-By LeN Diplomatic Correspondent
(Lanka-e-News - 01.Oct.2025, 10.50 PM)
On the evening of September 25th, the grand ballroom of Cinnamon Life was lit in red and gold, festooned with lanterns and banners celebrating the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. For the first time in Colombo’s diplomatic history, the Indian High Commissioner was spotted raising a toast to Beijing’s envoy.
The message, though delivered with champagne flutes and polite smiles, was anything but subtle. India and China — two rivals whose borders have bristled with soldiers and mistrust for decades — are learning to live with each other’s presence in South Asia.
And in Colombo’s small but noisy Tamil political circles, that shift was received like an earthquake. For decades, Tamil politicians in Sri Lanka — from the TULF to the present-day ITAK and TNA leadership — have wielded one reliable card: running to New Delhi with dossiers, complaints, and dire warnings about China’s “creeping” influence in the island.
But suddenly, that card has expired.
For years, Tamil politicians perfected a simple formula. Every time Colombo inked a deal with Beijing — a loan, a port, a highway, even a solar project in Jaffna — a delegation of Tamil MPs would dutifully march into the Indian High Commission, waving alarmist maps.
“Look, look,” they would plead. “The Chinese are in Hambantota. They are in Colombo Port City. They are building airports, highways, even fishery harbours in the North-East. This is a direct threat to India.”
The script worked — at least rhetorically. New Delhi, still haunted by the memory of Chinese submarines docking in Colombo in 2014, listened with furrowed brows. Tamil leaders like M. A. Sumanthiran found political mileage at home, boasting to their electorates that they had India’s ear.
But the ground has shifted.
What changed was not in Colombo, but in Washington. One month ago, Donald Trump imposed tariffs of 50 to 100 per cent on Indian exports, jolting Delhi’s economy. Faced with this squeeze, India needed new markets, new investment partners, and new diplomatic flexibility.
Enter Beijing.
While Indian officials once spoke in whispers about containing China in the Indian Ocean, the new reality is harder: India cannot afford to quarrel with Beijing while fighting a tariff war with Washington. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ever the pragmatist when domestic growth is at stake, quietly greenlit a thaw.
So when the Chinese ambassador hosted his National Day reception in Colombo, India did something unimaginable a week ago: showed up.
This single gesture sent shockwaves through Tamil politics in Sri Lanka. For decades, Tamil MPs had enjoyed the luxury of being New Delhi’s “watchdogs” on Chinese expansion in the island. Suddenly, that watchdog role looks obsolete.
As one Colombo-based diplomat put it bluntly:
“When Indian envoys are clinking glasses with Chinese envoys, it’s hard for Tamil MPs to walk in the next day with complaints about Chinese dredgers in Jaffna.”
For politicians like M. A. Sumanthiran, the most vocal among the current Tamil leadership, this is nothing short of an existential crisis. His brand of politics relies heavily on internationalizing Tamil grievances — running to Geneva, to Washington, and most reliably, to New Delhi. Now, his favourite corridor in Colombo — the High Commission on Galle Road — may no longer be as welcoming.
Compounding the crisis is the Tamil leadership’s credibility problem. In the wake of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, Sumanthiran made the tactical blunder of accusing the entire Muslim community of complicity, a statement widely criticised as reckless and sectarian.
Years later, as mounting evidence points toward political manipulation and intelligence failures at the heart of Sri Lanka’s state apparatus, Sumanthiran looks, in the words of one Tamil academic, like “a man who misread the whole chessboard.”
When a politician builds his reputation on being the “international voice of reason,” a single error of judgment can expose the limitations of his geopolitical grasp.
Even more damning for Indian Tamil Politicians hopes is India’s own record. For years, Tamil leaders in Tamilnadu promised their electorate that Delhi would defend Tamil fishermen from Sri Lankan Navy harassment in the Palk Strait. The reality? India could not even secure its own fishermen.
If New Delhi struggles to safeguard Tamil Nadu’s trawlers, how can it be expected to champion Sri Lankan Tamils in Jaffna? The silence speaks volumes.
The uncomfortable truth is that Tamil politicians are now politically homeless on the world stage. Washington has bigger headaches — from Ukraine to Taiwan. Europe has moved on from the Sri Lankan civil war. Even the UN Human Rights Council has grown weary of recycled resolutions.
And India, once the final refuge, is now hedging its bets with Beijing.
As a retired Indian diplomat in Colombo quipped over dinner:
“The Tamil MPs still think they can wave the China card in Delhi. They haven’t realised the card is no longer in the deck.”
What, then, is left for Sri Lanka’s Tamil leadership?
For decades, they relied on geopolitical theatre: the act of performing Tamil vulnerability for international audiences, leveraging diaspora activism abroad, and invoking India’s regional anxieties about China.
But the rules have changed. The global mood has hardened into realpolitik. India wants trade. China wants ports. The US wants tariffs. No one, it seems, wants to rescue Sri Lanka’s Tamils.
That leaves Tamil leaders with a stark choice:
Continue the theatre — playing the tired game of walking into embassies, holding press conferences, and promising their electorate that “the world is watching.”
Or engage seriously with Colombo — negotiating within the structures of the Sri Lankan state, however flawed, rather than relying on external patrons who no longer have the appetite.
For many younger Tamils, the answer is obvious. “We cannot eat speeches in Geneva,” one Jaffna university student remarked bitterly. “Our politicians should work with the government here, not wait for Delhi or Washington to save us.”
The symbolism of September 25th should not be lost. An Indian High Commissioner, once the patron saint of Tamil complaints, now raising a glass alongside Beijing’s envoy.
For Sumanthiran and his peers, it was more than just a diplomatic photo-op. It was a curtain call. The geopolitical play they have performed for decades has run its course. The audience has left.
The world has moved on. And the Tamil political class, once masters of the complaint circuit, find themselves stranded — politically irrelevant in Colombo, diplomatically abandoned in Delhi, and strategically sidelined in Washington.
The irony is bitter: in trying to play the geopolitics of giants, they have made themselves look small.
-By LeN Diplomatic Correspondent
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by (2025-10-01 17:24:53)
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