End of terminal dispute?

Monday 1st February, 2021

The government has found itself in an unenviable position. It has numerous problems to contend with both here and overseas. Two of them are very serious. It has had to face a port ca’canny against its proposed joint venture with India’s Adani Group to operate the East Container Terminal (ECT) of the Colombo Port, and is troubled by the prospect of another turn of the screw in Geneva soon. It is against this backdrop that the government decision to meet the port workers’ demand that Sri Lanka operate the ECT without any foreign involvement should be viewed. The port go-slow was still on at the time of going to press.

Interestingly, both the Rajapaksa government and the Modi administration have got into trouble because of Adani Group, among others. Here, the warring port workers intensified their trade union action as the government was determined to partner with Adani Group to run the ECT. In India, the Modi government is under fire for trying to corporatise agriculture for the benefit of big business at the expense of the poor farmers, who feed India. Protesters are burning effigies of Modi, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani of the Reliance fame.

PM Modi stands accused of having had his government cut several sweetheart deals beneficial to Adani, who is nicknamed Modi’s Rockefeller, the most controversial being the contract Adani won, in 2018, to operate six airports in India. The Kerala State government has moved the Supreme Court against the takeover of the state’s international airport, and workers there are protesting against the privatisation deal, which the Kerala Finance Minister has called an act of ‘brazen cronyism’.

The Sri Lankan government apparently sought to strike a sweetheart deal with Adani to get the Modi administration off its back, but it had its work cut out, given stiff resistance the protesting trade unions offered. The port dispute is fraught with the danger of spilling over into other sectors and developing into a full-blown strike, which the country needs like a hole in the head amidst the present crisis.

The government ought to explain the rationale behind its decision to invite Adani Group to run the ECT. Allowing foreign powers to have control over strategic state assets such as ports, airports and oil storages facilities, in the name of promoting foreign investment, poses a serious threat to any country. It was a huge blunder for the previous Sri Lankan governments to let China acquire a port, vast extents of land and a container terminal on lease; allowing India or any other country to control a vital container terminal by way of making amends will only make an already bad situation worse.

Meanwhile, the government strove to justify its decision to run the ECT jointly with Adani Group, by claiming that the Memorandum of Corporation, which the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government entered into with India and Japan, was a fait accompli. But before the last presidential election, it undertook to undo everything that the yahapalana government had done much to the detriment of the national interest. It scrapped the Light Rail Transit project agreement the previous government had entered into with Japan, didn’t it? If the government has decided to meet the port unions’ demand, as reported, will it explain why it initially insisted that it could not withdraw from the ECT agreement?

Meanwhile, a solution to the problem at hand is not to allow India or any other foreign power, troubled by the rise of China, to build another container terminal in the Colombo Port or elsewhere. Such action will give rise to another problem. Sri Lanka must do everything possible to allay India’s security concerns resulting from the Chinese presence here, and give New Delhi a cast-iron guarantee that it will never allow any anti-Indian activity on its soil. But it must not allow any of the country’s strategic assets to be acquired or controlled by any foreign power. It must learn from the yahapalana government’s blunder; a government minister has admitted that not even the Sri Lankan Navy is allowed to enter the Hambantota Port, according to a report we publish today.

If the government thinks it can bulldoze its way through simply because it has a steamroller majority in Parliament, it is mistaken. The port workers have brought it down a peg or two. One can only hope that it will honour the pledge it has reportedly made to the workers and thereby resolve the crisis, which has the potential to cripple the economy and plunge the country into chaos.