MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 14th May, 2022) Sri Lanka's neighbors are on edge as political instability continues to plague the cash-strapped South Asian island nation, Indian experts told Sputnik.
Sri Lanka has been grappling with soaring food and fuel prices after the pandemic and the global energy crisis exacerbated the import-dependent economy's downturn. Clashes between police and critics of the ruling Rajapaksa family have left several people dead and hundreds others hurt in the past weeks.
N. Sathiya Moorthy, an Indian policy analyst, said that Sri Lanka still had residual militancy that could come out of the woodwork as security continues to worsen, but suggested that national security forces will be able to prevent spillovers with the help from neighbors.
"An unstable Sri Lanka is discomforting for all neighbours and those that use shared waters... There could be residual militancy, which the nation's security forces are not incapable of confining to their borders, with cooperation from neighbors and others, in terms of intelligence-sharing," he said.
China, India and Japan have pledged to assist Sri Lanka during the crisis. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Friday that Beijing will support newly installed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in his efforts to stabilize the political and economic situation.
Shweta Singh, an associate professor of international relations at South Asian University in New Delhi, said Sri Lanka still faced the threat of violent extremism, three years after deadly Easter bombings of Christian churches.
"But this specific moment of economic and political turmoil should be read as people's revolt against populist authoritarianism (of the Rajapaksas)," she argued.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been accused of mismanaging the nation's worst economic crisis since it became independent from the United Kingdom in 1948. Rajapaksa came to power with support of the majority Buddhist population after the 2019 church attacks of Islamist extremists.
