If the Nobel Peace Prize, which is frequently awarded to people whose decisions influence international affairs, is rechristened the Nobel Diplomatic Prize, a strong contender for the honour in 2015 would be Sri Lanka's president, Maithripala Sirisena. Never mind that he was elected president only in January this year.
If Barack Obama could win the peace prize in his first year in office with no legacy to live up to the high standards of the coveted award, Sirisena is infinitely more deserving: but only if it is given away as a diplomatic prize in a new avatar.
Who would have thought that barely a week before Narendra Modi arrives in Colombo on the first bilateral visit by an Indian prime minister to Sri Lanka in 28 years, this small island nation would unilaterally rewrite the agenda for big brother Modi's visit on its terms? That is what Sri Lanka's prime minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, did last week when he justified shooting at Indian fishermen who poach on Sri Lankan waters.
Predictably, Wickramasinghe's threat instantly set India on fire, as it were, subsuming the preparatory talks of the external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, in Colombo for Modi's arrival and pushing into the background everything else in the sphere of engagement between India and its southern neighbour. It is likely that Swaraj made progress on other issues while engaging the foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera, during her visit, but even her report to the Rajya Sabha on Monday detailing her travel does not claim so.
Before the fishermen's issue came to the fore, the new power cohabitation in Colombo between traditional political rivals, the president's Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the prime minister's United National Party, was understandably apprehensive about several aspects of Modi's visit.
The Sinhala dominated political establishment in Colombo is seriously behind on relief and rehabilitation of Tamils after the decimation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and there are grey if not darker shades of clouds along the way forward. By getting India worked up on the fishermen issue, Wickramasinghe magically managed to get his country off the hook on its ethnic deficit before Modi's arrival.
Nobody believes that Wickramasinghe acted on his own or that his cutting remarks, especially taunting India on the scandalous delay in settling the issue of two Italian sailors who were put in jail for their use of fatal force against an Indian fishing vessel, were off the cuff. It showed Sirisena at his diplomatic best and served as a warning that the new Sri Lankan president is more than a match for Modi.
Sirisena, Modi has hopefully now been alerted, is cut from the same cloth that equipped Junius Jayewardene to make strategic putty out of Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, successfully trapping the novice of a then Indian prime minister in the Indian peace keeping force trap in Sri Lanka, from which he never recovered in diplomatic terms. It was then left to his successor twice removed, P.V. Narasimha Rao, to pick up the smithereens in New Delhi's relations with a cleverly manipulative leadership in Colombo.
By getting his prime minister to launch the verbal diatribe on the fishermen's issue, Sirisena achieved three things. Primarily, he preserved the atmospherics of his own visit to New Delhi, of which a lot was made since it was the new president's first State visit abroad after the remarkable election upset of his controversial predecessor, Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Second, by getting Wickramasinghe to raise the issue, Sirisena significantly controlled the impact of the verbal assault on the diplomatic stage if not in the public domain, since Wickramasinghe has a long and durable reputation as a 'friend' of India. His connections with India's consecutive line of political and religious leaders are well known.
Third, by getting Wickramasinghe into the act, Sirisena created a buffer between himself and Modi which will come in handy for the new president during Modi's visit. In this, the leadership in Colombo may have taken a leaf out of the old Atal Bihari Vajpayee-Lal Krishna Advani guidebook on political chess.
Just as Vajpayee and Advani used to play the good-cop-bad-cop game of political expediency even though both men were on the same page on most issues, Sirisena and Wickramasinghe are engaged in a similar game. Wickramasinghe, in the Indian public perception, is now the villain of the piece. Sirisena will come out smelling of roses when the fishermen's issue is defused during Modi's talks in Colombo. That is another reason why Sirisena is a worthy contender for any rechristened Nobel Diplomatic Prize.
In the nine weeks since assuming office, Sirisena's formidable diplomatic skills have been in evidence not merely in dealings with New Delhi. In Geneva last month, the United Nations human rights council agreed to postpone until September the release of a report on possible war crimes in Sri Lanka's protracted ethnic conflict. Originally, the outcome of the enquiry was to have been released this month.
Here too, Sirisena played the good-cop-bad-cop game cleverly. In the same television interview to a channel in Tamil Nadu where Wickramasinghe justified shooting at Indian fishermen, the prime minister emphatically ruled out any international enquiry into alleged war crimes.
On the other hand, Samaraweera not only invited the UN high commissioner for human rights to visit Sri Lanka, but also offered to host a UN working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances, the visit of which was long ago requested from Geneva but not permitted. The foreign minister offered to launch an enquiry of his own with the help of the UNHRC.
Sirisena cleverly outwitted the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein, on the war crimes issue just as he outwitted Swaraj last week even as she was on Sri Lankan soil. Al Hussein had no choice but to seek a postponement of the report's release.
Unlike Rajapaksa who used family and friends to run the government, including the island state's diplomatic outposts in the United States of America - a shade similar to the sangh parivar front outfits and saffron fellow travellers trying to influence the Modi government's Sri Lanka policy - Sirisena is able to produce results because he uses competent professionals to advance his country's foreign policy.
For those with insights into Colombo's diplomatic machine, the Geneva decision did not come as a surprise. Sirisena's ambassador in Washington, the career diplomat, Prasad Kariyawasam, has the rich experience of having led his country's delegation to two critical sessions of the predecessor body of the UNHRC, the UN commission on human rights. He was also alternate representative to three other sessions of this commission. Colombo had its back to the wall on the Tamil issue at all these meetings.
Kariyawasam was Sri Lanka's permanent representative to the UN in Geneva from 2001 to 2004 and in New York for the next three years. So if anyone knows how to twist the UN to suit his country's needs, it is Kariyawasam. This is his second posting in Washington. It is illuminating what Kariyawasam wrote in the White House guest book when he went to present his credentials to president Barack Obama recently: "Having enjoyed democratic traditions without interruption since 1931, Sri Lanka is South Asia's oldest democracy and we value your friendship and support for our nation's progress..." With the scrawl of his pen, the Sri Lankan envoy - who earlier had two postings in India - demolished two and a half decades of ritualistic hype about Indo-US relations, about what is common between the world's oldest democracy and the largest.
In New Delhi much is made of Sri Lanka's relations with China as if it poses an existential threat to this country. Indians completely overlook the reality that what gives Colombo the leverage to cock a snook at India - be it on Tamil rights or on threats against fishermen - is the abundant patronage it enjoys in Washington.
Within a month of taking office, Sirisena sent his foreign minister to the US, who told his American counterpart, John Kerry: "My job... is to ensure that we put back our relations to a ( sic) irreversible state of excellence in the coming months... to revive and strengthen the very strong bonds we have had with the United States for several decades." It will not be lost on Modi that soon after he flies out of Colombo, Sirisena will be heading for Beijing and Islamabad.
