed both New Delhi and Washington, and the two capitals have, at different points, worked to pull Sri Lanka back into their orbit – sometimes bluntly, sometimes through economic and political pressure.
The Cold War precedent
This isn’t a new game. During the Cold War, the US ran signals intelligence operations against India out of Sri Lanka, most notably the Voice of America relay station and related listening posts. India saw this as a direct threat sitting in its backyard. New Delhi’s response was to destabilise the J.R. Jayewardene government through the 1980s – training and arming Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE, partly as leverage to force Colombo into line. That pressure culminated in the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and the deployment of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF), an intervention that left thousands dead and produced the 13th Amendment – the still-unresolved promise of devolution to the provinces. It’s one of the clearest examples in the region of a great power treating a small neighbour’s internal politics as an extension of its own security perimeter.
Why today is different
What’s changed since then is that Indian and American interests have converged. Both now see China’s regional presence as the primary threat, so the old friction – Washington undermining Delhi’s backyard – is far less likely to recur. Instead, the two increasingly coordinate: trilateral frameworks, intelligence sharing arrangements like the Colombo Security Conclave (Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, with the US and others as observers), and quiet alignment on which Chinese projects get waved through and which get blocked or renegotiated – the aborted Hambantota deal to a Chinese firm in 2021, and Chinese research vessel visits being slow-walked or denied, are both cases where Indian objections effectively set the terms.
The practical lesson for Colombo is straightforward: Sri Lanka doesn’t need to choose isolation from the US or a wholesale rupture with China to protect itself. It needs to make sure India is consulted and comfortable before any major security-adjacent decision – a port deal, a military exercise, a new base access agreement – goes forward. Run it past Delhi first, and Washington’s ambitions become much less dangerous, because India functions as the gatekeeper for what the region will tolerate. Ignore that step, and Sri Lanka is exposed to exactly the kind of pressure it experienced in the 1980s, just with different sponsors and different tools – economic coercion instead of insurgency this time.
That is realpolitik (Willy Brandt: West German Chancellor vis-a-vis USSRv and East Germany). Simply geography. Small states positioned between great powers don’t get the luxury of picking allies on principle. They survive by reading the map correctly and never forgetting who their permanent neighbour is.
But the other side:
Strong counterarguments a person could raise:
India isn’t a monolith – the MEA, the Indian Navy, and Indian commercial interests (like Adani’s stake in Colombo Port’s West Container Terminal) don’t always want the same thing, so ‘check with India’ is more complicated in practice than it sounds.
Sri Lanka has also used Indian and Chinese competition to extract better terms from both sides – the ‘India-first’ framing may undersell Colombo’s own agency in playing them off each other.
Some would argue the 1980s parallel cuts differently: India’s IPKF intervention was itself deeply resented in Sri Lanka, which complicates using it as a model for why deference to India is the safe choice.