International Relations of Asia (India)

International Relations of Asia (India)

Primarily, Sri Lanka had been experiencing war between 1983 to 2009 with the minority LTTE group. Before 2006, India was disengaged from the Sri Lanka war due to the political and historical factors that were affecting the country’s stability. This way, the country had adopted the hands-off policy, whereby they did not intervene as conflict managers (Destradi, 600). However, in 2007 India was engaged in the war, whereby it supported Sri Lanka’s government to fight against the LTTE group due to regional like Sri Lanka’s diplomacy skills and international factors of Indo-Chinese economic competition.

According to Destradi (600), during the early 1980s, India had introduced the Indira Doctrine, which refrained external interventions in their regional sphere of influence. In 1987, the country resulted in imposing the ISLA and IPKF to regulate peace in the region (Destradi, 601). However, the LTTE group was disadvantaged by the imposition of the IPKF; thus, causing the group to fight back. The conflicts between India’s LTTE and IPKF resulted in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, India’s prime minister. This made India come up with a strict policy of non- interference in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict.

However, the tables turned in 2017 when India decided to indirectly support Sri Lanka (Destradi, 608). It supported the abuse of LTTE’s human rights even when New Delhi was against such practices. Later in 2009, the UNHRC held a special session that focused on investigating war crimes that were committed by the LTTE and Sri Lankan forces. The UNHCR developed motions that caused India and New Delhi to support the Tamil citizens in Sri Lanka. Despite that, India was still unable to end the civil war in Sri Lanka since they reflected an unwillingness to managing the regional conflict.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Cited

Destradi, Sandra. “India And Sri Lanka’s Civil War: The Failure Of Regional Conflict Management In South Asia”. Asian Survey, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/as.2012.52.3.595. Accessed 1 Sept 2020.