India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will be in Colombo for two days beginning Saturday in a mission to ‘review’ the entire gamut of defence ties with the island nation.
The defence minister’s visit will coincide with the docking of INS Delhi on Friday in the Colombo deep sea port. Singh is scheduled to meet the Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is also the country’s defence minister, and also the PM Dinesh Gunawardena.
INS Delhi, Indian Navy’s first indigenously designed and built guided missile destroyer, is equipped with the latest weapons and sensors that are capable of undertaking all facets of maritime operations—on surface, air and underwater domains.
The Indian defence minister’s visit is taking place in the backdrop of Colombo’s reported approval of the docking of the Chinese research vessel Shi Yang 6 in the Colombo and Hambantota ports for 17 days, beginning October 26, although it is still not clear in which area in Sri Lanka’s vicinity the Chinese vessel will operate in.
A top source in India’s military establishment had told THE WEEK that the Shi Yang 6’s visit is meant to engineer a crack in the bilateral relations between India and Sri Lanka.
“For China, the Shi Yan 6—with its planned underwater and hydrographic survey—will be able to collect all sorts of data that is required for any future operation including movement by Chinese submarines by mapping the terrain on the sea bed.”
“On the other hand, Sri Lanka is looking at data on sediment thickness of the continental shelf so that its sea territorial claims can be made before the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS).”
“At the moment, Sri Lanka’s territorial claim on the seas is excessive and is therefore on the lookout for sedimentation data which it hopes the Shi Yan 6 will be able to provide,” the source had said. According to UN laws, one of the ways in which a coastal state may establish the outer limits of its juridical continental shelf, wherever the continental margin extends beyond 200 nautical miles is by establishing the commonality of sediments.
In deep economic distress, Sri Lanka is delicately positioned between India and China, none of which Colombo can afford to displease. China is Sri Lanka’s biggest single creditor while it was India that bailed out the island nation for economic chaos with a US$ 4 billion handover in 2022.